America as a Horror Show

"The horror show is we are going to be slaves to profit. Some of us are going to be higher on the pyramid and we’ll count ourselves lucky and many, many more will be marginalized and destroyed” - David Simon, journalist and creator of the TV series The Wire, in an interview with Bill Moyers

CHRIS HEDGES ON NPR (NO JOKE!)

NPR bills Inskeep's surprising interview with Chris Hedges this morning as a critique of the SOTU, and that it is, but Hedges also gives him a civics lesson. (My emphasis in bold.)

INSKEEP: Let me play a piece of tape here. This is from the State of the Union address, and I'm just interested what you think of the president's language as he talks about increasing the competitiveness of America.

President BARACK OBAMA: In the coming months, my administration will develop a proposal to merge, consolidate and reorganize the federal government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive America. I will submit that proposal to Congress for a vote and we will push to get it passed.

INSKEEP: Got some applause there.

Mr. HEDGES: Well, he quite consciously uses the language of the business community to indicate that he is pro-business.

INSKEEP: You mean the word competitiveness, talking about a...

Mr. HEDGES: Competitiveness...

INSKEEP: ...competitive America.

Mr. HEDGES: Investments in education, that kind of stuff.

INSKEEP: What's wrong with that? Don't people want America to be more competitive in the world marketplace?

Mr. HEDGES: Because government's not a corporation. Government is not about competition. Government is about addressing the necessities of citizens: health, education, housing, security, jobs, living wages, protection so that people have clean and safe water and food. It's not about business programs. And that, of course, is the ideology of the right wing, to not only to make government serve corporations but essentially reduce government and cut citizens loose.

INSKEEP: Well, you know the argument that is made against that. People will say, look, we can't afford education, the social services, all those things you just mentioned, unless the economy is strong and businesses are strong and people are making money and paying taxes.

Mr. HEDGES: Well, and they're right. But who's responsible for the debt peonage. It's not those people working extra shifts in WalMart.

INSKEEP: You're talking about the fact that the United States has a huge public debt now, much of it...

Mr. HEDGES: Yeah...

INSKEEP: ...owed to overseas investors.

Mr. HEDGES: That's the fault of Wall Street. I mean, they're the people who ratcheted it up. They're the people we had to bail out. It's not the person working on a minimum wage job, but they're the ones who are going to be made to suffer.

By the way, after you've clicked the interview link, you might want to note how NPR has named it.

Dutch court fines Trafigura €1m for exporting toxic waste to Africa

GUARDIAN

The controversial oil trader Trafigura was today fined €1m (£840,000) for illegally exporting tonnes of hazardous waste to west Africa.

A court in the Netherlands also ruled that the London-based firm had concealed the dangerous nature of the waste when it was initially unloaded from a ship in Amsterdam.

It is the first time that Trafigura has been convicted of criminal charges over the environmental scandal in which 30,000 Africans were made ill when the toxic waste was dumped in Ivory Coast.

The fine was half the amount requested by Dutch prosecutors.

The fine is symbolic, just as the one levied on Goldman Sachs is a pittance. Trafigura's fine won't help the vicims in the Ivory Coast.

Radio Netherlands: Is the World Cup too expensive for Africa?

"The investments were budgeted at a few million. The real cost will be a thousandfold; 3 to 5 billion. And that in a country where a large part of the population still lives in deep poverty."



(Apologies for the lousy embedded video obtained from RNW's site.)

See this related report from Democracy Now! (an interview made prior to the start of the matches) - Raj Patel on How South Africa Has Cracked Down on the Poor and the Shack Dwellers’ Movement

Greece & Thailand and Where Else?

COUNTERLIGHT

Let's remember that so many of the proposed financial aid plans for countries like Thailand and Greece are about rescuing investors who lost their bets. They certainly aren't about helping the people who actually live there. Some line is trotted out about their governments being irresponsible and corrupt, and that's probably true (true for the increasingly plutocratic USA and Europe), but why punish the people, who had to live under those governments, with austerity measures in the middle of the worst global depression since the 1930s?[...]

I raise my old socialist question again, whose economy is it?

Mulcting the public on health care

"The fact that major corporations don't have to pay their own way, and instead are able to enlist legislators to mulct common citizens -- and businesses with more modest Washington connections -- deforms the entire political system."
-- Doug Bandow, "The Bipartisan Scandal of U.S. Corporate Welfare"

WSWS reporting on yesterday's 'bipartisan health care summit" at the White House:At Thursday’s meeting, the president and well-heeled Congressional attendees were at pains to conceal their disinterest in the real plight of the uninsured, the underinsured, the jobless, the poor—those ravaged by the effects of the recessionary crisis. Several Democrats read letters they had received from constituents who had been dumped by their insurer, or who could no longer afford coverage because their premiums had been hiked to obscene levels. These remarks were interspersed with joking exchanges about bipartisanship between the president and his Republican rivals, and cynical posturing by Democrats about the urgent necessity for enacting legislation.

The massive profits of the giant insurers and pharmaceuticals were hardly given mention. Rather, Obama emphasized his commitment to defend the capitalist, for-profit insurance market and sought to rebuff any notion to the contrary. “The exchange? That’s a market-based approach, not a government-run approach,” he stated. He boasted that his plan did not include an employer mandate to provide insurance coverage for workers, and that the consumer tax credits to subsidize insurance “were consistent with a market-based approach.”

Obama went out of his way to stress that his main priorities were controlling government spending and reducing the deficit, aims that can only be achieved by drastic reductions and rationing of care, particularly in the government-run Medicare program for the elderly and the disabled. Republicans seized on the opportunity to pose as defenders of the elderly, referring numerous times to the “half-trillion-dollar cuts” to Medicare, an issue that was avoided by the Democratic speakers.

The plan presented Monday by Obama is in fact devoid of even the fig leafs of reform contained in earlier versions of the legislation. There is no government-run public option. Even the “exchange” where people would be able to purchase insurance has been watered down to markets run individually by the states.

People would be mandated to purchase insurance or pay a penalty.

More Haiti coverage and comment

Lenin's Tomb comments on shades-of-Katrina racist reporting that Haitians are making roadblocks with corpses.

Prog Gold writes that "Pat Robinson is right," but it's not what you think. Read it.

Al Jazeera has a series of photos of people waiting for aid.

Bill Quigley on Democracy Now! talks about US treatment of Haiti and its effects on the current situation there. So does Ashely Smith here, with particular emphasis on former US President Bill Clinton's past role in that country's "development," and now - never missing an opportunity to get in the limelight (shocker) - as the UN's special envoy to Haiti. In the same vein, a video broadcast by Al Jazeera, summarising the history of imperialist exploitation of Haiti and their connection to this "natural disaster."

Bill Quigley also provides a list of "Ten Things the US Can and Should Do for Haiti."

Speaking of lists, Naomi Klein comments on Democracy Now yesterday, referencing what she wrote that afternoon on her website about the Heritage Foundation's Shock Doctrine opportunities in Haiti.

PULSE: Obama World-Killer

Read the total essay about the just completed Copenhagen UN climate change conference - from PULSE, here's the beginning, to get your rage going.

Look at the strangely robotic body language. Obama’s “accord” is go-nowhere hot air and he knows it. Nowhere good–it’s a letter-of-intent for genocide. It must be unprecedented for a world leader to issue such a warrant so calmly, with such technocratic language–it’s such a brazen refusal of responsibility. 10 billion dollars a year in capital transfers for mitigation and adaptation is an insult to the global South, and to the world’s collective intelligence. As the courageous Lumumba quipped, “Ten billion will not buy developing countries’ citizens enough coffins.” Perhaps they’ll economize on size. Children will die first. They’re more vulnerable to malaria and famine.

So to watch Obama jerkily rotating his head, repeating the words his speech-writers drafted for him perhaps 5 hours before the speech (it looks like he hadn’t even read it before delivering it), reminding the world that “our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now,” is infuriating. The notion of “collective action” suggests “collective responsibility.” But who is this collective? Why is “everyone” responsible? The global North’s climate debt—the dollar-amount of over-use of the atmospheric commons, both historical and projected given reasonable reductions in CO2 emissions—is 23 trillion dollars.

Slave labor conditions in Holland

Eastern European workers - mainly Roma - are to The Netherlands what Hispanic or Asian laborers are in the United States: targets of exploitation and inhumane working conditions. The annual asparagus harvest in Holland has prompted the authorities to raid a farm.

The owner of an asparagus farm in the province of Brabant is being investigated by the Social Intelligence and Investigation Service (SIOD) to see if criminal charges can be brought against her after 50 East European workers were discovered to be living in "near-slavery" conditions.

The SIOD - a body of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment charged with criminal investigations - had been given the go-ahead to raid the farm on Friday because the sleeping quarters were in breach of fire regulations. It was then that the extent of the conditions came to light.

The 50 farmhands, many of them Romanian, were not allowed to leave the premises and were sleeping in a filthy room without a window. The workers were being paid less than the agreed wage.

The farm owner has already been fined five times by the labour inspectorate since 2005 for employing illegal immigrants, paying under the minimum wage and failure to report an on-site accident. The fines amounted to more than 500,000 euros.

US taxes disappear in Dutch-Irish-Bermuda triangle (Updated)

Updated: And the Dutch react to the Obama "slur."

From Radio Netherlands

Obama targets "tax haven" Netherlands

The Netherlands is a corporate tax haven for US multinationals, and together with Ireland and Bermuda it is sheltering companies' earnings from the American tax authorities, president Barack Obama said on Monday. As long as they keep their earnings overseas US companies are legally exempt from paying. Taxes only become due when the money is "repatriated" to the United States.

The current practice is perfectly legal, but the US government considers it harmful to the American economy. President Obama announced a crackdown on the tax shelters, aiming to raise 210 billion dollars in taxes over the next decade. A Wall Street Journal report in April quoted a figure of 58 billion dollars in overseas earnings, which are out of the tax office's reach, losing it an estimated 20 billion dollars in tax revenue. One-third of the foreign profits in 2003 came from, what the US Treasury calls, "three small, low-tax countries: Bermuda, the Netherlands, and Ireland".

ABANDON SHIP

The New York Times

The bad economy is creating a flotilla of forsaken boats. While there is no national census of abandoned boats, officials in coastal states are worried the problem will only grow worse as unemployment and financial stress continue to rise. Several states are even drafting laws against derelicts and say they are aggressively starting to pursue delinquent owners.

“Our waters have become dumping grounds,” said Maj. Paul R. Ouellette of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “It’s got to the point where something has to be done.”

Derelict boats are environmental and navigational hazards, leaking toxins and posing obstacles for other craft, especially at night. Thieves plunder them for scrap metal. In a storm, these runabouts and sailboats, cruisers and houseboats can break free or break up, causing havoc.

Some of those disposing of their boats are in the same bind as overstretched homeowners: they face steep payments on an asset that is diminishing in value and decide not to continue. They either default on the debt or take bolder measures.

Marina and maritime officials around the country say they believe, however, that most of the abandoned vessels cluttering their waters are fully paid for. They are expensive-to-maintain toys that have lost their appeal.

OBAMA'S BETRAYAL OF THE WORKING CLASS

'The crisis in which we find ourselves is not a crisis of the capitalist class, much less a crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Nor is it even a crisis of neoliberalism. It's a crisis of the working class, plain and simple.

As Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," and, sure enough, the Barack H. Obama administration is doing all it can to make it easy for the capitalist class to make the best of the opportunities presented by this crisis and to further cut back the wages and benefits of workers in the primary labor market.'


And this, from Counterpunch

We are witnessing one of the fastest betrayals of the Democratic Party base in modern memory, as President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate slither away from a crucial constituency, the labor movement, and from support of labor’s key legislative agenda item: passage of a bill, “The Employee Free Choice Act,” which would restore a measure of fairness to labor relations.

Obama, who once supported the measure, and who campaigned saying he would sign the bill, has stood shamelessly silent as a massive corporate campaign mounted by such lobbying powerhouses as the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Retail Federation, hiding behind a fake “citizen action” organization called the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (sic), has descended on Congress, and especially the Senate, has worked to peel away support for the bill among both Democrats and swing Republicans who had formally backed the measure.

THE AIG KERFUFFLE: DECEPTION IS PART OF THE PLAN

Michael Hudson in Counterpunch

There are two questions that one always must ask when a political operation is being launched. First, qui bono -- who benefits? And second, why now? In my experience, timing almost always is the key to figuring out the dynamics at work.

Regarding qui bono, what does [sic] Sen. Schumer, Rep. Frank, Pres. Obama and other Wall Street sponsors gain from this public outcry? For starters, it depicts them as hard taskmasters of the banking and financial sector, not its lobbyists scurrying to execute one giveaway after another. So the AIG kerfuffle has muddied the water about where their political loyalties really lie. It enables them to strike a misleading pose – and hence to pose as “honest brokers” next time they dishonestly give away the next few trillion dollars to their major sponsors and campaign contributors.

Regarding the timing, I think I have answered that above. The uproar about AIG bonuses has effectively distracted attention from the AIG counterparties who received the $183 billion in Treasury giveaways. The “final” sum to be given to its counterparties has been rumored to be $250 billion, do Sen. Schumer, Rep. Frank and Pres. Obama still have a lot more work to do for Wall Street in the coming year or so.

To succeed in this work – while mitigating the public outrage already rising against the bad bailouts – they need to strike precisely the pose that they’re striking now. It is an exercise in deception.

The moral should be: The larger the crocodile tears shed over giving bonuses to AIG individuals (who seem to be largely on the healthy, bona fide insurance side of AIG’s business, not its hedge-fund Ponzi-scheme racket), the more they will distract public attention from the $180 billion giveaway, and the better they can position themselves to give away yet more government money (Treasury bonds and Federal Reserve deposits) to their favorite financial charities.

FAUX GESTURES OF OUTRAGE

Yesterday on Democracy Now! in its news recap:-- The failed insurance giant AIG is preparing to pay out $450 million in bonuses to top executives and other employees despite receiving a $173 billion government bailout.
...
On Sunday, Lawrence Summers, the director of the White House National Economic Council, described the bonuses as outrageous, but he said the bonuses are part of a contract:--

Lawrence Summers: “We are a country of law. There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system.”

Eli Stephens writes, Funny how that objection to abrogating contracts and the "very, very destabilizing consequences" doesn't come up when the contracts being abrogated are those with GM and Ford workers, or San Francisco Chronicle workers, or anyplace else where it's the workers who are suffering. Au contraire, it's precisely those cases where members of Congress actively call for the abrogation of contracts.

Just like "freedom of speech" belongs to those who own the presses and the airwaves, the "law" belongs to those who own the country. For the rest of us, it's a thin layer of ice which can be shattered at any moment.

On the car radio, I've listened to some of these call-in programs (c.f. "On Point"), and surely people are outraged, but the discussion doesn't go beyond that.

Richard Estes, telling it like it really is and what we might expect, Allow me to translate this for you: everything is going according to plan, right down to the faux outrage expressed by Geithner and Summers. Summers' reliance upon pre-existing contracts to justify inaction is particularly mendacious.
...
We are entering the early stages of this process, with capital retaining as many privileges as possible, despite the catastrophic failure of those who managed it, while the workers who have already been victimized, are called upon to sacrifice, even those with the contractual protections commonly utilized by bankers and investors. Will we eventually rebel? There is no sign of it. But if we do, how will Obama respond? Well, the Pentagon is already anticipating the deployment of troops to deal with domestic unrest.

LOCAL NEWS: UP, UP AND AWAY

Burlington Free Press:-- Burlington’s City Council argued Monday night over a proposal to permit developers to build about 20 feet higher — to a maximum height of 127 feet (10 stories) — on commercial buildings in downtown Burlington.

The council never got around to voting on whether to vote on the proposal at its March 30 meeting. Councilor Joan Shannon, D-Ward 5, proposed to reduce the height limit to 105 feet. The council rejected Shannon’s amendment, 8-5.

Haik Bedrosian has an informal poll at BurlingtonPol.com - "Should Burliington's maximum allowed building height be raised to 127 feet?"

I didn't participate in the poll, but did comment at Haik's blog:--

To paraphrase Kurt Wright, this is not a question that can get a straightforward yes or no answer.
If I'm thinking of more affordable housing developed downtown, then I would pick "yes" (even mixed-use - businesses and housing - buildings would be a "yes" as my choice). If it's just for more business development downtown, I'd go with "no." If increased height allowances happen, we must remind city council and the governing committees/boards of their shameful role in the horrible Westlake/Marriott fiasco and its ultimate outcome with no affordable housing.

LABEL: UNINTENTIONAL HUMOUR

For your immediate reflection, from the Guardian - "Is the recession David Bowie's fault?":- Who is to blame for the recession? Forget all that stuff about out-of-control bankers, negligent governments and sleepwalking regulators; instead, according to the BBC's Evan Davis, it's time to point the finger at David Bowie - a pioneer not only of experimental rock music and what used to be called "gender bending", but exactly the kind of financial sophistry that got us in this mess.

In yesterday's Daily Mirror, Davis laid out his theory as follows. In 1997, Bowie needed millions of pounds to buy back the rights to his songs from a previous manager. With the help of a financier named David Pullman, he thus created the so-called "Bowie Bond", through which investors would receive a share of the royalties from 287 Bowie songs over the next 10 years (£55m worth of them were sold to the Prudential Insurance Company).

OUR LIBERATION IS THE EARTH'S LIBERATION

GREEN LEFT INFOASIS:- There are plenty of good reasons we should be doing away with capitalism: its brutal class oppression, its undemocraticness, its enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, its constant drive toward war and empire, just to name a few. But one extremely urgent reason, which is related to all those other reasons, is its inherent tendency toward environmental degradation. With animals, plant life, oceans, forests, and the very ecological basis of human survival threatened, we have to act now to reverse the course we're on.

What we need to be doing, as a society, is halting growth, reigning in production and redirecting it toward meeting need and ecological sustainability. But look at our current predicament. The exact opposite is occurring. Politicians and corporate elites are scrambling to find a way to actually stimulate more growth to 'save the economy'. That's the wall we're up against. Capitalism must grow or die. Slowing of growth and slumps make the system unhealthy and could mean a crisis of global proportions like the one we're currently experiencing. Obviously, infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is completely unsustainable.

Through our labor, we interact with and transform nature. But under capitalism, our labor is controlled and directed by a capitalist. The things we produce are the property of the capitalist to be sent to market. The goal of the capitalist is to create profit and every capitalist has to constantly be striving to expand markets and profits. If they cannot or will not, they'll go under and be replaced by a capitalist who will. By eliminating the capitalist and the dictatorship of profit from the equation, it will be possible to take our economic lives into our own hands and re-orient the way we interact with nature. By liberating ourselves from wage slavery, we'll be in a position to also liberate the Earth from the grip of capital.

We desperately have to make need, quality of life, and ecology the priorities of society. But capitalism looks at human labor and nature and sees how much money they can be converted into. It will not guarantee success, but only by doing away with capitalism and moving to a classless economic democracy controlled by the associated producers do we have a chance of dealing with ecological crises in a humane and sustainable way.

GLI is one of my favourites in the blogsphere. It's been on my sidebar nearly as long as I've been blogging. Please do yourself a favour and check it out!

WHY DOESN'T IT HAPPEN HERE?

Over 1,000,000 strike in France, a protest over the Sarkozy's handling of the economic crisis.

THE OBAMA BRAND

From the Guardian

The global reach of Obama's message of renewal is making both subliminal and not so subtle appearances in controversial advertising campaigns from Washington to Jakarta. There is the new flavour of Ben 'n' Jerry's ice-cream: "Yes Pecan!" A new Hennessy Cognac with 44 (Obama is the 44th president) on the label. There is even an Indonesian advert for a form of indigestion tablets featuring a lookalike of the man himself.

Obama's formidable marketing potential was immediately apparent on the morning after the inauguration, when thousands of extra copies of newspapers were printed across the globe to meet demand for readers wishing to keep souvenir copies. Readers of the Daily Express, however, will have noticed their front page made no reference to the new President. It was taken up instead with a full-page advertisement for a Fiat 500 which, it turned out, happened to share its first birthday with the date of Obama's inauguration. "It's a big day for firsts," the slogan said. Rival newspapers contained a simply worded advertisement for Veet, the hair removal company: "Goodbye Bush."

If Fiat and Veet sought to quirkily exploit inauguration day, other companies appear committed to tapping into the longer term marketing benefits of Obama's presidency. Pepsi has unveiled a new red, white and blue logo which has an apparent resemblance to Obama's campaign motif, as part of a longer advertising campaign centred on themes of optimism and renewal.

For instance: another blatant example

DUTCH POLICE TARGET ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

RNW NEWS

22-12-2008

Extreme animal rights activists will be targeted by a specialist team of policemen, intelligence agents and the ministery of Justice. Dutch Interior Minister Guusje ter Horst has decided this new approach against violence by activists is needed because "they are going too far", she told de Telegraaf daily on Sunday. The minister was referring to increasingly violent actions "against directors of companies that cannot find favour in the eyes of animal rights activists."

The announcement almost coincided with an attack on the property of a senior official of the NYSE Euronext stock exchange. Two cars on the drive of his home in Wassenaar went up in flames. Euronext trades in stocks of British animal testing labs, Huntingdon Life Sciences. Responsibility for the attack has not been claimed yet, but an earlier attack in Hilversum last month was claimed by British animal rights activists.