Oh, Really? Imagine My Surprise.

Hot off the press comes this latest research report from the Department of Stating The Utterly Bleedin' Obvious:

Bush Nuts

Are George W. Bush lovers certifiable?

November 23, 2006 By Andy Bromage

A collective “I told you so” will ripple through the world of Bush-bashers once news of Christopher Lohse’s study gets out.Lohse, a social work master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

[…]

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”

Well fancy that.

Read more: US politics, Bush, Psychology

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Posted 11:32 AM by Republic of Palau

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Kentucky Fried Chicken Claims War Reparations From Iraq

No, that's not an Onion headline. From the Morning Star, via Lenin:

THERE are times when the phrase mind-boggling simply isn't adequate to describe the reaction to one or other item of news.

This is just such a time. The news that shattered and partially dismantled Iraq has paid out over $40 billion in so-called "reparations" is bad enough.

But to find out to whom that vast sum has been or is about to be paid to is so shattering as to be almost incredible.

That a country which has been illegally invaded, which has lost over 650,000 of its population, which has been carved up between the oil transnationals and the states that host them and which has had a puppet government foisted on it which has no more relation to democracy than fly in the air should have to pay reparations is, in itself, ludicrous.

That the companies which are claiming large slices of that $40 billion should include Kentucky Fried Chicken is appalling.

Also claiming Gulf war reparations are Halliburton and Bechtel, two war-profiteering corporations who've done more to ruin Iraq and its infrastructure and suck the country dry than anyone, while simultaneously raiding the US treasury and swindling American armed forces. In this they were aided and abetted by Bush, Cheney and their willing minions.

But what are these massive corporations actually claiming reparations for? What have the war-torn and exhausted Iraqis done to these international corporate bullyboys that could possibly warrant their shareholders being compensated with such vast sums? Not a lot actually, the Iraqis themselves did nothing: it's just that KFC, and Toys R Us et al lost profits.

Naomi Klein has the numbers:

Since Saddam was toppled in April, Iraq has paid out $1.8bn in reparations to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), the Geneva-based quasi tribunal that assesses claims and disburses awards. Of those payments, $37m have gone to Britain and $32.8m have gone to the United States. That's right: in the past 18 months, Iraq's occupiers have collected $69.8m in reparation payments from the desperate people they have been occupying. But it gets worse: the vast majority of those payments, 78%, have gone to multinational corporations, according to statistics on the UNCC website.

Away from media scrutiny, this has been going on for years. Of course there are many legitimate claims for losses that have come before the UNCC: payments have gone to Kuwaitis who have lost loved ones, limbs, and property to Saddam's forces. But much larger awards have gone to corporations: of the total amount the UNCC has awarded in Gulf war reparations, $21.5bn has gone to the oil industry alone. Jean-Claude Aimé, the UN diplomat who headed the UNCC until December 2000, publicly questioned the practice. "This is the first time as far as I know that the UN is engaged in retrieving lost corporate assets and profits," he told the Wall Street Journal in 1997, and then mused: "I often wonder at the correctness of that."

But the UNCC's corporate handouts only accelerated. Here is a small sample of who has been getting "reparation" awards from Iraq: Halliburton ($18m), Bechtel ($7m), Mobil ($2.3m), Shell ($1.6m), Nestlé ($2.6m), Pepsi ($3.8m), Philip Morris ($1.3m), Sheraton ($11m), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321,000) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In the vast majority of cases, these corporations did not claim that Saddam's forces damaged their property in Kuwait - only that they "lost profits" or, in the case of American Express, experienced a "decline in business" because of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. One of the biggest winners has been Texaco, which was awarded $505m in 1999. According to a UNCC spokesperson, only 12% of that reparation award has been paid, which means hundreds of millions more will have to come out of the coffers of post-Saddam Iraq.

[My emphasis]

The fact that Iraqis have been paying reparations to their occupiers is all the more shocking in the context of how little these countries have actually spent on aid in Iraq. Despite the $18.4bn of US tax dollars allocated for Iraq's reconstruction, the Washington Post estimates that only $29m has been spent on water, sanitation, health, roads, bridges, and public safety combined. And in July (the latest figure available), the Department of Defence estimated that only $4m had been spent compensating Iraqis who had been injured, or who lost family members or property as a direct result of the occupation - a fraction of what the US has collected from Iraq in reparations since its occupation began.

4 million dollars. If we take the civilian fatalities at the Lancet numbers that's just over six dollars each corpse.

For the price of two dead Iraqis you can get a 10 piece mixed meal with all the fixin's and chump change. Mmm, mm, mmm. I'm licking my fingers already.

Read more: Iraq, Civil war, War profiteering, Reparations

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Posted 1:52 PM by Republic of Palau

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Once Is An Accident, Twice Is Coincidence, Three Times Is Enemy Action

Oops. Looks like T Rex of Firedoglake has put his massively clawed prehistoric foot in it again following an ill-advised post from fellow contributor Pachacutec.

Normally I wouldn't bother with FDL or contributor TRex, not after the last time. I haven't read FDL since the his gratuitous insult of blogger Lisa at Culture Kitchen. I'm a big fan of energetic vituperation but that was just unpleasant.

I'd already been cooling towards the blog although they did fantastic work on Plamegate, but for some time it's been becoming a magnet for drooling fanboys and girls. The comments are becoming a stew of self-referential high-school types who tend to pile on at any sign of criticism of their idols. Who needs it?

Feh. Don't like it, don't go there and I don't. Simple.

But Tom Watson has been reading FDL and he's not happy with the tenor of some of FDL's more recent prose, particularly this from Pachacutec, seeing it as part of the wider issue of misogynystic language and attitudes on the left:

Anti-Feminism on the Left III

Do Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith have conservative operatives in their midst? Has FireDogLake - arguably a top five liberal group blog - been infiltrated by dirty tricks squads of the right? More directly, does FDL blogger Pachacutec work for Karl Rove?

I ask because of the reckless, misogynist post that appeared this morning in my regular blogroll (I'm a big FDL fan, most of the time) about Democratic Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher of California. Tauscher is a so-called Blue Dog Democrat, a centrist type who has often voted with the Republicans on military issues. She may well be due a primary from the left in her district in San Francisco's progressive suburbs. But she is certainly not due a vicious attack on her gender, dressed up as "snark" by a leading liberal blog. Here's the slime, headlined " FDL Late Nite: Whore, n., 1. A prostitute. . ."

You know, sometimes I'm an old fashioned sort. I can appreciate tradition. I certainly believe in hard work, and positively adore the craft of genuine professionalism. In that spirit, I bring you an underappreciated practitioner of the world's oldest profession, a woman in congress Congress, Ellen Tauscher. She can slurp the gnarly nub of power with the very best, gamely grinning to the gushing finish: a working girl's working girl. Howie calls her, "a bribe-taking corporate whore and shit eater who has guaranteed herself a nasty primary in 2008."

I hope Peter Daou is reading this, because his boss may well have to face this kind of sexist attack beginning next year. It's so bad, so poorly executed, that it really does appear to be a clumsy Republican efforts to pollute a top Democratic blog. These posts are permanent, folks. They give aid and comfort to the other side. They make our side look surly, sexist, hypocritical.

To put is [sic] another way: are you stupid? Or just insane?

[...]

But in a world where a hero like Mukhtar Mai of Pakistan overcomes court-ordered gang rape and a corrupt regime to help educate the children of her attackers, we kid ourselves that we're advanced enough, cool enough, hip enough, or evolved enough to throw around this low-brow gender-based garbage and think it won't stick - to us, to the left, to the Democrats, to our candidates, to our movement.

Tom's post is one of a series of three (one and two) examining the innate sexism that is apparent on so many left-wing blogs, not all of them run by men, attitudes which are even more apparent amongst supposedly sophisticated, allegedly liberal media types, many of them women.

Obligatory mea culpa: I'm as guilty as the next person of intemperate language but I will never apologise for that unless its shown to be factually unjustified. I wouldn't expect any other self-respecting blogger to do otherwise. As a political woman who self-identifies as feminist I try to be sensitive (and, as I've been told by a number of mysogynistic pricks, even hypersensitive) to the underlying implications and subtexts of language, particularly in the way language reinforces the continuing negative position of women in the world.

But and this is a big but, there are times when only certain insults will do - I certainly understand that. Even so, there is a line between entertaining invective and the outright sexist garbage Pachacutec produced. What are possibly entirely justified criticisms of Tauscher on the issues got lost in the spew of language. He might've got away with it too, if he'd actually been funny. There're are lot of sexists on the left who get away with it only because of that.

That said, I've noticed there is a terribly self-congratulatory and particularly male strain on the broad left that assumes that if they publicly profess to be a Progressive ('liberal' is so passe now) the act of having done so washes all their antifeminist sins away now and forever after. Just like the Born-Agains they affect to despise, by virtue of this public self-anointment as 'progressive' they feel forever exempt from any further self-examination. Hey presto, you're a Progressive! All you have to do is say so, loudly and often.

No need, now, to question your own attitudes, no need for any more of that boring stuff. It's hard work. Just say you're progressive and anything you do or say is fine.

But progressive is as progressive does and reacting like this when challenged, politely, on some assumptions about one's own sexist attitudes is not what I'd call progressive, not at all. Scabrous wit is one thing, you can get away with a lot if you say it cleverly enough. But crude sexist insult is another thing and speaks more of the writer's own insecurities:

"UPDATE II: The grown-ups at FDL have been busy. The C-word has been edited out of the post."

That was my decision, Tom. I decided I would rather refer to Miss Ingraham as a Bitch Troll from Hell.

You, on the other hand, are a miserable little cunt.

Posted by: TRex Nov 27, 2006 7:25:23 PM

Someone doesn't like being challenged.

You can say anything you like, but if you don't do it it means nothing. All these smug, supposedly progressive men resting on their laurels while displaying antifeminist attitudes worthy of any freeping wingnut; it's the same essential hollowness that's at the heart of American evangelical Christianity. It's all shows of piety, public professions of faith and no works.

US and UK politics both show this tendency written large. Everyone wants a party to represent their particular views, but too many want it like any tv-advertised commodity, instantly and with no visible sign of the boring machinery that got it there. They don't actually want to have to do anything. They vote for the left (well, some do), don't they? Isn't that enough?

Nope, it's not. Political activism, like patriarchy, starts at home and it means we have to consider everything we do or say, at home at work, wherever, in the light of our principles. What's the point otherwise? You can talk a good fight all you want but if you don't do it, or at least try to - even in your domestic life, on your blog, with your kids - it means nothing. That old saying, think globally, act locally has become such a cliche but it's never been more pertinent.

[BTW, I recommend the comments thread on Tom's post for the full flavour of FDL fandom in full flow]

Read more: US Politics, Blogs, Blogging, Feminism, Progressives, Language

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Posted 12:02 PM by Republic of Palau

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Blair's bourgeois dictatorship

Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.

Via Blood and Treausre, comes this story about the ultimate New Labour policy initiative:

A new contract between the state and the citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for quality services from hospitals, schools and the police is one of the key proposals emerging from a Downing Street initiated policy review.

Examples include an expectation that a local health authority will only offer a hip replacement if the patient undertakes to keep their weight down. Parents might also be asked to sign individually tailored contracts with a school setting out what the parents must do at home to advance their child's publicly-funded education.

The police might also promise to achieve a specific response time in a local area, so long as an agreement is struck on the local law and disorder priorities. The aim is to build on the government's rights and responsibilities agenda, and papers released yesterday by the Cabinet Office speak of seeking "a new more explicit contract between the state and the citizen on agreed public outcomes".

Here we have everything that makes New Labour so awful in one neat package: a distrust of the people, the centralised authoritarianism, the fetishisation of business as a model to run government services, the rampant managerialism. It is the logical outcome of nine years of New Labour policies, the last cornerstone of Blair's bourgeois dictatorship. It is impossible to be a democracy if the state can exclude citizens from the services it provides based on some nebolous criteria it has drawn up itself. Moreover, it's just as easy to exclude the critic of the local MP from receiving benefits for "antisocial thoughts" as it is to deny a smoker a new lung. All in the name of "people like us", the middle classes. Even if the middle classes, if they knew what they were getting, are not stupid enough to actually want it. But then again, the way it will be sold to the public is by pretending it will only apply to welfare scroungers, overweight chavs on estates still *gasp* smoking and terrorist sympathisers. Not to people with 2.4 children living in Islington who know which course goes with which wine, no...

Read more about: New Labour, Tony Blair, civil rights, UK politics

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Posted 11:07 PM by Martin Wisse

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Cascading Down The Generations

While we're on the subject of music, Fi Glover at BBC Radio 4 has a nice little feature on called Inheritance Tracks.

The idea is to tell the story of two songs - one which you have inherited from your parents and the other being the one that you would leave to the next generation. Plenty of examples are given from people like novelist Fay Weldon and comic Mark Thomas and includes music from Flanders & Swann, Joyce Grenfell and Dave Brubeck.

Oh, this one is a winner. The music that shaped us and songs for the next generation. What is the song that you think your parents have left to you, and the one that you would leave to the next generation? What do your choices say about you? Makes a change from the same old Friday iPod showoff list.

I'll set the ball rolling, shall I?

It was difficult to nominate just one song that I've inherited. Holst or Sinatra? Queen or Nana Mouskouri? Bernard Cribbins or Art Blakey? All were typical of my parents taste. In the end I just had to choose 'Firefly' by Tony Bennett - they always used to sing it together at drunken Irish family parties in the very long ago. Tony Bennett is also a musician whose sheer longevity has made him an integral part of the soundscape of that apparently innocent era after the war and Before The Bushes, when Dacron was cool and we all wore leisure suits, even the babies - you've only to hear his voice to be transported to a hipper, smoother, less angsty time.

I was torn over which to bequeath to my kids. My first inclination was of course to nomnate 'The Internationale', for obvious reasons. But 'The Internationale' has one big drawback, ie you can't dance to it. And that's a revolution if we can't dance? So I nominate Funkadelic and "One Nation Under A Groove" for my kids to inherit, because it embodies my generation's demented utopian dreams of worldwide love, harmony, understanding and all-round funkiness in one irresistable song.

What are your own two inheritance tracks?

Read more: Music, Radio 4, Inheritance tracks

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Posted 12:34 PM by Republic of Palau

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Music Saturday

The genius that is... Mulligan and O'Hare.

Read more: UK Comedy, Reeves & Mortimer, Video , YouTube

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Posted 12:11 PM by Republic of Palau

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The War On Christmas has begun! Huzzah!

And now it’s time to look ahead: Rather than destroy Christmas in the usual way this year — by boiling elves and impaling Christians on giant candy canes and peeing in creches, and all that — our plan, as liberals, is to work within the system, to send spies into Christmas itself, and to bring this so-called, scare-quotes “holiday” to ruin by the grinding of its own cogs.

Opening salvos were launched on Thanskgiving from the pagan base at Sadly, No and sleeper cells are already up and running in major cities around the world. Frustrate the spirit of Christmas! Give toys to children, bwahahaha! Here, here or especially here.

One commenter rather missed the point that Christmas isn't actually Christian anyway:

Major Woody said, November 24, 2006 at 13:46

I think Penguins are perfectly appropriate for Christmas. After all, they live at the North Pole just like Santa, and like the Baby Jesus, they are raised in beds of straw. Most penguins, like Mr. Christ, are born Jewish, too. Penguins also have the ability to walk on water (when it’s frozen) and like to eat fishes, which I believe Jesus and the Disciples (that’s the band he was in, it was quite big) enjoyed. In fact, before they formed the band, all those guys were fishers-men, except for Judas who was an accountant, and Paul, who was a gay hooker. It’s true, you can look it all up on Wikipedia, just give me about 15 minutes first.

Oh, pagans, not penguins. Sorry.

Hmm. I suspect that may 've been written for comic effect. Mind you, why shouldn't Yuletide become a penguin-based holiday?

Penguins are the perfect symbolic winter holiday bird. They're cuter than pagans; they tend not to mess the house up with awful purple batik throws and crystals, like those Bach-flower-remedy-spilling hippy drippies do; they don't insist that a microwave oven removes protein from food, or direct 'healing' rays in your direction whether you want them to or not, or disappear from family events because the negative vibe is just too much for their little sensitive-flower souls; they also don't dance in the moonlight singing paeans to the Goddess and pretend to be elves in their spare time. (Well, only the Gentoos, but their LARPing's isolated enough not to bother me much.)

Not all penguins are suited to seasonal celebrations though. The Adelies, for example, are monotheistic, bloodthirsty and in league with Opus Dei, so are no use at all for our evil purposes. Emperors, on the other hand, are anyone's for a bucket of squid and have that portly Maitre D' in a tux look that adds so much tone to one's festive events.

Who would you rather have at the feast, a religious nuttjob or an aquatic extremophile avian in cool monkey suit?

No contest, is there?

Read more: War On Christmas

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Posted 10:59 AM by Republic of Palau

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Australian Wheat Traders Told Of Iraq Invasion 13 months Beforehand

Blair never just lies, he lies about his lies.

Remember this?

AS a civil service briefing paper specifically prepared for the July meeting reveals, Blair had made his fundamental decision on Saddam when he met President George W Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002.

Well, this next rather undermines Blair's claims that no decision had been made to go to war until that April meeting :

NZ Herald:

World News: Iraq invasion plans tipped a year ahead

Friday November 24, 2006

CANBERRA - A senior diplomat tipped off the Australian Wheat Board a year before the Iraq war that Australia would join the United States-led invasion, new documents show. The evidence appears to contradict the Howard Government's statements that it did not decide to join the war before the invasion was debated in the United Nations in late 2002 and early 2003.

The revelation prompted the Opposition to call for the Cole inquiry into the AWB's Iraq kickbacks to be reopened and its terms of reference expanded - just 24 hours before the final report is handed to the Government. The documents, released by the Cole inquiry, show Australia's then United Nations Ambassador John Dauth revealed the Howard Government's position to former AWB chairman Trevor Flugge. Dauth briefed Flugge in New York in February 2002 - 13 months before the invasion - and the details appear in minutes of AWB's February 27 board meeting of that year, tendered to the inquiry. "The Ambassador stated that he believed that US military action to depose Saddam Hussein was inevitable and that at this time the Australian Government would support and participate in such action," the minutes say. [My emphasis]

[...]

Opposition leader Kim Beazley said the documents showed the Howard Government was prepared to take AWB into its confidence a year before going to war - but not the Australian people. The Cole inquiry, which is likely to recommend criminal charges against current and former AWB executives over the A$290 million ($339 million) in illicit payments the company made to Iraq, should be allowed to continue with expanded terms of reference, Beazley said.

[...].

So the wheat traders on the other side of the world knew in February '02 that the US would invade, but Tony Blair didn't? Oh, give me a break. If it was common knowledge even among the Australian diplomats, do we really thinkBlair didn't know until that meeting at the Crawford ranch in April?

What perplexes me most about Blair's deceit before the war and his continuing Iraq lies is his blatancy and seeming assurance that no-one will ever hold him to account. Many of his untruths have been indeed been speedily and relatively easily uncovered but Blair as yet hasn't had to face the music, unless you call the Butler report an accounring and I certainly don't.

Like the now desperately recanting US neocons Blair seems not to have thought beyond the actual point of the invasion to what might happen to either postwar Iraq or their own governments. They assumed it'd all be hunkydory both at home and abroad. But why? Had they had assurances that they needn't worry about any consequences, and if so, who from?

There's a lot more collateral info to come from the Cole enquiry - though it's otsensibly about kickbacks to .au wheat producers and the UN Oil for Food Scandal, it bears paying some attention to on both sides of the Atlantic for the backdoor insights it gives into the machinations leading up to the invasion.

Read more: Iraq, Invasion, Butler report, Blair war lies, Australia, Cole Enquiry

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Posted 9:33 AM by Republic of Palau

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Saturday Travelling Cat Blogging

Stowaway Cat Found After 17-Day Sea Voyage

(AP) LONDON A fluffy white cat stunned cargo workers in England when it jumped out of a goods container after a 17-day sea voyage of more than 2,000 miles from Israel to Britain, an animal charity said Friday.

The cat nicknamed Ziggy was starving and dehydrated when workers at a warehouse in the northwestern town of Whitworth discovered the unexpected cargo a week ago.

Ziggy fled from the workers when the container was opened and hid for more than five hours.

"I think he was scared to death," said James Ratcliff, an officer with charity the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "He'd traveled all that way and got to a strange country, and ran for his life."

The animal charity was called to help and officers discovered the cat by a pool of water on the warehouse roof, luring it to them with a plate of tuna, Ratcliff said.

Local trading standards officer Colin Barton said Ziggy began his journey at a factory in Afula, northern Israel, on Oct. 31, when a container was sealed and taken to the port of Haifa for shipment.

It arrived in Liverpool, northern England, 10 days later and was taken to the warehouse, where workers had expected to unpack a cargo of plastic goods, he said.

When the container was finally opened, staff unloading it got a real surprise when this fluffy white cat shot out," Barton said. "I think it has probably used some of its nine lives."

Ziggy has been tended to by veterinarians and is now being kept at an animal quarantine as officials attempt to trace its owners in Israel, Ratcliff said.

Read more: Weird news, Pets, Travelling cats

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Posted 8:55 AM by Republic of Palau

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A Liberal Is A Conservative Who's Been Arrested

Click To Play

8 minutes QuickTime

Check Point "Dubya" focuses on constitutional violations by security forces and the brutal over use of pepper spray at the 14th & Pennsylvania Ave. inauguration parade route check point. January 20th 2005. This piece aired on Free Speech TV as part of the documentary Mandate?

Remember the disgraceful and brutal behaviour of the police towards peaceful protestors during the demonstrations at Bush's two inaugurations in Washington DC? At the 2001 inauguration:

At a primary entry and check point to the Parade route and the location finally given by permit to protestors, the private Bush-Cheney Presidential Inaugural Committee working jointly with the D.C. Police and federal law enforcement officers prevented activists from entering, creating a highly provocative situation, in order to stop activists from being along the route of the Presidential motorcade.

At another location along the parade route, government agents provocateurs carried out felonious assaults, beating and pepper spraying peaceful protestors in order to disrupt their demonstration and assembly activities.

Elsewhere, hundreds of protestors who were marching to get to the parade route were surrounded on all sides trapped, and detained and falsely imprisoned by law enforcement officers with violence and force.

The naughty bad anarchists deserved all they got, according to some Bush supporters. But the courts saw it differently:

The D.C. police department agreed yesterday to pay $685,000 and take steps to protect protesters from police abuse and ensure their rights to settle a lawsuit over the treatment of demonstrators at President Bush's inauguration in 2001.

[...]

The lawsuit uncovered evidence that the department had suspended rules limiting the use of force during the protests, had pressed undercover officers to infiltrate protest groups and had sought to provoke protesters and uninvolved bystanders by attacking them with batons and pepper spray.

Under the settlement, the department denies any guilt but agrees to change its police handbook to better protect protesters, adding a requirement that officers report the use of force during a mass demonstration and prohibit arrests without evidence of a crime. Officers assigned to civil disturbance units will be reminded of the changes in a new, mandatory 40-hour training course and annual refresher session.

[...]

The settlement, which comes as [police chief] Ramsey is preparing to leave his post, is the latest in a series of payments the city has made stemming from police conduct at demonstrations. In January 2005, the District government agreed to pay $425,000 to seven people caught up in a mass arrest at Pershing Park in September 2002. More than 400 people were rounded up at the downtown park during demonstrations against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Several investigations found that Assistant Chief Peter J. Newsham, after conferring with Ramsey, had ordered arrests without warning or evidence of a crime -- including of people who had nothing to do with the protests.

Even those friendly towards Bush were shocked by the brutality of the DC police , including this Republican who was also a party to the lawsuit:

Mike Shinn, a security consulting company owner who joined in the suit settled yesterday, said he was glad that the department would be forced to follow the laws of the country. Shinn, a Bush supporter who went to watch the inaugural celebration, said he felt he was in another country when police pushed him, other spectators and protesters against a wall and an officer hit him on the head from behind with a baton.

"I tried to explain what I was doing and ask him what he wanted me to do, and he hit me again," Shinn recalled. "He said, 'Do you want some more of this?' I was just shocked, just utterly shocked. I thought: What in the world are they teaching them?"

Shinn said he hopes the incoming chief, Cathy L. Lanier, and the departing Ramsey learn a lesson.

"You can't arrest people for just having opinions, as unpopular as they may be," he said. "You don't just arrest everybody on the streets because you think they might have an opinion. It flies in the face of everything that is America."

If only more wingnuts were to feel the full force of the paramilitary police every time they exercised their right to free speech - that right that they like to boast is one that's unique to the US - perhaps they might be a little more clued in to what it is the rest of us are actually protesting about.

There are a number of lawsuits pending re the police violence at the 2005 inauguration and the Republican conventions in New York and Philadelphia and we're going to be hearing a lot more soon about exactly what it is the Bush administration has been putting the police and FBI up to.

Read more: US politics, Bush inaugural protests, Court settlement, Washington DC, Police brutality,

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Posted 6:17 PM by Republic of Palau

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They Do It With Fudge

Digby, on how the Right cleverly frames the contraception debate (AKA The War On Women) to incrementally carve away womens' hard-won gains of the last 50 years and turn them back into baby-making machines :

Anti-choicers: "Birth control is just like baby killing"

Reasonable Dupes: "Not true! It's nothing like baby killing. We are against baby killing!"

Anti-choicers: "We don't believe you. You just want the freedom to put little girls on the pill and when that doesn't work, you want to yank unborn babies from their wombs against God's will!"

Dupes: (rolling eyes) "Ok, ok. We'll prove it. We are willing to outlaw abortion, but you will pry our birth control from our cold dead fingers.

Anti-choicers: "heh"

Why am I a hard-line socialist? One of the reasons is because the above exchange is typical of the kind of thing that happens when social democrats act all reasonable and go for the fudgey middle - woolly compromise by woolly compromise, the far Right get their way.

The right of women and girls not to be forced to bear unwanted children is too important for that.

Read more: Abortion, War on women, Anti-choice Contraception

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Posted 4:57 PM by Republic of Palau

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Comment of The Day II - Tsk, Tsk, Tsk.

Racist, sexist, lookist, all these things and more, but still funny as hell. The News Blog's commenters on the news that Condi would be eating Thanksgiving dinner with the Bushes:

Y'all are just being silly.
There's an obvious answer and I'm shocked - shocked - none of you have gone there.

It's Thanksgiving. And while some people like stuffing, obviously Bush eats rice. (And Rice eats... well, never mind.)

[..]

Jesse Wendel

Seattle

.............................

Jesse Wendel--
So that would be white on Rice, then?

comsympinko 11.24.06 - 5:09 am #

Aaargh. Bad, bad commenters, no biscuit.

Read more: Sick Condoleeza Rice jokes,Comment of the day

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Posted 3:06 PM by Republic of Palau

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Which Do You Trust More, IKEA or Religion? The Flat-Pack Beats God in Sweden

It doesn't say a lot for Christianity when a cheap flatpack wardrobe is more popular than the peace of lutefisk that surpasseth all understanding:

Swedes trust Ikea more than the church

Swedes have more faith in their local Ikea store than in the church.

According to a survey by Dagens Industri, eighty per cent of Swedes said they trusted the furniture chain.

And though four-fifths of all Swedes claim to be members of the protestant Swedish Church only 46 per cent of those polled said they trusted the religious group.

People also trust Volvo (69 percent), Ericsson (59), Saab (57) and even pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca (47) more than the Church.

According to Der Spiegel,

There was, however, some positive news for the church: It got better marks than the conservative party of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt (30 percent). And it fared better than foreign companies like Coca-Cola, which only 22 percent of Swedes said they trusted.

I'd love to see what a similar nationwide poll in the US, or any other nominally religious nation, would say, especially in light of the whole Pastor Ted Haggard affair and other religious scandals. Which do you trust more, Walmart or religion?

Read more: Weird news, IKEA, Sweden, Religion, Polls, Trust, Churches

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Posted 1:35 PM by Republic of Palau

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If You Can't Get Rid Of The Family Skeleton, You May As Well Make It Dance.*

Most bloggers on the US left know of Christopher Hitchens and his drunken neoconnery (or if they didn't George Galloway's deft skewering of him certainly brought him to public attention), but fewer know of his brother Peter, the Daily Express' pet rabid rightwing reactionary.

I had meant to link to this interview with them both at Hay-on-Wye when it first came out, but it got lost in the rush of Iraq-related atrocities and political corruption. But 'tis the season for family rows.

However you feel about the Hitchens brothers and their toxic contributions to the public debate on both sides of the Atlantic, this extended interview really does give some insight into how two people can have exactly the same upbringing but reach dramatically different political conclusions, something which I expect will resonate with those who've just spent Thanksgiving with their own families.

My own elder sister I can't stand because of her raving small-minded, bigoted, petty-bourgeois Toryism - we haven't spoken since my mothers funeral and to be honest I don't miss the grief. There's nowt quite so horribly vicious as a political argument fuelled by festive booze, family history and simmering sibling rivalry.

This political argument's a classic example, though the Hitchens're necessarily constrained by the circumstances. It started out unpleasantly, with Christopher Hitchens telling a woman to kiss his ass, and went on from there:

[...]

Female audience member: Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.

CH (smoking heavily): Well you don't have to stay darling, do you? I'm working here and I'm your guest, OK? And this is what I'm like; nobody has to like it.

IK Would you just stub that one out?

CH No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it.

FAM We should all be allowed to smoke then.

CH Fair enough. I wouldn't object. It might get pretty nasty though. I have a privileged position here, I'm not just one of the audience, so it would be horrible if everyone was like me. This is my last of five gigs, I've worked very hard for the festival. I'm going from here to Heathrow airport. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass.

IK Would anyone like to take up that challenge?

(Laughter. Woman walks out)

IK Christopher. You've talked slightly with your tongue in your cheek about regretting the competition for your mother's attention and you said in one interview with the Times: "Mothers aren't supposed to have favourites, are they? But boys know. And to know that your mother loves you most, more than anyone, more than your father, more than your brother, which I always did know ..." Did you have a firm conviction that you were favourite?

CH No, what I was expressing there and badly, too, [was] an ambition, I hoped it was true but I am sure it was not. I don't usually use this term as a compliment but she was very even handed. Impartial. What I'm really saying there I think would be obvious to anyone who has even scanned the more accessible works of Sigmund Freud, is that had I been an only child, I could probably have handled it, to have mummy to myself and then of course to kill daddy and marry mummy. I thought I had all my ducks in a row, and suddenly to have to go to some nursing home and bring home a bundle was a shock and I may never have got over it. Took up smoking at around that time.

PH I don't know about the parenting but there was a story, although I can't remember anything about this, of Christopher having been discovered gleefully releasing the brake of the pram in which I was lying ...

CH That's when I took up drinking ...

[...]

Whole story

I still have the physical reminders of my elder sister's anger at my own arrival, in the shape of a big scar on the corner of my eye where she hit me with a housebrick. (Was that before or after she tried to smother me in my pram? I forget.) Then there was the time she pushed me off a high wall and I broke my leg... I don't recall her ever being punished for any of this either.

Early family experience informs our political choices much more than we think; we like to think we've reached our considered political positions by rational independent thinking but it's not so simple as that; the Hitchens are a prime example. I know that it's my own early experience of unfairness at home that made want to champion the underdog and which coloured my political views for life and I expect it's the same for many others.

We like to think that the people we elect to take charge of our political future are acting rationally. Wouldn't it be dreadful if it turned out that what passes for intelligent political decision-making is actually based, not on reasoning and empirical evidence, but on unresolved oedipal issues and lousy family dynamics?

* George Bernard Shaw

Read more: Politics, Family dynamics, Hitchens

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Posted 11:45 AM by Republic of Palau

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Comment of The Day

Sometimes the comments at Comment Is Free should be a post in themselves. This commenter on ousted Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimmons' hiring by a pro-Zionist lobby group has managed to sum up the entire Israel/Palestine struggle in a few paras:

Israel is attempting to do to the Palistinians what Europeans did to native Americans, and what the British did to Australian Aboriginals. It has established a system of religious apartheid as it deliberately and consciously seeks to make life as difficult as possible for Palistinians.

But it is not 1700, and such behaviour is no longer acceptable in the world. Israel's actions and the injustice it inflicts are brutal and sickening.

And Israel will not succeed. The Palistinian people have shown the ability to endure whatever hardship and humiliation Israel inflicts on them. Short of the ethnic cleansing that some members of the Israeli government advocate, they will not go away. And all the time the barbarity and brutality that Israelis inflict on palistinians corrupts Israel itself, making it a more brutal and more violent society, and sinking it further into darkness. You cannot do these terrible, terrible things and not be changed yourself.

The excellent book 'Country of My Skull', by Antjie Krog is the story of an Africaans reporter covering the Truth & Reconcilliation Commission following the end of apartheid in South Africa, and of her coming to terms with the horror that had been done on behalf of her people. While reading the often harrowing book I kept thinking that Israelis will someday have to go through a similar process if they are to face what they've done and rejoin the civilised nations of the world.

Lorna Fitzsimons justifies Israeli atrocities by pointing to the fear caused by the home-made missiles that have killed nine people and asks what Britian if British citizens would accept a single rocket on a British town.

Let me go further and ask if British citizens would accept the confiscation of much of their land? Would they accept regular bombardment from high-tech weaponery? Would they accept daily humiliation and disruption of their lives at roadblocks? Would they accept the division of their land into isolated blocks? Would they accept the absolute and total control over every aspect of their lives by another power? Would they accept roads and areas reserved for the use of the occupiers only?

Well? Would they?

Of course they wouldn't. They would resist. They would fight for the freedom of their country and of their people, as every occupied, subjugated people have the right - and the duty - to do.

Shame on what Israel has become and on those who support its brutal and horrific acts. Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!

Quite.

I once had to give a seminar for a socialist student group on Israel/Palestine and I struggled to find useful metaphors to explain what had happened, until I hit on the idea of using the Danish as an example.

If the Danes decided to reclaim all of the British land that was once governed by the Danelaw and were backed up militarily by all the other Scandinavian countries to invade and set up a Danish homeland in, say, Nottinghamshire - do you really think the inhabitants wouldn't complain?

To bring it a little closer to home for American Zionists - if New York was reclaimed by the Mohawk tribe, and all the inhabitants were penned up in camps in Queens, or Staten Island or exiled to Montreal; if they were subjected to checkpoints, internal passports and regular military bombardments, snipers and collective punishment - do you really think they wouldn't fight back with all the weapons available to them?

Shit, there'd be daily guerilla raids up the Hudson. It all depends on your perspective. Turn the kaleidoscope 90 degrees and the 'terrorist' is a freedom fighter.

Read more: Comment of The Day, Israel, Palestine

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Posted 10:54 AM by Republic of Palau

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Turn the Big Apple back into the Big Orange

So says the aptly named pressure group Give Us Back New York on whose website you can find several simple but effective measures that would help make New York a so much nicer, more relaxed city to live in, one of which would be renaming the Yankees:

That's where the word "yankees" comes from after all...

So come on! What do you have to lose?

Read more about: New York, New Amsterdam, yankees

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Posted 8:36 PM by Martin Wisse

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Fatty Boombatty

Sometimes I loathe the Netherlands, sometimes I love it. This is one reason why:

THE HAGUE (AFP) - Insouciant of police warnings, a Dutch group is reportedly set to roll the world's biggest joint, sending the previous record for a marijuana cigarette up in smoke.

The world's largest joint will be a 500-gram (17-ounce), meter-long (3.3-foot) monstrosity, rolled with cigarette paper and easily dwarfing the previous 100-gram winner, the ANP news agency said. To beat the record, it must be made entirely of marijuana with no tobacco mix.

"Afterwards we'll light it up," predicted event organizer Thijs Verheij, who is hoping his feat will land in the Guinness Book of Records.

The Dutch police are not amused however, warning they will intervene if the joint surpasses the five grams of marijuana allowed for consumption and sale in the Netherlands.

That's a weird construction, 'insouciant of' at the beginning of a sentence. It's the first time I've come across it IIRC and I'm reasonably widely-read - maybe someone whose grammar's better than mine can say whether it's grammatical or not, but it definitely reads clunkily.

Maybe the writer was partaking in a little practical research into their subject.

Read more: Netherlands, Drugs, Marijuana,World record attempts

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Posted 7:36 PM by Republic of Palau

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How Shitty Is This?

Woman victim of 7/7 attacks is sacked

A victim of the 7 July bombings is suing the firm which sacked her for failing to take into account the trauma she suffered.

Nattashar Gittens, 30, was physically and mentally scarred by the Tavistock Square bus bomb.

The explosion left her with back and pelvic injuries, hearing problems, nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia and bouts of depression. But despite returning to work after two months, Ms Gittens says she was dismissed in April this year as a PA for "poor performance" weeks before she would have become eligible for protection under employment law.

Full story

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Posted 7:13 PM by Republic of Palau

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Do As You Would Be Done By

I saw this, from the Dees Diversion, linked to at The Sideshow this morning:

Next time there's a hurricane I must remember not to go to Greenleaf, Idaho. Ordinance 208, passed last week by the Greenleaf City Council, requests that citizens keep guns in their homes, just in case people fleeing a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina should wind up there. "We could get refugees," said councilman Steven Jett, who dreamed up this piece of civic responsibility.

God forbid. Some of us might seek hotel rooms to rent, food and liquor to buy, and a place to pick up some bath foam and Ibuprofin.

Apparently, Jett's ordinance got through pretty easily, and "drew only mild criticism from the pastor of the town's Quaker meeting house." The law originally required citizens to keep guns in their houses, but the language was toned down to make allowances for people with religious or other moral objections to gun ownership.

The mayor of Greenleaf, which is just outside Boise, owns over two dozen rifles.

It's not just crackpot survivalist local sheriffs doing this either, it's whole nations - that post reminded of something I came across in one of the threads at the Grauniad's Comment Is Free yesterday, from an Australian who said that his country had already decided not to offer asylum or protection from climatic catastrophes to any Pacific island refugees.

I had a little google and it seems that that's true:

Calls mount for Pacific refugee policy October 9, 2006 - 8:54AM

Australia is under increasing pressure to formulate a policy to take in environmental refugees following warnings that millions of people in the Asia-Pacific could be left homeless because of climate change.

A CSIRO report released Monday raised concerns that millions of people on low-lying islands and lands in Asia-Pacific nations will be left homeless in the next 40 years due to rising sea levels induced by climate change.

[...]

Environment Minister Ian Campbell said Australia would not turn its back on its neighbours but he refused to commit to taking refugees.

He said the focus on helping Pacific nations cope with climate change should be economic and ensure that Pacific islanders stay in their home countries.

Stay in their home countries, when they're under a couple of feet of water? That might be a bit difficult when there's no there there any more. Take the situation the people of Tuvalu are in, for example:

In places like the tiny island nation of Tuvalu the effects of climate change are most apparent. The annual spring tides on Tuvalu have been at record heights in recent years. Crop gardens and drinking wells are being contaminated with salt water. Some villagers are forced to relocate inland in search of a less vulnerable place to live. Environmental refugees need the help of countries like Australia.

In 2001, the Tuvaluan government requested that Australia support the resettling of 50% of its population in recognition that the impacts of climate change would force Tuvaluan people to abandon their homeland. The Australian government refused on the grounds that climate change was not certain. This response is inconsistent with national and international scientific recognition of changing climatic conditions and their likely effects. Despite growing evidence about human displacement due to global warming – most recently outlined in the Stern Report, written for the UK government – the Australian government refuses to acknowledge the serious situation we face. In October 2006, the Immigration Minister Senator Amanda Vanstone says her Department has not made any plans to deal with climate refugees, and that this is because "there's no such thing as a climate [change] refugee" (http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200610/s1776389.htm).

[My emphasis]

You can see the thinking both from the US townspeople and the Australians -fuck 'em, let 'em all drown, just as long as we've got ours screw everyone else. The trouble is it's not going to be just a few pesky Pacific islands on the move to be fought off - a lot more people will affected and they won't be dismissed so easily as the poor Tuvaluans have been by Australia:

Examples of potential impacts of sea level rise can be noted all around the world. In Bangladesh, around half of the country's population lives in areas less that five meters above sea-level. Similarly, a one metre rise in sea-level would affect 67% of the Netherlands population. The mega cities of London, Shanghai, Hamburg, Bangkok, Jakarta, Bombay, Manila, Buenos Aires and Venice are all built on low-lying coastal areas. The city of Manhattan in New York is another example of an island that is under threat from sea-level rise.

There are 20 million people in Shanghai alone, in Greater Buenos Aires there's 12.4 million and growing. Mumbai, home to about 18 million people, will over the next two decades see its population grow to about 28.5 million. It's not just the megacities though, all low-lying coastal areas will be hit, including the home of the US government, Washington DC:

Tide gauges around the Chesapeake Bay indicate that the relative sea level in the Bay is rising at twice the average global rate of 1.8 mm per year.

If Washingtonians want to know what's in their future, they should take a look at Bangladesh:

Rising Sea Levels Erode Half Of Bangladesh's Biggest Island: Study

From a size of 6,400 square kilometres (3,968 square miles) in 1965, Bhola island near the mouth of the Bay of Bengal is now only half its original size.

[...]

Dhaka, Bangladesh (AFP) Jun 15, 2005 River currents strengthened by rising sea levels have devoured half of Bangladesh's biggest island in 40 years, leaving half a million people homeless, researchers said Wednesday.

From a size of 6,400 square kilometres (3,968 square miles) in 1965, Bhola island near the mouth of the Bay of Bengal is now only half its original size.

When the Chesapeake Bay and the low-lying parts of the US coast flood there'll be no escape to higher ground for even the nation's leaders, not if Idaho's has anything to do with it. But will they be able to stop them? What are you the likes of Australia and Greenleaf going to do, shoot them all? They can't murder everyone.

It'll be impossible too for any destination country to stop these massive numbers of potential refugees from trying to make a getaway when the rising tides come. It's long past time for a new international compact on climate change refugees: the UNHCR and other agreements were written in light of war and its aftermath, not massive global shifts in population resulting from climate change . If this isn't tackled before the actual event the results will be horrible.

Read more: Climate change refugees, Global warming, Rising sea level, Australia, US, Greenleaf, Idaho, Pacific islands, Tuvalu.

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Posted 3:16 PM by Republic of Palau

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How The Dinosaurs Became Extinct.

A happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating it, enjoy the turkey and the family rows, and to my compatriots, sod it, it's Thursday, it's nearly the weekend and it's geology and comedy night on BBC2 so screw the vile weather. Let's plan something nice for dinner and have a night in in front of the telly. Comfort food and enjoyable tv pablum, that's the ticket on these dismal November days.

Also happy post-election day and well done to the Dutch, who elected 25 Socialist Party candidates to the Tweede Kamer yesterday. What was really encouraging was to see so many people my sons' ages out campaigning and at SP rallies. I guess the Second Life strategy must've worked after all - or maybe it was the consistently anti-war and anti-capitalist stance and the bottom-up, good old-fashioned street campaigning to as many individual voters as possible in person that it did it. The SP over the past couple of years has been a model of how to build a party from the ground : they've also used technology as a tool to enhance campaign effectiveness, not as a substitute for actual people. Great branding too.

25 seats means they'll have a lot more clout in NL's negotiation based system than they did. (For a more detailed view of the results and their implications, see Wisse Words.) There's been a move on both left and right away from the mushy managerial middle towards parties that actually have a coherent agenda. This has also led to the Party For Animals gaining a seat, which no doubt will be jumped on as evidence of loony leftism: but if you think about it more than a second or two, it makes perfect sense that the the welfare of non-human animal residents of the country should be taken into account on issues like agricultural policy.

There was also reported to have been a massive swing by Dutch moslem voters away from the middle and to the SP, thanks to its vocal opposition to the rampant Islamophobe-baiting and racist pandering practiced by the other parties, most notably by that hatchet-faced harpy Rita Verdonk and the ridiculous-haired spiv Geert Wilder and his crew of provincial prodnoses. So why the dinsoaur cartoon? One, I liked it and two, it gves me a convenient peg to hang this post on - because there's a feeling around that we're on the cusp of significant worldwide change and that the right-wing political dinosaurs of the past generation are slowly becoming extinct or irrelevant as globalisation reveals the true complexities of the future we face.

(Except for Henry Kissinger, obviously, who's Undead.)

Let's hope that this Dutch leftward shift is another symptom, like the elections of leftists in Spain, Chile and Italy and the standoff in Mexico just to give a few examples, that the global political balance is shifting away from pure profit to people and planet, in spite of or maybe even thanks to the failed policies of the neocons in Washington.

That we can even begin to hope that it may be so is something we can all be thankful for whatever our nationality.

Read more: Dinosaurs, US Politics, Thanksgiving, Dutch elections, Video, YouTube

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Posted 1:27 PM by Republic of Palau

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It Wouldn't've Happened in Baghdad

Because the First Dingbats aren't there - rather than fighting Daddy's futile war for him, they're partying in Buenos Aires and getting too frisky to realise they've been robbed of the First Handbag and First Cellphone:

First Daughter Barbara Robbed in Argentina November 21, 2006 3:14 PM

From Our Sources:

First Daughter Barbara Bush had her purse and cell phone stolen as she had dinner in a restaurant in Buenos Aires, Argentina, even though she was being guarded by a detail of Secret Service agents, according to law enforcement reports made available to ABC News.

It was not the only mishap on the two-week trip to Argentina by Barbara (right) and her twin sister Jenna (left).

A Secret Service agent on the advance detail got into an "altercation" with someone after a night out and was badly beaten, according to the law enforcement reports. The Secret Service said today the incident was an attempted mugging that occurred while the agent was on his own time. The agent is doing fine.

The purse snatching took place on Barbara's first night in town while she was dining in the picturesque San Telmo neighborhood. According to the reports, the Secret Service agents failed to notice the incident.

Doesn't say an awful lot for the efficiency of the much-vaunted Secret Service, does it?

I suspect the contents of that cell-phone is a pretty marketable product. I wonder if the thief realises exactly what they've got? (I also wonder what interesting subtsances were in the handbag, given the girls' reputation for hard partying.)

Buenos Aires is pretty near Paraguay too, that notorious haven of Nazis , where the Chimperor's just bought a ranch - so is the twins' presence in neighbouring Argentina's capital more evidence that the Bush tribe are getting ready to do a runner?

I bet Poppy feels like doing just that right now, after the pasting he took in Abu Dhabi about his son's ineptitude and stupidity:

After delivering a speech at a leadership conference in Abu Dhabi, former President George Herbert Walker Bush was forced to defend his son from verbal attacks by the "hostile audience," on the same day that a new poll reveals that more Americans preferred the first Bush president.

"We do not respect your son," a woman in the audience told Bush. "We do not respect what he's doing all over the world."

The Associated Press reported that "Bush appeared stunned as the audience of young business leaders whooped and whistled in approval" at the woman's comments, coming after the "retired president had just finished a folksy address on leadership by telling the audience how deeply hurt he feels when his son the president is criticized."

According to the AP, Bush's voice "quivered" in response.

Awwww, diddums. I have two adult sons myself and though I love them to bits, I'm not blind to their faults. Did Bush really not know that the world knows his son's a fuckup?

I have no fucking sympathy whatsoever for Bush Sr., he made Junior what he is and what's worse, he made him President. He's made a rod for his own back and I hope it hurts.

It's not been a good week for la famiglia Bush. But never mind- there'll be plenty of time for family recriminations in the long, increasingly warm evenings down on the old Paraguayan estancia.

Read more: US politics, Bush family, Buenos Aires, Abu Dhabi

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Posted 8:38 AM by Republic of Palau

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The Rippers, They're Everywhere!

More time traveling psychos unmasked. Sadistic, twisted woman-haters or just practicing their love? You decide.

Dr Erick Kerouack Jack The Ripper

Jack The Ripper Dr Erick Kerouack

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Posted 7:43 AM by Republic of Palau

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Bread And Roses

Some good news for once, via Majikthise:

The Houston janitors win!

Round one of the historic Houston janitors' strike goes to: the janitors who reached a tentative three-year agreement with the city's five largest cleaning companies through non-violent civil disobedience:

What a difference a day makes! We have reached a tentative agreement for a 3 year contract for janitors.

Wages: $1.15 increase the first year, $1.00 the second year, and $.50 the third year.

Health Care: The third year is when single-payer health insurance will kick in and janitors will pay $20 per month into that plan. It is a plan designed and managed by SEIU and we are hoping to get all of our members nationwide on this plan.

Vacation: Two weeks paid vacation per year

Holidays: 6 paid holidays

Hours: 1st year everyone must work a minimum of 4 hours a day, 2nd year everyone must work a minimum of 5 hours per day, 3rd year everyone must work a minimum of 6 hours per day.

Protection: We have a grievance procedure in place. We have protection for all of the striking workers to get their jobs back with no discipline. We have a disciplinary proceedure in place so that no one can be illegally fired for no reason any more.

So, the two sides have come to a tentative agreement that includes a pay raise, a timetable for health insurance, a guaranteed number of hours of work every week, vacation, holidays, and protection from disciplinary action. The Houston Chronicle has more details. To recap, management refused to recognize the union, so the union took its appeal to the community at large. The justice of their cause was widely recognized and management was shamed into doing what it should have done all along--recognizing the right of workers to organize. Happily, management has recognized the janitors' union and negotiated a mutually agreeable contract in good faith. This is truly a big day for labor in America.

These are the same strikers that were deliberately trampled by mounted Houston cops , whose viciousness was captured on video for the whole world to see. Thanks to YouTube and progressive bloggers, the video of that brutality was around the world in a flash. I expect that contributed no small part to the pressure on the employers to back down.

Read more: US, Workers' rights, Labour movement, Unions, Houston janitors strike

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Posted 6:55 AM by Republic of Palau

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When Conspiracy Theories Collide: Jack The Ripper Unmasked As Lord Lucan

The seventh Earl of Lucan ( descendant of the Charge of The Light Brigade Lucan) was a typical sprig of the more louche end of the British nobility, who lived in Belgravia and spent much of his time at the gaming tables of Mayfair. He disappeared after his family's nanny, Sandra Rivett, was found beaten to death in the Lucan family home in 1974: he has never been found and theories still abound about the murder. Now comes this from The Scotsman:

Has a fresh look at 118-year-old evidence revealed the true face of Jack the Ripper?

VICTORIA THAKE

THE face of Jack the Ripper, the 19th-century killer whose identity still remains a mystery, has been revealed for the first time.

Using state-of-the-art profiling, investigators have created a vision of what the murderer, who strangled and butchered five London prostitutes, would have looked like - and revealed that police at the time were probably searching for the wrong kind of man.

Woooo, spooky.

Yes, they probably were looking for the wrong kind of man: perhaps what they should've been looking for was a psychopathic Time Lord in a battered blue police box.

Don't you love tinfoil-hattery convergence?

Read more: Lord Lucan, Jack the Ripper, Crime, Notorious British Murders

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Posted 1:06 PM by Republic of Palau

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The Business of Repression

When I was posting about police brutality the other day something nagged at my memory. Then someone mentioned Bernie Kerik on the radio yesterday and a I remembered: of course! The prelapsarian Bernie Kerik was on the board and made millions in stock options from pushing tasers to his law-enforcement brethren.

I knew there was something shady about tasers, aside from their potential lethality and use as a torture weapon and summary punishment tool. For those who don't know much about the Taser here's a brief description of what it is and what it does from Amnesty International:

Tasers, powerful electrical weapons used by law enforcement agencies in, among other countries, the USA are designed to incapacitate by conducting 50,000 volts of electricity into a suspect. The pistol shaped weapons use compressed nitrogen gas to fire sharp darts up to 21 feet [7 m]. The darts can penetrate up to two inches [5 cm] of clothing. Electricity is then conducted down wires connecting the darts and the taser gun. The electrical pulses induce skeletal muscle spasms immobilising and incapacitating a suspect and causing them to fall to the ground. They may also be used, in "drive stun" mode, as a close up stun weapon. The "drive stun" is specifically designed for pain compliance.(4)

Since June 2001, more than 150 people have died in the USA after being shocked by a taser. Of those deaths, 85 have occurred in the USA since Amnesty International released its report (in November 2004) calling for a suspension on the use and transfer of these weapons. Amnesty International raised its concerns in its previous report that the number of taser-related deaths had been rising each year. There were three deaths reported in 2001, 13 in 2002, 17 in 2003 and 48 in 2004. In 2005 there were 61 taser-related deaths, and by the mid February 2006 there have already been 10 deaths.

In These Times has an excellent article up about those taser deaths, about the history of the company's formation and about its links with conservatives in government and law enforcement:

In 2002, Taser brought on former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik as the company’s director. Kerik had attained popularity in the wake of 9/11 as a law-and-order-minded hero; the company had seemingly picked one of the best spokespersons imaginable.

With Kerik’s help, company’s profits grew to $68 million in 2004, up from just under $7 million in 2001, and stockholders were able to cash in, including the Smith family, who raked in $91.5 million in just one fiscal quarter in 2004.

Unbeknownst to most stockholders, however, sales have been helped along by police officers who have received payments and/or stock options from Taser to serve as instructors and trainers. (The exact number of officers on the payroll is unknown because the company declines to identify active-duty officers who have received stock options.)

The recruitment of law enforcement has been crucial to fostering market penetration. For instance, Sgt. Jim Halsted of the Chandler, Ariz., Police Department, joined Taser President Rick Smith in making a presentation to the Chandler city council in March 2003. He made the case for arming the entire police patrol squad with M-26 Tasers. According to the Associated Press, Halsted said, “No deaths are attributed to the M-26 at all.”

The council approved a $193,000 deal later that day.

Everyone was doing very nicely indeed, thank you. A USAF Lt Col even co-authored a report (later discredited) that bolstered the company's claims for non-lethality and boosted sales. All was sweet for Kerik and the other shareholders. But then came the Amnesty report and a series of product liability cases:

The prospect that its “stun gun” would provide an effective non-lethal weapon for law enforcement drove the share price of Taser International Corp. up sevenfold in 2004 to a high of $33 in late December. Reports of deaths from use of the product led to the announcement of an informal SEC investigation in disclosures about its safety in January 2005, leading to a plunge in stock price to $15. In September 2005, Taser announced the SEC had made the safety investigation formal, and the stock fell further, to $6. The company announced its legal fees and public relations expenses for the first half of 2005 were more than $12 million, double those expenses in the first half of the prior year.

Amnesty International's reports on taser use really hurt the company, so much so that Taser actually considered sueing. Taser are prepared to take a very agressive legal posture towards their critics, but as more and more instances of deaths come to light and the more adverse publicity tasers get, the more the share price drops and the less money it makes. The share price is is somewhere where bloggers really can hit a corporation hard just by publicising the truth .

The problem is that even if the left does generate enough negative publicity to make Taser's stock price drop precipitately - even if they could be pushed out of business - there are plenty of other torture equipment vendors drooling over the potentially massive profits to be made in the repression racket.

Another challenge to Taser’s dominance in the stun gun market occurred earlier this week when Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, announced that his deputies will begin testing 30 new stun guns as an alternative to Tasers. This could only have been regarded with concern by Taser International, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. According to Arpaio: "Stinger tells me their weapons have better target attainment, they cost less and are cheaper to operate. If those claims are true, I may very well move away from Taser weapons."

More and more US police departments are buying Stingers, so I suggest anyone who's thinking of protesting anything anytime soon makes themselves familiar with Stinger Systems Inc.'s products.

Stinger has recently done a deal with a Spanish defence-tech supplier that gives it accessibility to supply products to any of the allied NATO Armies worldwide, not to mention to various EU members' riot police and anti-terrorism squads. Your country is pushing this technology worldwide.

If you are American your hard-earned tax dollars are actually promoting the use if both Tasers and Stingers abroad: the US government is itself marketing the companies' products overseas. Take a a look at BuyUSA.gov: it's not shoes or food products or cars that the US government is promoting internationally as the best of US manufacturing, it's the tools of repression and dictatorship. Hand in hand with the US in this grisly trade is Britain.

For years the focus of anti-capitalist and antiglobalisation protestors in Britain, Europe and elsewhere has been the campaign against the arms trade. The words 'arms trade' may conjure up pictures of steely-faced, flint-eyed men flogging aircraft, tanks and missiles, but the market is much bigger than that and includes all sorts of riot and crowd control gear that I bet you never thought your local police department would even have, let alone use on you or yours. Even the smallest police departments, both in the US and Europe, are increasingly looking like paramilitary units. They seem to be arming themselves for mass insurrection.

Take universities for example; UCLA isn't the only US university campus prepared for a riot:

The Ball State University Police Department has purchased equipment designed to provide individual officers with an additional less-than-lethal force option, as well as new equipment appropriate for crowd control.

The university has purchased 35 Tasers, four chemical propellant guns and three projectile launchers at a cost of nearly $38,400.

"This is a significant investment in our efforts to enhance the safety and security of the campus community," said Gene Burton, director of public safety. "This kind of equipment helps minimize the risk to our officers and those they are sworn to protect. This is a very positive step in the evolution of our department."

35 tasers? Why on earth do institutes of learning need this kind of firepower? Just what is being planned for?

The answer is they don't need it - it's been sold to them, just like double-glazing or timeshares, by clever marketing men who know exactly which buttons to push.

After all if their own government buys it and approves and promotes the stuff, it must be a good thing. Mustn't it? Law and order types tend to be conservative, they listen to conservative media and tend to take conservative viewpoints. Already these officers are ripe for the sales pitch.

Since your customers're already so receptive, all you have to do is to get your friends in the media - who owns both tv stations and defence tech companies? Step forward General Electric - to keep bumping up the conservatives' scaredy-cat level by promoting an 'us and them' mentality and the fear that their way of life is constantly under threat from within and without . Add a few freebies, a conference in Vegas and few techy presentations with shiny graphics, sexy product names and some obfuscated stats and specs, and voila, one multimillion dollar sale.

The Defence tech industry is is massive. It provides jobs: it contributes hugely to the balance of payments and international trade - and it makes huge contributions to politicians who enable it to continue doing so. It's one big self-sustaining ecology.

The Boston Globe this week:

The United States last year provided nearly half of the weapons sold to militaries in the developing world, as major arms sales to the most unstable regions -- many already engaged in conflict -- grew to the highest level in eight years, new US government figures show.

According to the annual assessment, the United States supplied $8.1 billion worth of weapons to developing countries in 2005 -- 45.8 percent of the total and far more than second-ranked Russia with 15 percent and Britain with a little more than 13 percent.

Arms control specialists said the figures underscore how the largely unchecked arms trade to the developing world has become a major staple of the American weapons industry, even though introducing many of the weapons risks fueling conflicts rather than aiding long-term US interests.

The report was compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Yippee for free markets, and fuck the rest of the world!

That we're now seeing this kind of defence tech used against our own Western civilian populations when we question these corrupt relationships between the free market and repression should come as no surprise. That it should be extended to even the least threatening critics of of the free market of any kind does not surprise, not at all - it's all done pour encourager les autres.

Those of us who were against the Iraq invasion and occupation from the start, who pointed out the corruption and futility of that particular exercise in imperial adventure by the military-oil-industrial combine; we were denounced as a bunch of shrill anarchists. But we were right. Those of us who've been warning for years about the potential for state repression by that same combine are right too, as is now becoming clear.

But it gives no pleasure at all to be able to say 'we told you so'.

Read more: Tasers, Stingers, Crowd control, Torture equipment, Police, State repression.

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Posted 1:43 PM by Republic of Palau

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