And here I thought women got the right to vote almost a century ago
by digby
Wow, these numbers are huge:
And as you can see, it affects far more women than men. And these are women without photo ID, not the ones who will be barred from voting for having to common issue of different married, divorced and/or maiden names on their IDs. That’s a lot of people committing non existent voter fraud.
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The world has failed Syria
by David Atkins
As America stands on the precipice of yet another war, it’s worth remembering how we got to this point. The list of imperialist actions and domestic reactions goes back hundreds of years, and many of the internal squabbles in Syria can be traced back for a millennium or more.
But to focus on very recent history in a vast oversimplification, here’s what happened: the United States began supporting a range of strongmen and dictators in the Middle East who were theoretically friendly to the West and would provide access to oil and shipping lanes. The U.S. chose to ignore and in many cases to support the repressions and atrocities committed by those regimes.
Partly in response to Western imperial actions and partly in response to the corruption and lack of social mobility of petro-socialism, a religious conservative counter movement took hold, particularly in more rural and tribal areas. Where that religious conservative backlash could be controlled by the corrupt dictatorial governments, it used as a convenient foil to direct anger away from the corrupt governments and toward Israel and the West generally. Expansionary Israeli and Western policies certainly didn’t help matters. Where that conservative backlash could not be controlled, there was revolution and insurgency: the Mullahs in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan and many others. Almost without exception, the new religious masters in these places were worse than the old ones had been. Secular liberals were squeezed out.
But what is most important is that there remained only two power centers: corrupt, repressive, more secular governments backed by the West, and an even more repressive theocratic alternative.
Western governments and hawks seemed not to realize that obvious dynamic when they decided to invade Afghanistan (with some credible justification) and Iraq (with no credible justification at all) without a coherent plan for the aftermath beyond privatizing their resources and installing some puppet of corruption.
Then came the Arab Spring. Liberals celebrated as the people of various Middle Eastern countries began to throw off the chains of their corrupt governments. But neither liberals nor conservatives seemed to realize that people power isn’t magic: whatever organized elements of society are left will always control whatever comes out of the chaos. They also didn’t seem to realize that when one dictator is felled by a revolution, the others won’t go so quietly. In fact, they’ll be happy to massacre their own population in order to stay alive and in power.
So quite predictably, most of the places where people power overwhelmed the dictators, the second most powerful organized element of society, the religious conservative Islamists, stepped in to take their place. In Egypt, the military brutally took power back. So much for people power.
In Libya, Syria and Bahrain, the dictators wouldn’t go so quietly. Massacres ensued. Greater massacres were promised. Liberals in the West told themselves that if they closed their eyes, did nothing and murmured phrases like “blowback,” the bloodshed would not be on their hands. Conservatives in the West couldn’t wait to drop a bunch of bombs, show the world how big and tough they were hiding behind their keyboards and drones, and install a new set of puppet regimes. Almost no one was thinking through how to solve this problem long term.
And so we stand on the brink in Syria. The dictator is massacring his own people. It may or may not be that the latest gas attack atrocity was committed by Assad, but that’s almost irrelevant. Western doves want to do nothing and watch the bloodshed continue. Western hawks want to drop lots of bombs, probably making the situation worse and opening the door for Islamists to take power–at which point they’ll push for more drone attacks.
The whole thing is a primitive farce, an symptom of a world facing the end of the fossil fuel and resource extraction economy in which powerful nation states exploit nations for fuels and patriarchal domestic insurgencies respond by murdering women for adultery and call themselves righteous for opposing the Great Satan.
It’s the product of a world in which the United States, China and Russia would rather engage in staring contests in a bid to control more resources even as the world burns around them literally and figuratively.
We are nearing the end of this phase of human history. We are nearing the end of the extraction economy and the end of overfinancialized economies desperately seeking to crack open new markets to keep illusory and inflated stock market growth alive. We are nearing the end of the ability of nation states alone to cope with climate change, international terrorism, and a host of other issues.
The world will soon wake up from this nightmare to face the need to do something different. It may be too late to stop the worst from happening in Syria, but one can hope that forward thinkers will begin building and organizing the systems that will finally stop this cyclical, predictable, and murderous farce from reoccurring in the future.
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The cry wolf syndrome
by digby
The problem with the US government crying wolf about “WMD” and/or wartime atrocities to justify interventions in foreign wars is that people become cynical and don’t know what to believe when their government once again tells them we must act because of some alleged existential threat or moral horror.
For instance, this piece was written on the eve of the Iraq war but in the wake of 9/11 too many Americans didn’t want to hear it:
More than 10 years later, I can still recall my brother Sean’s face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. “We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now,” he said passionately.
I completely understood his feelings. Although I had no family of my own then, who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the US would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident.
Too bad it never happened. The babies in the incubator story is a classic example of how easy it is for the public and legislators to be mislead during moments of high tension. It’s also a vivid example of how the media can be manipulated if we do not keep our guards up.
The invented story eventually broke apart and was exposed. (I first saw it reported in December of 1992 on CBC-TV’s Fifth Estate Canada’s “60 Minutes” in a program called “Selling the War.” The show later won an international Emmy.) But it’s been 10 years since it happened, and we again find ourselves facing dramatic decisions about war. It is instructive to look back at what happened, in order that we do not find ourselves deceived again, by either side in the issue…
[…]
[U]nder the auspices of a group called Citizen for a Free Kuwait, which was really the Kuwait government in exile (the group received almost $12 million from the Kuwaiti government, and only $17,000 from others, according to author John R. MacArthur) the American PR firm Hill & Knowlton was hired for $10.7 million to devise a campaign to win American support for the war. Craig Fuller, the firm’s president and COO, had been then-President George Bush’s chief of staff when the senior Bush has served as vice president under Ronald Reagan. The move made a lot of sense after all, access to power is everything in Washington and the Hill & Knowlton people had lots of that.It’s wasn’t an easy sell. After all, Kuwait was hardly a “freedom-loving land.” Only a few weeks before the invasion, Amnesty International accused the Kuwaiti government of jailing dozens of dissidents and torturing them without trial. In an effort to spruce up the Kuwait image, the company organized Kuwait Information Day on 20 college campuses, a national day of prayer for Kuwait, distributed thousands of “Free Kuwait” bumper stickers, and other similar traditional PR ventures. But none of it was working very well. American public support remained lukewarm the first two months.
According to MacArthur’s book “Second Front,” the first mention of babies being removed from incubators appeared in the Sept. 5 edition of the London Daily Telegraph. The paper ran a claim by the exiled Kuwait housing minister that, “babies in the premature unit of one of the hospitals had been removed from their incubators, so that these, too, could be carried off.” Two days later, the LA Times carried a Reuter’s story that quoted an American (first name only) who said, among other things, that babies were being taken from incubators, although she herself had not seen it happen.
Read on, it’s quite a story if you haven’t heard it before.
And then came Iraq and Curveball and yellow cake, aluminum tubes etc. all of which I’m sure is still familiar. I’m not saying that the government is lying about Assad’s use of chemical weapons. I have no way of knowing. But I am saying that when governments lie repeatedly to their people to justify military interventions, it’s wise to be skeptical when they use the same rationales all over again.
It’s especially problematic when they do something like this:
U.S. trying same trick as it successfully did in Iraq–telling UN to pull inspectors out because we may start bombing at any moment. This ended inspections–which were finding no WMD–in Iraq, but so far UN holding firm. But no specific U.S. warning of pending attack but could come any minute.
NYT in lead story promotes attack by citing anonymous White House official and rebels both saying UN inspection worthless because evidence of chemical degraded by now–without going to any experts to judge if this is actually true. The truth is that, yes, by some degrading–but far from too late. Even McClatchy just gets quote from an expert on how long inspecting must take, not on the degrading aspect.
Kerry gives bellicose speech. UN inspectors disagree that no good evidence left–they say they collected plenty today.
Syria is a human tragedy of epic proportions, there is no doubt about that. It’s very possible that the Assad government has become so unhinged that it is using chemical weapons on the streets of its own cities. It’s also possible that the rebels have done this. Nobody really knows. It’s horrifying on every level. But it is unclear to me how US intervention will makes things better and it’s highly likely that it could make things worse. Nobody’s made a persuasive argument beyond “we have to do something!” That’s not good enough.
And at the very least, considering our documented manipulative and dishonest behavior in the past, trying to usurp the inspection process seems to me to be a very, very bad decision. The nation is not in favor of another military intervention at the moment. If they are determined to do this thing with any democratic authority it behooves them to at least prove that Assad is behind this and make a decent case to the American people as to how our intervention will help the situation. Bellicose speeches about a middle east tyrant “gassing his own people” isn’t going to cut it. We’ve seen that movie one too many times and the ending is all too predictable.
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Same as it ever was
by digby
Conservative radio host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham attacked the speakers at the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, at one point using the sound of a gunshot to cut off a sound bite of civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) — a man whose skull was infamously fractured by a state trooper on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, AL, in 1965. Ingraham used the speech’s anniversary to race-bait about black-on-white crime statistics and hosted Pat Buchanan to bemoan the idea that minorities face any higher level of adversity in America 50 years later.
You know, things have changed. But not that much, at least not among the hardcore right wing. Same as it ever was.
Yuck.
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No, Martin Luther King was not the Bill O’Reilly of his day
by digby
Twitters cons who keep telling me MLK would’ve been Fox contributor if Fox had existed back then? #justwow
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) August 26, 2013
No kidding. I guess it’s progress of a sort but it’s so delusional that I wonder how useful it is.
For some real historical context, this discussion on Up with Steve Kornacki this week-end is a must see. In the first segment, Rick Perlstein draws attention to St Ronnie of wingnuts’ comments after King’s assassination:
He said he had it coming. He said, “it’s the sort of great tragedy when we begin compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they would break.”
He’s referring to civil disobedience. This was pretty much a consensus view on the right among the same people who celebrate Martin Luther King now. Frankly, Martin Luther King had to be forgotten before he could be remembered. Martin Luther King called himself a socialist. Jesse Helms wasn’t pulling that out of nowhere. His associate, Daniel Levinson, probably had been a communist. And the main demand of the march for jobs and freedom was a phrase that was resounding at the time but we don’t remember it now, “a Marshal Plan for the cities”, which meant a massive federal investment in developing the depressed areas of america. Which I don’t think we heard in Washington [this past week-end]
Pretty sure we wouldn’t hear that on Fox News of 1965 or 2013 either. (But the sentiment about “choosing the laws we would break” in order to force change certainly sounds familiar… and not just on Fox News.)
Watch the whole thing, it explains just how radical King was and how threatened people were by him. Like I said, it’s probably a form of progress that they want to be associated with him today, but the history has to be completely re-written to make it work.
The secondary boogeyman: Cartel invasion
by digby
When Sen. John McCain spoke during an Armed Services Committee hearing last year on security issues in the Western Hemisphere, he relayed a stark warning about the spread of Mexican drug cartels in the United States.
“The cartels,” the Arizona Republican said, “now maintain a presence in over 1,000 cities.”
McCain based his remarks on a report by a now-defunct division of the Justice Department, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), which had concluded in 2011 that Mexican criminal organizations, including seven major drug cartels, were operating in more than 1,000 U.S. cities.
But the number, widely reported by news organizations across the country, is misleading at best, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and drug policy analysts interviewed by The Washington Post. They said the number is inflated because it relied heavily on self-reporting by law enforcement agencies, not on documented criminal cases involving Mexican drug-trafficking organizations and cartels.
The Post interviewed local police officials in more than a dozen cities who said they were surprised to learn that the federal government had documented cartel-related activity in their communities.
I don’t know about you but I am shocked to learn that the government is exaggerating statistics on drugs, gangs and people from south of the border. Why do you suppose they would do that?
The good news is that the Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center was closed by the Obama administration in 2012. And it was met with much caterwauling by certain people on the right:
Mexican cartel violence is at an all-time high along the increasingly porous southern border yet the Obama Administration has shut down a critical intelligence agency dedicated to identifying, tracking and severing the nexus between drug trafficking and terrorism.
It’s a senseless move, which is why it was done very quietly. The only real way to discover that the Justice Department’s 19-year-old National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) has been closed is by trying to visit its website. It simply says that on June 15, 2012, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) closed. The public is redirected to another website with “historical materials, an archived version of the NDIC.”
The move is baffling considering the agency’s crucial mission. Consider this; just a few years ago an NDIC task force uncovered that Mexican drug cartels are buying arms from radical Islamic terrorists and that they team up to distribute narcotics in Europe and the Middle East. The NDIC report that revealed this identifies terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestine Liberation Front and the Palestine Liberation Organization as Arab associates of Mexican drug-trafficking cartels. All are officially designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. Department of State.
Gee, I wonder who was staffing that agency, Frank Gaffney and Liz Cheney?
The bad news is that while it was closed, its functions were transferred to the DEA which has a huge vested interest in keeping up the “Mexican cartel” fear-mongering. Still, I think it’s a good thing to disband as many drug war operations as possible, especially one’s that have the words “intelligence” in the titles. That’s the sort of thing that leads to threat conflation and unconstitutional domestic spying. We wouldn’t want that, would we?
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Sydney records its warmest winter on record
by David Atkins
Every winter the climate deniers use the fact that it’s colder outside to mock the idea of global warming. And indeed, polls show that people are predictably more concerned about global warming when it’s hot outside than when it’s not.
But a few more unseasonably warm record winters, and they may not even be able to do that much longer. It’s been a very warm winter across the globe, and the Southern Hemisphere is no exception. Consider Sydney, Australia, which just had its hottest winter in history:
So much for winter.
With only a handful of days to the end of the month, Sydney is all but certain of registering its warmest winter on record.
The outlook for the first couple of weeks of September is also for above-normal temperatures. “We’re going to blitz [the average],” Mr Sharpe said.
The Harbour City averaged daily maximums of 19.5 degrees in July and is likely to fall just short of 21 degrees for August. That compares with long-term averages of 19.4 and 20 degrees for May and September, respectively, said Rob Sharpe, a meteorologist with Weatherzone….
Australia-wide, temperatures have been considerably warmer than average since last spring. The September-August period looks likely to be Australia’s warmest 12-month period on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.
It’s getting worse, and the world is doing next to nothing about it.
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Who says there’s nothing but bad news?
by digby
Well, actually, there’s nothing but bad news:
Tokyo Electric Power Company workers have detected high levels of radiation in a ditch that flows into the ocean from a leaking tank at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Japan’s nuclear watchdog said Thursday the leak could be the beginning of a new disaster — a series of leaks of contaminated water from hundreds of steel tanks holdng massive amounts of radioactive water coming from three melted reactors, as well as underground water running into reactor and turbine basements.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. says about 300,000 litres of contaminated water leaked from one of the tanks, possibly through a seam. The leak is the fifth, and worst, since last year involving tanks of the same design at the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, raising concerns that contaminated water could begin leaking from storage tanks one after another.
“That’s what we fear the most. We must remain alert. We should assume that what has happened once could happen again, and prepare for more,” Nuclear Regulation Authority chairman Shunichi Tanaka told a news conference. “We are in a situation where there is no time to waste.”
This is happening in one of the most developed countries in the world, by the way. It’s highly technologically advanced. And yet:
During the meeting, officials also revealed that plant workers apparently have overlooked several signs of leaks, suggesting their twice-daily patrols were largely just a walk. They have not monitored water levels inside tanks, obviously missed a puddle forming at the bottom of the tank earlier, and kept open a valve on an anti-leakage barrier around the tanks.
TEPCO said the leaked water is believed to have mostly seeped into the ground after escaping from the barrier around the tank. It initially said the leak did not pose an immediate threat to the sea because of its distance — about 500 metres from the coastline. But TEPCO reversed that view late Wednesday and acknowledged a possible leak to the sea after detecting high radioactivity inside a gutter extending to the ocean.
The company also said the tank may have been leaking slowly for weeks through a possible flaw in its bottom. That could create extensive soil contamination and a blow to plans to release untainted underground water into the sea as part of efforts to reduce the amount of radioactive water.
It’s hard to imagine they would not be doing absolutely everything possible to ensure there is no radioactive leakage. And yet, it seems that they’re being sort of sloppy. WTH??
In the meantime:
Contaminated water that TEPCO has been unable to contain continues to enter the Pacific Ocean at a rate of hundreds of tons per day. Much of that is ground water that has mixed with untreated radioactive water at the plant.
No biggie? Well, not too bad I guess:
The watchdog also proposed at a weekly meeting Wednesday to raise the rating of the seriousness of the leak to level three, a “serious incident,” from level one, “an anomaly,” on an International Nuclear and Radiological event scale from zero to seven.
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Yeah, it’s all about terrorism
by digby
Clearly, the whole world really is a battlefield to the NSA. Even our allies are terrorist suspects:
The U.S. National Security Agency has bugged the United Nations’ New York headquarters, Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly said on Sunday in a report on U.S. spying that could further strain relations between Washington and its allies.
Citing secret U.S. documents obtained by fugitive former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel said the files showed how the United States systematically spied on other states and institutions.
Der Spiegel said the European Union and the U.N.’s Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were among those targeted by U.S. intelligence agents.
In the summer of 2012, NSA experts succeeded in getting into the U.N. video conferencing system and cracking its coding system, according one of the documents cited by Der Spiegel.
“The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!),” Der Spiegel quoted one document as saying, adding that within three weeks the number of decoded communications rose to 458 from 12.
Internal files also show the NSA spied on the EU legation in New York after it moved to new rooms in autumn 2012. Among the documents copied by Snowden from NSA computers are plans of the EU mission, its IT infrastructure and servers.
According to the documents, the NSA runs a bugging programme in more than 80 embassies and consulates worldwide called “Special Collection Service”. “The surveillance is intensive and well organised and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists,” wrote Der Spiegel.
Oh please! How can we keep the babies safe if we don’t spy on the European Union legation at the UN? It’s a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. Everyone knows that.
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