Fighting Over Their Share of the Healthcare Dollar

The Washington Monthly

I would happily pay for universal healthcare just so I never had to read an op-ed like this again. It's not that Williamson doesn't have a point, it's just that this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude is enough to make me retch, and I see it all the time. I don't get dental coverage, so why should grocery workers? My copay went up last year, so why shouldn't everyone else's? I don't pay for healthcare for my housecleaners, so why should I pay it for school cafeteria workers? Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes.

Stealing The 2008 Vote

TomPaine.com

If you thought Tom DeLay's Texas gerrymandering scam in 2003 was bad, just wait. Now partisans are seeking to steal the 2008 presidential election.
It's that serious. Taking advantage of the frustration their supporters understandably feel about their powerless role in presidential elections, leading California Republicans are promoting an initiative to divide California's slate of 55 electoral votes. Rather than all electoral votes going to the statewide winner, each U.S. House district in a state would elect one presidential elector, while the statewide popular vote winner would take the two electoral votes corresponding to states' Senate seats.


That way, the Golden State's GOP would deliver a score of electoral votes to their party's nominee. When you see that some Democrats in North Carolina have advanced the same plan in order to pick up four or five electoral votes for their ticket, the plan may seem evenhanded.


In fact it is indefensible policy no matter how it is done—state-by-state or nationally. Allocation of electoral votes by congressional district may give more weight to a state's oft-frustrated minority party, but it breaks down in yielding accurate representation of the will of the nation at large. We should be seeking fair elections of presidents, not faceless electors. Through that lens the congressional district plan utterly fails two important criteria: representation of the national will and equal relevance of all Americans.


In 2000, for example, Al Gore won the popular vote by 0.5 percent while George Bush took the presidency with a 0.9 percent victory in the Electoral College. With a district-by-district vote in all states, Bush's electoral vote margin would have increased to 7.1 percent. That's an eight-fold distortion of an already distorted result. Bush's margin would have similarly increased if only California had enacted the district plan.


The 2000 result was hardly atypical. In 1968, Nixon's 0.7 percent lead over Humphrey in the popular vote translated to a 20.95 percent lead in electoral votes. With congressional district allocation, Nixon would have maintained that distortion, winning by 19.3 percent electoral votes. In 1976, under the district system Jimmy Carter would have defeated Gerald Ford by a scant two electoral votes despite a relatively comfortable 2 percent win in the national popular vote.


The congressional district plan also leaves most Americans as irrelevant spectators in presidential campaigns. In 2004, fewer than 87 percent of congressional districts were won by more than 4 percent, the margin where political activity might make a difference. In California, 50 of 53 districts were won by even more comfortable margins of at least 8 percent.


But good government isn't really the motivation here. Indeed, partisan meddling with the Electoral College is an old game. In 1890, Michigan Democrats adopted the district system to help their ticket; once partisan control flipped again, Republicans immediately restored the unit rule. Going back to 180l, when most states either didn't hold popular elections or divided their electoral votes, Virginia supporters of Thomas Jefferson hastily adopted the unit rule to keep John Adams from winning any electoral votes.


With so few Americans able to hold their chief executive accountable, the current Electoral College system demands reform. Instead of pursuing partisan machinations, however, California should join my state of Maryland in the National Popular Vote agreement. This innovative, constitutionally sound proposal will guarantee election of the national popular vote winner in all 50 states and the District of Columbia once participating states collectively represent a majority of the Electoral College.
Only then will Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states share an equal vote with their neighbors and their fellow Americans. From the battlegrounds of Ohio and Florida to the far reaches of spectator states like Alaska, Hawaii and California, let's vote together as Americans, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Female Airman Makes Rape Accusation, Ends Up On Trial Herself, With Her Accused Given Immunity

AlterNet[VIDEO]

CBS News reported Tuesday on a current case that calls into doubt the Air Force's promise, after a scandal four years ago, of better treatment for alleged rape victims. The case is that of Airman Cassandra Hernandez, who has stated that she was raped by three fellow airmen.


Hernandez gave an exclusive interview to CBS in which she admitted having drunk "a lot" at a party before accompanying three male colleagues to a dorm room. She acknowledged that her memory of events is fuzzy, but said she definitely remembers saying "No" and trying to push the men away. The three men allege that Hernandez started taking off her clothes and that the sex which followed was consensual.


A hearing was originally set on the rape charges, but after harsh pre-trial questioning, Hernandez decided not to testify. At that point the Air Force brought lesser charges against all four airmen, citing Hernandez for underage drinking and "indecent acts." The three men accepted minor punishments, while Hernandez refused. She is now facing a court-martial and could be jailed or expelled from the Air Force. At the same time, the three men have been granted immunity in their testimony against her.


It is that outcome that has so alarmed advocates for rape victims and raised a concern that -- regardless of whether Hernandez is correct in her accusations -- the case will have a chilling effect in the future. According to the Los Angeles Times, Hernandez' attorneys have released a statement saying that "'important, relevant evidence' was denied them during discovery and that Hernandez decided not to plead to the same indecent-act charge as the three airmen because 'she was told that she was considered guilty unless she proved herself innocent.'"


"The system failed Hernandez," one of her attorneys told CBS.

Research Support for the Class Warfare Model of Politics

Robert Biggert - Assumption College

Regional differences in party support have attracted a good deal of attention since the 2000 election. A striking feature of the current pattern is that Democratic support is higher in more affluent states. At the individual level, income is associated with Republican support, but in a recent paper, Gelman et al. (2006) find that this relationship is weaker in more affluent states. In affluent states, people with high and low incomes both tend to vote Democratic; in poorer states, people with low incomes vote Democratic while people with high incomes vote Republican. This paper extends Gelman et al.'s analysis by considering both education and income. We find that the effects of income and college education both vary among states, in a largely independent manner. Variation in the effects of college education is related to the educational composition of the state: where college education is more common, it is more strongly associated with support for the Democrats. Overall, regional differences are largest in the middle classes, contrary to the claims of some popular and theoretical accounts. There is some evidence that a pattern of weaker class divisions is associated with more support for the Democrats.

So egalitarian communities tend to be inclusive and spread wealth more effectively, or at least have the wealth to spread. Perhaps such communities witness the richness of diversity and celebrate it by voting democratic.
Poorer communities with less wealth to go around, tend to reinforce stratification in social structure, support concepts of unworthy poor and prejudice. Republicans in poor states are more inclined to blame the poor for their problems and take no responsibility for helping them. I've believed this all along. Now it's documented by research.

Mahdi Army and Badr Corps Fight Over Shia Shrine

Informed Comment

Two senior aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani--Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i and Ahmad al-Safi-- were kidnapped on Tuesday by the Mahdi Army and are still being held as captives, according to the Kuwaiti News Organization. This report seems to confirm that the Mahdi Army attempted to take over the shrine of Imam Husayn in Karbala under the cover of the festival of the birth of the 12th Imam, which had brought a million pilgrims into the city. The shrine is worth millions if not hundreds of millions in pilgrimage revenue annually, and is also a source of prestige among Shiites. The two kidnapped clerics had preached there.


[..]Al-Maliki fired 1500 policemen in Karbala on Wednesday and dismissed the police chief, Major General Saleh Khazal Al-Maliki, on grounds of dereliction of duty. (It may be that the police were in some part recruited from or highly sympathetic to the Mahdi Army, and so they declined to intervene in its push to take the shrine by force).


In the aftermath of the fighting Tuesday in the holy city of Karbala between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, and then attacks on SIIC offices in Baghdad by Mahdi Army fighters, the militia's leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, called Wednesday for it to lay down its arms for 6 months.


My guess is that Muqtada realizes that his men went too far, in trying to take the shrine of Imam Husayn by main force, and in disrupting a major Shiite festival. These actions would be highly unpopular in the Shiite street, and could cost Muqtada some of his otherwise impressive popularity in the South. Aljazeera showed him speaking in Najaf, by the way, putting the lie to Bush administration allegations that he had gone into hiding in Iran (that was just a smear, since he prides himself on his Iraq nationalism).

More From Edward's Speech on 8/23

There is no doubt in my mind who I want to see on the Democratic Ballot. His name is John Edwards.
To Build One America, End the Game

Real change starts with being honest -- the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it's rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They'll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are -- not for the country, but for themselves.


Politicians who care more about their careers than their constituents go along to get elected. They make easy promises to voters instead of challenging them to take responsibility for our country. And then they compromise even those promises to keep the lobbyists happy and the contributions coming.


Instead of serving the people and the nation, too many play the parlor game of Washington -- trading favors and campaign money, influencing votes and compromising legislation. It's a game that never ends, but every American knows -- it's time to end the game.


And it's time for the Democratic Party -- the party of the people -- to end it.


The choice for our party could not be more clear. We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.

More Children In Prison in Iraq

The US invasion has destroyed the country, so much so, that in order to survive, children must fight in this war.
The Bush Administration points to this fact as reflecting the success of the surge! So we as our sons and daughters to fight and die in this war killing hungry teenagers.
Los Angeles Times

Child fighters, once a rare presence on Iraq's battlefields, are playing a significant and growing role in kidnappings, killings and roadside bombings in the country, U.S. military officials say.


Boys, some as young as 11, now outnumber foreign fighters at U.S. detention camps in Iraq. Since March, their numbers have risen to 800 from 100, said Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, the commander of detainee operations. The Times reported last month that only 130 non-Iraqi fighters were in U.S. custody in Iraq.


Stone attributes the rise in child fighters in the country, in part, to the pressure that the U.S. buildup of troops has placed on the flow of foreign fighters.


Fewer of them are making it into the country, he said, and the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq is having a difficult time recruiting adults locally. Thus, it has turned to children.


"As our operations have increased, Al Qaeda [in Iraq] and others have used more minors in the fight against us, and in the process we have detained more and more juveniles," Stone said.


He said the children make effective fighters because they are easily influenced, don't experience fear in the same way as adults and don't draw as much scrutiny from U.S. forces.


Other causes for the increase in detentions may be that U.S. forces are simply coming into contact with more children because of the troop buildup, and that financial pressures may have pushed some Iraqi families toward the militants.


Stone said some children have told interrogators that their parents encouraged them to do the militants' dirty work because the extremists have deep pockets.


Insurgents typically pay the boys $200 to $300 to plant a bomb, enough to support a family for two or three months, say their Iraqi instructors at a U.S. rehabilitation center.


About 85% of the child detainees are Sunni and the majority live in Sunni Arab-dominated regions in the country's west and north. In these deeply impoverished, violence-torn communities, the men with money and influence are the ones with the most powerful arsenals. These are the children's role models.

John Edwards: In His Own Words

New York Times

In an address yesterday in Hanover, N.H., John Edwards issued a thinly veiled criticism of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, an opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, without mentioning her by name. Mr. Edwards has recently been challenging Mrs. Clinton to stop taking campaign donations from lobbyists, a challenge she has rebuffed, saying she will not be influenced by lobbyists or special interest groups. The following is an excerpt of Mr. Edwards’s remarks, a full text of which is available on nytimes.com/politics: Full Text of Speech (johnedwards.com)


“The choice for our party could not be more clear. We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.


The American people deserve to know that their presidency is not for sale, the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent and lobbyist money can no longer influence policy in the House or the Senate.


It’s time to end the game. It’s time to tell the big corporations and the lobbyists who have been running things for too long that their time is over. It’s time to challenge politicians to put the American people’s interests ahead of their own calculated political interests, to look the lobbyists in the eye and just say no.


And it’s time for the American people to take responsibility for our government, for in our democracy it is truly ours. If we have come to mistrust and question it, it is because we were not vigilant against the forces that have taken it from us. That their game has played on for so long is the fault of each of us. Ending the game and returning government of the people to the people is the responsibility of all of us.”

FOX Attacks Iran

FOX Attacks Iran

Dear ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN,


"My station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at FOX News." That is CNN's Christiane Amanpour explaining why the major television networks failed to accurately inform the public in the lead-up to the Iraq war, choosing instead to follow FOX's lead.


Now, FOX is beating the drums for war with Iran. Robert Greenwald's short film, "FOX Attacks: Iran", outlines the evidence from the station's own broadcasts, comparing their reporting before the Iraq war with what they are saying now about Iran.


You have a sacred responsibility to the American people to provide accurate and reliable information so we can best make the decisions which affect our lives. We urge you to accurately and thoroughly report all sides of this important story.



Please do not blindly follow FOX down the road to another war.


Sign the Open Letter. Tell the networks not to follow FOX down the road to war.

Curfew declared as Bangladesh violence spreads

World - smh.com.au

SHATTERING the calm of seven months of army-backed rule, Bangladesh's caretaker government has imposed an indefinite curfew in six of the largest cities after clashes between students and police. The leader of the Government, Fakhruddin Ahmed, said on Wednesday in a televised address that the Government was compelled to impose the curfew, close down mobile phone networks and shut colleges and universities across the country to "protect public life and property as well as stop illegal activities".


Commuters jammed buses and cars in a rush to reach home before the start of the curfew in Dhaka. Thousands who could not find transport simply walked. There were signs of panic buying in the city. Residents crowded shopping centres to buy essential supplies, and there were queues at petrol stations. As the curfew came into effect at 8pm, police using loudspeakers urged residents to stay home. Security forces sealed off and patrolled the deserted streets.


The curfew order came on the third day of unrest after student protests spilled from campuses into the streets of Dhaka, burning cars and buses and fighting security forces, who used tear gas to disperse demonstrators. One man was killed in the north-west of the country after students tried to burn down a vice-chancellor's home. Hundreds are believed to have been injured by police baton charges.


The protests, which pose the biggest challenge yet to the Government, began over a scuffle on Monday involving army personnel and students at Dhaka University, long a hotbed of political activity. After the scuffle, students demanded that troops stationed on the campus be removed. The Government said the army had already withdrawn from the campus and that a judicial inquiry had begun into the initial clash that prompted the protests. Dr Ahmed suggested that the student protests had been exploited by others to stir political unrest. "It is unfortunate that some evil forces and opportunist, unruly people created anarchy in different parts of the country, including Dhaka, capitalising on the university incidents," he said.


The army seized power in January, hand-picking a government and banning all street assemblies following months of clashes between rival political parties. Scheduled voting was cancelled, political activity was banned and the Government, with backing from the army, pledged to rid the country of corrupt politicians and to prepare for elections next year. There is little sign of the promised elections and no poll date has been announced.


Many feel that the Government has overplayed its hand in recent months - notably by arresting a former prime minister, Sheik Hasina Wazed, and charging her with extortion. Her main rival, Khaleda Zia, also a former prime minister, faces tax evasion charges, which she has denied.

Pakistan ex-PM Sharif to return

CNN.com

Pakistan's embattled leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, could face a key challenge to his rule in the coming months following the expected return of two major opposition leaders.
art.sharif.afp.gi.jpg


Pakistan's Supreme Court Thursday lifted the exile imposed on former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, ousted from power eight years ago by Musharraf in a bloodless coup. The move is expected to clear the way for Sharif to run for office in elections scheduled for later this year or early next year.


In addition, opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto also plans to return to Pakistan from self-imposed exile and take part in the upcoming elections.


Musharraf wielded a tight grip on power after imposing military rule in 1999, but has seen an increased backlash after failed attempts to control Islamic militants within the country's borders as well as his controversial suspension of the country's top judge in March.


The Bush administration continues to support Musharraf, who it views as a key ally in the war on terrorism. Administration officials have toned down that support in recent months after intelligence assessments indicated Musharraf's agreement with tribal leaders gave Al Qaeda and Taliban militants free rein along the Afghan border. That agreement has since been scrapped and the Pakistani military has resumed operations in the tribal regions.


Thursday's ruling was the latest blow to Musharraf, who is currently facing the most serious challenge since seizing power. The ruling was expected after the top court freed the acting president of Sharif's opposition party from prison in Pakistan several weeks ago. The court is led by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who was recently reinstated after he was suspended in March by Musharraf.


His suspension triggered massive protests and accusations that the Pakistani president was trying to influence the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling on whether he can run for another five-year term under Pakistan's constitution.


Musharraf recently reached out to Bhutto in an attempt to consolidate his power, meeting face-to-face in Abu Dhabi in late July, according to senior officials on each side of the talks. Despite her opposition to Musharraf, Bhutto told CNN that she would be open to serving as prime minister under his government if he resigns his post as chief of the country's powerful military. That would significantly weaken Musharraf's grip on power.


Sharif, who retains his Pakistani citizenship, has been in exile in Saudi Arabia since 2000 and has not been allowed to travel or take part in Pakistani politics. Both opposition leaders are demanding free and fair elections in Pakistan.


Musharraf was elected president in a 2002 vote that was widely viewed as rigged. His five-year presidential term expires in November and he is seeking to retain his position as president and army chief.

EU: Don't Lose Turkey

International Crisis Group

When a half-century of convergence between Turkey and the European Union last floundered a decade ago, the Turks regrouped and forged forward and the EU met them halfway. The result was a revolutionary period of reform in Turkey. Last month, grateful for their most fruitful period of political stability in many years, the Turkish electorate gave a resounding 46.7% vote of confidence to the ruling, pro-reform AK Party.


Now it is Europe's turn to take a stand. Instead it is stumbling: finding enlargement unfashionable, fearing immigration and mistaking some nonintegrated Turks within the EU for Turkey itself. Governments in France, Germany, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands are trying to short-change Turkey with the new idea of a "privileged partnership," not the membership promised repeatedly since 1963.


There is no need for Europe to fear Turkey's membership goal. The Turks themselves acknowledge the country is far from ready; the earliest date for joining the EU is a decade away. Turkey has to fulfill the stiffest conditions applied to any candidate. Any EU government can veto its membership, and the French people can vote it down in a referendum. If and when Turkey becomes acceptable to the EU, the Turks, attached to their sovereignty, make no secret that they too may think hard about the last step.


Nor is there cause to fear the Turks' mostly pragmatic take on Islam. The AKP's affable foreign minister, Abdullah Gül, almost certain to be elected president by parliament this month, has highlighted his vow to preserve the secularism of Turkey's political system. Mr. Gül's wife wears the urban-chic headscarf of Turkey's new Muslim conservatives, but in time this symbol is likely to become as unremarkable as the one worn by Recep Tayyip Erdogan's wife, which was equally controversial when he became prime minister four years ago. The secularist mass demonstrations this April and May showed that Turkey's still-powerful Kemalist establishment and vigilant society will be the first to block any real attempt to install a theocratic regime.


[..]Since 2005, however, the EU's loss of nerve, driven by domestic politics, mistakes on all sides over Cyprus and misplaced prejudices about Turkey's progressive Islam, has put the process under pressure. The U.S.-led war in Iraq has done even more to rouse anti-Western feelings in Turkey. These have triggered jarring actions by nationalist Turkish prosecutors, who harassed intellectuals, and authoritarian generals, who fanned political tensions this year as they warned of intervention if they felt the republic's secularist heritage was at risk. This in turn provoked new European criticism.


Turkish politicians are now avoiding pro-EU stances. The military has slowed purchases from Europe; French companies, in particular, have suffered losses. Religious and ethnic minorities in Turkey have come under renewed pressure. Rows over Cyprus are increasingly damaging EU and NATO diplomacy. Ankara is questioning its contributions to the new European defense structure and showing signs of a go-it-alone attitude in military matters, particularly toward northern Iraq, where Kurdish rebels from Turkey have bases. Behind closed doors, the idea of being strategically alone in a rough neighborhood is making some in Ankara weigh up whether Turkey, too, should pursue a nuclear option.


It is not too late to reverse this trend. Despite the increasingly negative atmosphere since 2005, technical work on EU reforms continues. In April, the AK Party drew up the country's most intensively researched action plan for convergence toward EU standards. Prime Minister Erdogan did not highlight his pro-EU credentials in the election campaign, but neither did he jump on the neonationalist bandwagon that has developed in reaction to the EU disappointments. In his first speech after the election victory, he vowed to use his strong new mandate to relaunch the EU reforms.


To help that happen, Europe has to reach out, seriously and sincerely, with the goal of membership firmly in place. Palliatives like a "privileged partnership" or "Mediterranean Union" cannot gain the traction the EU needs with Turkey. And the EU-Turkey accession process is not, as one French politician has portrayed it, a breakable flirtation or engagement. Like two towns that have grown into each other, Turkey and Europe, once distinct, now overlap to an extent that cannot be undone.

Prelude to an Attack on Iran?

TIME

Reports that the Bush Administration will put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of two ways: it's either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months. And they think that as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities. An awe and shock campaign, lite, if you will. But frankly they're guessing; after Iraq the White House trusts no one, especially the bureaucracy.


As with Saddam and his imagined WMD, the Administration's case against the IRGC is circumstantial. The U.S. military suspects but cannot prove that the IRGC is the main supplier of sophisticated improvised explosive devices to insurgents killing our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most sophisticated version, explosive formed projectiles or shape charges, are capable of penetrating the armor of an Abrams tank, disabling the tank and killing the crew.


A former CIA explosives expert who still works in Iraq told me: "The Iranians are making them. End of story." His argument is only a state is capable of manufacturing the EFP's, which involves a complicated annealing process. Incidentally, he also is convinced the IRGC is helping Iraqi Shi'a militias sight in their mortars on the Green Zone. "The way they're dropping them in, in neat grids, tells me all I need to know that the Shi'a are getting help. And there's no doubt it's Iranian, the IRGC's," he said.


A second part of the Administration's case against the IRGC is that the IRGC has had a long, established history of killing Americans, starting with the attack on the Marines in Beirut in 1983. And that's not to mention it was the IRGC that backed Hizballah in its thirty-four day war against Israel last year. The feeling in the Administration is that we should have taken care of the IRGC a long, long time ago.


Strengthening the Administration's case for a strike on Iran, there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking.


And what do we do if just the opposite happens — a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. "IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran."

Smashing the Plutocracy

The Nation

Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.


First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract. There were "NINJA" loans, for example, awarded to people with "no income, no job or assets." Conservative columnist Niall Fergusen laments the low levels of "economic literacy" that allowed people to be exploited by sub-prime loans. Why didn't these low-income folks get lawyers to go over the fine print? And don't they have personal financial advisors anyway?


Then, in a diabolically clever move, the poor--a category which now roughly coincides with the working class--stopped shopping. Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot announced disappointing second quarter performances, plunging the market into another Arctic-style meltdown. H. Lee Scott, CEO of the low-wage Wal-Mart empire, admitted with admirable sensitivity, that "it's no secret that many customers are running out of money at the end of the month."


[..]Global capitalism will survive the current credit crisis; already, the government has rushed in to soothe the feverish markets. But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis. Who would have thought that foreclosures in Stockton and Cleveland would roil the markets of London and Shanghai? The poor have risen up and spoken; only it sounds less like a shout of protest than a low, strangled, cry of pain.

Hurricane Dean: 1 Of 10 Most Intense Atlantic Hurricanes Ever Measured

Chris Mooney

Dean now takes its rank among the top ten most intense Atlantic hurricanes. If you look at that list you’ll see that six of the strongest (Wilma, Rita, Katrina, Mitch, Dean, and Ivan) have been in the past ten years. That’s not the kind of statistic that’s easy to overlook. According to these data we are getting more super-strong storms in the Atlantic basin than we ever have before.


[..]And what about the global perspective? Well, according to my ongoing “Storm Pundit” count of mega-hurricanes, Dean is the 10th Category 4 or 5 tropical cyclone observed globally this year. There have also been two borderline Category 3/Category 4 storms in my estimation. Here’s my tally of the data on intense storms in all the global hurricane basins, which is based upon the Unisys database of so-called hurricane best track records and supplemented by other data[..]


[..]I discuss in detail in my book Storm World — some scientists argue that the total number of the most intense hurricanes occurring annually is on the rise due to global warming and its heating of the oceans. 2007 isn’t over yet, but in this ongoing debate, this year’s complete tally of intense storms will serve as an important data point. That’s where Dean and its cousins fit in.


At least by my own count, there were 19 of these intense storms in 2006, 22 in 2005, and 23 in 2004. Hurricane specialist Jeff Masters says the long term average is 17 — in which case all of these years would be above it and we might indeed be looking at a trend.


It remains to be seen how 2007 will ultimately look when compared with these global totals for the past 3 years. But we can count on some more very strong storms this year. Not only do we expect more action from the Atlantic, Northeast Pacific, and especially the highly active Northwest Pacific, but we could also get a strong North Indian storm later this year. Finally, once the southern hemisphere summer rolls in around November and December, we might even get an intense storm or two rotating the other direction on the other side of the equator.

Pakistan: Parliamentary Secretary Accuses US of Terrorism

Informed Comment Global Affairs

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases a report in the conservative Urdu daily Nava-i Vaqt on remarks of the Pakistani parliament's chief staffer for defense issues.
"Pakistan: Parliamentary Secretary Asks Government To Expose 'Real' Face of US Report by Staff Reporter: "United States Itself is an International Terrorist: Parliamentary Secretary for Defense"


Islamabad: The parliamentary secretary for defense, retired Maj Tanvir Hussain Syed, has said that the United States is itself an international terrorist. In order to hide its own blatant aggression, it is describing the victims (of its atrocities) as terrorists.


While talking to the Nawa-e Waqt, he rejected the US objections to his speech in the National Assembly. He said that the Pakistan Government and people have to make a resolve to expose the real face of the US policies. He said that his speech in the National Assembly was very independent. However, the US attitude has always been very irresponsible at the international as well as regional level. The United States has always betrayed Pakistan. If the Americans are right, they should respond to the following questions: How much is the annual budget of the CIA and against which countries and for conspiracies against which particular religion, 80 percent of this budget is being used? The United States should tell whether defenders of ones homeland are terrorists or those who attack them?


Neither the Iraqi mujahidin nor the Taliban in Afghanistan, but the United States had attacked these two countries and had unleashed a reign of terror and aggression on their people. He said that the United States, intoxicated by its military might, was digging a ditch for its own people by invoking aggression. The United States has enslaved the UN for the sake of its vested interests. If the United States is a sworn flag-bearer of principles, why plebiscite has not been held for the poor Kashmiris until to date. The entire history of the United States is witness to its utterly irresponsible attitude. The United States embraces every country, which subjugates the Muslims. Israel and India are the obvious examples in this connection.


(Description of Source: Rawalpindi Nawa-e Waqt in Urdu -- Privately owned, widely read, conservative Islamic daily, with circulation around 125,000. Harshly critical of the US and India.)"

The Cold War Resumes

VOA News

Russia is resuming long-range bomber flights after a 15-year suspension. President Vladimir Putin said Friday that he ordered patrols of long-range aircraft to begin immediately and said they will be permanent. The long-range bombers are flying missions over the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans.


Fourteen long-range bombers took off from seven airfields across Russia early today. The Russian military and media report that NATO planes are escorting some of the bombers, but NATO will not confirm that. The Soviet Union used to conduct long-range bomber flight with planes carrying nuclear missiles. The practice ended when the Soviet Union collapsed.


Mr. Putin told reporters that Russia is resuming strategic long-range flights because other countries have not stopped these kinds of flights, creating what he called security problems for Russia. Russia, receiving a boost from high oil prices, is spending more money on its military budget.


Last week a Russian military plane flew near the U.S. military base on the Pacific island of Guam, but the U.S. military said it did not get close enough to be intercepted.

Greenland on Verge of Meltdown

Greenland on Verge of Meltdown

The complete collapse of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet -- which has a mean height of about two kilometres -- now appears inevitable, and could raise sea levels seven metres. "It's a sobering message, I think," says Tim Lenton, of the School of Environmental Sciences at Britain's University of East Anglia.


Lenton's research group surveyed climate and glacial experts around the world and the consensus is that the recent evidence shows that rising temperatures will soon reach the Greenland Ice Sheet's "tipping point", where it will break up within 300 years, raising sea levels by seven metres and flooding millions out their homes long before the year 2300.


Recent calculations show the Greenland collapse could be triggered by temperature rise of just 1 degree Celsius warmer than today. This is an example of what scientists call a "non-linear response", in which a small change can make a big difference, more commonly described as "tipping points".


And this point is coming much sooner than it looks. Due to a time lag in the atmospheric warming response, even if there were no more greenhouse gas emissions from this day forward, temperatures would still rise another 0.6 degrees Celsius.


"I don't want to say the Greenland meltdown is inevitable, but it will be very difficult to avoid," Lenton told IPS. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, believes that without drastic international efforts, a sea level rise of up to five metres is possible before the end of this century. "In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, such massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century," Hansen wrote in the Jul. 25 issue of New Scientist magazine.

Help End Dick Cheney's Quagmire in Iraq

Help End Dick Cheney's Quagmire in Iraq

Heritage Foundation finds the enemy: it's the CIA

Robert Dreyfuss:

On Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation makes its contribution to the global war on terror by finding the real enemy -- no, not bin Laden. It's the CIA.


Rowan Scarborough and John Edward Hilboldt will tell us how the CIA is the bad guys. The name of the panel is called: "Sabotage--America's Enemies Within the CIA." The title comes from a book of the same name by Scarborough, a former writer for the Washington TImes.


The blurb for the event says:


"Significant elements within the CIA are undermining both the President and national security through leaks, false allegations, and outright sabotage. ... Using sources in all levels of national security – from field officers to high-ranking analysts to former intelligence heads – Scarborough presents a disturbing picture of partisan politics endangering the success of our campaigns abroad and the very lives of our soldiers and agents. In his view, the agency has become increasingly political and digressed from its job of being a scrupulously nonpartisan collector of facts."


You might have thought that it was the Bush administration and Vice President Cheney who've been twisting facts, leaning on the CIA to get in line with the prefabricated analysis that led to the war in Iraq. But no.

Forced Sex and Labor Trafficking in the U.S.

AlterNet

We like to think of slavery in America as something consigned to history books, a dark chapter set in Southern cotton plantations and the hulls of ships set sail from Africa. Flor Molina wishes this were true.


For part of the year in 2003, Molina, a 29-year-old Mexican, was held against her will and forced to work in a factory in southern California, making dresses from 5:30 in the morning until 11 at night, seven days a week. She was not allowed to leave the factory or take a shower; she shared a small bed with another woman in the back of the shop. If she didn't sew fast enough, her boss would pull her hair, pinch and slap her.


"If we wouldn't do what she [her employer] said, she told us somebody who we love would pay the consequences," says Molina, a small woman with steady dark eyes and black hair that falls below her waist. "She told me she could kill me and no one would ask her for me. She told me dogs have more rights than I have in this country."


Molina is one of tens of thousands of people trafficked into the U.S. from other countries and forced to work against their will. They come here primarily from El Salvador, Mexico, Korea and China, but in any country where people are desperate for jobs they're prey to the allure of a mythic, prosperous U.S.


About 80 percent of those enslaved are women, pawns in the fastest-growing and one of the largest criminal industries in the world, second only to the drug trade and tied with the arms trade. With an estimated 800,000 people trafficked across all international borders each year, the shadow industry is estimated to generate $31.6 billion in profits annually.


There is a perception, propagated in large part by mainstream media, that slavery in the U.S. occurs mostly in the guise of forced prostitution. But the majority of trafficking victims are people who may be sewing our clothes, picking our crops, washing dishes in our restaurants, cleaning our motel rooms and building our homes and office buildings. They may be enslaved as domestic servants in our neighbors' homes.

Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq

The Observer

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis.


[..]A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.


Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

Turkey Still Massed on Iraqi Kurdish Border

Djelloul Marbrook

One of the events that has overtaken General Petraeus’ report—remember, he has already told the BBC we need to stay 18.jpgput—is the positioning of 160,000 Turkish troops along Iraq’s northern border. This may well prove to be the event that overtakes everything else.


Turkey, a Sunni nation and a member of NATO, has been telling the government of Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad for more than a year now that it must curb pan-Kurd ambitions in northern Iraq. The situation is far more volatile than the press has described. The Shias have their own militias. The Kurds have the well-trained Pesh Merga, which is in fact a standing army. But Iraq’s Sunnis have only their tribes. That in itself is enough to explain Sunni concerns.


The Kurds would like to see an independent Kurdistan. Considering the large Kurdish minorities in Iran and Turkey, it is not difficult to see why Shia Iran and Sunni Turkey are worried. Short of independence, the Kurds would like a semi-autonomous Kurdistan, which would contain Mosul’s rich oil fields. The Kurds could then continue to agitate for a greater Kurdistan, perhaps even arming militants inside Iran and Turkey.


Where does this leave us? In the soup, where we have been from the beginning. Consider these combustibles:


—Turkey has not set foot on Arab land since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.


— Iran and Turkey are traditional enemies. Iran would feel as threatened by an expanded border with Turkey as the Arabs feel threatened by a militant Iran.


—The Sunni Arabs have more in common with the Turks than they have with the Iranians, but the reappearance of Turkish soldiers on Arab land would be viewed with alarm.


—There are more than 100 million people in the world of Turkish origin. Turkey, a secular nation with an Islamist party in power, regards itself as the protector of these people. There are large Turkish minorities in Iran and Afghanistan, and people of Turkish origin are spread throughout Central Asia.


—Turkey has no oil, but it is host to oil pipelines. Moving into northern Iraq would give Turkey control of its oil fields. The Turks would say they have come only to stabilize the situation, but that is our story too, and we have already witnessed how many people in the world believe us.


If we are soon presented with a situation in which Turkey has as many troops in Iraq as we do it will change the entire equation, and yet the Washington establishment—the press, the government, the think tanks, the industry lobbyists—are all silent about an eventuality that would change everything in a thin minute.

Bhutto: Democracy is the Hope of Pakistan

OpinionJournal

Ms. Bhutto offers what amounts to a double diagnosis of Mr. Musharraf's problems, one narrowly political, another fundamentally philosophical.


On the political front, she says, Mr. Musharraf "has had a set of partners since 2002, the last elections, and it's under those partners that extremism has spread in the country. Now as these negotiations have been going on with the Pakistan People's Party, that group is worried that it's going to lose control. . . . So they are trying to jettison the return to democracy."


According to this analysis, Mr. Musharraf's problem, in effect, is that he is attempting to oblige two opposite constituencies: on the one hand, Islamic political parties, on whom he depends for parliamentary support and as a bulwark against Pakistan's democratic forces; on the other hand, the U.S., on whom he also depends for financial support, international legitimacy and a genuinely shared interest in combating Al Qaeda (though not necessarily lesser terrorist groups).


Not without reason, Ms. Bhutto sees herself as the solution to Mr. Musharraf's problems, provided he's willing to come to terms with her various demands. "In Pakistan there are two fault lines," she says. "One is dictatorship versus democracy. And one is moderation versus extremism. So while we are on opposite sides of the spectrum on the one end we have something in common on the other end. So we have been meeting with Gen. Musharraf to see how we could agree on a plan to move Pakistan in the direction of credible elections and the restoration of a truly democratic government."


But Ms. Bhutto also offers a more subtle and cohesive analysis for what she describes as Mr. Musharraf's "ambiguity of policies" toward Islamic extremism. "The military regime," she argues, "needs the threat of Al Qaeda and the militants to justify military rule, to justify the derailment of democracy . . . and also because it brings the money in. You see, if there is no threat, there is no money."


This is not an idle theory. As Ms. Bhutto accurately recounts, U.S. assistance to Pakistan has followed a stop-go pattern for over 50 years, often to disastrous effect. Aid flowed in the 1950s and '60s, when Pakistan was seen as an ally against the Soviet Union and Soviet-tilting India. (Gary Francis Powers's U-2 spy plane, which was shot down by the Soviet Union in May 1960, took off from an airbase near Peshawar.) It dried up in the 1970s, a period when Ms. Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, dominated Pakistan's political scene until his execution at the hands of his successor.


Aid resumed in the 1980s, when the U.S. needed Pakistan to wage a proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. It evaporated again after the war, when Pakistan was sanctioned by the U.S. for its nuclear programs. And it resumed again when Pakistan was called into service against Al Qaeda after Sept. 11, 2001.


Now prominent American voices--a certain U.S. Senator from Illinois among them--are calling for a new hard line against Pakistan, including unilateral U.S. military action in the tribal areas. How does Ms. Bhutto feel about Barack Obama's tough-guy act?


She grimaces. "I was disturbed by his comments. And I was disturbed because any unilateral attack will unite all Pakistanis together because they will see it as a threat against our country."


What Ms. Bhutto proposes instead is for Pakistan itself to do more. "We'd like to work closely with NATO and the United States in eliminating militancy," she says. "But I think enough effort hasn't been made by Pakistan on its own in those areas. . . . If the government had the consistent and persistent will to take them on then I think government writ can be established."


Ms. Bhutto is unimpressed with suggestions that the tribal areas are simply too wild to govern or police: She claims she cleaned out drug barons--as violent and heavily armed then as the Taliban and Al Qaeda are today--from the area in the late 1980s. It's part of her larger complaint against Mr. Musharraf's government and what she charges are its ongoing links to extremists.


"Whether Gen. Musharraf is colluding in what is happening, or whether he is ineffective in dealing with it . . . the net result is the same," she says. "And what has really bothered me from the very beginning is the type of people around Gen. Musharraf." She gives the example of Brigadier Ijaz Shah, who runs Pakistan's intelligence bureau: "Brigadier Shah and the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] recruited Omar Sheikh, who killed Danny Pearl. So I would feel very uncomfortable making the intelligence bureau, which has more than 100,000 people underneath it, run by a man who worked so closely with militants and extremists."


Ms. Bhutto also raises hard questions about the long chain of decisions leading up to the Red Mosque showdown. "Three years ago when [mosque ringleader Abudl Rashid] Ghazi was arrested bringing weapons into Islamabad to store at the Red Mosque, the minister of religious affairs had him freed. There is no question of the Homeland Security officer in America, for example, releasing terrorists who are caught with weapons."


What does all this portend for Pakistan? Ms. Bhutto is by turns hopeful and despondent. "Pakistan is still caught in a time warp, it is still the same battle lines between the modernizers and the extremists. But unfortunately the long period of military rule has emboldened the extremists. . . . I think it is just a matter of five to 10 years, if they continue building as many militant headquarters as they have in the last five years, it may be too late. They have been building and building and building."


The remedy to all this, says Ms. Bhutto, is democracy, plain and simple. She does not believe that Pakistani society has become more illiberal in its political outlook, despite the almost metastatic growth of radical madrassas (religious schools) in recent years. On the contrary, she argues that the increasing--and increasingly unrestrained--power of militants to compel or kill ordinary people to get what they want has created a huge backlash, one that could make itself felt at the ballot box if people are given the chance to vote their consciences. Radicals and militants, she says, recalling the fate of the moderate Mensheviks at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1917, "are not enough to tilt an election. But they are enough to unleash against the population, to rig an election, to kidnap police, to kill the army, and therefore to make it possible to take over the state."


Ms. Bhutto plans to return to Pakistan quite soon, perhaps within a matter of weeks. She worries that Mr. Musharraf could have her arrested, or that he will declare a state of emergency (as it seems he was nearly prepared to do this week), or that he will use brazen or subtle methods to rig the elections. She is plainly confident that her party will score big at the polls if given a fair chance, and that, whether as prime minister or from behind the scenes, she will be at its helm. In a life marked by the sharpest reversals of fortune, it's another turn of, and at, the wheel.


Mr. Stephens writes "Global View," The Wall Street Journal's foreign affairs column.

Informed Comment Global Affairs

Our anxiety and mistrust for our most valuable ally in the global war on terrorism comes from the same fear and incomprehension with which we perceive the broader Muslim world. Our news coverage, after all, shows us little besides faces contorted into masks of rage, mosques turned into fortresses of hate, and the aftermath of yet another bomb blast. Our support for “democratization” will remain nominal until we learn to look beyond the dictates of conventional wisdom and the confines of a pre-destined clash of civilizations. We must know, understand, trust and dialogue with the global community of Muslims


Instead of reducing this sprawling, diverse, multi-denominational and multi-cultural nation to nothing more than a caricature of its madrasas and tribal chieftans, US policy must explicitly support immediate and full democracy in Pakistan. As we continue to insist on a flat, binary world of those with us or against us; as we continue to distrust those masses populating the streets of Pakistan; as we continue to believe that the only outcome to an election in Pakistan will be power for the extremists, we ignore the birth of a real and pure movement for democracy – and we ignore it at our peril.


We have to practice what we preach. Our weapons against extremism are democracy, civil society, a free press and the rule of law, not support for military dictators.

Facism in America?

Brief flash movie.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Glenn C. Loury in Boston Review

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.


Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.


How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.


[..] The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime:


"The growth was entirely attributable to a growth in punitiveness, about equally to growth in prison commitments per arrest (an indication of tougher prosecution or judicial sentencing) and to longer time served (an indication of longer sentences, elimination of parole or later parole release, or greater readiness to recommit parolees to prison for either technical violations or new crimes). "


[..]This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.


Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow.


[..]Fagan, West, and Holland explain the effects of spatially concentrated urban anti-drug-law enforcement in the contemporary American metropolis. Buyers may come from any neighborhood and any social stratum. But the sellers—at least the ones who can be readily found hawking their wares on street corners and in public vestibules—come predominantly from the poorest, most non-white parts of the city. The police, with arrest quotas to meet, know precisely where to find them. The researchers conclude:


"Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration . . . three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods."


The effects of imprisonment on life chances are profound. For incarcerated black men, hourly wages are ten percent lower after prison than before. For all incarcerated men, the number of weeks worked per year falls by at least a third after their release.


So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.


[..]The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men. Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.


[..]Deciding on the weight to give to a “thug’s” well-being—or to that of his wife or daughter or son—is a question of social morality, not social science. Nor can social science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment of security or property or peace of mind for the rest of us. These are questions about the nature of the American state and its relationship to its people that transcend the categories of benefits and costs.


Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.


Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: “The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” The boundary between prison and community, Garland continues, is “heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent risks leaking out from one to the other.


[..]Deciding on the weight to give to a “thug’s” well-being—or to that of his wife or daughter or son—is a question of social morality, not social science. Nor can social science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment of security or property or peace of mind for the rest of us. These are questions about the nature of the American state and its relationship to its people that transcend the categories of benefits and costs.


Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.


Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: “The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” The boundary between prison and community, Garland continues, is “heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent risks leaking out from one to the other.


[..]Given our history, producing a racially defined nether caste through the ostensibly neutral application of law should be profoundly offensive to our ethical sensibilities—to the principles we proudly assert as our own. Mass incarceration has now become a principal vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchy in our society. Our country’s policymakers need to do something about it. And all of us are ultimately responsible for making sure that they do. MORE

More on Ethnic Cleansing in 1948 Israel

United Press International

The Palestinians call Israel’s 1948 war of independence their nakba, or catastrophic ethnic cleansing, or forced exile. The Israelis, for their part, have steadfastly rejected any suggestion of ethnic cleansing as calumny in all its anti-Semitic horror.


Historic revisionism is now under way. Without fanfare, just below the media radar screen, the Israeli Education Ministry has approved a textbook for Arab third-graders in Israel that concedes the war that gave birth to Israel was a “nakba” for the Palestinians. The textbook refers to the “expulsion” of some of the Palestinians and the “confiscation of many Arab-owned lands.”


Textbooks for Jewish Israelis in the same grade make no such verbal concession. But Israel’s “new wave” historians have been combing through fresh material now available from the British mandate period and Israeli archives that document the history of Israel before and after it became a state. Long-lasting myths are being debunked.


Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian and Haifa University lecturer, whose ninth book is titled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” documents how Israel was born with lands forcibly seized from its Palestinian inhabitants who had lived there for hundreds of years.


During the British mandate (1920-1948), Zionist leaders concluded Palestinians, who owned 90 percent of the land (with 5.8 percent owned by Jews), would have to be forcibly expelled to make a Jewish state possible. Pappe quotes David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, addressing the Jewish Agency Executive in June 1938, as saying, “I am for compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”


Pappe outlines Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), which followed earlier plans A, B and C, and included forcible expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians from both urban and rural areas with the objective of creating by any means necessary an exclusive Jewish state without an Arab presence. The methods ranged from a campaign of disinformation -- “get out immediately because the Jews are on their way to kill you” -- to Jewish militia attacks to terrorize the Palestinians.


The first Jewish militia attacks, says Pappe, began before the May 1948 end of the British mandate. In December 1947 two villages in the central plain -- Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa -- were raided, and their panicked Palestinian inhabitants fled. Jewish leaders gave the order to drive out as many Palestinians as possible on March 10, 1948. The terror campaign ended six months later. Pappe writes 531 Palestinian villages were destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities were emptied of their Palestinian inhabitants.


There is no doubt in Pappe’s mind that Plan D “was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity.”


Plan Dalet began in the rural hills on the western slopes of the Jerusalem mountains halfway on the road to Tel Aviv, according to Pappe. It was called Operation Nachshon, and served as a model for massive expulsions using terror tactics. Pappe also details what he calls the “urbicide of Palestine” that included attacking and cleansing the major urban centers of Tiberias, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Safad and what he calls the “Phantom City of Jerusalem” once Jewish troops shelled, attacked and occupied its western Arab neighborhoods in April 1948. The British did not interfere.
MORE

Ethnic Cleansing Continues in Israel Against Arab Israelis

Building permits anywhere else are designed to protect the naive home owner from shoddy building practices. But in Israel, it serves another purpose. Concerned about the growing proportion of Arab Israelis in Israel, the government uses building permits and razing of housing without them as a form of ethnic cleansing.
Since 1948, the official government policy of Israel has been to ensure a Jewish state. With the birth rate higher among Arabs, they will fail in this endeavor unless they more aggressively drive Arab Israelis out of their country.
Clearly, Israel runs a virtual apartheid, keeping Arab citizens as second class class citizens in their own country and driving out as many as they can.
The Daily Star

Six months pregnant and exhausted, British mother Jessica Barhoum is still shocked that Israeli authorities ordered her, her husband and their baby out of bed at daybreak and pulverized their home. "I can't believe that it's lawful, that this law exists. I'm from England. Do you know what I mean?" asked Jessica, 32, who grew up in the southern city of Salisbury but moved to Israel after marrying Moussa, her Arab Israeli husband. "You can't believe a country like this would make a law against its own citizens," she added.


For the last four decades, Israeli legislation has permitted the demolition of homes built without a construction permit, the case for the Barhoums' home in the village of Ein Rafa, west of Occupied Jerusalem, although a permit was pending.


Critics say the law is disproportionately used against Arab Israelis rather than Jewish Israelis. Permits can take years to acquire, particularly for Palestinians wanting to build in Israeli-occupied and annexed East Jerusalem.


Jessica, a landscape gardener who also holds Swiss nationality, converted to Islam before marrying and moving to her husband's village, giving birth to their daughter Sara and learning to speak nearly fluent Arabic and Hebrew.


Last week she watched in disbelief as two bulldozers with pneumatic drills implemented an 18-month-old demolition order against their home, which Moussa spent eight years building on land owned by his family.


Armed Israeli security forces woke them up at 5:00 a.m. Jessica said she was given five minutes to get out. Her daughter screamed and her husband was arrested as clearers stuffed some of their possessions into plastic bags before the bulldozers pulverized the two-bedroom house and vegetable patch into rubble.