May 2009 archive

I posted this over at DailyKos the other day and some people said posting it here would be a good idea. So here I am.

Here I’ve compiled a lengthy list on the ongoing discussion (read: illegal implementation and defense) of torture. I just think it is really interesting, in hindsight, to go re-read articles where various agencies commented on torture.

I’m not trying to prove a point that torture doesn’t work, so we shouldn’t use it. We should never use it even if it ‘works’ because it’s cruel, inhumane and un-American. There is no excuse to use torture and there never will be. I am writing this because I’m actually wondering, given all these comments about how it doesn’t work, why was it still used?

Honestly, it makes no sense. It hampered evidence gathering and trials of real terrorists and everything else, along with being completely immoral. I doubt we’ll ever get any answers but I figured I’d put it out there.

I’m sorry but my machine is acting really hinky and while I’ve been working on it for 4 hours now, my next diagnostic step involves a fresh OS install which will take about 2 hours and during which I’ll not have ‘net access.

I’ll be back when I can with WND and in the mean time you can use this open thread to complain about your computers so I won’t feel so stupid.

Pete Seeger – Guantanamera

In a few hours I’m going to the Pete Seeger 90th birthday concert, courtesy Lee and Alice (pbut). In my early teens, some who know me now will be surprised to learn, I was a folky. These days, not so much.

But I am proud to say, I have never once stopped defending Pete Seeger from criticisms aesthetic and political. His instrument is not and never was his voice, nor even his banjo. It was his audience. And he played his audience so brilliantly because he genuinely loved them and trusted them to help make his music, their music.

His politics? About the worst you could say about him is that he was a mush-minded humanist, but dammit, he was our mush-minded humanist. And that would a half-truth at best. It was from him that I first heard the song “I Hate The Capitalist System” by Sarah Ogan, who was active in the Harlan County coal-mining struggles in the ’30s (the strike in which Florence Reece wrote “Which Side Are You On?” the song in the video above). And possibly his best instrumental composition for banjo, save only the incomparable “Goofing Off Suite,” is his arrangement of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s “Three Rules of Discipline and the Eight Rules of Attention.”

Here is a video that brings all these points together. It’s one of his greatest compositions, a hymn to optimism of the will and the continuity of the struggle called “Quite Early Morning.” It was recorded within the last couple of years in Beacon, NY, and Pete’s voice, as he’s been telling us for years, is shot. It’s freezing cold in the venue where they are taping this. Besides whoever’s behind the camera, there are two people in front of him, bundled up on metal folding chairs, and damned if he doesn’t get them to chime in on the chorus.

Many happy returns, Pete…

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

Richard Wolff, American Economist well-known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology and class analysis, Yale University Ph.D. in Economics, and Professor at The New School University in New York City, talks with Real News CEO Paul Jay about the reform needed to pull the United States out of economic crisis.

“If we say something is too important to let it die, too big to fail, then we’re saying it’s so important to the society as a whole, but if it’s that important, it can’t be in the hands of a few people in the first place. If you’re too big to fail, your too big to be in private hands.” He goes on to suggest that if there is chaos in the US economy, the rest of the world will have chaos as well. “We have an unknown situation, the outcome of which could be very bad, we actually have a vision of that already, Mexico, it’s a society in free fall.”

Real News Network – May 2, 2009

Too big to fail, too big to be privately owned

Auto industry affects the whole society, it’s too significant for private ownership

Rorschach “Rachel”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Simone Bitton’s documentary “Rachel,” which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, is what’s not in it. Bitton, a Moroccan-born Jewish filmmaker who spent many years in Israel and now lives in France, conducts a philosophical and cinematic inquiry into the death of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist who was killed under ambiguous circumstances in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip in March 2003. But the political firestorm that followed Corrie’s death, which saw her beatified as a martyr for peace by some on the left and demonized as a terrorist enabler by some on the right, is virtually absent from the film….>>>>>Much More Here

Rachel’s mother and father, a brother ‘Nam Vet, were living and working for a stop to the impending illegal invasion of Iraq, here in Charlotte, at the time of Rachel’s Murder by the Israeli Army!!

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

I had a thought-provoking May Day.

It started on teh Intertubes. The social networking space called Facebook, or at least the small self-created corner of it where I rattle around, was awash in May Day greetings, forwardings and comments. I clicked the li’l thumbs-up button to register my approval of every one that came my way. Literally dozens of my Facebook friends chipped in on the theme.

Some included snatches of poetry, verses to The Internationale, embedded YouTube videos or links to articles on the holiday, like this and others at Kasama and some Rowland Keshena Robinson posted at By Any Means Necessary.

Meanwhile, on Leftist Trainspotters, an oddball internet group for people whose hobby is following left organizations around the world (especially small and peculiar ones), the estimable David Walters, of the Marxist Internet Archives, encouraged everyone to report in on their local International Workers Day activities.

Thus prodded, I headed out to check out two rival May Day rallies called in downtown Manhattan yesterday afternoon. I can’t claim that it was altogether a heartening or uplifting trip.

Ben Nelson Has Gold

Standard Health Care

But Doesn’t Want

Anyone Else To Have It    

It’s all on Obama now

Political observers say that with the events of the last week, accountability for the nation and its current problems has clearly shifted from Bush.

By Peter Nicholas

May 3, 2009

Reporting from Washington — In the span of a single week — from the day Arlen Specter turned Democratic to the moment Congress passed the White House’s budget blueprint and on through the opening of a spot on the Supreme Court — President Obama crossed a fateful line: From now on, it’s his country.

Every president inherits a tangle of problems from his predecessor. War and recession, natural disaster and foreign crises. And for some undefined interval, new presidents argue that they should not be accountable for the troubles that arose on another’s watch.

But inevitably, responsibility shifts. And for Obama, that time came last week, bringing both greater opportunities and greater risks.

On the economy, Obama won approval Wednesday of a $3.5-trillion budget plan that aims to help pull the country out of the worst recession in decades. It also smooths the way for one of the president’s signature domestic priorities — overhauling the nation’s healthcare system.

Tiananmen: The flame burns on

Twenty years ago tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to crush the biggest pro-democracy movement in history. Hundreds were killed, thousands jailed and many fled to escape persecution. Here exiled leaders of the student revolution tell their remarkable stories and reveal how, after being forced to build new lives, they remain haunted by its bloody legacy



Isabel Hilton

The Observer, Sunday 3 May 2009

Over seven tumultuous weeks of nationwide demonstrations and protests, beginning with the death of the sacked reformer, Hu Yaobang, on 15 April 1989 and ending with the movement’s violent suppression on 4 June, an estimated 100 million people across China demonstrated in support of political reform. The movement was inchoate, contradictory and politically confused but it remains the biggest peaceful pro-democracy movement in human history. For the millions who took part, life would never be the same again.

Last week I listened to a man in his 40s unburden himself of a secret he had carried for two decades. He was a student leader in a major provincial city, and although he was arrested in mid-June 1989, he was released after a month of enforced confessions. He moved to another city and eventually made a successful career. But for 20 years the burden of the hopes that were shattered on 4 June, and the apprehension that he could be targeted at any time by a regime that never forgets and rarely forgives, has weighed on his spirit. It is part fear, part depression, part rage.

USA

U.S. Workers’ Wages Stagnate As Firms Rush to Slash Costs



By Annys Shin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, May 3, 2009

In December, Timothy Owner, a trombone player with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, called his landlord to tell her he might have trouble paying rent around May. He and the orchestra’s 53 other full-time members, many of whom are paid less than $30,000 a year, had agreed to a month-long furlough.

The furlough, which ended yesterday, was rough, Owner said. But he and other musicians acknowledged that the alternative could have been worse. “We’re less unhappy if this means the orchestra will survive,” he said.

Across the country, workers’ earnings are stagnating or, in some cases, declining.

Let’s Rock