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Posted by Harkavy at 3:18 PM, May 7, 2008
High-tech horror: Widespread cell-phone violence against women in Iraq and the Congo.
The downside of the 21st century's high-tech age is lower than you can imagine: Cell phones and cell-phone technology are prime culprits in a growing epidemic of rape, beatings, and murder of women in the Congo and Iraq.
A war over "coltan," a crucial ingredient in the manufacture of cell phones and other electronic devices, has helped cause the ongoing tragedy of rape and murder by the millions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC horrors far outstrip even Darfur as a tragedy, as I noted in June 2005.
Go to Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News, the website of Czech-Canadian Katerina Cizek's documentary film series of that name, to read "Cell Phones Fuel Congo Conflict." . The series explains how the fight over coltan, only one of the treasures in the resources-rich Congo, is directly responsible for much of the savage war in which millions have died and hundreds of thousands, at the very least, have been raped and otherwise brutalized.
Eve Ensler, famous for the Vagina Monologues, is one of the few Westerners to latch onto the rampage against women in the Congo and try to publicize it. Incongruously, her monologue on the violence, gleaned from a trip there, can be found in Glamour. Here's the second paragraph of Ensler's in-your-face August 2007 article:
How do I tell you of girls as young as nine raped by gangs of soldiers, of women whose insides were blown apart by rifle blasts and whose bodies now leak uncontrollable streams of urine and feces?
Meanwhile, in Iraq, cell phones as finished products are prime weapons — in a high-tech fashion — for brutalizing women.
Amanj Khalil, a young journalist for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, described on May 2 one recent incident in Iraq's northern Kurdish area:
Salma trusted her boyfriend enough to speak freely with him about romance, love and even sex.
But she has paid a high price for her candour. Salma, who asked that her real name be concealed because of the sensitivity of her story, is hiding in a women’s shelter in the northeastern city of Sulaimaniyah, her body battered and bruised.
Her boyfriend recorded their intimate conversations on his phone and passed them onto her family through a friend when she refused to marry him. Salma’s body still bears the scars of her family’s response. The 28-year-old’s hand was fractured during one of the beatings from her brothers, father and uncles.
“They started to beat me without even letting me speak,” she said. “They beat me so severely that I fainted several times."
Salma's just one of many Iraqi women being brutalized in a high-tech way by lower-than-low scumbags.
It's worse in the Congo. Natural disasters, like the cyclone that ravaged Burma, are one thing. Manmade disasters are another. And no manmade disaster is as unnatural as what's going on in the DRC, surely the rape capital of the world.
Here's a grim fact: In the Congo, "vaginal destruction" has become an official term of medical art used by beleaguered doctors and nurses to describe war-related injuries.
Western governments and the mainstream press usually, but not always, ignore the DRC. (Certainly, Western corporations don't ignore it the country's rich natural resources.) So you have to go elsewhere to find out about the situation. Thanks to the Web, the upside of high-tech, you can.
One of the best pieces, and I've referred to it previously, is Sarah J. Coleman's June 2005 article on Beliefnet, "Congo's Conflict: Heart of Darkness." Her lede is worth repeating:
How do you measure the horror in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Add up all of the American deaths in every single war we've fought in since 1776, including World War II and the Civil War (1,540,665). Now add to that the estimated deaths from the recent tsunami (169,752 confirmed dead, 127,294 missing). Next, add to that the estimated death toll in the conflict in Darfur (400,000). Then, add to that the victims of genocide in Rwanda, one of the most horrific slaughters of the 20th century (937,000).
Add all of the deaths together — and you still have a smaller number than the 3.5 million people who have died in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 1998.
The toll's up to an estimated 5 million now — that's the scope of the Holocaust. Read Stephen Lewis's April 12 speech at Ensler's V-Day Celebration in New Orleans.
Lewis really got down to it in September 2007, quoting from "The Shame of War: Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in Conflict," a March 2007 major report from IRIN, the U.N.'s excellent and free global news service:
“As a result of the systematic and exceptionally violent gang rape of thousands of Congolese women and girls, doctors in the DRC are now classifying vaginal destruction as a crime of combat. Many of the victims suffer from traumatic fistula — tissue tears in the vagina, bladder, and rectum.
Additional long-term medical complications for survivors may include uterine prolapse (the descent of the uterus into the vagina or beyond) and other serious injuries to the reproductive system, such as infertility, or complications associated with miscarriages and self-induced abortions. Rape victims are also at high-risk for sexually transmitted infections.”
I won't apologize for the graphic nature of this, because we need to face the unexpurgated facts.
The Congo violence is the biggest war tragedy, but of course it's far from the only manmade disaster. Among the many battlegrounds of violence against women is Kurdish Iraq. That northern region of Iraq has long been thought to be the most civilized area of the war-torn country (aside from the increasing number of skirmishes between Turkey and the Kurd separatists). But Salma's story is far from unique.
Here's the intrepid reporter Khalil again to give the broader view of cell-phone-induced violence in Iraq:
Mobile phones have become a new threat to young women’s safety in Iraq’s northern region, members of parliament and women’s rights campaigners warn.
Men are using them to take photos and record audio and video clips of women and girls who are breaking social codes by having sexually explicit conversations or intimate relations with their boyfriends. In many cases, the conversations and videos have been widely distributed, damaging women’s reputations and, in doing so, putting their lives at risk.
In 2007, nearly 350 women were the victims of violence in mobile-phone related cases, according to statistics compiled by women’s organisations and the Sulaimaniyah police directorate. In 2006, 170 cases were recorded.
However, experts believe that the actual number of incidents is much higher.
Can you hear me now?
Posted by Harkavy at 5:26 PM, May 5, 2008
The Rooskies are rolling out the hardware once again.
Everybody's talking tough these days. Hillary threatens to nuke Iran and now Vladimir Putin is launching the kind of "Victory Day" parade on Red Square that hasn't been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Here's how France 24's Nick Coleman described it today:
Fighter jets circled over Red Square on Monday as Russia prepared a huge patriotic display around this week's presidential inauguration, amid rising tension with pro-Western neighbour Georgia.
MiG fighter jets together with strategic bomber planes thundered over the capital in a rehearsal for traditional World War II commemorations on Friday featuring a show of military hardware unprecedented for the post-Soviet era.
Vlad the Paler may be stepping down as president, but he's still the prime minister, in every sense of the word. He ain't giving up anything.
He's rolling out the big guns, just like in the bad old days when thousands of missiles, troops, and weapons paraded in the square before the doddering conservatives who called themselves Communists.
Coleman's story goes on to note Putin's explanation of how the current display of planes, trained soldiers, and airplanes isn't anything other than peaceful:
The military parade is part of the dramatic backdrop to president-elect Dmitry Medvedev's inauguration on Wednesday, following Soviet-style May Day parades last week.
President Vladimir Putin, who is to step down after eight years but retain power in the prime minister's post, said the pumped up display was not intended as a threat.
"For the first time in many years heavy military equipment will be used. This is not sabre-rattling. We are not threatening anyone.... This is a demonstration of our growing defence capability," Putin said.
Everybody loves a parade. That's an order.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:39 AM, May 5, 2008
Hope I'm not jinxing anything, but here it is almost two weeks since Hillary Clinton threatened to nuke Iran, and both countries are still standing.
Hard to believe that Clinton's vow to exterminate Iran hasn't gotten more play. Everybody got exercised when Iran's crackpot leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was quoted as saying that he wanted to make Israel disappear.
Why not the same outrage about Hillary?
Even grammarians haven't taken her to task for saying that if Iran nuked Israel, she would attack Iran, adding, "We would be able to totally obliterate them." (See it here.)
"Obliterate": "to remove or destroy all traces of; do away with; destroy completely."
Clinton would go beyond that to "totally obliterate" Iran? Whew.
At least the Boston Globe has already made the comparison of Hillary to Dr. Strangelove.
The Globe made an important point:
This foolish and dangerous threat was muted in domestic media coverage. But it reverberated in headlines around the world.
Barack Obama's campaign got everything mixed up in its response to Hillary's nuke threat. Here's what Obama said:
"It's not the language that we need right now, and I think it's language that's reflective of George Bush."
Wrong. She's more like Dick Cheney.
In fact, she really is a lot like Cheney, except that he had more experience. To deal with energy problems, Cheney called in oil executives early in the Bush administration and met with them secretly and then refused to release info about those meetings.
That was no different from Hillary's decision early in the Clinton administration to call in health-care executives for private meetings. Hillary then refused to release info about those meetings.
In Hillary's case, she's threatening Iran because she clearly wants to nail down as much money from wealthy Jewish donors as she can in her fight with Obama.
Better for her to bomb in her campaign than to bomb anywhere else.
Posted by Harkavy at 4:21 PM, May 2, 2008
The word is "recession," whether or not Bush will say the word, and we're in it.
George W. Bush's press conference the other day on the economy was really a hoot — his presence never promised us a Rose Garden performance that wouldn't be.
But for a change, this performance on April 29 was more notable for what Bush didn't — and wouldn't — say.
Here's one of the exchanges with a nameless reporter:
Reporter: Americans believe we are in a recession. What will it take for you to say those words, that we are in a recession?
Bush: Yes, thank you. I've answered the question on the words and terminologies. I will tell you that these are very difficult economic times — very difficult. And we'll let the economists define it for what it is. I would hope that those who worry about recession, slowdown, whatever you want to call it, make the tax cuts permanent as a way of helping to address this issue — because if you're somebody out there trying to plan your future and you're worried about the future and you think your taxes are going to go up, it's going to cause different behavioral patterns.
Bush managed to call the recession a "slow economy" and "difficult times," a "sour time," "tough for the American people."
The U.S. press is having the same problem coming to terms with the term. For years now, a civil war has been raging in Iraq and most of the U.S. press refused to call it that. Now we're in a recession, and the papers won't call it that. What are they waiting for? Walter Cronkite's pronouncement?
Overseas, there's no such namby-pambiness. AS an April 30 story in the Scotsman said:
Britain could follow America into a full-blown recession unless there is an urgent and aggressive cut in interest rates, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee warned.
Peter MacMahon's piece went on to quote the guy, economist David Blanchflower, as saying:
"There has been no decoupling of the two economies: contagion is in the air. The US sneezed and the UK is rapidly catching a cold."
You'd better hope it just a cold.
Posted by Harkavy at 2:39 PM, April 29, 2008
6-3 opinion on photo-ID law opens door for more privacy intrusions
Monday's Supreme Court decision upholding a harshly restrictive photo-ID requirement for voting deals a severe blow to people who value privacy and individuality. That's all of us, by the way.
But it's future generations that will really pay the price, because they may grow up in a country whose governments and corporations will routinely track their movements, activities, likes, dislikes, opinions, resentments — just about everything they say or do.
Monday's 6-3 court decision upholds a misbegotten Indiana law requiring voters to present photo IDs.
But it opens the door wider for more sophisticated uses of photo IDs, such as facial biometrics for tracking your movements and buying habits. That's all in the near future, in part thanks to RFID tags (which I wrote about earlier in an item about Vegas casinos).
My take is that once photo IDs are going to required for voting (and many states will now try to pass laws modeled after Indiana's), the government and corporations will have all sorts of tools to play with. The court decision blesses such attempts because Indiana's law was particularly intrusive.
So go to the Electronic Privacy Information Center for info on the long-range danger of RFID chips implanted into drivers licenses.
We'll have no more privacy than cows with ID tags in their ears.
For now, the story is the Indiana law and the court ruling. Start your reading not with the decision but with these three paragraphs on the dissent, courtesy of Linda Greenhouse's story in the New York Times, which is a useful but typically establishmentarian take on this issue:
In a dissenting opinion, Justice David H. Souter said that for those on whom the law had an impact, the burden was “serious” and the state had failed to justify it. Like the Virginia poll tax the court struck down 42 years ago, he said, “the onus of the Indiana law is illegitimate just because it correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise.” The other dissenters were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
Six states in addition to Indiana — Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan, and South Dakota — now require voters to provide photo identification before casting a ballot. Bills are pending in two dozen other states, although they are not likely to pass this year in more than a handful, due to short legislative sessions and Democratic opposition.
The Indiana law, adopted by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2005 without a single Democratic vote, is regarded as the strictest in the country. It requires a voter to present a photograph as part of an unexpired document issued either by Indiana or the federal government, a requirement that in most cases can be satisfied only by a current driver’s license or a passport. The state’s motor vehicle agency provides a free photo ID card for people who do not drive, but obtaining it requires a “primary document” like an original birth certificate or a passport.
But that's all you need from here. Go to the this Jurist site, which tells the story quickly and has all the pertinent links for you curious ones out there.
Here's how Jurist lays it out:
The US Supreme Court [official website; JURIST news archive] on Monday let stand Indiana's controversial voter identification statute, which requires voters to present photo identification as a prerequisite to voting. The decision comes in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, where the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the law in 2007, ruling that it does not put an undue burden on the right to vote and therefore does not violate the US Constitution.
Supporters of the law have said that voter identification can be used to deter voter fraud, but its critics have argued that the legislation makes it difficult for minorities, the elderly and the impoverished to participate in elections. Click for the majority opinion and David Souter's dissent. You'll find other links at the Jurist link listed earlier.
EPIC filed its own brief against the Indiana law (for all the good it did), and so did Rick Hasen, whose Election Law blog archive on the topic is useful. (Hasen's brief is here.)
It's already tough enough to vote in this country. Why in the world do we have elections on Tuesdays, instead of the weekends, when so many other countries conduct votes? That's to keep the riff-raff — those who don't have the pull or the money to get time off from their bosses nor the education to know their options — from voting.
Democrats in Congress and various state legislatures will try to fight off attempts by those various states to enact laws similar to Indiana's. Supposedly, those laws won't be passed in time to affect this November's vote, but don't count on it.
We're devolving to the days of anti-democratic, racist gimmicks like the poll tax (read this 1948 piece by courageous Southern editor Hodding Carter — the father of Jimmy Carter's former flunky), and a photo ID for voting is just one more step toward a national ID. And that's one step closer to a national ID with RFID chips.
You will be tracked (assuming you're not already tracked).
Posted by Harkavy at 1:18 PM, April 24, 2008
Recalling a past outbreak of fete-in-mouth disease.
McCain gives Bush the Freedom Award in 2005.
Pols will say anything, especially at chicken-dinner affairs where they pat one another on the back in front of selected guests of their own ilk.
That must be the reason that John McCain gave George W. Bush something called the Freedom Award in 2005.
We're nearing the third anniversary of that barely noted annual event hosted by the International Republican Institute. (Laura Bush "won" it in 2006; other recipients include Dick and Lynne Cheney.)
You'll say that this is typical behavior by pols to give one another awards and make glowing speeches, so don't give much weight to such speeches. OK, fine, but it's still funny and somehow a little tragic to hear these pols log-rolling. My old guru, John Bremner, tried to pound into my head that "words convey ideas." So, these words by McCain mean at least a little something about our democratic process and its phony-baloney "civility."
The only time to pay attention is when the candidates (not their handlers or aides) are ripping into each other. "Dirty politics"? Bullshit. That's when you get down to what democracy is all about: lots of arguing, with, hopefully, some deals and compromises struck.
This chicken-dinner speech, though pretty humorous, may not reveal anything that's specific to John McCain, because every pol indulges in this kind of ass-kissing in selected venues. But McCain hasn't always been very good at checking the credentials of the asses he has kissed.
Back in Arizona, he pinned his tail to donkeys like financiopath Charles Keating and phony-war-hero Duke Tully (publisher of the state's largest paper). He stroked those two schmucks vigorously.
In the end, that's what McCain is really good at. When he's not losing his temper, he's a hail fellow well met, as I know from personal experience — he's a good guy to talk with, smart, lively, and great with the press, which will always cut him a break.
Anyway, back in May 2005, when this marvelous dinner took place in D.C., McCain was the president of the IRI, an org that sprung from the Cold War tool called the National Endowment for Democracy.
McCain gushed over Bush like a White House intern. And why not — they were at a GOP soiree, not in front of the general populace.
Read McCain's whole spiel (and Bush's reply in kind), if you want, but here are some excerpts of current presidential candidate McCain talking about current president Bush:
"George W. Bush is not just any president. He has become the world statesman; more than any other, he’s dedicated his presidency to securing the success of liberty abroad. …
"We have a president who dares to work for the best. He works to achieve a safer, freer, better world — a world in which governments are chosen, not imposed, a world where freedoms are embraced, not abridged, a world in which there is justice and opportunity for all, not rights and riches for some. …
"Years ago the President and I were once opponents. Now it is my privilege and honor to stand with him, in the great and noble work he has undertaken. Like all of you, and like all who believe in our good cause, I am indebted to and very proud of our honoree. It’s my great honor to present the 2005 Freedom Award to our President and my friend, George W. Bush."
It chokes you up, right?
Posted by Harkavy at 8:09 AM, April 11, 2008
It doesn't take a Dalai Lama to convince you of reincarnation. All it takes are pictures of the Dalai Lama.
I noted this gonzo/gyatso connection last October and can't resist adding to it now.
Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out in 2005, poor guy. It's his twin who arrived in Seattle early today as his homeland keeps shaking with riots.
The resemblance ends with the photos. The Dalai Lama is scheduled to lead a "five-day conference on compassion," as the AP says this morning.
As for Thompson? He tried to solve some problems with violence. For all you people fawning over his memory, he was not only a great writer (at least early in his career) but was also a woman-beater and sweetheart-mistreater.
Posted by Harkavy at 5:24 PM, April 10, 2008
Oops. Tommy Thompson had a money implant, not an RFID chip.
Earlier today, in an item about the creepy RFID chips, I wrote that erstwhile presidential candidate Tommy G. Thompson had had a chip implanted:
Former Bush health secretary Tommy Thompson had an RFID tag implanted a few years ago — the lap dog was named to the board of a company that makes them, so he was more than willing.
But Jason Denby, a Thompson aide at the law firm Akin Gump (where the former Wisconsin governor hangs his hat), writes to say:
I read your article online and felt I should clarify that former Secretary Thompson was never implanted with the chip. He made a statement at one point that he would, but only when his current medical professionals had the technology to utilize it.
He is also no longer a member of the board of the company.
Thanks, Jason, and sorry about that. Yes, Thompson vowed to get a chip but never did get one; I relied on an outdated story, so my error.
Thompson was indeed on the board of VeriChip, but he no longer is. Before he left, the company implanted a nice bundle of money in him. He didn't need no stinkin' chip to get that bundle, thanks in part to an inside deal the company had with Akin Gump.
This is yet another item in the unending catalog of top government officials whoring themselves out to the private sector and getting money and stock for doing nothing more than having connections.
Yes, I'm stating the obvious. So what? I previously noted Jerry Bremer's sweet deal with BlastGard, which sells reinforced wrap to protect Humvees from roadside bombs. That's just too rich, isn't it?
So, sorry for stating the obvious that, while most Americans are about to be engulfed by a recession or depression, people like Bremer and Thompson are making money for doing little but simply existing.
Regarding Thompson, SEC records on VeriChip's parent note that during 2006, the company paid $800,000 to Akin Gump as its legal counsel. The records go on:
Tommy G. Thompson, a partner with Akin Gump, was a member of VeriChip’s board of directors from July 2005 to March 8, 2007, and, as a result of his directorship services, as of December 31, 2007, holds fully vested options to purchase 55,556 shares of our common stock.
A subsequent SEC document filed earlier this year clarified things: VeriChip got a bill from Akin Gump for legal fees of $1.2 million during 2005 and 2006. As a result of his being a director for less than two years, he got fully vested options to purchase 100,000 shares of stock.
That's a nice deal, but maybe not as nice as the one he now has with Pure Bioscience, a California company that makes pesticides and disinfectants. Thompson is a board member of Pure.
SEC records filed in the past few weeks show that Pure inked a two-year consulting contract with Thompson. Very handy fellow for Pure — Thompson has deals as a board member and consultant. Under the consulting deal, Thompson was to be paid $12,500 a month and got an option to purchase 300,000 shares of that company's stock. But wait, there's more: Another consultant (and board member at the time), Michael Sitton, then transferred the rights to 700,000 options to Thompson. After the dust cleared, Thompson owned a cool million options.
Cool, yeah, but too hot to hang onto.
SEC insider-trading records — click here for Thompson's recent insider trades — show that, among other deals, Thompson bought 100,000 shares of Pure for 85 cents a share. That transaction was on January 15, 2008. Seven days later, he sold 20,000 shares of Pure for $5.28 cents a share. Nice going. He sold some more off during the next several weeks — all for more than $5 a share. These were "automatic" sales, so that somehow sanctifies them.
Thompson didn't need an RFID chip to home in on subsequent lucrative deals emanating from his catbird seats at Pure. On March 3, he exercised his options on 161,000 shares, paying $1 a share. Since then, he's been selling them off in dribs and drabs at prices ranging from $5 to $6 a share. Let's see: You buy a share for $1 and you sell it either the same day or within days for $5 or $6.
This is not shocking. This lazy-ass, money-for-nothing churning is business as usual on Wall Street. Too bad the news of it doesn't get hammered into our brains. We're the fools for not getting outraged.
Just to show that Thompson is no fool, on April 1 he sold 25,000 shares of Pure at $5.99 per share, making his proceeds $149,750. Not bad for a day's non-work.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:31 AM, April 10, 2008
Creepy privacy threat sure to get under your skin.
The RFID threat to privacy is spreading fast in Las Vegas casinos.
Read "RFID keeps tabs on Vegas bartenders and, soon enough, on you, too," a report by Patrick Thibodeau on Computerworld.
Don't count on vacationers complaining about these tags keeping track of their every move, desire, and need — they'll be having too much fun losing their money to care about it. But that acquiescence just means that this "radio-frequency ID" microchip assault is likely to spread faster into other parts of our culture.
Those records of your activities will stay on computers and will likely be marketed throughout the private sector. For sure, those records will be used by governments and law-enforcement, and they no doubt will be hacked, too.
The Bush regime, which has constantly pushed for wider use of RFID technology to track people instead of dogs and equipment, took a major step in January, as the AP reported back then:
Passport cards for Americans who travel to Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean will be equipped with technology that allows information on the card to be read from a distance.
The technology was approved by the State Department and privacy advocates were quick to criticize the department for not doing more to protect information on the card, which can be used by U.S. citizens instead of a passport when traveling to other countries in the Western hemisphere. …
The administration wanted to begin requiring passports or passport cards in mid-2008, but Congress mandates that the rule not go into effect until summer 2009.
Lib senator Pat Leahy is one of those fighting against the RFID. Late last month, when Homeland Security issued new, stiffer passport rules, Leahy noted of the Bush regime's flunkies:
"There is no signal they will reconsider using problematic RFID technology that poses security and privacy concerns."
Former Bush health secretary Tommy Thompson had an RFID tag implanted a few years ago — the lap dog was named to the board of a company that makes them, so he was more than willing.
Read Stuart King's Computer Weekly column for more.
You think life's a bitch now? See Dan Newling's 2006 story in the Mail on Sunday (U.K.), "Britons 'could be microchipped like dogs in a decade.' "
Posted by Harkavy at 7:37 AM, April 10, 2008
What's happening in Pakistan would ordinarily be poetic justice, in a vigilante sort of way: Lawyers are killing other lawyers.
But any country in which gangs of lawyers are rioting in the streets and are ambulance-calling instead of ambulance-chasing is in trouble.
This Shakespearean drama just shows how Pakistan, the world's sixth most populous country, is breaking down. That's a scary situation in a country that's armed with nukes (thanks to North Korea) and fighter jets (thanks to the U.S.).
As Jurist (the must-read, Pittsburgh-based legal-news site) says:
Opposing groups of Pakistani lawyers clashed with each other in the city of Karachi Wednesday, prompting widespread rioting that led to at least seven deaths.
Lawyers supporting Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf who gathered to protest the Tuesday lawyers' beating in Lahore of former Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Sher Afgan Niazi were confronted after their meeting by anti-Musharraf lawyers; fighting broke out near the city's main court complex which then spread to other areas. Most of the dead were killed when they were trapped in a nearby building containing some lawyers' offices that was set ablaze. A local bar association office was gutted. Now I can think of some lawyers who need to be slapped up side the head — Alberto Gonzales comes to mind, and so does Cheney flunky David Addington — but this is ridiculous.
What if it spreads to New York City? We've got 23,000 members of the Bar right here. Think of the battles. Think of the lawsuits after the battles.
Praise Allah that our lawyers are too busy foreclosing on our mortgages and representing us against foreclosures to waste billable hours on rioting.
Posted by Harkavy at 2:46 PM, April 4, 2008
The federal government appears to have reversed itself on the ban of the search term "abortion" in its huge reproductive-health database Popline.
A few hours ago, I noted the absurd blockage, the story of which was broken by bloggers (including Maud Newton) and also reported by Wired.
At the time I wrote, you could type the word "abortion" into the Popline database and get zero hits. Now, you get 536 hits — wait, now it's miraculously up to 730.
Hold on, now it's registering 1,087 hits. Popline's techs may be fiddling with the database to restore its ability to search for the word "abortion."
And why shouldn't you be able to search it? After all, USAID-funded Popline boasts that it's the world's largest clearinghouse for reproductive-health literature.
No word yet from Popline's Debbie Dickson on whether the ban was officially lifted just within the past couple of hours. But that's what seems to have happened.
I just now tried to search "abortion" on Popline and got 1,374 hits. It's a miracle of rebirth.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:58 AM, April 4, 2008
Not content with trying to stop abortions, Bush regime flunkies have banished the word "abortion."
Type the word in the search engine for Popline, the huge database that the federal government bills as "your connection to the world's reproductive health issues."
You get zero hits.
It's not a glitch. It's intentional.
Read about it on Maud Newton's excellent blog, and see the story that Wired posted a few hours ago.
Popline is funded by USAID, the highly politicized government agency that spreads money throughout the world, particularly in "developing" countries.
The Popline search engine considers "abortion" a "stop word," like the articles "a," "an," and so on. Maud Newton notes that stop words are "terms automatically omitted from searches under the assumption that they don’t add value or meaning."
After users of Popline noticed the sudden, unannounced change late last week, they queried Johns Hopkins people about it (the university runs the database). They professed ignorance until, as Newton notes, Debbie Dickson of Popline replied to a medical librarian with this:
Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’. This is the broader term to our ‘Abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields. Also, adding ‘unwanted w2 pregnancy’ in place of aborti*. We have a keyword Pregnancy, Unwanted and there are 2517 records with aborti* & unwanted w2 pregnancy.
I hope this helps.
It doesn't.
Dickson's response was on April Fool's Day, but this is no joke.
However, you can still search the words "1984" and "Orwell" on Popline and get hits. I guess those words still "add value or meaning."
Posted by Harkavy at 5:54 PM, March 31, 2008
But real money for those of us in the bottom 90 percent of incomes? Forget it.
If "change" is this presidential campaign's catchword, then let me ask: Can you spare any?
I'm not asking for myself, because I'm one of the lucky ones. But I am a member of the bottom 90 percent of Americans in income. In other words, I make less than $105,000 a year.
Income disparity in the U.S. is shocking not because it exists but because it's getting worse. How about some newly released factoids from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a serious and respectable D.C. think tank? From the CBPP's March 27 report by Aviva Aron-Dine on income concentration:
• Between 2005 and 2006, the average income (before taxes) of the top 1 percent of households increased by $73,000 (or 7 percent), after adjusting for inflation, while the average income of the bottom 90 percent of households increased by just $20 (or 0.1 percent). (In 2006, the top 1 percent of households were those with incomes above about $375,000.)
• 2006 marked the fourth straight year in which income gains at the top outpaced those among the rest of the population. Since 2002, the average income of the top 1 percent of households has risen 44 percent, or $335,000, after adjusting for inflation. The average income of the bottom 90 percent of households has risen about 3 percent, or about $1,000.
• The share of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent has increased sharply, rising from 15.8 percent in 2002 to 20.3 percent in 2006. Not since 1928, just before the Great Depression, has the top 1 percent held such a large share of the nation’s income. In 2000, at the peak of the 1990s boom, the top 1 percent received 19.3 percent of total income in the nation. And let's get even more personal with these fun facts churned out the same day in another report by the CBPP's Aron-Dine:
New Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data show that the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the very highest incomes pay only 18 percent of their income, on average, in federal individual income taxes. . . . While the incomes of those at the top have skyrocketed, their tax rates have fallen significantly, with the largest reductions occurring after the capital gains tax cuts of 1997 and 2003.
This ain't the America in which the baby-boom generation grew up. Today's economy, run to hell by the all-growed-up baby-boom generation, holds out little hope to today's whippersnapper. Just another reason not to trust people over 30. Or under 30, for that matter.
Posted by Harkavy at 11:58 AM, March 31, 2008
In D.C., a new baseball stadium opens amid the same old staggering poverty and inequality
Oh, they're so happy over on ESPN because of the Washington Nationals' new baseball stadium, which opened last night when George W. Bush threw up the first pitch.
The doofus POTUS was wild with his throw to Nats' manager Manny Acta. Strange, isn't it, that Bush's battery mate was Acta instead of the Nats' catcher, Paul Lo Duca. But the ex-Met is ensnared in the steroids scandal, so his PR quotient is below the Mendoza Line.
Funnier still was during the game itself, when Bush showed up in the broadcast booth to say of the steroids scandal, "I hope the players fix it." He didn't say "the commissioner" or "the owners." Only "the players."
The broadcast crew noted that Bush is a former baseball owner. But that's only technically true. Before he was even Texas governor, Bush was trotted out before the public as the "owner" of the Texas Rangers. But Tom Hicks was the real owner; Bush put up a minuscule amount of money but was only the front man for Hicks and the rest of the real ownership group so they could get a stadium and other parts of a sweet deal with Arlington, the home of the team. When the Rangers were later sold, Bush cashed in for a lot of dough.
Years later, Bush became Dick Cheney's front man, where he's been even more dangerous.
Too bad D.C. isn't making out as well as Bush. The new stadium was a point of contention when D.C. didn't even have a team and its luxury boxes were only a dream in the minds of politicians and lobbyists.
Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post kicked ass on that story in 2004, pointing out D.C. residents' terrible plight when the decision was finally made by Major League Baseball to put a team back in the U.S. capital.
As I noted at the time in "Playing Ball in D.C." [October 25, 2004]:
Baseball's execs have spread some money around, and they've probably quelled forever all threats from Congress to repeal baseball's fortunate exemption from antitrust laws now that they've placed a team in D.C., the former Montreal Expos. Just another toy for the congressmen to play with, starting next year. Think of their being entertained by corporations and their lobbyists in the new D.C. stadium's skyboxes.
Way down below them will be the average D.C. resident. The U.S. leads the world in wealth inequality, and the gap is continually widening. And income inequality in the District of Columbia is wider than in any other major U.S. city.
Yes, way down below them, if they could afford tickets in the cheap seats, will be the average D.C. resident. Bleacher bums? No. Just bums.
Since 2000, the gap between rich and poor has widened throughout the country. But D.C. was in terrible shape even during the Clinton years. From an analysis of census data by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute before Bush even took office:
The study found that the average income of the top fifth of DC’s households equaled $186,830 in 1999. This was 31 times higher than the average income of the bottom fifth of households—$6,126.
While Atlanta and Miami have income gaps similar to DC’s, income inequality is much less pronounced in most other cities. In the typical city in the analysis—which includes central cities of the nation’s 40 largest metro areas—the income of the top fifth of households is 18 times the income of the bottom fifth.
Well, maybe things are better since Bush became president. Yeah, right. Here's what the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute had to say last October:
Despite dramatic improvements in the District’s economy over the past decade, economic conditions have actually worsened for many residents, according to a new report by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
The study, entitled DC’s Two Economies: Many Residents Are Falling Behind Despite the City’s Revitalization — examines trends in employment, wages, income, and poverty. One of its most striking findings is that while the number of jobs in the District has grown every year since 1998, the percentage of African Americans who are employed has actually fallen, as has the employment rate among residents with no more than a high school diploma. For both groups, employment rates are near 30-year lows.
"It is surprising — and deeply troubling — that large numbers of DC residents are falling behind when so many of the city’s economic indicators are at their best levels in decades,” said Ed Lazere, executive director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. “The District’s well-known economic disparities are getting even worse."
And how about that earning gap between rich and poor?
The earnings gap between DC’s highest (top 20 percent) and lowest (bottom 20 percent) earners is at its widest level since 1979. Inflation-adjusted earnings have increased just 6 percent for low-wage workers in that period, while jumping 40 percent for workers at the top.
Trying to stem the out-of-control crime in poverty-stricken D.C., district officials enacted a strict gun law that the Supreme Court just got finished hearing arguments on. (See this L.A. Times editorial that lays out the arguments.)
Guns aren't the only problem of course. There's also butter. Only the pols and lobbyists can afford the high-priced spreads.
Meanwhile, even the baseball owners called the plan to finance the bonds for D.C.'s new stadium the sweetest sweetheart deal they'd ever seen.
The baseball owners and Congress were the ones playing ball. As of last night, the luxury boxes are now occupied by lobbyists and their lackey pols, while D.C.'s poor continue their everyday drudgery.
Wonder if there's a Larry Craig Memorial Bathroom in the joint?
Posted by Harkavy at 10:08 AM, March 27, 2008
Today, Basra. Tomorrow, Baghdad.
The complex civil war in Iraq, unleashed by our ill-advised invasion five years ago and widely predicted before that but ignored by the Bush regime, is heating up as spring heats up the desert country.
And what's happening in Basra right now — Shiite factions fighting one another and fighting U.S.-backed Sunnis — gets right to the heart of the matter: oil.
The battle now is in oil-rich southern Iraq — aside from the continuing suicide bombings in Baghdad and the growing menace of a full-fledged Turkish-Kurdish war in northern Iraq.
What's happening in Basra is just a sign of things to come in Baghdad, if and when the U.S. pulls out. The suicide bombers will drop what they're doing now in Baghdad and take up arms in full-scale war.
Go back almost a year, to April 2007, and you'll see what I mean. In mid-April last year, Baghdad was trying to endure an incredible number of suicide bombings. As an April 18, 2007, BBC story described it:
Television pictures showed a blasted scene littered with blackened and twisted wreckage.
One witness told the Reuters news agency that many of the victims were women and children.
"I saw dozens of dead bodies," the man said. "Some people were burned alive inside minibuses. Nobody could reach them after the explosion.
"There were pieces of flesh all over the place."
Ahmed Hameed, a shopkeeper in the area said: "The street was transformed into a swimming pool of blood."
Beirut's Daily Star reported at the time:
One man waving his arms in the air screamed hysterically: "Where's Maliki? Let him come and see what is happening here."
A year later, where is Prime Minister Nouri Maliki? He's in Basra, where the fight over oil is now taking place. If the Basra situation degenerates, Iraq won't remain a single country. Baghdad and the central provinces don't have the oil; it's only in the northern and southern regions, where war is either raging or imminent.
Dick Cheney got his wish: We're fighting for oil, and all the rest is bullshit.
Keep in mind that Basra is now exploding only after the British handed over control of that southern city to Iraqi forces.
What do you think will happen in Baghdad when we pull out?
Whether Maliki will survive is questionable. He's liable to get blown up while he's in Basra. His chances of survival are about as good as Benazir Bhutto's were.
Even before the 2003 U.S. invasion, the Pentagon was warned by one of its own agencies, the Naval Postgraduate School, of the civil war. Naturally, that went unreported at the time. As I wrote in May 2005:
Back in the summer of 2002, when Bush's handlers were plotting the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon neocons were warned of the consequences: chaos, a fractured country. All we heard about was the propaganda about "liberation."
In June 2001, James A. Russell, a Persian Gulf expert in the Department of Defense, was assigned by Doug Feith, Don Rumsfeld's undersecretary for policy, to the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. Just a guess, but I would imagine that meant that Russell was not part of Feith's inner circle.
Anyway, the Naval Postgrad School, a slice of governmental academe, formed something called the Center for Contemporary Conflict and started pumping out research papers, posting them in an electronic journal, Strategic Insights. They make for interesting, and relatively jargon-free, reading. In June 2002, for instance, Russell produced "Shibboleth Slaying in a Post-Saddam Iraq," a nice little report that charted our options for Iraq while we were already planning to invade it. "As the United States marches inexorably towards regime change in Baghdad," Russell wrote, "the critical issue facing policy makers is determining what happens after Saddam is removed from power."
Russell noted that Iraq is an unnaturally unified country—and he concluded that maybe it shouldn't even stay that way. It won't. And our personnel in Baghdad's supermax embassy will wind up fleeing by helicopters, just as Americans did when they fled Saigon in 1975.
And we'll leave without the oil.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:49 AM, March 27, 2008
The Bud Light John McCain Quote of the Day
Loved John McCain's speech Tuesday to a bidness group in Orange County, California, when he said:
"It is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers."
But it is a senator's duty to haul the federal government's chief investigator of financiopaths to a private meeting with five senators to get him to ease off. That's what McCain and the rest of the "Keating Five" did on behalf of schnook Charles Keating.
Douglas Frantz of the New York Times did a fine job back in 2000 of detailing McCain's suck-up relationships with Arizona swaggarts like Keating and Arizona Republic publisher Darrow "Duke" Tully. Not to mention that McCain entered politics thanks only to his wife's money as heiress to the biggest Budweiser distributorship in Arizona.
As Frantz put it at the time:
After his arrival in Phoenix, Mr. McCain did not have to wait long for his chance at politics. Representative John Rhodes, a veteran Republican from the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, decided not to seek re-election in 1982.
Mr. McCain defeated two longtime Mesa Republicans in the primary, including a state senator, and he went on to win the general election. He defused accusations that he was a carpetbagger by saying the place he had lived longest was Hanoi.
Records show that he outspent his opponents in part through access to his wife's family wealth. He received $11,000 in contributions from [Budweiser baron Jim] Hensley and company employees. More significantly, though he had little money of his own because he had been a career naval officer, his wife's fortune allowed him to lend $167,000 to the campaign, which was permissible under campaign laws then.
Additional money was raised by another powerful Phoenix businessman who served as a big benefactor, Charles H. Keating Jr., the corrupt savings and loan operator whose ties to Mr. McCain continue to haunt the senator. Years later, Mr. McCain intervened with federal regulators on behalf of Mr. Keating's savings and loan, an episode that has tarnished the senator's reputation as a reformer.
So why didn't the Times's John Sullivan look at his own paper's clips and at least put in a paragraph or two of perspective in his story about McCain's firm stance against bailouts?
Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press did it in her story about McCain's Tuesday speech. She tacked on this at the end:
As a freshman senator, however, McCain took a different approach. In early 1991, the Senate's ethics committee concluded that McCain "exercised poor judgment in intervening with the regulators" on behalf of banker Charles Keating Jr. Keating was a wealthy Arizona real estate developer and owner of a California thrift that failed during a nationwide savings and loan crisis - when Keating and other bankers made risky investments with depositors' money.
McCain was known for accepting contributions from Keating, flying to the banker's home in the Bahamas on his company planes and taking up Keating's cause with U.S. financial regulators as they investigated him. Keating served more than four years in prison for fraud.
Posted by Harkavy at 4:39 PM, March 26, 2008
The kind you get on your face.
Harkavy
George Bush (above) with leishmaniasis, the Baghdad Boil disease. (Full disclosure: Bush is pictured with tegumentary leishmaniasis, not the cutaneous variety that causes the classic boil.)
Yes, Iraq is a sore subject — after five years and 4,000 U.S. deaths, it can't be anything else — but things could be worse for George W. Bush. He could be suffering from "Baghdad boils," as are hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi kids and U.S. soldiers and all kinds of other people over there.
The good news is that the boils aren't usually fatal. However, they do leave scars. Everything about the insane invasion of Iraq in 2003 leaves scars.
Combine the poor sanitation and stagnant pools of water, and you've got a feast for sand fleas and sand flies. War-torn Iraq is broken down when it comes to furnishing clean, fresh water and medical supplies, so outbreaks of leishmaniasis (the proper name for the boils) are common.
Iraqi dermatologist Mohammed Sahib, swamped with cases at a hospital, took a break last month to briefly describe the boil problem to IRIN News:
“Cutaneous leishmaniasis is not fatal, but can cause up to 200 facial lesions and crater-shaped sores, leaving patients seriously disfigured. Kalaazar can kill, and causes fever, weight loss, anaemia, and swelling of the spleen and liver,” Sahib said.
Children are particularly at risk because they typically have weaker immune systems than adults, he said. A single sand fly bite can be enough to transmit the disease.
Local health authorities were still suffering from a shortage of medicines to treat the disease, he said: “The medicines are not enough, as the disease is spreading and in addition to medical treatment there should be insecticide spraying campaigns to kill the sand flies.”
Posted by Harkavy at 12:19 PM, March 25, 2008
How dare you say that Hillary Clinton never ran from snipers.
Forget Bosnia, about which she says she "misspoke," when in fact she downright lied.
The only time Hillary Clinton ran from a sniper was right here in New York City, during the 2000 Senate campaign.
Clinton was speaking at a luncheon of elderly Teamster retirees in May 2000 about how much she supported collective bargaining and workers' rights.
Immediately after her speech, while the rest of the gaggle of reporters remained motionless, I walked toward the podium and, when I was about 10 feet away, politely asked her about her stint on the board of directors of Wal-Mart, the world's largest union-busting company.
She stared at me in shock, her eyes grew big as saucers, and, despite the well-wishers and celebrity-seekers who were still waiting for a word or a blessing, she scurried off the stage without saying a word. Yes, she didn't walk, she scurried.
Meanwhile, her Secret Service agent, a guy named Bob with whom I'd struck up a friendly relationship at the back of the room during Clinton's speech, rushed toward the stage and dragged me back.
"Bob," I said, "are you acting as Hillary's Secret Service protector or as her campaign aide? You know who I am. I showed you my credentials and we've been talking in the back of the room during her speech."
Bob replied, "I'm working for her."
I don't usually argue with people who have guns, so I let it drop.
But I did write about her speech. Here's how I started by May 23, 2000, story, "Wal-Mart's First Lady":
Twice in three days last week, Hillary Rodham Clinton basked in the adulation of cheering union members. Her record of supporting collective bargaining, however, is considerably worse than wobbly.
Pity the thousands of unionists at last Tuesday's state Democratic convention who chanted her name, and the hundreds of retired Teamsters at Thursday's luncheon in midtown who had interrupted their Founder's Day meal to hear the corporate litigator turned union-loving Democrat deliver a campaign speech.
They would have dropped their forks if they had heard that Hillary served for six years on the board of the dreaded Wal-Mart, a union-busting behemoth. If they had learned the details of her friendship with Wal-Mart, they might have lost their lunches.
Oh, and let's talk about Hillary's "experience." All she was for Wal-Mart was be the wife of Arkansas's governor and thus a PR prop for the company's devastating march through Middle America during which it laid waste to more Moms and Pops than Sherman did as he descended upon Atlanta.
Clinton put a respectable public face on Wal-Mart during its staggering growth period in the '80s. And she partook in some of the profits as a board member and thus, shareholder. As I wrote at the time:
In 1986, when Hillary was first lady of Arkansas, she was put on the board of Wal-Mart. Officials at the time said she wasn't filling a vacancy. In May 1992, as Hubby's presidential campaign heated up, she resigned from the board of Wal-Mart. Company officials said at the time that they weren't going to fill her vacancy.
So what the hell was she doing on the Wal-Mart board? According to press accounts at the time, she was a show horse at the company's annual meetings when founder Sam Walton bused in cheering throngs to celebrate his non-union empire, which is headquartered in Arkansas, one of the country's poorest states.
Too bad she didn't face any verbal sniping during those days. But then, she hasn't tolerated any verbal sniping since then, either.
Posted by Harkavy at 11:44 AM, March 19, 2008
White House releases beta version of Iraq 5.0.
After five long years, the United States has finally secured victory in the War on Terror, George W. Bush declared today.
I'm as surprised as you are. This is what the president said this morning at the Pentagon:
"The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around — it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror."
The announcement comes 5.0 years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and 4.9 years after Bush declared, "Mission accomplished!"
In this morning's speech, Bush also said:
"In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama Bin Laden. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated."
The BBC's report on the speech notes:
Meanwhile in Iraq, a female suicide bomber killed six people at a bus station in Balad Ruz in Diyala province, according to Iraqi police.
And near the northern city of Kirkuk, US troops shot dead three Iraqi policemen by mistake, an incident officials described as "a tragic accident, which was sincerely regretted".
Don't let that spoil your celebration.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:09 AM, March 13, 2008
The clues were there all the time.
We should have figured out what would happen to New York's top pol. It was inevitable. So, move over, "Kristen" — er, Ashley. It's my turn to play with Governor Eliot Spitzer:
Loves pro tit. Zero reign.
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