When Commercial Radio Calls
A few days ago I received an interesting call from a representative of Citadel Radio, which owns four stations in Grand Rapids.
The reasons for his call was prompted by reading a story I wrote for Recoil magazine (also posted here) about Clear Channel’s decision to eliminate a locally produced show and fill that three-hour slot with syndicated Radio Talk Show personality Glen Beck.
The Citadel spokesperson was responding to my criticism of WOOD radio’s decision to include Beck to a line up that already included Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity. He wanted to assure me that Citadel had a commitment to local programming and that the only program they air that I would find objectionable would be the Mark Levin show.
First, I found it interesting that he would call me at all. The Citadel spokesperson did not bother to note that besides writing for Recoil I have been doing local media watchdog work with GRIID for the past 12 years.
Second, had the Citadel spokesperson bothered to find out more about my politics he would realize that I would object to more than just the Mark Levin show. It is true that I would object to the content of Mark Levin’s show. Levin is included in Rory O’Connor’s important book Shock Jocks, as one of the more racist radio commentator’s in the country. One only has to spend a few minutes on Levin’s webpage to see that he advocates for far right politics.
However, in looking at the four stations that Citadel runs in the Grand Rapids market there isn’t much local about what is broadcast. The station owns WBBL (talk sports radio), WLAV (Classic Rock), HOTFM (pop music station) and WJRW. WJRW went through a major facelift within the past year shifting to talk radio, but with content that is reflective of much of the local radio shows.
Besides the far right ranting of Mark Levin, WJRW also has former Congressman and President candidate Fred Thompson, Jim Bohannon and Allen Hunt, all of which could be included in the right/conservative politic camp.
In addition, WJRW has a show hosted by the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce, local businessman Tommy Brann, Tony Gates and WZZM 13 news anchor Lee Van Ameyde. Sure these are all local programs, but the content and politics of each of these four programs are clearly in line with the same reactionary politics of Mark Levin.
For instance, Lee Van Ameyde does not hide his political conservatism. When talk show host Sean Hannity visited Grand Rapids years ago, WZZM 13 allowed him to broadcast his show from their location. Van Ameyde about fell out of his chair telling viewers that “Sean Hannity sat in this very seat.”
Van Ameyde, like most TV news-readers tends to have contempt for the general viewing population. At a GR Summit on Racism breakout session in 2002 Van Ameyde admitted that WZZM 13 dumbed down the news to a fourth grade level, since that it what they think they average level of intelligence is of their viewers. Now, I’m not sure how they can make such determinations, but having monitored channel 13’s content for 10 years I would agree that they do news at a low intelligence level.
While I am sure that the Citadel Radio spokesperson was hoping to win points with GRIID on wanting to distance themselves from the likes of Glen Beck, any reasonable person would conclude that the content of WJRW is not much different than WOOD radio, locally produced or not.
Who Is the FBI Really Trying to Entrap?
(This article by Glen Ford is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.)
Attorney General Eric Holder told hundred of Muslims near San Francisco that the FBI’s sting operations penetrating mosques across the country are an essential “tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks.” But of course, most of the FBI’s high profile prosecutions for alleged domestic terrorism involve plots that were hatched in almost every detail by paid FBI informants who nurtured the schemes to their pre-planned conclusions.
So, in point of fact, the FBI has not been engaged in “uncovering and preventing terrorist attacks,” as Eric Holder claims, but rather, it has spent tens of millions of dollars and many thousands of man-hours concocting, financing, and providing training and equipment for crimes purely of its own invention. The FBI – first under George Bush and then even more aggressively under Barack Obama – has fabricated the illusion of a wave of terror that did not, for the most part, exist. In doing so, the U.S. government has perpetrated at least two classes of crimes: one, against those it has directly entrapped and prosecuted for crimes conceived and executed by the government, itself; and the second, larger class of crime, conspiracy to deliberately deceive and terrorize the American people, for the purpose of depriving the American people of their civil rights, and to foment a public hysteria that would facilitate the launching of military attacks on other peoples.
“Poor and powerless men were manipulated like puppets in theatrical productions directed by the FBI for purpose of frightening an audience of 300 million Americans.”
These are high crimes, as high as they come, which, in a just world, would warrant many counts of impeachment for both chief executives responsible: presidents Bush and Obama. The irony is, the very atmosphere of hysteria and war fever that the fake terror plots engender among the public, insulates the perpetrators from accountability for their crimes. No wonder the incoming Obama administration shielded the outgoing Bush gang from prosecution. Obama instructed Eric Holder to expand the phony terror racket, not to shut it down. Both presidents’ historical legacies are now inextricably tied to a domestic war on terror that is largely a fiction.
The fiction has real victims, including the poor and powerless, largely Black and brown men who were manipulated like puppets in theatrical productions directed by the FBI for purpose of frightening an audience of 300 million Americans. The families of some of these entrapped, involuntary actors in the FBI’s fake terror dramas are scheduled to gather at New York University, in Manhattan, on December 16, to devise strategies for seeking justice.
Muslim Americans have been criminalized as a community. In Irvine, California, an FBI operative was so brazen in soliciting recruits for jihad, mosque members got a court restraining order to shut him up. It turns out the informant was paid $177,000 to incite a holy war – the going rate, apparently, for inventing terror where none has previously existed.
So who is the real target of government entrapment? It could not be the individuals sucked into the FBI vortex, since Eric Holder’s men knew they were incapable of independently carrying out the crimes and, therefore, represented no danger to society. No, American society, itself, has been entrapped by the Bush and Obama manipulators. The object is to terrify the American public, so that they will surrender their civil liberties – possibly the greatest extortion scheme in U.S. history.
What We Are Reading
Below is a list of books that we have read in recent weeks. The comments are not a review of the books, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these books are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
The Black History of the White House, by Clarence Lusane – Official histories of the United States have ignored the fact that 25 percent of all U.S. presidents were slaveholders, and that black people were held in bondage in the White House itself. And while the nation was born under the banner of “freedom and justice for all,” many colonists risked rebelling against England in order to protect their lucrative slave business from the growing threat of British abolitionism. These historical facts, commonly excluded from schoolbooks and popular versions of American history, have profoundly shaped the course of race relations in the United States. Lusane deals with everything from slaves in the White House, to servants, Black entertainers and racial policies endorsed by Presidents since the founding of the nation. The Black History of the White House is an excellent text for anyone wanting to come to terms with the White Supremacist history of this country.
All That We Share: How to Save the Economy, the Environment, the Internet, Democracy, Our Communities and Everything Else that Belongs to All of Us, edited by Jay Walljasper – In an accessible field guide format—replete with illustrations, charts, and other visual materials—Things We Share offers an engaging entrée into a broad range of key topics and concepts from the commons movement, which touches everything from natural resources, art, and the environment to technological knowledge, the digital realm, economics, and politics. Veteran progressive journalist Jay Walljasper frames each chapter around a single idea, with additional contributions by other distinguished activists, politicians, and writers. All That We Share is an important contribution for those seeking to re-claim the commons from corporate capitalist control.
War is a Lie, by David Swanson – War is a Lie is methodical look at the justifications that people in power provide for the US going to war. Swanson walks the reader through the layers of propaganda that have accompanied US wars from the founding of the country up to the Obama administration. The author looks at the human & economic cost of war, whether or not it makes us more secure, who profits from war, how administrations have defended sending troops into war, how soldiers have been made into heroes, how the “enemy” has been demonized, the physical and technological nature of war, the legalities of war and the absurdity that wars are waged for humanitarian purposes. The book is well sourced and a useful tool for those who are opposed to war but struggle to articulate reasons for being against war beyond moral objections.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Pacifist and Nazi Resister (DVD) – Distributed by Icarus Films, Bonhoeffer is biographical look at German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was part of what was known as the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany. Bonhoeffer, is known in some circles as an influential theologian, but is often not recognized for his role in resisting Nazi policy and even participating in intelligence gathering in a plot to assassinate German leader Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested and put in prison and was executed after the failed assassination attempt. Bonhoeffer wrote extensively while in prison where he expanded his views on faith and justice. Bonhoeffer never saw a contradiction in his religious beliefs and his participation in the plan to assassinate Hitler.
The Aftermath of the Cancun Climate Summit
Two weeks ago we posted a piece about the issues facing the international community at the beginning of the Global Climate Summit in Cancun, Mexico.
The climate summit has now wrapped up and there has been virtually no attention given to this event in US commercial media. Major news outlets in the US made the Obama tax cut policy, WikiLeaks and the death of Elizabeth Edwards the main story for the week of December 6 – 12. Thus, the Cancun Climate Summit was nowhere to be found.
Independent sources continued to report on the event, both inside the government talks and on the street where protests and people’s assemblies were held. Latin American specialist Laura Carlsen reports that there will be no major international agreements on reducing global warming coming out of the Cancun talks. Instead, polluters will continue to get away with devastating practices and the rich nations of the world continue to be held to a different standard.
Reporter and activist Patrick Bond had an even sharper critique of the Climate Summit in an article entitled, “Climate Capitalism Wins in Cancun.” Bond asserts that the market solutions to global warming dominated the summit, which essentially means that things will go on business as usual. Bond is particularly critical of the United Nation’s Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), both of which promote the false solutions of the market.
The lack of US news coverage of the Climate Summit not only reflected the complete disregard of the summit from Washington it ignored the grassroots organizing and opposition to much of what took place. The Indigenous Environmental Network released on the final day of the Climate Summit this statement, which summarizes much of what popular movements throughout the world have been saying about Global Warming and Climate Justice:
As representatives of Indigenous peoples and communities already suffering the immediate impacts of climate change, we express our outrage and disgust at the agreements that have emerged from the COP16 talks. As was exposed in the Wikileaks climate scandal, the Cancun Agreements are not the result of an informed and open consensus process, but the consequence of an ongoing US diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and bribery that targeted nations in opposition to the Copenhagen Accord during the months leading up to the COP-16 talks.
We are not fooled by this diplomatic shell game. The Cancun Agreements have no substance. They are yet more hot air. Their only substance is to promote continued talks about climate mitigation strategies motivated by profit. Such strategies have already proved fruitless and have been shown to violate human and Indigenous rights. The agreements implictly promote carbon markets, offsets, unproven technologies, and land grabs—anything but a commitment to real emissions reductions.
The Voices of the People Must be Respected
Indigenous Peoples from North to South cannot afford these unjust and false ‘solutions’, because climate change is killing our peoples, cultures and ecosystems. We need real commitments to reduce emissions at the source and to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Because we are on the front lines of the impacts of climate change, we came to COP-16 with an urgent call to address the root causes of the climate crisis, to demand respect for the Rights of Mother Earth, and to fundamentally redefine industrial society’s relationship with the planet. Instead, the Climate COP has shut the doors on our participation and that of other impacted communities, while welcoming business, industry, and speculators with open arms. The U.S., Industrialized nations, big business and unethical companies like Goldman Sachs will profit handsomely from these agreements while our people die.
Women and youth in our communities are disproportionately burdened by climate impacts and rights violations. Real solutions would strengthen our collective rights and land rights while ensuring the protection of women, youth and vulnerable communities. While the Cancun Agreements do contain some language “noting” rights, it is exclusively in the context of market mechanisms, while failing to guarantee safeguards for the rights of peoples and communities.
The failures of the UN talks in Copenhagen have been compounded in Cancun. From the opening day to the closing moments of the talks, our voices were censored, dissenting opinions silenced and dozens ejected from the conference grounds. The thousands who rallied outside to reject market mechanisms and demand recognition of human and Indigenous rights were ignored.
The Market Will Not Protect Our Rights
Market-based approaches have failed to stop climate change. They are designed to commodify and profit from the last remaining elements of our Mother Earth and the air. Through its focus on market approaches like carbon trading, the UNFCCC has become the WTO of the Sky.
We are deeply concerned that the Cancun Agreements betray both our future and the rights of peoples, women, youth, and vulnerable populations. While the preamble to the Cancun Agreements note a call for “studies on human rights and climate change,” this is in effect an empty reference, with no content and no standards, that will not protect the collective rights of peoples. The market mechanisms that implicitly dominate both the spirit and the letter of the Cancun Agreements will neither avert climate change nor guarantee human rights, much less the Rights of Mother Earth. Approaches based on carbon offsetting, like REDD, will permit polluters to continue poisoning land, water, air, and our bodies, while doing nothing to stop the climate crisis. Indeed, approaches based on the commodification of biodiversity, CO2, forests, water, and other sacred elements will only encourage the buying and selling of our human and environmental rights.
The Cochabamba People’s Agreement Points the Way Forward
There is another way forward: the Cochabamba People’s Agreement represents the vision of everyday people from all corners of the globe who are creating the solutions to climate change from the ground up, and calling for a global framework that respects human rights and the Rights of Mother Earth.
If any hope emerges from Cancun, it comes from the dramatic demonstrations we saw in the streets and from the deep and powerful alliances that were built among indigenous and social movements. The Indigenous Environmental Network joined thousands of our brothers and sisters to demand real climate solutions based in the rights of Indigenous Peoples, the rights of Mother Earth, and a just transition away from fossil fuels. We will continue to stand with our allies to demand climate justice. The communities on the frontlines of the problem––those who face the daily impacts of the climate crisis––are also on the frontlines of the solutions. Community-based solutions can cool the planet!
The fight for climate justice continues. We are committed to deepening our alliances with indigenous and social movements around the world as we build in our communities and mobilize toward COP-17 in Durban, South Africa. Social movements in South Africa mobilized the world to overthrow Apartheid and create powerful, transformative change. The same mass-based movement building is our only hope to overturn the climate apartheid we now face. We look forward to working with our African brothers and sisters and tribal communities in Durban.
We only have one Mother Earth. As Indigenous Peoples, we will continue our struggle to defend all our Relations and future generations.
Graduation gowns, landfills and another greenwashing story in the Press
On Saturday, the Grand Rapids Press ran a short article on new “sustainability” effort at GVSU.
The university now offers to provide “eco-friendly” graduation gowns for students to buy. According to the article the gown “is made of wood pulp and the zippers of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a plastic commonly used in beverage containers.”
Interestingly, the GVSU bookstore manager states in the next paragraph that “most of the gowns may still end up in landfills, at least they’re made of material designed to disintegrate quickly.” He goes on to say that the eco-friendly gowns in the landfill are better than the old ones made with polyester.
What the bookstore manager fails to acknowledge or be aware of is how ridiculous this green consumer scam really is. First, there is no discussion about why graduates need to wear any kind of gown in order to participate in a brief ceremony upon graduation. Not wearing a gown would not detract from the ceremony itself and it would eliminate the waste of millions of gowns every year across the country.
Second, the lack of any critical assessment of this so-called sustainable initiative on the part of GVSU and the bookstore manager is that it’s primarily driven by the company that makes the gowns, Jostens. Indeed, the bookstore manager even puts in a plug for the company in the Press story by saying that Jostens will donate $1 to an environmental sustainability project when student who use their gowns contact them.
This whole effort by Jostens seems like a clear campaign to convince people that they should keep buying their products because now they have some sort of commitment to environmental responsibility. The truth is that what the company has a commitment to is making a profit and justifying what it is that they do.
Jostens is the largest “graduation” products based company, which sells gowns, yearbooks, rings and other items through high schools and colleges across the country.
Jostens has a “sustainability” section on their website, which has all kinds of lofting language about commitment to the environment, but it seems that reasonable people would be able to see through all of this greenwashing.
Would high school and college graduate feel slighted if they didn’t wear a gown on graduation day? And how many people actually wear their high school graduation ring? Jostens, however, assures us that they buy gems for their rings from companies that engages in environmentally and socially responsible mining activity. The Jostens website doesn’t post the names of companies they buy their gems from, which if course should make us all suspect as to the integrity of their claims.
However, even if the mining of gold and other gems for their products do not harm the environment (a claim I find implausible) the bottom line is do they even need to be selling and marketing products, which have no intrinsic value to improving the quality of human life? Unfortunately, the Press reporter didn’t bother to ask such questions, but instead treated the claims of sustainability as fact.
Billions Down the Drain in Useless US Afghan Aid
(This article by Patrick Cockburn is re-posted from CounterPunch.)
Beautiful but fake photographs are often the only evidence that companies have carried out expensive aid projects located in parts of Afghanistan too dangerous for donors to visit.
“I went to see a food processing plant in the east of the country which was meant to employing 250 women,” says an Afghan who used to work for an American government aid organization. “We had started the project and were paying for the equipment and the salaries. But when I visited the site all I found was a few people working on a vegetable plot the size of a small room.”
When he angrily complained about the non-existent plant he was told by a local official to keep his mouth shut. He said that “if I did not keep quiet there would be trouble on the road back to Jalalabad – in other words they would kill me.”
As President Obama prepares his review of how his Afghan strategy is working to be issued next week he is likely to focus on military progress.
But the most extraordinary failure of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan is that the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars has had so little impact on the misery in which 30 million Afghans live. Since 2001 the US alone has provided $52 billion in aid, two thirds for security and one third for economic, social and political development.
Despite this some nine million Afghans live in absolute poverty while a further five million, considered ‘not poor’, try to survive on $43 a month.“Things look alright to foreigners but in fact people are dying of starvation in Kabul,” says Abdul Qudus, a man with a deeply lined face in his forties, who sells second-hand clothes and shoes on a street corner in the capital. They are little more than rags, lying on display on the half frozen mud.
“I buy and sell clothes for between 10 and 30 Afghanis (two to six cents) and even then there are people who are too poor to buy them, “ says Mr Qudus. “I myself am very poor and sometimes I don’t eat so I can feed my children.” He says he started selling second hand clothes two years ago when he lost his job washing carpets.
US officials admit privately that the torrent of aid money that has poured into Afghanistan has stoked corruption and done ordinary Afghans little good. Aimed at improving economic and social conditions in order to reduce support for the Taliban it is having the reverse effect of destabilizing the country. Afghanistan was identified as the third most corrupt country out of 178 in the world in a report released yesterday by Transparency International.
“The aid projects are too big, carried out in too short a time, and the places they are located are too remote,” says a diplomat. He recalled that he was unable to monitor a road construction project in Kunar province in the east, because he was not allowed for security reasons to visit areas where he and his team could not be protected by indirect fire. Afghan and Americans who have overseen aid projects agree that the ‘quick fix’ approach has been disastrous. Schools that local people may not need are equipped with computers in districts where there is no electric power or fresh water.
The flood of money has had little success in reducing economic hardship. “It has all messed up into one big soup,” says Karolina Oloffson, head of advocacy and communication for the Afghan NGO Integrity Watch Afghanistan. Aid organizations are judge by the amount of money they spend rather than any productive outcome.
“The US has a highly capitalist approach and seeks to deliver aid through private companies,” she says. “It does not like to use NGOs which its officials consider too idealistic.”
Big contracts are given to large US companies that are used to a complicated bidding process, can produce appropriate paper work, and are well connected in Washington. The problem is that much of Afghanistan is far too dangerous for these companies to carry out work themselves or monitor sub-contractors.
In his office in Kabul Hedayutullah, the owner of the Noor Taq-e-Zafar Construction Company, says that there is a simple reason why the quality of work is so poor. He says: “Let us say the main US contractor has a contract worth $2.5 million donated by a foreign government. He will take a 20 per cent administrative fee and find a sub-contractor, who will sub-contract to an Afghan company, which may sub-contract again. At the end of the day only $1.4 million may be there for building the project which is too little to do it properly.”
Progress of schemes is often monitored by photographs of work in progress. In one small but typical case an Afghan company was paid to build and get running a tractor repair shop in highly dangerous Oruzgan province in the south to give employment to local youth.
The contractor rented an existing tractor repair shop in Kandahar for the day and hired local young men to look as if they were busily fixing engines in the shop. This was all photographed and the pictures emailed to the main contractor and the donor organization, both of which expressed high satisfaction at what had been achieved. “There is no intention to provide service,” says Mr Hedayatullah, “just to make money.”
There have been some successes. Kabul now has an almost continuous supply of electricity which comes from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan along wires hanging from newly built pylons that cross the Hindu Kush mountains. The US commander, Gen David Petraeus, is demanding that emergency generators supply continuous power to Kandahar.
But overall aid has done surprisingly little for most Afghans. Little of the money trickles down and much of it is monopolized by a tightly-knit group of businessmen, warlords and politicians at the top. Former Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud is alleged to have been stopped entering the United Arab Emirates with $52 million in cash in a suitcase according US diplomatic documents leaked through Wikileaks. Police chiefs and provincial governors all want a cut of the pie.
Yama Torabi, the co-director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan, says it is not really possible to carry out development aid in areas of conflict where there is fighting, It might be better to stick to humanitarian aid.
This would be contrary to US military policy, pioneered in Iraq, whereby local US military commanders control substantial funds that can be used for local aid projects through the so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). But this militarization of aid means that the Taliban target schools built on the orders of a US commander.
“People see schools built by the Americans as American property,” says an Afghan who once worked for a US government agency. “They are frightened of sending their children there.” Overall it is doubtful that aid provided by PRTs does the US or other members of the foreign coalition much good because “villagers don’t forgive the US army for killing their sons just because it has built a road or a bridge.”
The US government policy of providing aid through large American private companies, whose interest lies in making a profit rather than improving the life of Afghans, is proving a failure in Afghanistan as it did previously in Iraq.
As winter approaches half of Afghans face the prospect of ‘food insecurity’, or not getting enough to eat in the next three months, according to the US Famine Early Warning System. The best use of aid money may be to subsidize food prices and help people like Mr Qubus, the old clothes seller, and his family from starving.
Racism and the Readers of the GR Press
For a long time, I’ve complained to friends about letters to the editor in the printed copy of the Grand Rapids Press. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed the bigotry, the lack of compassion, and the deep scorn for social justice issues displayed in them.
Not long ago, a friend said, “You know what? The comments posted by readers on the MLive site are even worse.” This sparked an idea. I decided to set a time frame (10 days), start commenting about multiple articles on the Grand Rapids Press part of MLive, and record both reactions to my posts and comments from the threads as a whole.
My friend was right. The only thing worse than those letters in the Press is when the letters talk back to you.
My comments drew a lot of fire. I decided to alternate between reasonable fact-based posts and ones that were provocative, although I was never openly hostile as many of the readers were. My user name indicated I’m a woman (I’d estimate that about 80 percent of the regular commentators are men), which made me a target. And I clearly came across as someone who was not, let’s say, a member of the Tea Party. Within a couple of days, I was being tackled every time I posted, and called “a liberal piece of shit,” “a radical bitch,” and “a Marxist whore” on a regular basis.
But that was nothing compared to the level of anger and outrage I found on the site in general. And it appeared to be 100 percent White rage. The kind of rage that Bob Grant, an early radio host in the 1970s, used to gin up to increase his listener base, a style Rush Limbaugh copied on his own show on Fox. In fact, it seemed that a lot of the comments posted were nothing more than Fox News sound bites. If you tried to get the authors to elaborate, or produce facts to back up their statements, they usually couldn’t. But they were united in one idea: it was all the fault of the “liberals”…the minorities…the “illegal immigrants” … the U.N.
This us-versus-them mentality came across clearly in all discussions. Here are some comments from various threads:
When discussing unemployment figures, many readers felt the high rate was the fault of immigrants. As one reader said:
Let’s see, 20 MILLION illegal alien scum, you know – “doing the lobs Americans just won’t do”? Remember them? Hmmmmm, I wonder…What if we rounded them all up like the infectious cancer on our society they are, beat them into submission, then dumped their broken bodies back HOME in me-hee-co, maybe, just maybe, there would be – oh I don’t know , MILLIONS of jobs available?
Other comments on this topic included:
•“…they are breaking into our country and TAKING jobs, health care, welfare, and NOT paying taxes.”
•“Minority this, minority that! You get special treatment if your not WHITE!”
•“Path to citizenship? How about a path to Mexico? We don’t need them here. They are CRIMINALS! They might be future Democrats…..but THEY ARE CRIMINALS.”
An article about a high school student that was shot and then run down by a car in Kentwood while attempting to save his brother from being killed found no sympathy with the Grand Rapids Press crowd. One man wrote:
I am getting so sick of hearing about the blacks shooting each other. Ok, the article doesn’t state the color of anyone involved but I’d bet my next paycheck I am correct. This crap is getting too close to where I live, time to get out of the area and let them ‘take over’ another nice area of town.
•A side discussion about how affirmative action was somehow responsible for this violence caused me to object about calling affirmative action “racist.” A reader responded: “Calling affirmative action racist is repulsive to you? That’s all you needed to say. I mean, what’s the problem with telling minorities they can’t perform at the same level as white people?”
•A third follow-up article, about the dead boy’s family and brother, netted this comment: “If I pay for their health care, welfare, why not throw in a couple bucks for the funeral. The American Dream-From the womb to the tomb without ever working.”
•Chillingly, this statement capped one thread about the shooting: “Its called thinning out the Herd.”
During the time I was posting, two article related to the GLBT community appeared in the news. One was about a GVSU group of GLBT students who were attempting to get the dorm rules changed so that they could choose the gender and orientation of their roommates, rather than endure random assignments. The men of the posting community were universally disgusted by the idea. Some of the comments included:
•“SICK SOCIETY. Take it to the Truck Stops.”
•“What a cesspool.”
•“Back to mambi-pambi land for these freaks. I am so sick of kowtowing this crap. I am considering sending my girl to GVSU next year…. BUT…. not if this sickos get to rule the roost…..”
•One reader noted that the students’ spokesperson would just have to go back to “stalking” across town since the dorms would be off-limits to him as a resource.
The second article was about the proposed repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. The regular commentators were universally against this. The level of “jokes”—and accompanying sexual tension—over this topic was noticeable. Some of the comments included:
•“Homosexuality is a mental disorder.”
•“Testosterone + 5.56 mm rounds + gays = big trouble for all.”
•“youwhoo youwhoo oh youwhoo, attention.”
•“…if a gay couple (male) are married and serving together in Afghanistan, who wears the burka?”
Interestingly, the “jokes” came to an abrupt end when male readers who were or had been in the military made it known that they were nearly 100 percent in favor of the policy’s repeal.
A lot of this seemed familiar from the printed paper’s editorial page. But one topic that generated perhaps the most anger caught me by surprise, and that was a hatred of the unemployed.
The majority opinion among the Grand Rapids Press readers posting on MLive seemed to be that the unemployed were leeches draining our economy of any lifeblood it had left. They were accused of wanting “handouts” and deliberately not looking for work in order to spin out their unemployment benefits longer. One reader wrote:
FIGURE IT OUT! You popped that family out without giving a thought on what could happen if that job you were barely making ends meet with went away, so now its our responsibility to make a game plan for you?
Other comments included:
•I know a few people who have never worked & just because they are a “minority” they were able to get on welfare and are still on it – and there ain’t a damn’d thing wrong with them.
•The U.S. has babied too many freeloaders for too long.
•In one thread on the extension vote, a number of people who were unemployed related their experiences of sending out hundreds of resumes, never getting chances at job interviews, losing their homes, or being barely able to feed their children. One woman asked, “What do you expect us to do without the unemployment extension?” and a regular reader replied, “FU. You sick perverted Biatch!!!”
•Another man said he thought the stalling on the extension was “just the beginning” of discrimination against those who could not find work, and a reader replied, “You damn right, skippy…this is just the start. We will break you.”
MLive’s user agreement states: You agree not to use any obscene, indecent, or offensive language or to provide to or post on or through the Website any graphics, text, photographs, images, video, audio or other material that is defamatory, abusive, bullying, harassing, racist, hateful, or violent. You agree to refrain from ethnic slurs, religious intolerance, homophobia, and personal attacks when using the Website.
It appears that each newspaper is responsible for policing its own articles for these violations. But Editor Paul Keep routinely brags about how many comments there are for Grand Rapids Press’s articles, and has made it clear that the Website is the foundation of the Press’s future.
So it’s not hard to imagine that the terms of use might be ignored deliberately to keep number of posts up…even when the majority of those posts contain bigotry, homophobia, racism, and violent and harassing language. This daily commentary goes way beyond political Kool-aid; it’s the classic and toxic White rage cocktail.
The Charade of Israeli-Palestinian Talks
(This article by Noam Chomsky is re-posted from ZNet.)
Washington’s pathetic capitulation to Israel while pleading for a meaningless three-month freeze on settlement expansion—excluding Arab East Jerusalem—should go down as one of the most humiliating moments in U.S. diplomatic history.
In September the last settlement freeze ended, leading the Palestinians to cease direct talks with Israel. Now the Obama administration, desperate to lure Israel into a new freeze and thus revive the talks, is grasping at invisible straws—and lavishing gifts on a far-right Israeli government.
The gifts include $3 billion for fighter jets. The largesse also happens to be another taxpayer grant to the U.S. arms industry, which gains doubly from programs to expand the militarization of the Middle East.
U.S. arms manufacturers are subsidized not only to develop and produce advanced equipment for a state that is virtually part of the U.S. military-intelligence establishment but also to provide second-rate military equipment to the Gulf states—currently a precedent-breaking $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, which is a transaction that also recycles petrodollars to an ailing U.S. economy.
Israeli and U.S. high-tech civilian industries are closely integrated. It is small wonder that the most fervent support for Israeli actions comes from the business press and the Republican Party, the more extreme of the two business-oriented political parties. The pretext for the huge arms sales to Saudi Arabia is defense against the “Iranian threat.”
However, the Iranian threat is not military, as the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence have emphasized. Were Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capacity, the purpose would be deterrent—presumably to ward off a U.S.-Israeli attack.
The real threat, in Washington’s view, is that Iran is seeking to expand its influence in neighboring countries “stabilized” by U.S. invasion and occupation.
The official line is that the Arab states are pleading for U.S. military aid to defend themselves against Iran. True or false, the claim provides interesting insight into the reigning concept of democracy. Whatever the ruling dictatorships may prefer, Arabs in a recent Brookings poll rank the major threats to the region as Israel (88 percent), the United States (77 percent) and Iran (10 percent).
It is interesting that U.S. officials, as revealed in the just-released WikiLeaks cables, totally ignored Arab public opinion, keeping to the views of the reigning dictators.
The U.S. gifts to Israel also include diplomatic support, according to current reports. Washington pledges to veto any U.N. Security Council actions that might annoy Israel’s leaders and to drop any call for further extension of a settlement freeze.
Hence, by agreeing to the three-month pause, Israel will no longer be disturbed by the paymaster as it expands its criminal actions in the occupied territories.
That these actions are criminal has not been in doubt since late 1967, when Israel’s leading legal authority, international jurist Theodor Meron, advised the government that its plans to initiate settlements in the occupied territories violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, a core principle of international humanitarian law, established in 1949 to criminalize the horrors of the Nazi regime.
Meron’s conclusion was endorsed by Justice Minister Ya’akov Shimson Shapira, and shortly after by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, writes historian Gershom Gorenberg in The Accidental Empire.
Dayan informed his fellow ministers, “We must consolidate our hold so that over time we will succeed in `digesting’ Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and merging them with `little’ Israel,” meanwhile “dismember(ing) the territorial contiguity” of the West Bank, all under the usual pretense “that the step is necessary for military purposes.”
Dayan had no doubts, or qualms, about what he was recommending: “Settling Israelis in occupied territory contravenes, as is known, international conventions,” he observed. “But there is nothing essentially new in that.”
Dayan’s correct assumption was that the boss in Washington might object formally, but with a wink, and would continue to provide the decisive military, economic and diplomatic support for the criminal endeavors.
The criminality has been underscored by repeated Security Council resolutions, more recently by the International Court of Justice, with the basic agreement of U.S. Justice Thomas Buergenthal in a separate declaration. Israel’s actions also violate U.N. Security Council resolutions concerning Jerusalem. But everything is fine as long as Washington winks.
Back in Washington, the Republican super-hawks are even more fervent in their support for Israeli crimes. Eric Cantor, the new majority leader in the House of Representatives, “has floated a novel solution to protect aid for Israel from the current foreign aid backlash,” Glenn Kessler reports in The Washington Post: “giving the Jewish state its own funding account, thus removing it from funds for the rest of the world.”
The issue of settlement expansion is simply a diversion. The real issue is the existence of the settlements and related infrastructure developments. These have been carefully designed so that Israel has already taken over more than 40 percent of the occupied West Bank, including suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; the arable land; and the primary water sources of the region, all on the Israeli side of the Separation Wall—in reality an annexation wall.
Since 1967, Israel has vastly expanded the borders of Jerusalem in violation of Security Council orders and despite universal international objection (including the U.S., at least formally).
The focus on settlement expansion, and Washington’s groveling, are not the only farcical elements of the current negotiations. The very structure is a charade. The U.S. is portrayed as an “honest broker” seeking to mediate between two recalcitrant adversaries. But serious negotiations would be conducted by some neutral party, with the U.S. and Israel on one side, and the world on the other.
It is hardly a secret that for 35 years the U.S. and Israel have stood virtually alone in opposition to a consensus on a political settlement that is close to universal, including the Arab states, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (including Iran), and all other relevant parties.
With brief and rare departures, the two rejectionist states have preferred illegal expansion to security. Unless Washington’s stand changes, political settlement is effectively barred. And expansion, with its reverberations throughout the region and the world, continues.
A Message from Anonymous to the World
(This article is re-posted from Infoshop.)
Greetings. We are Anonymous. Due to the misconceptions being propagated, we are setting the record straight.
Anonymous is a diverse collective of individuals focused on securing freedom of speech and information worldwide. Our intent is not to disrupt without cause, but to protect the Internet from the tyranny that government and corporate agencies are now seeking to impose on it. We do this not for ourselves, but to assert the rights of the freedom of speech and information globally. We ask you to support us, not for our sake, but for your own rights. Do not allow governments, corporations or the media to control what you are allowed to see, hear and think.
Many in the media have painted a distorted image of what Anonymous is. The Constitution of the United States is said to be a living document because it can be amended to suit the changing needs of the American people. In that same spirit, Anonymous is a living culture of people and ideas; a growing, shifting entity. Anonymous is any individual, regardless of nationality, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or creed. Anything attributed, credited, or tagged to Anonymous is rarely based on any consensus of us as a whole–we operate through a democratic meritocracy of ideas, and we follow our own consciences convictions rather than any leader. Anonymous seeks to stand up for truth and transparency and we ask you as an individual, a media organization, or government, to do the same.
During the American Civil Rights movement, activists conducted sit-ins to prevent access to businesses in non-violent protest against segregation. People were certainly inconvenienced and angry as a result, but those non-violent protests were essential to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, many businesses of the world live on the internet, and so the protests too, must move online. Our DDoS attacks are virtual sit-ins, aimed at those entities that have aided in the censorship of information. These actions do no permanent damage or harm: we merely take up bandwidth and system resources, like protestors filled the seats of Woolworth’s lunch counters.
This particular campaign, Operation Payback, is a response to the actions taken against WikiLeaks. A number of the world’s most economically and politically powerful institutions have attempted to destroy the credibility of this organisation and to remove it entirely from the Internet. This repression is done in the name of protecting national interests, but it is actually a way to protect those who are guilty of destroying transparency in an attempt to conceal their own misdeeds from the public. There is no evidence that any individual has come to harm due to the information released. WikiLeaks operates with the co-operation of several press outlets, and have attempted to discuss what should be released with the state department to no avail. It is due to this concerted effort to suppress them that we are standing up for their freedom.
The Internet is the final stronghold of freedom in this increasingly authoritarian world. It is capable of connecting and uniting all of humanity, removing the barriers of language and distance. When we are connected, we are strong. When we are strong, we need not fear tyranny. This is why governments and corporations are moving on Wikileaks. They fear our power when we unite globally; they fear our ability to demand justice. Do not forget this.
This is a historically important moment for the fate of free speech in this emerging information society. These attacks on freedom of expression will have important implications for the future. Our peaceful activism will focus on anyone who intends to infringe on the freedoms of speech and information, regardless of the power they wield. The entities that we campaign against are denying everyone a basic human right. Any person, corporation, government, or other entity that turns against this pattern of censorship, and starts promoting freedom of speech instead, will become our allies. Anonymous wants to educate our opponents rather than hurt them; we are campaigning for freedom for everyone, even those who criticize and attack us. Anonymous’ campaign does not intend to harm the individual citizen, any organization, any website, or government that supports true freedom of speech.
Anonymous urges the people of the world to join in the fight against all forms of censorship, in defense of freedom both online and off. We exist on the fringes of society, both online and off, but if you search for us, you will find us. We will end this note with a final message for those who still intend to continue their campaign against the human rights of freedom of speech, freedom of expression through the press, and freedom of information:
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
Join us.
IWW film night: “What Would Jesus Buy?”
Free Film Screening!
What Would Jesus Buy
Thurs. Dec. 16 at 7p.m.
IATSE Hall, 931 Bridge St. NW
The Shopocalypse is upon us … Who will be $aved?
Do you need some inspiration to overcome the commercialization of Christmas and hell-fires of credit card debt this holiday season? Join Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping for a heartwarming, hilarious and insightful cross-country crusade against consumerism. Co-sponsored by IATSE Local 26 and the Grand Rapids IWW, the film What Would Jesus Buy? will give you a good laugh along with the wake-up call you need to enter the New Year free from the bonds of over-consumption. Stick around after the film for a good discussion of consumerism in America.
Produced by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), What Would Jesus Buy? lays bare the commercialization of Christmas. The film’s Web site elaborates, “Bill Talen (aka Reverend Billy) was a lost idealist who hitchhiked to New York City only to find that Times Square was becoming a mall. Spurred on by the loss of his neighborhood and inspired by the sidewalk preachers around him, Bill bought a collar to match his white caterer’s jacket, bleached his hair and became the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. Since 1999, Reverend Billy has gone from being a lone preacher with a portable pulpit preaching on subways, to the leader of a congregation and a movement whose numbers are well into the thousands.
Through retail interventions, corporate exorcisms, and some good old-fashioned preaching, Reverend Billy reminds us that we have lost the true meaning of Christmas. What Would Jesus Buy? is a journey into the heart of America – from exorcising the demons at the Wal-Mart headquarters to taking over the center stage at the Mall of America and then ultimately heading to the Promised Land … Disneyland.
Will we be led like Sheeple to the Christmas slaughter, or will we find a new way to give a gift this Christmas? What Would Jesus Buy? may just be the divine intervention we’ve all been searching for.”
View the trailer.
