FBI Targets The Critical Art Ensemble

The FBI has subpoened several members of the highly regarded Critical Art Ensemble under the baner of the Patriot Act. They are accused of having something to do with "bioweapons."

CAE is under investigation for their use of scientific equipment to produce art projects that question the relationship between commerce, politics and biotechnology. Critical Art Ensemble have been producing performances and theory that merge political realities with technology and theater since 1987.

Many of the rules and regulations that were put in place at the FBI were put there because of well documented abuses. Legislation like the Patriot Act is now stripping away some of those restrictions. So this is what we get, the persecution of artists whose work is critical?

Thus far seven subpoenas have been issued to: Adele Henderson, Chair of the Art Department at UB; Andrew Johnson, Professor of Art at UB; Paul Vanouse, Professor of Art at UB; Beatriz da Costa, Professor of Art at UCI; Steven Barnes, FSU; Dorian Burr and Beverly Schlee.

What's really upsetting is, like similar cases recently, the FBI is frighteningly off track. Is this where they are looking for bio terrorists, among domestic artists? Professors at state universities? They are continuing the administration pattern of diversion and distraction. I'm sure the the real bio terrorists are relieved, as are the rest of the terrorists, happy that we are distracted with Iraq.

The FBI is trying to criminalize art. Seems like this has happened before in history.

Find out more and support the artists here.

The Crisis in Sudan and Darfur

A major humanitarian crisis is occurring in Africa. Politicians are ignoring it. The major news media are barely covering it. Thankfully ABC News did a story and it's on the cover of In These Times. The BBC is also giving it an airing.

Human Rights Watch provides the following overview:

The government of Sudan is responsible for “ethnic cleansing” and crimes against humanity in Darfur, one of the world’s poorest and most inaccessible regions, on Sudan’s western border with Chad. The Sudanese government and the Arab “Janjaweed” militias it arms and supports have committed numerous attacks on the civilian populations of the African Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups. Government forces oversaw and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians—including women and children—burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. The Janjaweed militias, Muslim like the African groups they attack, have destroyed mosques, killed Muslim religious leaders, and desecrated Qorans belonging to their enemies.

The government and its Janjaweed allies have killed thousands of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa—often in cold blood—raped women, and destroyed villages, food stocks and other supplies essential to the civilian population. They have driven more than one million civilians, mostly farmers, into camps and settlements in Darfur where they live on the very edge of survival, hostage to Janjaweed abuses.

The UN has failed to act in many cases and in this case is apparently suppressing its own report. This is where The U.S. should show leadership - moral leadership.

Unfortunately the failures of the United States itself in preventing genocide are well documented. Samantha Power notes in her Pulitzer prize winning book A Problem From Hell that

The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred... (and) no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.

It looks like the pattern is repeating itself yet again.

I am a humanitarian hawk. Military power would be used to stop atrocities and otherwise keep power in check. Such efforts should always be international. The world needs to know that certain things will not be tolerated. As it stands now, if you don't have significant oil reserves and are black, well, nobody cares. All the rhetoric about saving the Iraqi people from Saddam and torture chambers is morally bankrupt in the face of inaction in Sudan. Genocide, torture, rape, displacement, and starvation are all occurring on a huge scale. What needs to happen is that some very prominent people need to call attention to the ethical contradictions in this issue.

I agree with Howard Zinn that the United States needs to be a humanitarian superpower, not a military one. Maybe we should take a lot of the troops out of Iraq and place them in the Sudan. Looks like the administration arguments fit better there than in Iraq. After all, the Sudanese government really has harbored Al Qaeda, unlike Saddam (who Osama bin Laden called a "socialist infidel" just 36 days before the U.S. invaded Iraq).

The world is a small place, and cruelty is cruelty. It's the worst thing we can do. It is not lessened by its remoteness. It is not lessened because of religion or skin color or lack of media coverage. We are the tribe of the world, the human tribe. And doing nothing, looking the other way, not thinking about it - these things make us, as Bush likes to say, evil. For the connection to other human souls is not diminished by distance.

What can you do? Call or email your senator and tell them this issue needs urgent attention. Send money if you can.

Resources an Information: Human Rights Watch | Amnesty International | International Crisis Group

Obese Children, Television Advertising, and Suburban Sprawl

A new study finds that the more you drive, the fatter you are.

Kelly Brownell, chairman of Yale University's psychology department and director of its Center for Eating and Weight Disorders notes:

"Most regions look very similar to Atlanta – anything that's built after World War II is pretty much auto-oriented," he said. "We need to start to look at the way we're designing our communities."

"These results show that the environment, affecting our physical activity, is quite influential."

Dysfunctional suburban sprawl patterns are a huge part of the problem. Is there a park next to you? Is it worth going to? Can you walk to the store? Would you want to?

We are becoming voluntarily isolated in our own homes. Instead of being outside relating to the community we are indoors relating to a virtual electronic world of television, internet, and games.

Another new study finds that Texas children are among the nation's fattest. A huge part of the problem, in addition to sprawl, is advertising and its inseparable partner: corporate media.

We don't allow advertisers to sell out kids cigarettes and alcohol, why are we allowing them to see tens of thousands of commercials, all convincing them that they need to eat things that will eventually lead to a variety of diseases?

Advertising supported media is complicit in this arrangement. Major networks routinely refuse ads from consumer groups that are critical of the food advertised in their broadcasts.

"Suck it up, it's the real world.”
-ABC, vice president of advertising, Julie Hoover

So because it's the "real world" it's acceptable to take advantage of our children and make them sick for private profit?

"Personal responsibility" is an embarrassing argument in the face of the onslaught of - literally - brainwashing. Of course parents do need to severely restrict (or eliminate) television and have children not see any commercials until they are old enough to understand the propaganda.

But some people never understand it. They stare unblinking night after night into the glowing orb of commercial messaging with a voiceover screaming thoughts that, at some point, the person will think were their own. That's part of the reason why obese kids become diseased, obese adults.

A major part of the solution is strict regulation of advertising of food to children, if not outright banning.

Further, media literacy and critical thinking need to be taught in the schools. The school's responsibility should not be just to indoctrinate us in to behaving and operating cash registers. They need to teach us to think for ourselves and understand that most messages, images, and sounds they will hear the rest of their lives are commercial messages of one type or another whose sole purpose is to convince them of something, if only for a moment: Buy This.

The television is not kid friendly, especially child-oriented TV. The more "cute" or "cool" it is, the more worried you should be.

We are creating the first generation of children who will be less healthy than their parents.

Dallas Morning News Censors Doonesbury - Again

I'm sure glad the only newspaper in town is protecting us from unsettling, inconvenient thoughts. I don't know how I'd be insulated without them.

Sunday's Doonesbury strip by Garry Trudeau featured the list of over 700 names of soldiers killed in Iraq (it's over 800 as of today). The Dallas Morning News chose not to run it.

This follows on the heels of another Doonesbury strip that was canned for reasons of "taste."

"We will run a small editor's note in that space on that day, explaining that we've decided not to publish Doonesbury for taste reasons," said Keven Ann Willey, editorial page editor of The News.

This one ran all over the country except in two papers from the same state. Take a wild guess. The Houston chronicle and the The Dallas Morning News. The paper has a history of censoring cartoons that offend its political sensitivities.

I'd like to see some open debate on the editorial pages or weblog regarding the decision not to run the Doonesbury strip for the second time. The explanation that it was not run because it would "somewhat duplicate " the feature on the Texas war dead is not sufficient. It's one thing to show 65 Texas dead, another to list all 700+ as several major news sources have.

Paul Krugman notes:

some news organizations, including The New York Times, are currently engaged in self-criticism over the run-up to the Iraq war. They are asking, as they should, why poorly documented claims of a dire threat received prominent, uncritical coverage, while contrary evidence was either ignored or played down.

Is the Dallas Morning News similarly involved in such self-criticism?   Will they investigate their participation in the creation of consent and marginalization (sometimes demonization) of dissent in the lead-up to the war?

The deaths in Iraq, which we were not allowed to see in the Doonesbury strip, are in some part the shared responsibility of the press. The press absolved itself of its responsibility to seriously question administration claims and arguments early on, abandoning its 4th estate charge. They should own up to it, rather than "protect" us from the realities of a war they had a hand in promoting.

Dallas Recycling: The Time has Come

Recycling rates in many western cities are at 30 & 40%. In Dallas the rate is a pathetic 2%. The question to ask is why recycling rates in cities like San Diego are so much higher than ours.

Recycling requires an equal commitment from citizens as well as the city. 

From the citizen perspective, recycling requires – hold on to your gimme caps – a change in the way you think about the riveting topic of trash.  Obviously with all the Hummers and oversized SUVs hurtling around Dallas there's not a popular desire to be efficient or to tread lightly on the planet.

Recycling becomes a part of life.  One develops an awareness that ours is not a world of infinite resources. The plastic you remove from your favorite new purchase is basically with us forever.  Simply throwing things away may be expedient, but it is not responsible.

The change in thinking is this: unless you recycle, when you consume you pollute. 

The city (in good faith) has made small, initial efforts that are mostly ineffective.  They admit their communication and public education efforts have been poor. You can't just say "recycling is good." 

Recycling needs to be encouraged by the way it is implemented.  But the current system actually discourages recycling. 

The blue bag solution is counter - productive.  And making people search out the bags and then pay for them?  No wonder our recycling rate is an embarrassing 2% versus 45% in San Diego.  Further, asking people to separate things is unworkable.  Keep it simple.  Do the separation on the other end. Let us just put the nasty stuff in the trash and the rest in the recyclable container.

When I lived in Los Angeles County they made it simple.  They also made it a mandate. Once a week pickup with a limit of one container.  Any more and you were fined. 

More importantly, another container was provided for recyclables.  It was larger than the trash container.  Once you get in the habit of separating your trash you find that, hey, most of this stuff is reusable.  I found 60-70% of what I used to think was trash to be recyclable.

Dallas is known for its selfish culture, its resistance to change.  But this is one area where we can prove to ourselves that we are capable of looking beyond the boundaries of our own homes and apartments, and beyond the regionalism that restricts our thinking.

Recycling and sustainability are ideas whose time has come for Dallas, finally.

Time to Buy A Hummer and a Gun

Ok, you're thinking, the progressive-minded writer has gone insane. A Hummer and a gun?

I'm the last person that would consider owning a Hummer. I've spent the last several years writing and complaining about these and other oversized SUV's, or Selfish Urban Vehicles.  

Driving around Dallas the past year and a half since I moved back here from the West Coast has made me think otherwise, at least for a few moments. Those few moments are the ones where I see people's cars flip over from driving too fast or one person slamming into another right in front of me.

Or the moment when my wife calls screaming and says some idiot driving too fast in the rain slammed into her car, sending her hurtling across the freeway and into the median. My grandmother was in the car, and is still recovering.  

So when I see a self absorbed suburbanite rushing up behind me talking on the cel phone eating a sandwich I fantasize: I need a bigger car, a monstrosity, a land yacht. One bigger, meaner than the other guy's, one that looks meaner. Time for a Hummer,

Of course I would refer a hybrid vehicle. But in this environment of oversized SUV's I'd be the sandwich.

Let's face it: the freeways are an idiot fest. I'm convinced many people shouldn't be driving, and others need to be severely restricted (or restrained).

As I've had lots of time to sit in traffic and think about these events, watching buffoons in would-be coffins on wheels, I've come up with a few ideas.

One, where are the highway patrol? They are few and far between as far as I can tell.  On Southern California freeways they seem to be everywhere. And whatever happened to the Dallas Police doing rolling traffic slow downs?

Two, how about much stiffer penalties? Start with tripling everything. Then double it again. Better yet, how about tying the fees to the blue book value of the car, or last year's tax return? Some European countries take a similar approach.

A $100 ticket doesn't mean much to people driving 50k + vehicles. Many of those vehicles are SUV's and they are the much more dangerous to other motorists than are ordinary cars. They are also dangerous to their owners and increase our dependence on foreign oil.

Third, how about a ring of radar detectors on all the freeways that work like the toll tag detectors? There's a system like this in London. It would certainly slow down traffic.

While not particularly in favor of SUV's, I'm even less in favor of government restrictions of personal behavior.   But in this case it's a public safety issue. And if we are going to act like children we need to be treated like children. More police, stiffer penalties, less leniency.

Ok, so much for the Hummer. Now for the gun.

Pictures Matter: The Ethics of War Images

Congressman James Inhofe (R-OK) this week said he was more "outraged by the outrage" than the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers and contractors. Of course he was. Like most conservatives and the White House he would prefer we see nothing from Iraq but smiling Iraqis. Oh, but there aren't any of those any more are there?

They also never wanted us to see the pictures of flag draped coffins on that cargo plane returning from Iraq. Basically they don't want us to see anything that will further diminish support for a war that we were misled into. There aren't a lot of legs to stand on now if you are a supporter other than shallow flag waving.

Iraq war supporters say that showing difficult images will lessen support for the war. Well of course it will, and should. That's because Iraq is a war of choice, not necessity. If it was a justified war of necessity, even the worst images would deter only the few who lack the capacity to see the larger issue. The exception is when unnecessary and unjust actions are taken in an otherwise just war.

This is what happened in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki during World War II. Dresden, Germany was firebombed in 1945 and over 100,000 were killed. The bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were entirely unnecessary and cost the lives of more than 200,000 Japanese. (The propaganda which many still believe that it would have saved the lives of tens of thousands of americans was just that, propaganda. Japan was already finished.)

But what if we saw, immediately, or even live, the images from Dresden where entire families, buildings, and blocks were incinerated, one after the other? What about the radiation burn victims from Hiroshima? They should have been in the paper the very next day. First person accounts should have been broadcast across American radio. If they were, such excesses would be less tolerated today.

Just like Vietnam reduced, for some, the appetite for war, so should recent images from Iraq quell the blind patriotism of Bush war supporters, few of whom seem to think beyond the sloganeering.

It's one thing to see dead enemy soldiers, quite another to see dead civilians, especially when they are not "collateral damage" but rather intentionally or carelessly killed. It is our duty to view and reflect upon such pictures, to consider the impact of our political and military actions.

I make a point of looking at difficult images of wars, past and present. I look, and I say "This is what my government is doing. I am responsible for this."

Lupus est homo homini

Good Cents = Good Sense

An Alt7 guest editorial by Greg Metz

The wave of horrendous photographs we have yet to see…

Most recently in the wake of outrageous human rights abuses carried out by the U.S armed services (or contracted services) on prisoners in custody of an American occupied Iraq, President Bush had the audacity to ask for another 25 billion dollars to shore up our defense of freedom (via our invasion of Iraq). This request for additional funding comes following a most recent congressional subsidy of $85 billion extra to this cause.

How much is 112 billion dollars? I flash back to Bush's 2003 State of the Union announcement where the president pledged $15 billion, in 5 incremental years (and uncharitable red tape headed by the past CE0 of Ely Lilly ), to fight the AIDS epidemic that has polarized Africa and become the concern of the world.

30 million people are afflicted with this virus in Africa alone. Many fear this real ‘tyrant', AIDS, may threaten the very existence of that continent and consequently have a tsunami effect on the world.   

This pledge comes at a time when AIDS representatives have stated that a very possible cure if not massive relief to this plague could be achieved if this gift were to be contributed now in a lump sum!

If you tally all the money that has been spent on the Iraq invasion and occupation, coupled with the resources and American lives sacrificed (including those innocent Iraqi citizens lost as collateral damage), and compare this to the beneficial effects for the world for discovery of an AIDS vaccine and related programs for pain relief for AIDS victims, the second far out weighs the overturning of a small country in the Middle East suffering from the indigestion of a toothless tyrant. And at a fraction of the cost!

Hell, or Sugarland Texas

"It's so predictable here" The Washington Post has an excellent article that provides a portrait of a Sugarland, TX resident. B. Stein is a landscape contractor and one of his clients is neighbor Tom Delay.

It all starts at breakfast:

Stein's breakfast is scrambled eggs over congealed grits fried in butter, and coffee that comes not in bean form but already ground and is brewed not through natural brown paper filters but unnatural white ones. " 'Melitta plants four trees for every one used in the production of our filter paper,' " he says, reading the side of the box of filters. He puts the box back in the cabinet. "I could care less."

Sustainability is an idea as foreign as Islam. For such "good Christian folk" there certainly is a strong disdain of the natural environment. And a complete lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of things. This is morally irresponsible at best. People like this will eventually be seen like those who once said they "could care less" about slavery.

Now it's time to be threatened by gay people, again:

"Where homosexuality falls, maybe it's inside the line, but somewhere we have to say: No farther. Our society, our culture, our religion, our history all revolve around the family. The traditional family unit. There are variations, sure, but go too far, and somebody has to say that's wrong.

This is the heart of the culture war. There's an assumption that America always was and/or should be homogeneous. Neither is true.

Reminds me of people in Plano, TX who recently walked out en masse when - aaaaahh! - two men kissed in a play.

Life is tasting a little too sweet for people in Sugarland. They say that "blue people" are always complaining. Well, maybe there are things to be concerned about beyond a weedless front lawn and a lack of homosexuals on your block. Maybe they are unable to understand the moral outrage that drives many liberals, one that takes into account a larger perspective and happens to include people different from oneself. More importantly it includes the future. And compound sentences.

"I don't know," Stein's wife Patrice says. "Maybe I just want to live in a little bubble or something."

Really? It's so hard to tell. Sugarland. Sugar Thoughts.

Leaders like Tom Delay are helping to inflate this bubble, to define it and energize its mythology. In talking to his constituency, compound sentences are a no-no. Simple thoughts for simple folks. Good-Bad. Black-White. Evil-Good.

"You find communities like this all over the place," DeLay says of Sugar Land. "This is what the future is about."

Then it's the end of the world. And this is what it looks like.

Sand Storms, Butterflies, and Dead Zones

Large areas of our oceans are becoming "dead zones" - places where nothing but plankton live. Several studies have been released recently including one by the United Nations Environment Program. There are now nearly 150 dead zones around the globe, more than twice the number in 1990. Some extend 27,000 square miles, approximately the size of Ireland. The main cause is excess nitrogen run-off from farm fertilizers, sewage and industrial pollutants. The nitrogen triggers blooms of microscopic algae known as phytoplankton. As the algae die and rot, they consume oxygen, thereby suffocating everything from clams and lobsters to oysters and fish. "Human kind is engaged in a gigantic, global, experiment as a result of inefficient and often overuse of fertilizers, the discharge of untreated sewage and the ever rising emissions from vehicles and factories," UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said. "Unless urgent action is taken to tackle the sources of the problem, it is likely to escalate rapidly." UNEP is warning that without a concerted effort to improve access to safe drinking water, a third of the world's population will likely suffer chronic water shortages within a few decades. Already nearly 1.1 billion people lacked access to safe drinking water in 2000, and another 2.4 billion lacked access to basic sanitation.

There is a myth combined with a large scale public denial about the interconnectedness of the natural world. The myth is that of infinite resources - the frontier mentality from the last century when there was always more land to plunder, and the modernist myth of continual progress. These myths are the biggest dangers to "civilization." More than terrorism. More than the "clash of civilizations."

We need a new model of sustainable civilization.

The state of macro denial will increasingly be difficult to maintain. For example, UNEP researchers have recently linked damage to coral reefs in the Caribbean with sand storms in the Sahara.

Watch out. Dead oceans full of plastic and fertilizers are everybody's problem.

Butterflies cause hurricanes.

Testing Testing: Questioning the SAT

In this piece Clay Reynolds performs a role reversal and puts some hard questions to the SAT, the testing services that develop it, and academia which insists on it. He discusses in some detail what I've suggested for years: that the SAT and tests like it basically test how well you take the tests themselves. Worse yet, they are unfair and a colossal waste of time and money besides. -DT.

None of the Above: Teaching to the College Entrance Test
A Guest Commentary by Clay Reynolds

Each year, college bound high school juniors and seniors find themselves facing a common ordeal:   the taking of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) or similar college entrance examinations. As they approach the date for taking these exams, many worry that the test will not measure their actual academic aptitudes or abilities to complete college work successfully. Rather, they fear the exam will only measure their abilities to take the tests themselves. They fret that fellow test-takers across the country have spent more time preparing with special books, courses, hired tutorial services, and sample tests than they have. They are anxious that their chances of being accepted to a quality university will be limited because they have merely concentrated on academic work, classroom performance and comprehension of subject material, high school grades, and the odd extracurricular activity and have ignored intensive preparation for what are euphemistically called "the college boards."

Many of them have cause to worry.

My experience as a college professor and an associate dean for undergraduate studies who routinely considers "marginal" applications (i.e. insufficient test scores to meet our minimum requirement or insufficient class standing to meet our minimum requirement for automatic admission) combines with my parental experience with my own teenaged youngsters (now both college graduates) to convince me that the two main standardized instruments ordinarily used by American universities to assess the academic worthiness of an applicant are seriously flawed if they are not completely useless. I believe they lack a comprehensive measuring capability, and that they are often "beaten" by astute and well-prepared students who have figured out, to coin a paraphrase, that it's not whether you know anything that matters; it's how you play the game.

The Suburbs: A Dysfunctional Personality?

Last night as I went on an evening walk I was thinking about a question recently posed by the editors of the Dallas Morning News: do new suburbs like ours here in Plano, Texas have no personality?  Are they faceless? Look around.  What do you see that has personality that reflects the specific civic values of Plano or Collin County?  The natural landscape itself has little to offer and so it is dominated by big box stores and freeways and a few oversized churches. The central meeting place is the mall - a commercial space where you are free to consume but be careful what you say and what you wear.  It's not a true public space, it is private corporate space. And generic.

When was the last time you were in a store that was not part of a chain?  Where your experience would not be repeatable a thousand times over?  Where the shopkeeper knew your name?  Where it felt “local?”

Of course suburbs like Plano have a personality.  Unfortunately it’s not a pleasant one.  Some might say it is oppressively regimented.  In fact it’s rather ugly.

The physical environment affects people.  It affects their moods, how they treat each other.  If the environment is impersonal and lacks human scale it creates a citizenry that itself becomes impersonal.

Developers try and enforce personality and name subdivisions things like "Country Brook" where there is no country and no brook.  The homes reflect a narrow range of bland architectural styles. 

City officials allow developers to build the same dysfunctional sprawl pattern suburb over and over.  Everything is separated from everything else and a car is required to do even the simplest of errands.  This creates more smog, traffic, distance, and isolation.

There’s a pressure in newer neighborhoods to conform, not to do anything too interesting.  In some older neighborhoods gain their character from an eclecticism that is encouraged.  Rather than expressing individuality suburban homes generally express uniformity.

Many people may like to live in these areas because they unconsciously associate homogeneity with safety.  But if no one talks to each other it’s actually more dangerous.  Anyone could be living next door to you.  Our neighborhoods are perfect for criminals, even terrorists.  Who would know?

This kind of landscape is actually a kind of prison.  Children in particular are victims.  They are trapped in homes or stores or restaurants.  There are few if any "wild spaces," places of mystery where children can explore and test the natural limits.  Instead they explore the mall or the virtual space of video games.

It's not surprising that many kids become addicted to games or television or drugs.  They need an escape from the lethal combination of monotony, conformity, and locally, a peculiar Plano style of rude inhumanity.

Will something like "new urbanism" help alleviate this facelessness and dysfunction?  If pursued vigorously, of course it will.  The basic principles of mixed use, heterogeneity, and civic expression are all things that made traditional towns and cities become genuine communities.

The problem is that it's not implemented on a larger scale, and many city leaders lack the vision to carry it out.  There is also the fact that residents mostly fail to recognize the dysfunction until they experience an actual, living community.  One that encourages eclecticism and vibrant expression, rather than shunning it.

It’s up to regional leaders to provide the opportunity for a livable community.  This involves scrapping conventional ideas about city zones and insisting developers rethink their cookie cutter approach to building subdivisions. 

It’s up to citizens to realize that having that new Wal-Mart or Home Depot provides convenience but has serious, unseen costs to our community.

For individuals, there are things that can be done.  For a start, try mutiny.  Take over your neighborhood association.  Fill it with friendly, energetic people.  Have a funky Fourth of July parade.  Be silly.  Relax.

You should feel comfortable where you live, not uptight.  And certainly not oppressed.

For more on this topic see the article Communities or Sprawl?. Suggestions for change, action, and further analysis in upcoming articles. Photo credits: csmonitor.com

The Bush Press Conference

Bush had his third press conference tonight. Overall I think he fared poorly to many of those in the middle who were previously supporting him. In other situations he has come off in a way that strikes many as man of strong convictions. Of course this is actually empty swagger, but that's beside the point. This time, though, the sheen was gone, he was obviously nervous, and completely fumbled when asked what his biggest mistake was in since 9/11.

QUESTION: After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?

BUSH: I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.

[very long pause]

John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could've done it better this way or that way. You know, I just — I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet.

It was a truly embarrassing moment. For the country, For the planet. For our humble Milky Way galaxy.

Bush stood there for a very long, uncomfortable period of time, fumbling, searching.Mistake? I got the impression that second guessing was not something Bush was accustomed to doing. That changing one's mind in response to a change in conditions was not an option. There is an abstract decision process completely disconnected from reality. It was Freudian, and symptomatic of the administration's inability to admit any sort of mistake. They think the strategy of being unwavering and unapologetic is a display of strength but it actually reveals a unresponsive kind of dogmatism - something Paul O'Neill has described in his book.

QUESTION: Mr. President, why are you and the vice president insisting on appearing together before the 9/11 commission?

BUSH: Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 commission is looking forward to asking us. And I'm looking forward to answering them.

Here's an uncomfortable situation. The question was completely dodged. He wants Cheney there to hold his hand. Shouldn't the president be able to hold his own?

QUESTION: Mr. President, April is turning into the deadliest month in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, and some people are comparing Iraq to Vietnam and talking about a quagmire. Polls show that support for your policy is declining and that fewer than half of Americans now support it. What does that say to you? And how do you answer the Vietnam comparison?

BUSH: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy.

This is getting dangerously close to the period before the war where "supporting the troops" was equivalent to supporting the policy, that criticizing the policy was equivalent to "giving aid & comfort to the enemy." This is of course political rhetoric designed to paint dissenters as traitors. Lyndon Johnson used a similar strategy during Vietnam.

BUSH: The Iraqi people need us there to help with security. They need us there to fight off these, you know, violent few, who are doing everything they can to resist the advance of freedom.

What happens when it's not a few, and when the vast majority support a vigorous resistance? Will we then wage another war against those with sincere nationalistic sentiments? Going into Iraq without legitimate international authority was and is a phenomenal mistake.

We do not have the market cornered on nationalistic pride. Like all those "Power of Pride" bumper stickers that Home Depot gives away, did we think we're the only ones who have "pride"? And is one country's pride another's irrational nationalism?

BUSH: I believe so strongly in the power of freedom. You know why I do? Because I've seen freedom work right here in our own country. I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country ’s gift to the world. Freedom is the Al mighty’s gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom.

Now he's championing the abstraction "freedom" as "the greatest power on the face of the earth." But like all abstractions his preferred definition rests on debatable presumptions. Freedom is the "deepest desire of the human soul". Really? What about money and sex and SUV's? Power? And what do we do with our freedom here? The assumption is that our view of "freedom" and western government are the best for everyone. That everyone views the world in the same way. This is the height of hubris and ignorance.

Our own system is infected and corrupt. We are crude, selfish, and our elections are bought. This is our freedom.

It is likely the freedom the Iraqi's will choose to exercise is to vote us the hell out and vote in a hostile Islamic state. Because of the approach we are taking to the recent uprising this outcome looks ever more certain. If it happens, is that also freedom?

Freedom is the opposite of being determined, having a lack of choice. Regardless of our intentions, the Iraqi's are beginning to feel that we are determining their choices.

BUSH: I feel strongly about what we ’re doing. I feel strongly it's the course this administration is taking will make America more secure and the world more free and, therefore, the world more peaceful. It ’s a conviction that ’s deep in my soul.

Bush continued to make the neocon argument that Iraq is part of the war on terror and that we are safer because of our intervention there. Well that's the central argument, isn't it? Actually, our very efforts to quell the situation in Iraq are exacerbating the situation. Yes it is the case that there was no great love of the United States prior to the war, but its very hard to imagine how we have improved the situation, or in what universe the neocon dream of a pro - U.S. democracy will take root in Iraq.

For them, hard power is the only approach. The entire strategy is guided by a masochistic mentality that says that aggressive military power is the only way to change the situation in the Middle East to our advantage. It's an old school cold war approach. Terrorism is a distributed threat, but armies are built to defend and attack countries - and not knowing what to do, not having any understanding outside of this packaged ideology, that's what we did - we attacked a country.

Bottom line this is not a war of necessity. It is an ideological war of choice. And a colossal, historical mistake. A tragic waste of resources and lives. And we and our decedents are much less safe because of it.

Bush's soul is wrong.

Cutting Higher Education

A Guest Commentary by R. Clay Reynolds

The recent announcement by the Republican governor of California that among his mandated budget cuts will be a reduction in funding to higher education is no surprise. Universities and colleges have always made safe targets for political budget-cutters. Republican administrations on all levels have never been particularly friendly to university financial needs. In recent years, even Democrats have rarely taken up the cause of funding higher learning with any zeal. Seemingly, slicing funds to higher education makes perfect political sense.

Consider:

- University faculties and administrations do not make up a demographic bloc of voters. Coming from diverse backgrounds and geographies, they may share a general critical opinion of a sitting government, but they seldom act in concert and certainly represent no identifiable constituency. As a group, they’re notoriously unhappy with their professional lot; inadequate salaries, hiring freezes, and deteriorating facilities are pretty much what they have come to expect from the state.

- Students feel the most dynamic effects of budget cuts as they face larger classes, fewer or poorer quality of instructors, reductions in library and resource materials, outmoded facilities, and rising costs. But they don’t represent any significant political threat, either. For the most part, they’re transient, at least insofar as their association with a school is concerned. Only a handful of them vote, anyway, and many are from out of state. To students, the “enemy” in terms of decreasing expectations and increasing expenses is the school; they rarely think to blame the political overlords who set the budgets and who cut them.

- To the average voter, universities are gargantuan labyrinths that suck up enormous amounts of state revenues and produce very little tangible return. Sprawling campuses with monolithic buildings attracting troublesome people who create significant problems for the surrounding community are, to many citizens’ way of thinking, already too big, too expensive, too inconvenient. To the average citizen, a university is a “closed society.” (Hey, it’s hard just to go there and park and have a look around.) Unless a school has a sensational sports program, few people pay much attention to it, anyway, at least until their children are old enough to attend. Even then, they are mostly concerned with the school their kids go to and how much it costs.

Ethical Investing (2)

(Part 2 of a 2 part series)

(part 1 of this article is here) How do you invest your hard earned money in an ethical way? It's a difficult dilemma. If you want to put away money for retirement or education there are not a lot of options. You have to make 3% at the absolute minimum to keep from losing money due to inflation. With health care and education costs rising much faster than the rate of inflation, your concerns are multiplied. Safe, non stock alternatives are generally not keeping up with inflation.

There's a market for everything of course, and it's hard to know whether those selling you something that satisfies your concience share your values. That said, one strategy involves so-called socially responsible funds.

These funds generally avoid tobacco, firearms, and nuclear power and often screen for labor practices and environmental issues.

Domini Social Investments, for example, looks for "enlightened policies"

ranging from the diversity of their boards, to the way they treat their employees, to their environmental performance. In the long run, we believe companies with fewer environmental liabilities, more diverse boards and work forces, generous employee benefits, and authentic commitments to their communities are better positioned to succeed and prosper.

Firms like this are also often involved with community investing which "help build affordable housing, create jobs, and assist lower-income entrepreneurs."

People who run these funds believe, as I do, that corporations should be socially responsible. Too often companies see their only obligation to the shareholders, social impact and workers be damned.

But even these "responsible" funds often still invest in other things many might find troublesome.

Jerome Dodson of The Parnassus Fund has noted

Take a company like Coca-Cola, which many social investment funds put in their portfolio because they have some positive things, such as good employee and community relations. But for us, Coca-Cola does not have a positive social impact.

Some of the funds ethical research caught on early to Enron and Worldcom, when the rest of the financial world was touting them and incidentally where (in the case of Enron) Bush was getting his largest donations.

Does investing responsibly mean lower returns? Morningstar doesn't think so. They actually have an online course in socially responsible investing.

There's always real estate, collectibles, and other investments. But most people just want to put their money to work and not think about it. Maybe it's time to start thinking about what that money is doing.

Even with this careful approach, it is still possible to be troubled by the nature of the corporation itself. Some think the corporate charter and related laws should be rewritten, that the corporation's status as a "person" should be revoked, and that companies should have increased community responsibilities. In the current political environment, these are pipe dreams.

We are talking about money here. And on the scale of American values, much of the time money ranks higher for most than, well, values.