Change sells out

Barack Obama and a majority of democrats voted yes on extending wiretap powers of the federal government. This in a ongoing debate about preserving privacy of individuals and getting those pesky Al Qaeda-types who use cell phones to call their contacts in Canada, Florida, and Tacoma, Washington.

In a quote that sounds a bit like Yosemite Sam meets Tony the Tiger, Republicans allay our fears by explaining that some new safeguards are in place to insure no prying on citizens who don't deserve it.

There is nothing to fear in the bill, said Senator Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who was a lead negotiator, in the NYTimes “unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.”

Yeah, for all those pesky militants that carry Al Qaeda in their cell phone address books...

Back to Obama...

The campaign of "Change" (whatever the hell that means) is smelling like a sound-bite ridden, not-too-offensive pile of goat dung. The man who made brilliant speeches about the need to deal with racial bias, the need to preserve civil liberties, proper judgment to keep out of unnecessary wars.... Now is talking about "moderating" his Iraqi pullout timetable, giving states more leverage in limiting reproductive choice, and voting to spread the backward policies of impinging on civil liberties in the name of "getting the badguys."

A big point of contention was the issue of retroactive immunity for telecom companies who helped government spy on us. Obama had earlier said that he'd vote against immunity, even filibuster, before deciding to "moderate his position." (Is there something moderate about government powers to spy on citizens?)

Democrats are sure doing a heckuva job trying to portray themselves as the party of change. What with voting to extend the war funding, and this latest policy blowjob to a president that's unpopular and policies that are seen as failing.

A CNN poll late June puts the percentage of Americans opposing the Iraq War at 68 percent. 64 percent want to see most troops removed from the war in the first couple months in the next administration.

Bush now has a whopping 24% approval rating. Congress is got 21% of Americans happy with them.

Why can't the democrats(Feingold and friends are excepted), and Obama in particular, get some balls and legislate change instead just putting out nice PR rhetoric about "valuing everyone's perspective," even if its counterproductive? Say, bringing the troops home, using the millions per day spent over there to foster private and public investment in green technologies, education, health care etc?

Why do I give tax money to these people?

I love how we're "dealing" with the poor economy. Printing off more dollars for people to spend in the form of tax breaks. Yes, when the people are angry, lets give them money that doesn't exist to make them happy. Cutting interest rates so that people can borrow more...

The Audacity of Acquiescence...

Sad Days

My beloved Isthmus, Madison's alt-weekly, is considering lay offs that are spreading across the newspaper industry, reports the Capital Times, who itself had to cut staff and quit printing paper editions of the daily.

This as advertisers prefer to go to lower cost venues instead of pumping money into a paper that not only uncovers police brutality and government corruption, but does it with personality. The great thing I like is that editors there don't pretend to be objective and rehash quotes/old story lines. In this way the paper addresses a more specific audience.

Much more valuable to advertisers than just a general info rag for the "average American."

I've been thinking for a long time that Isthmus should collect a minor subscription fee instead of being soley funded by ad dollars. Such a fee could be negligible, but still help fund substantive gaps.

For example, instead of being free, how about charging $0.05 per copy? A lot of readers would likely pay a nickel for Isthmus.

If Isthmus charged five cents with its current circulation of 61,000, that's $3050 extra each week. Enough to pay for more reporters (and freelancers). Even if circulation dropped to 45,000 due to the price, that's an extra $2,250...

...jeez I'm happy I joined the journalism industry...

Thedailypage/Isthmus will find a way to get its message out despite changes/a poor economy. If not just because it's a Madison institution.

Operation Iraqi Oil

It's official, Bush cronies have swapped oil deals for international cred, despite the Iraqi government, according to a Congressional panel. Bush's friendly friends at Hunt Oil contracted under the semiautonomous government of Kurdistan (a region in Iraq's north); this without the consent of Iraq's central government in Baghdad.

In the NYTimes:

The company, Hunt Oil of Dallas, signed the deal with Kurdistan’s semiautonomous government last September. Its chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, a close political ally of President Bush, briefed an advisory board to Mr. Bush on his contacts with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed.

In an e-mail message released by the Congressional committee, a State Department official in Washington, briefed by a colleague about the impending deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government, wrote: “Many thanks for the heads up; getting an American company to sign a deal with the K.R.G. will make big news back here. Please keep us posted.”

...The encouragement by State Department officials did not end with the signing of the contract on Sept. 8, the documents suggest. Five days later, a State Department official in the southern city of Basra wrote to Ms. Phillips, “I read and heard about with interest your deal with the regional Kurdish government.”

“I don’t know if you are aware of another opportunity,” the official wrote, mentioning an enormous port project and a natural gas project in the south. After a few more lines, the official concluded, “This seems like it would be a good opportunity for Hunt.”

Glad we went to Iraq to build democracy and help our brothers and sisters in the Iraq government, by allowing that central government to be undercut by private American interests allied with the president.

This also may pose a problem as Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish Iraqis have tensions between them. A thorny issue is reception of revenue of rich oil deposits in the northern city of Kirkuk.

Islamic Bretheren in the Pakistani Mountains (or) Bringing Hope to the Village.

After losing himself in the Karakoram mountain range amid an effort scale K2 in 1992, Greg Mortenson found his purpose in a mountain village cut off from the world, to bring education to Pakistanis and Afghans who've been neglected by nature and their government. This is the premise of Three Cups of Tea, a book that I've just completed. After a series of British dystopian novels, it was a welcome celebration of humanity in an otherwise harsh part of the world.

The first school was built in a village of Korphe, where boys and girls had practiced math lessons in freezing dirt between weekly visits from an unpaid teacher. Mortenson was so taken by the kindness of the village, he saw the opportunity that was lost as kids had no alternative to the fundamentalist Islamic Madrassas, funded by Saudi petrol dollars.

After donations from a French scientist, Jean Horni, Mortenson set on his path through the Central Asia Institute to build schools and provide non-fundamentalist education to the children of Korphe, and eventually to other villages in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I don't want to teach Pakistan's children to think like Americans," says Mortenson on page 209. "I just want them to have a balanced, nonextremist education."



With such tact to listen to the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan, to create opportunity through their lenses and viewpoints, Mortenson was able to appeal to actual tenets of Islam, of giving to the community and caring for the poor. Something militant Islam seems to neglect in pursuit of political gains.

Mortenson did face his threats, fatwas by political, fundamentalist Islamic and Taliban leaders. But one of the more heartening parts of the story, aside from a girl from Korphe eventually becoming a doctor and asserting herself in a patriarchal society, is the support Mortenson received from conservative and moderate Islamic leaders.

"There are certain Europeans who come to Pakistan determined to tear Islam down," says Syed Abbas (page 191), a conservative shia leader influential in Iran and Pakistan. "And I was worried, at first, that Dr. Greg was one of them. But I looked into his heart that day at the petrol pump and saw him for what he is -an infidel, but a noble man nonetheless, who dedicates his life to the education of children. I decided on the spot to help him in any way I could."

Syad Abbas would later help to persuade Shia leaders to condemn fatwas against Mortenson, and defend him as a better follower of Islamic tenets of charity than clerics bent on halting the schools.

Such help wasn't a rarity as Mortenson engaged more moderate leaders. After 9/11, Islamic leaders protected Mortenson from harmful actions of fundamentalist militant Islam. This even as Americans were threatening Mortenson and his family with death for "helping those Muslims." Moderate individuals in the region blamed the tragedy of 9/11 and the ensuing war in Afgahistan on lack of education and the head-butting of President Bush and Bin Laden.

"Osama is not a product of Pakistan," says Brigadier General Gashir Baz, on page 310. "... you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is Ignorance."

After reading, similarities between small-town America and small-town Pakistan appear. The belief that if outsiders respected the lifestyle of these groups, and tried to work within that framework, whether it be Evangelist Christianity or Shia Islam, then progressive relationships could create opportunity for understanding.

In America, Evangelists are working with liberals, despite their differences, to lobby for proper stewardship of the environment. In Pakistan, an American can work towards empowering woman in a reinterpretation of Islamic tenets of charity and goodwill.

With the Afghan war increasingly more dangerous, and military leaders still mentioning the "picking off" of Al Queda leaders as the real gains in the "War on Terror," I can only hope that policy makers will gradually see that ideological conflict is better fought with books than guns.

"Before I met you Greg, I had no idea what education was," says Jahan, the first educated woman of Korphe, and granddaughter of Mortenson's mentor and Korphe nurmadhar, Haji Ali. "But now I think it is like water. It is important for everything in life."

Instead of being the humble wife, subject to strict limits on her economic future, Jahan is studying medicine and hopes on building and managing a hospital to help children of her village to find their own way. It's a great story. Even better, it's true.

Act like you give a shit and people will like you

Onion once again delivers the fake news in such a real way that it's more real than the real news, or something to that effect.

Puerto Rico, Iraq, and the ability to see gray

My latest chitowndailynews.org article highlights the work of 14 students Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School, who curated an exhibition looking at Puerto Rico's past through the eyes of others.

Amidst a week of celebration in Humboldt Park on Puerto Rican heritage the week of June 9, I found the students work to be the best show of pride. (My street was turned into a parking lot, otherwise, for a carnival in the park next door)

17th century documents show Europeans dealing in the slave trade, 19th-20th century photos/books show Puerto Ricans in a disparaging light (needing to be developed by those industrious Yanks and Spaniards), academics from the same period spoke of the burgeoning independence movement after the Spanish American War.

I don't think the article does justice to the efforts of the students; I never was able to get a hold of any of them. But their work was impressive...See info here.

Also, the University of Chicago Oriental Institute is running an exhibition on the looting of Iraq's past until December, which I wrote about here in a column for New City alt-Weekly.

Coalition forces are documented as not stopping tbe looting the elements of Iraqi history, and ultimately civilization writ large. This as New Conservatives talked about building a democratic society. There's some irony.

In the news, Big oil companies are now "negotiating" no-bid oil contracts in Iraq, one sees the real reason we went to war... The results of these negotiations will be known Monday.

I digress...

The University of Chicago exhibition is worthwhile for a cold/rainy day. Or someday when you don't feel like going outside and want to be cynical, yet informed. Cynicism and knowledge are far from mutually exclusive. For more about location, etc., click here.

Today's weather, however, is beautiful. And I'm not feeling like reveling in my cynicism. Perhaps tomorrow.

Talking to Nazis

US figurehead W. Bush told Israeli parliament that talking to himself is like appeasing the Nazis.

I'm not kidding, it was reported in the New York Times after all.

His exact words:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr. Bush said. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Radicals, like the Bush administration, won't admit when they're wrong, no matter how many times a civil discussion is attempted. They advocated torture, a war for oil, compromise national security by outing operatives who disagree with them. Not to mention hiring, and sheltering, vigilante groups (Blackwater) that kill civilians abroad and hiring crony businesses (Haliburton, Kellog Brown & Root) that give poor, yet overpriced, services US troops.

Of course, Bush was really talking about attempts to engage and negotiate with Hamas and Hezbollah, how that's a bad thing. Because listening to those with whom one disagrees is a bad thing, even though listening isn't accepting. Instead, radicalism should be met with one-sided argument that claims a very simple worldview for the benefit of one group of people (radicalism).

...it's just too easy...