sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with human rights

Wisconsin Unions Call For General Strike

I didn't think I'd actually see this happen in the U.S. in my lifetime. And of course it hasn't happened yet, it's simply being threatened, but it is a very potent threat with a storied history.

To explain what that means, let's start with Economics 101 and the idea of the free market. Specifically, the free labor market. The first principle of someone with a trade skill who wants to earn what she's worth is, don't work for less than you're worth. This principle crashes against reality in two ways. Problem one: there's probably only one employer in your town. But even where that isn't true you run into problem two: there's usually someone else with your same skills who has a child to feed and who will take the salary you rejected as too little. So, chances are, if you try to hold out for what you're worth, your child will be the one that starves.

So, there isn't really a free labor market -- unless everyone in your town who has the same skill gets together and all refuse to work for less than you're all worth. This requires open collaboration and is known as "collective bargaining."

Collective bargaining has a storied history because once upon a time it was illegal. And actually in many places in the U.S. it's still illegal. This is interestingly dissonant with the idea that in the U.S. we have the freedom to speak our ideas and to peaceably assemble. When it comes to peaceably assembling with your trade peers and freely sharing ideas (such as everyone there making what they're worth), many Americans do not actually have that right.

Why should it be illegal? Because of the cynic's version of the golden rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules." If you're a capitalist, whatever difference there is between the wage you pay a worker and the marginal revenue product of their labor is money in your pocket. (Economic theory tells us that paying a worker less than the MRP of their labor is not efficient, but you don't need a theory to tell you this is wrong, just look at the ever-growing income disparity in the U.S.) Any law that makes collective bargaining illegal benefits the rich at the direct expense of everyone else.

During the Great Depression, the economic downturn was used as an excuse to cut wages and demand concessions. According to the laws in force at the time, the workers didn't really have any recourse. When they got together to discuss what was happening to them, their meetings or strikes were busted by the police, or private goons known as "Pinkertons," or sometimes the National Guard. What happened then was sometimes a massacre, sometimes a bona-fide battle.

In 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act. It wasn't perfect, but it did end the bloodshed.

A lot of the violence occurred in the 'rust belt': Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. People there literally died for the right of collective bargaining. Some of the protesters in Wisconsin today may even be descendants of people roughed up or killed in attacks on picket lines. And Governor Walker -- who, after less than two months in office may soon be facing a general strike, could easily earn the title for most divisive politician in America today -- is the spiritual descendant of the strikebusters.

My gosh, but the Democrats completely messed up the DADT repeal, didn't they? There's theoretically a chance it could be voted on again next week but... I would be utterly shocked. They put it off, put it off, put it off, and now it's too late, the Republicans are going to sweep in November and it will be at least 10 years before we have another shot at DADT.

ENDA is not even on the horizon, apparently. I haven't heard it mentioned in a long time. And the DOMA repeal? Doubt it was ever even seriously considered.

It's safe to say the Dems have completely disheartened the GLBT community at this point, and we're big enough to swing some districts. Most of the credit for gay rights victories this year actually go to Republicans.

Frakkin' cowards. They are about to get beat by the tea party... the tea party, the modern Know-Nothing ultra-philistine iconoclasts who on a normal year would be the fringe weirdos who get a brief mention on the local news for showing up in colonial America costumes on election day.

The moral of the story? Don't compromise. I'm a pretty firm believer in this. I mean, sometimes it's okay to let go, to pick your battles sparingly, but generally you should try to exchange A for B as long as A and B are each things that someone fully wants. If you take A and cut it in half and offer that in exchange for half of B, you satisfy no one, and there is no victory to proclaim.

Also, a little bit of populism would have gone a long way.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs let loose on leftist critics of the administration the other day:

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy. ... They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."

Frankly I think this should cost him his job, which is not something I say lightly. It won't, though, because he's only saying what everyone in the White House is thinking. But outbursts like this, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's lovely 'f*cking retards' comment last year, and so on, are going to cost the Democrats dearly on election day this year and in 2012. They can't afford to keep insulting the folks who are most likely to contribute, to volunteer, and to vote on their behalf. They may think they can rely solely on the wealthy donors who flocked to them in 2008, but they can't.

These outbursts also show what they're thinking: we're leftists, they've billed themselves as "leftists," therefore we owe them our vote, our support, and our praise. But leftist bloggers don't work for the Democratic party, and this is what really annoys them. In 2009 they established "Common Purpose," an initiative to essentially get leftist bloggers to start spreading White House talking points for them. Well, hey, it works for the Right, right? ;)

But let's get to the real meat of the problem, which is: the Obama administration is doing a lot of the same things that annoyed leftist bloggers when the Bush administration did them. Leftists complained then, and complain now, not because they are anti-Republican partisan hacks, but because they are anti-injustice.

Foremost in my mind, and the one that I think 20, 30 years from now is going to really tarnish Obama's legacy: the establishment of a permanent authority whose purpose is to imprison people -- citizens and non-citizens -- indefinitely without trial. This is an indelible blemish on the American human rights record akin to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But they "stopped torture" (they didn't, but they said they would), and they "tried" to close the prison at Guantanamo, so we should be happy, right?

Continuing the war in Afghanistan despite the apparent absence of any evidence that it's making the US safer from Islamist terrorism? There's that, too. People can oppose the war for rational reasons that don't involve the desire to replace the Pentagon with a hippie flower garden. Then there's: appointing bankster wolves to watch the economic henhouse... refusing to prosecute telecoms for their willingness to aid DHS in their program of mass invasion of privacy without search warrants... refusing to prosecute agents who committed torture or investigate detainee deaths or accounts of torture... refusing to investigate the Katrina disaster... and these are all things Democrats did of their own free will without being able to blame them on Republican obstructionism.

So this is not, as the White House wants to paint it, a matter of being upset because the public option was taken out of the health care bill or because other legislative compromises were made to pass bills. Yes, those things suck too, but they are forgivable and they can be fixed. But it turns out we're really bad at paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Look, I have to say something about the 'Ground Zero Mosque,' because frankly, what I'm seeing disgusts me to no end.

First of all, I'm appalled by the very fact that anyone opposes it. I am not personally a huge fan of Islam, any more than I'm a fan of Christianity, generally speaking; the two religions are about 97% identical and mainstream versions of both think I am hellbound. But I do think that Muslims, like Christians, as members of our society have the right to practice their religion openly, in peace.

Muslims were among the Americans killed on 9/11. Muslims are among the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Muslims pay taxes (or avoid them, hehehe) just like everyone else in the US. To say that a mosque near Ground Zero is an 'affront' to survivors' families (1) overlooks the families of Muslims killed there and (2) papers over the distinction between peaceful Muslims and Islamist terrorists. It is thus a position rooted in sheer prejudice. Opposing the mosque near Ground Zero is like opposing a church near the spot where the Murrah building once stood in Oklahoma City.

Second of all, the ADL can take a flying leap into the Hudson River. They showed their true colors with their self-serving opposition to the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, and they show their true colors again by adding their voice to those of the haters on this issue.

So, Rand Paul, Republican candidate for the Senate from Kentucky, is not a racist but does not agree with the civil rights acts of the 1960's. His argument is that when the government tells businesses that they cannot refuse service to someone on the basis of race, it's a government intrusion equivalent to a takeover of ownership.

So, let's go back in time to 1963, before any of these acts were signed into law. Segregation is the law in much of America. The controversy over Brown v. Board of Education is still fresh and heated. Jim Crow laws are still on the books. Poll taxes are still used to deny registered blacks access to the ballot. Many places had "separate but equal" facilities. Police were siccing their dogs on black high school students and spraying them with fire hoses. Martin Luther King, Jr., was in a Birmingham jail.

How do you bring about equality? How do you do away with the injustice of prejudice, violence, murder, and economic disparity? Wishing didn't make it so. Our country started down the path of righting these wrongs by passing civil rights laws and ratifying the 24th Amendment to the Constitution. These laws, along with Supreme Court rulings, set the tone for discourse about race which made it clear that discrimination was neither acceptable nor legal. It hasn't solved the problem, but we could not have achieved the progress we have without those laws. Wishing was not going to make it so.

Paul draws a distinction between changing the government's treatment of people of color, and mandating the way private businesses, even those which are effectively public accommodations, are to conduct themselves. Opponents of racism, he feels, should have guided businesses towards change by voting with their dollars -- the old Libertarian saw with no basis in reality, because you can't count on change to come about in this way. Wishing doesn't make it so. Government intervention may not be an ideal approach, but it works.

Maya Arulpragasam, also known as M.I.A., released a new video, a short movie around her song "Born Free." The music is not my usual speed, but the video is striking (and graphically violent). I watched it last night, and reflecting on it this morning realized I had rarely seen anything like it.

Usually, in American media, whenever you see depictions like this -- stormtroops rounding people up, killing them for fun -- Mel Gibson is there. Or Bruce Willis. Or Sly Stallone. They'll fight back and win, or run away, survive, and get revenge. Our sense of reality is shaped around the idea that the bad guys won't really get away with anything so heinous. World War Two is proof of that, right? The Nazis tried to pull that stuff, and boy did they get handed their asses. If there weren't heroes in real life, Hollywood can just invent some when they tell the story. And even if heroes don't make sense in a narrative, God and nature will set the slaughterers straight.

Maybe this is the nature of narratives. People who participate in overwhelmingly one-sided slaughter don't tell their stories about it. Neither do the ones who are slaughtered. So I suppose the only narratives we have about genocide are from those who survive being slaughtered, or their children.

It's easy to say, "Well, stories with no hero, with no one acting righteous, are just depressing. Who wants to watch that? Who would be enriched by it?" The problem is, though, as I see it, that we've become so used to just assuming that a hero will come along and the bad guys won't win that we've become unable to process reality, because bad guys do win quite a lot of the time. Almost always, I would even say. And since they are winners, certain other aspects of our cultural discourse kick in and we even sympathize with them. The hero stories, though, enable us to side with bullies and abusers even while pretending we don't. It is, unfortunately, a bucket of bull-hockey.

( M.I.A. & Romain Gavras, 'Born Free', NSFW )

You know, when I was growing up, the difference between the US and the Soviet Union was summarized with a two-word phrase: "papers, please." Now that's the law in Arizona. Law enforcement groups actually hate the law.

Meanwhile Oklahoma passed a law that requires probe-rape for pregnant women who want an abortion. Yes, when someone inserts an object into an orifice of your body without your permission, that is rape.

But, hey, the Republicans also say they want less government.

Current Mood: bitter

So, now we finally have a firm idea of how many people the Obama Administration intends to imprison indefinitely without trial: as many as 50 of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. And they mean to do more than just hold them; they mean to build an official apparatus by which people are detained indefinitely by the United States of America.

No trial. No public hearing. We won't even be told what they supposedly did. They can't be put on trial in large part because the evidence against them was obtained by way of illegal torture. We're just supposed to trust the president that these are "the worst of the worst," people who would gleefully mass murder us.

And you know what? Maybe they all are. But even if Jesus Christ himself was the president I wouldn't simply take his word for it.

Where does it end? Will it only be these 50? Or will there be more? Will it only be members of al-Qaeda? History does not give us much reassurance that a government, once it grants itself a certain power, will be restrained in the use and misuse of it.

By announcing that the administration refuses to hold CIA torturers accountable for their crimes against humanity, the Obama Administration has sealed the deal on legitimizing torture by the police state. In fact, what Obama and Holder have done goes far beyond simply letting torturers off the hook -- they have, in tandem with the Bush administration, constructed a framework to legitimize torture by any modern state.

Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder offered the first definitive assurance that the CIA officials who were involved are in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal advice at the time. ... "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Holder said.

There you have it: the justice department issues memos outlining the ways in which crimes can be committed, and those working on behalf of the government can be absolved of accountability if they were following the advice of those memos. The "I was just following orders" defense.

Furthermore, in making this announcement, the Obama administration has also made it much harder to hold the authors of the torture memos accountable, because it will now be much harder to compel CIA torturers to testify. If they know they won't be charged with a crime, there is no incentive for them to turn state's evidence.

While i'm glad to hear that the president is not planning to authorize any more torture at present, they have set an extremely bad precedent that essentially lets the government (and any other nation who wants to use the same logic) rewrite the rules on torture whenever they please, without fear of reprisal or accountability.

So fuck you very much Eric Holder for making George W. Bush's destruction of civil rights a mission accomplished.

At this point i want to hear what the administration plans to do to prevent this from happening again, and how it intends to answer charges from the international community that the US is out of compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture.

Honestly, i felt great after watching his big speech. I dared, for a fleeting moment, to even have a little bit of hope. But i should have remembered never to listen to anything any politician says and watch only what they do. What the White House is actually doing is, to say the least, distressing.

Obama is again defending Bush's human rights abuses and seeking to expand them. From Obama to Appeal Detainee Ruling:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.

In a court filing, the Justice Department also asked District Judge John D. Bates not to proceed with the habeas-corpus cases of three detainees at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Judge Bates ruled last week that the three — each of whom says he was seized outside of Afghanistan — could challenge their detention in court.

Remember the jokes about conservative radio hosts doing nothing more than reading off a daily set of talking points faxed to them by the Bush Administration? Read this and weep: the White House has established a group called "Common Purpose" which is basically tasked with guiding (or if necessary strongarming) progressive organizations into promoting the administration's agenda.

The Treasury's being plundered by Wall Street, unions are being forced to accept concessions, military spending is up, the war is being expanded, the White House is fighting harder than ever before against human rights and privacy, and the overall impression that's starting to form in my mind is of a brewing disaster.

This week alone, the Obama Administration has:

Actively fought efforts to undo telecom immunity and hold the government accountable for past and present spying on private citizens. This is of course the opposite of what Obama promised when he campaigned: he vowed to make government more transparent, more accountable, and more respecting of civil liberties, and as time passes, this is turning out to have been an out-and-out lie.

Actively sought to forever immunize the government from ever being held accountable for wrongdoing, whether for torture or domestic surveillance. On these issues the Obama administration has so far been to the right of Dick Cheney.

Extended Wall Street's plunder of the American people to the FDIC. The FDIC is a relatively small fund (capped by law at $30B) which is now tasked by the PPIP (the federal program buying up toxic assets from flailing banks) with insuring over $1T in toxic asset purchases. If they lose money, they plan to assess fees from the banks they're insuring... unless those banks are bankrupt, in which case they'll simply ask the Treasury Department to print them the money. Put another way, the Treasury is holding its door wide open for bankers to take as much money as they want, keeping whatever profits they make and not having to worry about any losses they incur. Said bankers will also never have to worry about sleeping under a bridge or living in a tent or applying for food stamps. Meanwhile, if the FDIC becomes defunct because of this latest bizarre development, who's going to cover our measly little bank accounts in the event of a sector-wide banking breakdown?

I suppose the mass media is downplaying this because they think it's ancient history and no one will care. But if there are people alive now who remember it, it's not ancient history.

As the Chinese-backed North Korean army rapidly overran South Korea in 1950, they released leftists whom the southern regime had rounded up in mass arrests and recruited them to help administer their occupation. When southern Korean leaders learned this was going on, they decided to slaughter their political prisoners en masse rather than allow them to be freed and assist the North Korean regime.

It will never be known how many people were thusly murdered, but an estimate of 100,000 is called by at least one historian "very conservative." US General Douglas MacArthur was aware of the mass executions and numerous men under his command colluded in them.

On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime.

In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.

Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan’s political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned "to execute some 3,500 suspected peace-time Communists, locked up in the local prison," according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.

Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared, and that "atrocities could not be condoned."

But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.

"Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical," wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. "Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns."

... Emmerich wrote that soon after his session with Kim, he met with South Korean officials in Daegu, 55 miles north of Busan, and persuaded them "at that time" not to execute 4,500 prisoners immediately, as planned. Within weeks, hundreds were being executed in the Daegu area.

from U.S. ignored Korea killings; Ally executed 100,000, new research shows

In a way, this is of a piece with US forces operating under rules of engagement that called for the killing of literally anyone who moved.

On 26 July the US 8th Army, the highest level of command in Korea, issued orders to stop all Korean civilians. 'No, repeat, no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time. Movement of all Koreans in group will cease immediately.' On the very same day the first major disaster involving civilians struck.

The stone bridge near the village of No Gun Ri spans a small stream. It is similar to a great many others that cross the landscape of South Korea, except that the walls of this bridge were, until very recently, pockmarked by hundreds of bullet holes. On the very day that the US 8th Army delivered its stop refugee order in July 1950, up to 400 South Korean civilians gathered by the bridge were killed by US forces from the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Some were shot above the bridge, on the railroad tracks. Others were strafed by US planes. More were killed under the arches in an ordeal that local survivors say lasted for three days.

High Court: Gitmo detainees have rights in court

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

...The court said not only that the detainees have rights under the Constitution, but that the system the administration has put in place to classify them as enemy combatants and review those decisions is inadequate.

The administration had argued first that the detainees have no rights. But it also contended that the classification and review process was a sufficient substitute for the civilian court hearings that the detainees seek.

... The court has ruled twice previously that people held at Guantanamo without charges can go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention. Each time, the administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to try to close the courthouse doors to the detainees.

The American Indian Movement yesterday launched a new, interesting discourse on authority and colonialism, in declaring their intention to dissolve the treaties between the Lakota nation and the United States of America and seek international recognition as a soveriegn nation.

I have to confess, i read about what happened yesterday with a great deal of joy, but also a considerable amount of worry. The AIM is not well regarded by the US federal government and, assuming the feds don't just ignore this completely, they are likely to find themselves being designated a terrorist organization.

If that happens, any US citizen who expresses support for their cause would be considered by the federal government to be a terrorist sympathizer. Let that sink in for a moment.

Consider these two different articles describing yesterday's event:

( Read more... )

Here's what i want to draw my attention to, because it's essential to how the world and the US federal government are going to respond to this. The first article describes the Lakota delegation as a collection of freedom-seeking activists who pointedly do not represent the official tribal governments. The second article characterizes the delegation as a collection of Lakota tribal leaders, and treats their declaration as if it has official force.

So, what does this mean? Essentially the move is being done by a collection of influential activists who are denouncing the authority of their official tribal governments and claiming for themselves the authority to negotiate with the United Nations on behalf of the Lakota people.

Can they do that?

Well, that's a hell of a question, isn't it?

Who has the right to speak 'on behalf of' someone else? Well ideally, someone can only speak for you if you have individually granted them that authority. But functionally it's just not possible to get individual assent from every single person.

I'm not familiar enough with the AIM or with Russell Means and his allies to know how much popular backing and authority they have within the Lakota nation. I think, though, that they are acting on their own and counting on widespread popular support for their actions within the Lakota nation: a sort of after-the-fact delegation of authority from the populace to speak for them. The underlying chance they're taking is that a significant number of Lakota Indians will even notice it. So whether or not Means & co. can claim to speak for the Lakota people will become clear over time.

In the meantime, it may be said that they perceive a need to speak out, even without that official, on-paper authority which we all pretend comes from democratic elections. They perceive that they live under an unjust hegemony and feel driven by conscience to speak out against it and to seek allies, to seek like-minded people who have the position and authority to give assistance. As such, they're taking a chance that in claiming authority before the fact it will materialize after the fact when a 'critical mass' of people act as though they have it.

Which is why AIM is seeking the assistance and recognition of the new South American Superpower.

In any case, isn't this basically what a prophet does? I mean, setting aside religious and spiritual dimensions, a prophet is basically someone who speaks on our behalf before the rest of us even know that a thing needs to be said. I'm not saying Russell Means & co. are prophets (you can each be the judge of that), but i am saying that we don't always know who is and who isn't a prophet until after the fact.

The plight of gallae in prison is quite severe. Cases like that of Alexis Giraldo, who is suing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation because they initially ignored her complaints that her cellmate was regularly beating and raping her, are not unusual. The complicity of law enforcement people and prison guards and administrators in enabling and even encouraging rape and violence against GLBT prisoners has been previously documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Kalani Key, who is now a coordinator of the Transforming Justice coalition, wrote an account for Alternet of her experiences in prison. It's a fascinating read, notably because it is clear from her account that (A) the state of California has actually diminished its protections for transgender prisoners over the last 20 years, and (B) she received far better protection and treatment from fellow prisoners than she did from prison guards and administrators. (Thanks to Monica Roberts.)

A piece in this weekend's Washington Post is the Rosetta Stone that unravels the mystery of why Democrats like Nancy Pelosi took the impeachment of Bush and Cheney off the table - their hands are in the torture pie too.

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

So, there you have it. The Democrats won't impeach for the same reason that Mukasey, during his confirmation hearings, could not even admit to have pondered whether waterboarding is torture: because it makes them open to prosecution too. They are personally and individually complicit in the Bush Administration's crimes against humanity.

As far as i can tell, the Baldwin Amendment to ENDA, which would have reinstated protection for gender identity to the bill, never even came up for a vote. At least that's what this page seems to be telling me. Can anyone confirm this? I want to know if my rep in Congress voted on it.

ETA: nevermind, this page answered the question - the amendment was withdrawn, and then Baldwin voted for the bill as written.

ETA 2:

sfzboy points out in

transnews how HRC attempted to justify their move by pointing to a poll saying that the majority of people in the GLBT community support their pragmatic move. This is a supremely hypocritical move for an organization within a movement which argues that minority rights should never be put to a majority vote.

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

source: Bush Administration Blocked Waterboarding Critic

How did the White House reward this intrepid and enterprising individual? By forcing him out of the Justice Department before he could finish writing his memo.

As Keith Olbermann put it (thanks

novapsyche for the link):

The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

Four retired generals weighed in on the matter [PDF]:

...We write because this issue above all demands clarity: Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.

...This is a critically important issue - but it is not, and never has been, a complex issue, and even to suggest otherwise does a terrible disservice to this nation. All U.S. Government agencies and personnel, and not just America's military forces, must abide by both the spirit and letter of the controlling provisions of international law. Cruelty and torture - no less than wanton killing - is neither justified nor legal in any circumstance. ... Abu Ghraib and other notorious examples of detainee abuse have been the product, at least in part, of a self-serving and destructive disregard for the well-established legal principles applicable to this issue. This must end.

But will it end? Here's the punchline: the nomination of Mukasey for attorney general, after he could not, in the course of his role in covering the ass of George Bush and Dick Cheney, even admit to having thought about this question, has just been rubber-stamped by the Democrats.

The Gap has gone into full PR-damage control mode after it was revealed that one of their vendors was selling them clothing made by literal child slaves.

They have plausible deniability of course, because they buy from vendors who hired subcontractors to make their clothing. And they probably are actually appalled by the problem itself, not just by the criticism they're facing. They never told anyone to purchase children as slaves... they just gave their business to whoever could come up with clothing at the lowest price.

The Marxian term for the process at work here is commodity fetishism, which is a distortion in social priorities brought about by putting price tags on things. It's a distortion which blinkers us to the causal effects of our decision-making, the long-range or distant ethical ramifications of continuous cost-cutting and profit-maximization.

One aspect of this distortion is the devaluation, and subsequent discarding, of children.

In the agricultural and pastoral economy, children are a boon and blessing; in the urbanized economic model, they are (economically speaking) a burden. It is not a simple matter of children working on farms and ranches but not working in markets or factories - throughout most of history (including the present), children have occupied a place in the urban division of labor. No, the real issue is that in an urban economy people are separated from the wealth they create. They make things or perform services, for which they receive a wage which is not - which is never - equal to the average revenue product of their labor. What that means, in plain language, is that a person is never paid a wage equal to the value their labor creates.

That extra value is sucked up by the upper class. This is how it is that the gap between rich and poor tends to grow, and this is part of what i have, for two years now, referred to as slow-motion cannibalism.

Simply by virtue of existing in an urbanized society, an individual wage earner can statistically expect their net value to decrease over time. Some people manage to improve their lot; for every one who does, there are two or three who sink further into the whole. This is reflected in our financial life by perpetual debt; unless one owns property and capital, one is in debt forever to landlords and to banks. And to a poor family which has little of worth to give a child upon their birth, a child is an economic drain from the instant she or he is born.

It is a drain that people are willing to bear because of love. But being in debt makes you vulnerable. And a family that starts out with a margin of zero is on very thin ice indeed. Any kind of mishap - an illness, a drought, an inopportune death, and suddenly the unthinkable becomes the inevitable.

There are certain realities that are not altered by economic or political philosophy, and one of these realities is that the survival and caretaking of an individual human child represents a tremendous investment, of time, energy... even of love.

However, because of the way commodity fetishism works, this investment is not recognized as such. It is not recognized as an undertaking which creates value, even though it does. Viewed through dollar-sign-colored-glasses, the investment of raising a child is invisible, contrasted with the investment of buying a new piece of factory equipment.

When bankers run into problems, other capitalists and the government rush to prop them up. But when parents run into problems, they are on their own, a problem exacerbated by the urban breakdown of the extended family. On their own, with no prospects of aid or rescue, a desperate family will turn to horrific measures to survive - selling a child into slavery, or prostituting them, or killing them.

As an alternate vision, imagine a society that does recognize and give value to the investment of child-raising. Imagine a society where parents who run into difficulty are able to draw upon assistance based on the capital of their investment in the future. This would have to be a society where people ask, "How does this benefit us?" instead of, "How does this benefit me?"

We are only a state of mind away from it.

Not that it's been mentioned in US news anywhere, but yesterday the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the rights of indigenous people which has been in negotiation for 20 years.

Four nations voted against it: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. What do these nations have in common? Huge tracts of land and vast amounts of natural resources which were stolen from indigenous people.

Critics in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are vocal about their country's "no" vote. Here in the US? I think the media's still talking about how 'fat' Britney Spears looks now.

The State Department is concerned that this will impact US relations with Indian tribes. Most galling for the empire, i think, is Part V which requires the consent of all indigenous nations before laws can be passed which affect them.

Defenders of the vote in Australia and New Zealand have echoed the old racist refrain that it gives "one group special rights over another." It just sickens me every time i see challenges to one's privilege and efforts to bring about equality interpreted as "reverse -ism."

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December 2021

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a bit of history you don't learn much about in high school
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
how the hero narrative distorts our view of crimes against humanity
(no subject)
(no subject)
legitimizing torture: mission accomplished
is it too early to start thinking about impeachment?
i am becoming increasingly frustrated with and mistrustful of the obama administration
it's ok if the mass graves are full of commies
third time's a charm?
who gets to speak for 'the people'?
abuse and sexual assault of transwomen in prison
the non-impeachment rosetta stone
the cold technical words that underlie my second-class citizenship
the rubber-stamping of mukasey, another shiv stuck in the heart of freedom
it's all about the way we define our society's priorities
the un declaration on indigenous rights

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with human rights

a bit of history you don't learn much about in high school

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

how the hero narrative distorts our view of crimes against humanity

(no subject)

(no subject)

legitimizing torture: mission accomplished

is it too early to start thinking about impeachment?

i am becoming increasingly frustrated with and mistrustful of the obama administration

it's ok if the mass graves are full of commies

third time's a charm?

who gets to speak for 'the people'?

abuse and sexual assault of transwomen in prison

the non-impeachment rosetta stone

the cold technical words that underlie my second-class citizenship

the rubber-stamping of mukasey, another shiv stuck in the heart of freedom

it's all about the way we define our society's priorities

the un declaration on indigenous rights

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December 2021

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