bigOfeature

ON THE HISTORY OF THE U.S. ECONOMY IN DECLINE

May 16, 2012 – 1:38 pm

If we are going to avoid a world where elites rule, then the Occupy movement must be nurtured and sustained. It’s going to be a long haul says Noam Chomsky.

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead - because victory won’t come quickly - it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s - although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today - nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world - you could see it in the business press at the time - because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself.

The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today - the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression - and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy - a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise - producing things people need or could use - to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On Banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian. The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles - what’s called the “middle class” here, the “working class” in other countries - but it was real.  And the 1960s accelerated it.

The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country… The world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat - in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: de-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn’t benefit the economy - it probably harms it and society - but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On Politics and Money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of 1 per cent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble.

Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact. Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn’t really much of an issue.

The issue is joblessness. There’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and the Precariat

For the general population, the 99 per cent in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh - and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1 per cent and even less - the .1 per cent - it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through the corruption, but it’s pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs - the Plutonomy and the rest.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function.

These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” - people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” - hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) - was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is… As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble…

If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat - in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place. In 1977, US Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won. It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce - which owned it anyway - turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it’s very serious. It not only affects people’s lives, but the economy. In that regard, here’s a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, DC, to Boston. It took two hours. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it’s operating at about the same speed it was 60 years ago when my wife and I first took it. It’s a scandal.

It could be done here as it’s been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the rust belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can’t happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke. And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted - and, in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures. It’s inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

Note: Noam Chomsky’s latest book is Occupy. The above article article was originally published by TomDispatch. It was also posted at CounterPunch.

+ + + + +

Posted in noam chomsky | No Comments »

THE PASSION OF A SEX ADDICT

May 15, 2012 – 4:31 am

Imagine a sex addict as a pilgrim on a personal Calvary, an impossible quest that can only lead to disaster, one pelvic thrust at a time. That’s Steve McQueen’s Shame for you, says Critic After Dark Noel Vera, about a film that ran afoul of the $ingapore censors.

Steve McQueen’s Shame, about Brandon, an ad executive and closet sex addict, is a fascinating passion play - ‘passion’ in the older sense, of a dramatic re-enactment of Christ’s trial, suffering, death, with Brandon as the Christ figure.

Difficult to avoid the religious overtones - McQueen practically mashes your face in it. Brandon (Michael Fassbender, McQueen’s collaborator here and in his first feature Hunger (2008)) is like a flagellant purifying his flesh for God, only it’s not a whip but his phallus he’s both wielding and mortifying at the same time (convenient, when you think about it), on and against any available woman.

As with any flagellant turned upside-down and inside-out, the pleasure (like pain) is not an end in itself, but the means - to what, exactly, is the mystery at the heart of the film. There’s a humorless fervor to Brandon, a tendency during the act of sex to see past the woman - past her clenched haunches, her heaving breasts - towards some unseen objective.

At one point McQueen gives us a series of explicit images, and the music (by Harry Escott) practically pounds into us (artfully, artfully) the idea that Brandon is a pilgrim on a personal Calvary, an impossible quest that can only lead to disaster, one pelvic thrust at a time. You get the impression that if McQueen had used unknown actors and just tilted his camera a few inches to the right or left of the shot’s focus, one might mistaken the film for something directed by Robert Bresson - back when Bresson thought there might be such a thing as a human soul worth saving.

And then - and here’s the conflict of the film - we’re given Brandon’s sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), who’s everything Brandon’s not. Where Brandon is prosperous, Sissy is homeless (she asks to stay at his apartment for a few days); where Brandon is cautiously self-contained, she is recklessly expressive; where Brandon as played by Fassbender is all hard angles and chiseled muscles (his flaccid penis being the only thing soft about him as he pads around his place naked), McQueen for a first glimpse of Sissy gives us right off a full frontal view: childlike, with tiny breasts and a slight pudginess developing around the waist.

Later Brandon comes to watch Sissy sing at a nightclub and she offers a fragile, wavering interpretation of “New York, New York” (with its lyrics about determination and success in the Big City, what song could be more inappropriate for such a tentative performance?). McQueen gives us a gigantic closeup of Mulligan’s gamin face, padded with dimples and a pair of plump cheeks, breathing into her mike: “I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep/to find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap,” and Brandon (in a similar closeup) finds he has shed a teardrop.

The irony of Sissy singing that song is big - too big, actually; McQueen’s firm grip here starts feeling a bit obvious, if not oppressive - and older brother can only sympathize. It’s a crucial moment, a turning point: that drop is possibly the first sign of empathy to be squeezed out of him onscreen.

To complicate matters McQueen adds a strong undercurrent of sexual tension between siblings. Sissy is naturally affectionate; Brandon holds her firmly, and not a little desperately, at arm’s length (he’s like a cokehead asked to safeguard a kilo of cocaine). The tension awakes unknown needs in him - the need, for one, to have a normal relationship with a woman as another person and not some sexual object, not some mere receptacle for his sperm (again, you have this strong sense of foreboding that matters will not end well).

McQueen directs in a series of long takes, framing his characters in a relentless medium shot that on occasion follows them as they move about, but usually sits down patiently to wait for the scene to resolve itself. He repeats shots over and over, of Brandon standing at the subway station like a warrior-knight waiting to ride into battle, or of Brandon pacing naked in his room, a tiger restlessly measuring the limits of his cage. From Mulligan he elicits a minor miracle; where in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) she was a rather dull young mother, here he uses her very same physical immaturity to give the film vulnerability, emotional accessibility, warmth.

Fassbender is the central consciousness of the film; his asceticism is our asceticism, his suffering our suffering, and the film is relentless in its fidelity to this idea - we only see or hear what he sees or hears, can infer only what he feels, thinks. It’s a wearying task, carrying an audience’s attention for most of a film’s running time, stretching without snapping the string of sympathy between him and the audience; to do it while being for a large part naked and performing budoir gymnastics is something of a feat.

Fassbender’s physical charisma gives the film its magnetic pull; no matter what little he does or how much he seems to want to pull his shell tighter about him your eyes are still drawn to him, you’re still invested in what he is about to do or say.

Shame largely succeeds, I feel, in what it set out to do. It startles; briefly, it even shocks. But it doesn’t unhinge you. Can’t help but think of another work about endless sex, with a wilder, far more uncompromising imagination: David Cronenberg’s adaptation of JG Ballard’s Crash (1996), about a disparate group of people who discover the erotic power of the car crash (Crazy? If you only knew). Consider a protagonist with Brandon’s relentlessness but without the spiritual anguish; a creature with an insatiable appetite for sex who just doesn’t care. Accepts his bizarre psychopathology totally, cruising the roads in search for a chance at penetration, carnal or metal or both.

Cronenberg shoots the novel with a pornographer’s unflinching eye, depicting the most bizarre sexual acts with the calm professionalism of a lab scientist recording the mating practices of a rare beetle; he has Ballard’s cold regard down perfectly, effortlessly translated to the big screen. McQueen is a genuine artist, I think, a romanticist with an ascetic’s approach - but he’s basically covering ground Cronenbeg has trod years before, and contaminated with the spunk of a more current, more unsettlingly amoral generation.

Note 1: Telegraph.co.uk reported that $ingapore censors ordered a threesome between the main character and two women to be shortened in English director McQueen’s film - and rated it suitable only for viewers 21 and above on condition the scene was edited.

A spokeswoman for distributor Cathay-Keris Films told AFP: “Mr McQueen feels that it is important for his work to be seen in the way it was intended and hence was… not agreeable to have his film be cut in any way. We respect his decision and as such this film will not be able to be released in $ingapore theatrically.”

Note 2: You can also email Noel Vera at noelbotevera@yahoo.com.

Click here for more movie reviews.

Posted in noel vera | No Comments »

THE BigO PLAIN-SPEAKING, STRAIGHT-TALKING NO B.S. CONTEST No. 16

May 12, 2012 – 4:42 am

THE RICH ARE GETTING…. RICHER

It’s unsurprising that capitalism unfettered - the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and ushered in the collapse of Euro-Communism - has led to fat cats getting even fatter. No need to look over their shoulders and worry about discredited Communism. No B.S., the rich are getting richer.

Singer-songwriter Richard Hawley, who has a new album Standing At The Sky’s Edge, figures England’s burning again. He says his new album is a metaphor for the state of modern Britain.

He says: “The government are really limiting us by closing libraries and reducing NHS funding. Kids are coming out of university £50,000 in debt and still end up flipping burgers. This is no longer a civilised society, the dignity of our sick and elderly is being taken away.”

He continued: “This has impacted on the sound and made me realise what’s important. We had to fight for those things and I just don’t want to see them taken… away. It’s pissed me off and it think it’s pissed every fucker off to be honest.”

Are we the generation that’s witnessing yet another “decline of Western Civilization”? Is money culture, the only culture left?

Note: Richard Hawley’s previous album, Truelove’s Gutter (2009), won Mojo magazine’s Album of the Year.

Your no B.S. comments will earn you a pass to free music.

==========

Click here for Contest No. 1
Click here for Contest No. 2
Click here for Contest No. 3
Click here for Contest No. 4
Click here for Contest No. 5
Click here for Contest No. 6
Click here for Contest No. 7
Click here for Contest No. 8
Click here for Contest No. 9
Click here for Contest No. 10
Click here for Contest No. 11
Click here for Contest No. 12
Click here for Contest No. 13
Click here for Contest No. 14
Click here for Contest No. 15

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments »

THE AVENGERS: WHY PIRATES FAILED TO PREVENT A BOX OFFICE RECORD

May 12, 2012 – 4:42 am

Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking US$200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage. By Ernesto of TorrentFreak.

A week before its premiere in US movie theaters, a camcorded version of The Avengers appeared online. Immediately thousands of fans jumped on the release and, according to figures collated by TorrentFreak, in the days that followed it was downloaded half a million times. While this may very well be a record for a “CAM” movie, it failed to exceed the download numbers of several other movies that were available in higher quality.

Record or not, the movie’s distributor Disney must have been terrified by this early release. However, last weekend the suits at the studio were able to breathe a sign of relief, or rather, start popping open the Champagne.

With more than US$200 million in box office revenue, The Avengers had the most successful first weekend in movie history. It broke the record set by Harry Potter last year by more than $30 million, despite the “massive” piracy.

But is this really such a big surprise? Not when you look at the numbers.

Of all the people who downloaded a pirate copy of the film about 20 per cent came from the US. This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5 per cent higher.

Not much of an impact, and even less when you consider that these “pirates” do not all count as a lost sale. We don’t think that there are many movie fans who see a low quality camcorded version of a movie as a true alternative to watching a film in a movie theater. The two are totally different experiences, and not direct competition at all.

If anything, downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances.

The same might be said for advance leaks of games. These pre-release copies are often downloaded by tens of thousands of people, but not necessarily those who refuse to pay. The people who download these buggy and sometimes hardly playable games are often curious game fanatics who tend to buy the official game when it comes out.

Downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances.

The claim that camcorded films are killing the movie industry is nonsense and spending millions of dollars on anti-camcording technologies is simply not worth it. But does this mean that piracy is not an issue for the movie industry at all? Well not so fast.

A recent study showed that the US box office is not suffering from movie piracy, but that there is a detrimental effect on international box office figures. The researchers attribute this impact to the wide release gaps, which sometimes result in a high quality DVD copy being available on pirate sites while a movie is still showing in theaters.

These high quality copies are more likely to “compete” with movie theater attendance and if a movie is not showing in local theaters at all, it definitely has the potential to impact future attendance. This is even more true for the DVD-aftermarket and VOD sales. High quality pirated copies are direct competition and can impact revenues.

The challenge for the movie industry is to make legal offerings more appealing than pirated counterparts. Of course it may not always be able to compete with “free,” but there is still a lot of ground to make up when it comes to availability and quality of legal offerings.

But in no way are camcorded copies killing the US movie industry.

Note: Visit TorrentFreak for more updates.

Posted in ernesto | No Comments »

PHIL OCHS LIVES!

May 9, 2012 – 12:24 pm

If there was a cause or an event, Phil Ochs was there in a heartbeat. Michael Simmons on the new movie of the folk singer with a conscience, Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune.

A recent study maintains that empathy has declined in young Americans over the last 30 years. My own unscientific observations tell me that us Americans as a whole don’t seem to give a damn about our fellow citizens as much as we used to.

Iraq and Afghanistan - are those dumb wars still goin’ on? Hurricane Katrina - I can’t afford a vacation to New Orleans anyway so who cares if it washes away? I ain’t gettin’ tortured at Gitmo or Bagram so why should I give a flying Blackwater? And in all fairness, it’s asking a lot of humans with a foreclosed home and a family to feed to worry about wars and disasters in the backyards of others.

The late Phil Ochs, one of the greatest singer/songwriters of the 1960s on a rarified perch with Dylan, Joni and Cohen, wasn’t a household name but he was big enough to have affected a lot of people. Director/writer Kenneth Bowser’s powerful documentary of his life is called Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune and it’ll tweak your empathy gland while breaking your heart.

Hopefully it’ll also wire and inspire the viewer to go out and demand that America live up to its self-image as a nation of people who care about others. Among the many onscreen friends and troublemakers who tout Phil’s complicated genius are Sean Penn, Paul Krassner, Ed Sanders, Van Dyke Parks, Abbie Hoffman, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Peter Yarrow, and Tom Hayden. Brother Michael Ochs (who also produced), sister Sonny, and daughter and activist Meegan Ochs provide the most personal insights.

Born in Texas, raised in Ohio, Phil fused JFK-inspired New Frontier idealism with his natural musical ability and it led him to the guitar and New York City 1962 where folk music and left-wing politics created an army of singing rebels.

Phil had a fluid, Irish tenor with a perfect vibrato and wrote prodigiously. The songs were ripped from the headlines, as they say, addressing the civil rights struggle (”Here’s To The State Of Mississippi”), Vietnam (”White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land”) and US imperialism (”Cops Of The World”).

Two of his classics - “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” and “The War Is Over” - became anthems of the anti-war movement. He also had a razor sharp sense of black humor as heard in “Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends,” his faux-upbeat examination of apathy’s victims.

If there was a cause and an event, Phil was there in a heartbeat. “Phil would turn down a commercial job for a benefit because the benefit would reach more people,” says brother Michael. We see scene after scene of the handsome, upbeat, stiff-spined troubadour singing truth to power and joyously quipping in period interviews.

A charter member of the ’60s counterculture (though not uncritical of its excesses), he co-founded the Yippies with friends Hoffman, Krassner and Sanders, Jerry Rubin and Stew Albert. The Yippies’ plan for a Festival Of Life to contrast the festival of death at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago resulted in blowback by the powers that be and while the whole world watched, Windy City coppers ran amok, beating heads in, spilling buckets of blood and mocking dissent in the greatest democracy in the world.

Like many, Phil was devastated. “I guess everybody goes through a certain stage of disillusionment and decides the world is not the sweet and fair place I always assumed and that justice would out,” reflected a bitter Phil after Chicago ‘68. “I always thought justice would out, I no longer think that by any stretch. I don’t think fairness wins anymore.”

The festival of blood along with the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were a turning point. In addition, manic depression ran in his family and can be triggered by external events. Phil’s music had already begun to turn more inward and he left orthodox folk music behind in favor of more complex melodic, harmonic and lyrical composition and production.

While he lost some fans at the time, in hindsight there are those (like me) who maintain that his later music equaled - even surpassed - his more well-known “protest” music. I hope one of the collateral rewards of this film is that Phil’s extraordinary baroque, contrapuntal latter recordings are unearthed and enjoyed.

By the dawn of the ’70s Ochs was drinking heavily, thrashing about while still trying to Pied Piper a movement that had grown in size but was losing its cohesion. (Perhaps, ironically, because it had grown.) He appeared at Carnegie Hall dressed in a gold lame suit, maintaining that the alchemy for an authentic American revolution would mix elements of Elvis and Che. (A certain subset of predictable folkie squares didn’t get it.)

He sang ’50s rock ‘n’ roll and country music and criticized the counterculture for shoving its freak flag in Middle America’s face. He theorized that in order for the left to succeed, it needed to find common ground with its more conservative fellow citizens. This insight shows immense wisdom as well as perhaps a bit of delusional folly, but at least he was asking the right questions. (Within a few years Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings would indeed bridge this cultural, if not political, gap.)

The coup de grace - pun acknowledged - was the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government by the Chilean military in collusion with the Nixon Administration and the CIA. Phil’s friend - Chilean folksinger Victor Jara - was brutally tortured in a soccer stadium and then murdered with countless other dissenters.

While Ochs had enough spirit left in him to organize a benefit for Chilean refugees that featured Dylan and others, it appears that the one-two punch of Chicago ‘68 and Chile ‘73 revealed the enormity and savagery of The Beast - the ruling class - and drained him of hope. Empathy without hope is a dark road. Despite the victories of Nixon’s ousting in ‘74 and removal of US troops from Vietnam a year later, Phil was ravaged by booze and bipolar illness and hung himself on April 9, 1976.

“Not everyone has the constitution to follow his dream,” said a friend of mine about Ochs. Trying to save the world while juggling the ups and downs of manic depression is a daunting gig, one that Phil couldn’t handle. But Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune most prominently succeeds here in 2011 - in what thus far has been The Little Century Of Horrors - because it reminds us of the urgency and nobility of empathy. It’s a remarkable chronicle of one man’s pursuit of justice through music in the 20th Century while serving as a lesson for the 21st.

Note: As leader of the band Slewfoot, Michael Simmons was dubbed “The Father Of Country Punk” by Creem magazine in the 1970s. He was an editor at the National Lampoon in the ’80s where he wrote the popular column “Drinking Tips And Other War Stories.” He won an LA Press Club Award in the ’90s for investigative journalism and has written for MOJO, LA Weekly, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, High Times, LA Times, CounterPunch, and The Progressive. Currently wrapping a solo album, Michael can be reached at guydebord@sbcglobal.net. The above article was posted at huffingtonpost.com.

Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune is available on DVD. Order your copy here.

+ + + + +

Posted in Uncategorized, michael simmons | 1 Comment »

SEX AND ZEN: THE VIRGIN YEARS

May 8, 2012 – 4:28 am

Before Michael Mak’s Sex And Zen became a cult favourite in the ’90s, there was Ho Fan’s Yu Pui Tsuen (The Carnal Prayer Mat, 1987). But without sex bomb Amy Yip, coarse humour or lesbian love affairs, Yu Pui Tsuen had to rely on the nudity and sex from his cast of relative unknowns to save the day. Stephen Tan reviews.

Scholar Yun-sheng approaches patriarch Iron Plate seeking to marry the old man’s daughter, Yuk Hsiang. Thinking that Yun-sheng is the decent sort, the old man agrees but the sex on the wedding night proves to be a painful experience for the innocent Yuk Hsiang. Undeterred, Yun-sheng shows his wife his family secret - a sex manual - after which the young couple becomes inseparable - they are constantly having sex, not only in their bedroom but in the garden, in the rock pond and on a swing.

Even with a willing and devoted sex partner and wife, Yun-sheng wants more - he wants to bed as many women as he can. On the pretext of going for the imperial exams in the capital, Yun-sheng sets off on his journey of conquest. At a roadside stall, he befriends burglar Choy, who agrees to scout for women for Yun-sheng. But first Choy tells Yun-sheng that if he wants to be a successful lover, he must have the “correct” equipment, otherwise he might as well stay at home with his wife. To achieve his aim, Yun-sheng gets a transplant for a longer penis.

Choy then introduces Yun-sheng to Mrs Kuan, who sells cloth with her burly husband. It is lust at first sight and touch for the two. Kuan feels helpless over his wife’s infidelity but before he can do anything, Yun-sheng offers to buy his wife off him.

Despite the great sex with Mrs Kuan, Yun-sheng also has his eyes on the young wife of an elderly teacher. Seeing the young man, the wife welcomes Yun-sheng’s advances and gladly has sex with him when he breaks into her room.

For Kuan, losing his wife and being paid off is a humiliating experience and he swears revenge on Yun-sheng. He goes to Yun-sheng’s home and gets employed as a gardener. Old Iron Plate is so satisfied with Kuan’s work that he even allows Kuan to marry Yuk Hsiang’s maid. But before the marriage can take place, Kuan and the maid are already having sex and the sounds of their love making drive the sex-starved Yuk Hsiang into a frenzy.

One day, while Yuk Hsiang is taking a bath, Kuan breaks into her room and the two end up having sex in the bath-tub. But their happy days come to an end when Yuk Hsiang tells Kuan that she is pregnant. They decide to run away and, on the road, Yuk Hsiang losses her baby. Kuan then tells her that he has sold her to a brothel.

Later, Yun-sheng visits the brothel but Yuk Hsiang, realising who her client is, refuses to see him. Forcing his way, Yun-sheng discovers that the brothel’s star attraction is his wife but the despondent Yuk Hsiang soon hangs herself. Realising his error, Yun-sheng becomes a monk. At the temple is Kuan, who has also become a monk.

If Ho Fan’s Yu Pui Tsuen (aka The Carnal Prayer Mat, 1987) sounds familiar, that’s because in 1991, Michael Mak remade the film and called it Sex And Zen. In fact to cash in on Sex And Zen’s success, Yu Pui Tsuen was re-released in 1996 as Sex And Zen - The Virgin Years. Strangely, it has also been listed as Yu Pui Tsuen 2. To add to the confusion, amazon.co.uk shows that Mak’s 1991 movie has also been marketed as Sex And Zen (The Virgin Years).

But Yu Pui Tsuen did not have hot sex star Amy Yip, an “expanded” though a bit jokey section on the horse penis transplant episode, or Isabelle Chow, who is into S&M and has a lesbian fling with her cousin. On the other hand, there is enough nudity and sex to justify its Category III rating.

The film opens phantasmagorically, with its colourful cavern set - like a scene from Mario Bava’s Hercules In The Haunted World - with Yun-sheng wandering among a group of nude women whom he eventually succumbs to, and even “drowns” under. It is pure theatre and a captivating sequence, only to be best by the love making scene between Yun-sheng and Mrs Kuan, set amidst a sea of trailing silken web and threads.

While these scenes show off director Ho Fan’s visuals, overall, the film is not without its shortcomings, especially when compared to Mak’s Sex And Zen. For a start, soft porn movies are not new for Ho. At Shaw Brothers, he had directed soft porn films such as Adventure In Denmark (1973), The Girl With The Long Hair (1975), Body For Sale (1976) and Innocent Lust (1976). And that’s the problem. Ho had made Yu Pui Tsuen just like a Shaw movie - for the early ’70s! But since the ’70s, Hong Kong sex films had become even more explicit, featured themes such as S&M and homosexuality and even coarser sex jokes. Next to Sex And Zen, Yu Pui Tsuen is fairly tame!

Surprisingly, the print on this KAM DVD is minus an “introductory” section that appears in the accompanying movie trailer. This is what one synopsis of the film notes: “When a young man dreams that he drowns after a night of carnal passion, he asks a Buddhist monk to translate the experience for him. The monk replies that the dream is a warning not to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh to excess, but the man ignores his advice…” The scene of the monk explaining the man’s erotic dream can be seen in the accompanying trailer but it does not carry any English subtitles.

While many of these Hong Kong sex movies, especially the ones from Shaw Brothers, have a moralistic message, they also kind of remind one of the story of the thief who stole Heaven. As he hung dying on the cross next to Jesus, a thief asked for forgiveness and gets a place in Heaven. It may be a neat summation to a life of crime but for the characters in Yu Pui Tsuen (and many such movies) who wantonly destroy innocent lives in the pursuit of sex, meditating as a monk for the rest of one’s life seems an easy way out. And that’s so prevalent in Asian movies.

And for those who follow Hong Kong movies, it’s just ironical that filmmaker Ho Fan, who acted as the chaste monk, Tripitaka, in Shaw’s Journey To The West movies, should find a second career making soft porn movies; or that Sun Chien - one of Chang Cheh’s famous Five Venoms and star of numerous Shaw’s action movies - would count the soft-porn Yu Pui Tsuen as part of his filmography.

Note: The Yu Pui Tsuen DVD (KAM) is banned in $ingapore.

Posted in stephen tan | No Comments »

A POTENT SYMBOL OF WORKER DISCONTENT

May 6, 2012 – 4:28 am

On May Day, $ingapore workers were once again reminded they have to bear the burden of low, low wages if investors are to be attracted to set up shop in $heep City. Higher wages would drive corporations elsewhere. But May Day is the symbol of workers rights. The right to a fair wage. A wage that must be equal to the high cost of living. Professor Lawrence S Wittner explains its history and relevance.

Many people might be surprised to learn that the May Day celebrations that occurred around the world on May 1 were born more than a century ago out of a struggle by American workers for the eight-hour day.

The late 19th century was a particularly hard and brutal time for working people in the United States. The rise of giant corporations fostered accelerated exploitation of workers in the interests of profit by the wealthy few.

In the new, giant factories, it was common for workers to labor from 60 to 80 hours a week. Many workers had a six-day workweek, but a seven-day workweek was the standard for steel mills, oil refineries, paper mills, and other highly mechanized plants.

The industrial accident and death rate soared to new heights - not only thanks to new, dangerous machines and the use of child labor, but because of worker exhaustion. In 1881 alone, an estimated 30,000 American railway workers were killed or injured on the job.

Gradually, plans took shape for a day of worker protests demanding the eight-hour day. And on May 1, 1886, protests erupted all across the United States, with some 340,000 workers taking part. An estimated 190,000 went out on strike.

Although popular celebrations on May 1 can be traced back to pagan times, they became connected to the lives of workers as a result of these lengthy, exhausting workdays and workweeks. In the United States, a campaign to limit the workday to eight hours picked up steam in the 1880s, thanks to its backing by the Knights of Labor (a rapidly-growing labor federation), small craft unions, and left-wing supporters of the working class.

Among working people, a popular slogan swept across the country: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” Meanwhile, the corporate titans of the era closed ranks against the eight-hour day movement, with the New York Times condemning it as “un-American.”

Gradually, plans took shape for a day of worker protests demanding the eight-hour day. And on May 1, 1886, protests erupted all across the United States, with some 340,000 workers taking part. An estimated 190,000 went out on strike. In Chicago, a center of the eight-hour day agitation, some 80,000 workers walked off the job, with most of them joining a vast parade through the city streets. At a concluding rally, the marchers were regaled with speeches condemning the exploitation of workers by big business.

Although things passed peacefully enough during the great demonstration in Chicago, soon after that the local police launched an assault on union members by gunning down locked-out workers at the nearby McCormick Harvester Plant.

When an explosion of unknown origins went off at a subsequent protest rally at the Haymarket, a large open square in the city, police also opened fire on that worker gathering, killing some and wounding hundreds of others in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre. Radical labor agitators were arrested and blamed for the bloodshed, although most of them were not present at the rally. Four of them were executed.

In 1958, Congress - anxious to undermine the significance of May Day as a time of worker protest - declared May 1 to be Loyalty Day, which thereby became an official US holiday.

Nevertheless, the march of labor was unstoppable. Although the Knights of Labor crumbled rapidly during the time of hysteria and repression that followed the Haymarket Massacre, the new American Federation of Labor vowed to continue the eight-hour day movement, and set May 1, 1890 as a day for further action.

Joining the call for May Day protests, the International Socialist Workers Congress, in 1890, helped organize May 1 parades, meetings, and rallies throughout Europe in support of the struggles of American workers. Starting in 1891, May Day demonstrations became annual events in the United States and many other countries.

Decades later, communist governments, eager to appear as champions of the working class, organized official May Day celebrations in their countries, and this, in turn, led to a falling off in support for May Day in non-communist nations. In 1958, Congress - anxious to undermine the significance of May Day as a time of worker protest - declared May 1 to be Loyalty Day, which thereby became an official US holiday.

Nonetheless, the tradition of May Day as an occasion for the display of workers’ power continued in many lands and, in the post-Cold War years, began to revive in the United States. It received a major boost on May 1, 2006, when mostly Latino immigrant groups in the United States launched massive protests and strikes against anti-immigrant legislation.

In recent decades, the drive of the wealthy to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of society has grown considerably more intense… Popular anger has grown over Wall Street impunity, huge tax breaks for the rich… and the widening gap between the falling wages of workers and the rising income of corporate executives.

And, on May 1, 2012, that tradition of protest against exploitation of workers was drawn upon by the Occupy movement, which held May Day demonstrations and rallies - often with a significant union presence - in numerous cities and towns across the United States.

Of course, the labor movement’s long and difficult campaign for the eight-hour day was won in 1938, when the Roosevelt administration - as part of its New Deal program - shepherded the Fair Labor Standards Act through Congress. This legislation made the 40-hour workweek the norm and established a minimum wage for American workers.

But, in recent decades, the drive of the wealthy to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of society has grown considerably more intense, and certainly more flagrant. Popular anger has grown over Wall Street impunity, huge tax breaks for the rich, unlimited spending in election campaigns, corporate destruction of the environment, and the widening gap between the falling wages of workers and the rising income of corporate executives. Therefore, it seems likely that the struggle for economic justice will heighten in coming years, with May Day continuing to serve as a potent symbol of worker discontent.

Note: Lawrence S. Wittner is professor of history emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is “Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual” (University of Tennessee Press). The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

+ + + + +

Posted in lawrence s wittner | No Comments »

TRIALS WITHOUT CRIMES OR EVIDENCE

May 2, 2012 – 12:33 pm

As the government rots, so does the United States of America. That’s what happens when the US uses secret evidence to lock up detainees and where no one is held accountable anymore. By Paul Craig Roberts.

Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in providing the facts of the US government’s illegal abuse of “detainees,” against whom no evidence exists. In an effort to create evidence, the US government has illegally resorted to torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea bargains, and false testimony against others in order to escape further torture.

For these reasons, in Anglo-American law self-incrimination secured through torture has been impermissible evidence for centuries. So also has been secret evidence withheld from the accused and his attorney. Secret evidence cannot be confronted. Secret evidence is distrusted as made-up in order to convict the innocent. The evidence is secret because it cannot stand the light of day.

The US government relies on secret evidence in its cases against alleged terrorists, claiming that national security would be threatened if the evidence were revealed. This is abject nonsense. It is an absurd claim that presenting evidence against a terrorist jeopardizes the national security of the United States.

To the contrary, not presenting evidence jeopardizes the security of each and every one of us. Once the government can convict defendants on the basis of secret evidence, even the concept of a fair trial will disappear. Fair trials are already history, but the concept lingers.

Secret evidence murders the concept of a fair trial. It murders justice and the rule of law. Secret evidence means anyone can be convicted of anything. As in Kafka’s The Trial, people will cease to know the crimes for which they are being tried and convicted.

This extraordinary development in Anglo-American law, a development demanded by the unaccountable Bush/Obama Regime, has not resulted in impeachment proceedings; nor has it caused an uproar from Congress, the federal courts, the presstitute media, law schools, constitutional scholars, and bar associations.

Having bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory, Americans just want someone to pay. They don’t care who as long as someone pays. To accommodate this desire, the government has produced some “high value detainees” with Arab or Muslim names.

But instead of bringing these alleged malefactors to trial and presenting evidence against them, the government has kept them in torture dungeons for years trying to create through the application of pain and psychological breakdown guilt by self-incrimination in order to create a case against them.

The government has been unsuccessful and has nothing that it can bring to a real court. So the Bush/Obama Regime created and recreated “military tribunals” to lend “national security” credence to the absolute need that non-existent evidence be kept secret.

Andy Worthington in his numerous reports does a good job in providing the history of the detainees and their treatment. He deserves our commendation and support. But what I want to do is to ask some questions, not of Worthington, but about the idea that the US is under terrorist threat.

By this September, 9/11 will be 11 years ago. Yet despite the War on Terror, the loss of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, an expenditure of trillions of dollars on numerous wars, violations of US and international laws against torture, and so forth, no one has been held accountable. Neither the perpetrators nor those whom the perpetrators outwitted, assuming that they are different people, have been held accountable. Going on 11 years and no trials of villains or chastisement of negligent public officials. This is remarkable.

The government’s account of 9/11 implies massive failure of all US security and intelligence agencies along with those of our NATO puppets and Israel’s Mossad.

The government’s official line also implies the failure of the National Security Council, NORAD and the US Air Force, Air Traffic Control, Airport Security four times in one hour on the same morning. It implies the failure of the President, the Vice President, the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defense.

Many on the left and also libertarians find this apparent failure of the centralized and oppressive government so hopeful that they cling to the official “government failure” explanation of 9/11. However, such massive failure is simply unbelievable. How in the world could the US have survived the cold war with the Soviets if the US government were so totally incompetent?

If we attribute superhero powers to the 19 alleged hijackers, powers in excess of V’s in V For Vendetta or James Bond’s or Captain Marvel’s, and assume that these young terrorists, primarily Saudi Arabians, outwitted Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Tony Blair, along with the CIA, FBI, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, etc., one would have expected for the President, Congress, and the media to call for heads to roll.

By this September, 9/11 will be 11 years ago… Going on 11 years and no trials of villains or chastisement of negligent public officials. This is remarkable.

No more humiliating affront has ever been suffered by a major power than the US suffered on 9/11. Yet, absolutely no one, not even some lowly traffic controller, was scapegoated and held accountable for what is considered to be the most extraordinarily successful terrorist attack in human history, an attack so successful that it implies total negligence across the totality of the US government and that of all its allies.

This just doesn’t smell right. Total failure and no accountability. The most expensively funded security apparatus the world has ever known defeated by a handful of Saudi Arabians. How can anyone in the CIA, FBI, NSA, NORAD, and National Security Council hold up their heads? What a disgraced bunch of jerks and incompetents.

What do we need them for?

Consider the alleged hijackers. Despite allegedly being caught off guard by the 9/11 attacks, the FBI was soon able to identify the 19 hijackers despite the fact that apparently none of the alleged hijackers’ names are on the passenger lists of the airliners that they allegedly hijacked.

How did 19 passengers get on airplanes in the US without being on the passenger lists?

I do not personally know if the alleged hijackers were on the four airliners. Moreover, defenders of the official 9/11 story claim that the passenger lists released to the public were “victims lists,” not passenger lists, because the names of the hijackers were withheld and only released some four years later after 9/11 researchers had had years in which to confuse victims lists with passenger lists. This seems an odd explanation.

Why encourage public misinformation for years by withholding the passenger lists and issuing victims lists in their place? It cannot have been to keep the hijackers’ names a secret as the FBI released a list of the hijackers several days after 9/11. Even more puzzling, if the hijackers’ names were on the airline passenger lists, why did it take the FBI several days to confirm the names and numbers of hijackers?

Researchers have found contradictions in the FBI’s accounts of the passenger lists with the FBI adding and subtracting names from its various lists and some names being misspelled, indicating possibly that the FBI doesn’t really know who the person is. The authenticity of the passenger lists that were finally released in 2005 is contested, and the list apparently was not presented as evidence by the FBI in the Moussaoui trial in 2006.

David Ray Griffin has extensively researched the 9/11 story. In one of his books, 9/11 Ten Years Later, Griffin writes: “Although the FBI claimed that it had received flight manifests from the airlines by the morning of 9/11, the ‘manifests’ that appeared in 2005 had names that were not known to the FBI until a day or more after 9/11. These 2005 ‘manifests,’ therefore, could not have been the original manifests for the four 9/11 flights.”

The airlines themselves have not been forthcoming. We are left with the mystery of why simple and straightforward evidence, such as a list of passengers, was withheld for years and mired in secrecy and controversy.

We have the additional problem that the BBC and subsequently other news organizations established that six or seven of the alleged hijackers on the FBI’s list are alive and well and have never been part of any terrorist plot.

These points are not even a beginning of the voluminous reasons that the government’s 9/11 story looks very thin.

But the American public, being throughly plugged into the Matrix, are not suspicious of the government’s thin story. Instead, they are suspicious of the facts and of those experts who are suspicious of the government’s story. Architects, engineers, scientists, first responders, pilots, and former public officials who raise objections to the official story are written off as conspiracy theorists.

Why does an ignorant American public think it knows more than experts? Why do Americans believe a government that told them the intentional lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction despite the fact that the weapons inspectors reported to President Bush that Hussein had no such weapons? And now we see the same thing all over again with the alleged, but non-existent, Iranian nukes.

As Frantz Fanon wrote, the power of cognitive dissonance is extreme. It keeps people comfortable and safe from threatening information. Most Americans find the government’s lies preferable to the truth. They don’t want to be unplugged from the Matrix. The truth is too uncomfortable for emotionally and mentally weak Americans.

Worthington focuses on the harm being done to detainees. They have been abused for much of their lives. Their innocence or guilt cannot be established because the evidence is compromised by torture, self-incrimination, and coerced testimony against others. They stand convicted by the government’s accusation alone. These are real wrongs, and Worthington is correct to emphasize them.

In contrast, my focus is on the harm to America, on the harm to truth and truth’s power, on the harm to the rule of law and accountability to the people of the government and its agencies, on the harm to the moral fabric of the US government and to liberty in the United States.

As the adage goes, a fish rots from the head. As the government rots, so does the United States of America.

Note: Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Click here to support his work. The above article was also posted at Information Clearing House.

+ + + + +

Posted in paul craig roberts | No Comments »

DEFORMED IN THE USA

April 30, 2012 – 7:15 pm

Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution from the 2010 oilrig explosion believed to be the likely cause. By Dahr Jamail of Al Jazeera.

“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera in New Orleans, LA. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010. Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp - and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

Eyeless shrimp

Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp. “At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added. “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes… they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”

On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.

Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.

“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds and, so far, the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”

While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”. “We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added. Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.

Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within… they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.

Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.

“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.” Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.

“I’ve never seen this,” she said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities. Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.

BP’s chemicals?

“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor, told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic - able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus - and carcinogenic.

Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.

Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.

“Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline,” Subra told Al Jazeera. “We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation.”

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs “are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned”.

“The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments,” explained Cowan. “There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome.”

The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan’s: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them.

“I asked a NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it’s one tenth of 1 per cent,” Cowan said. “Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we’ve seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill.”

“What we think is that it’s attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor,” Cowan said. “There’s no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Official response

Questions raised by Al Jazeera’s investigation remain largely unanswered.

Al Jazeera contacted the office of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who provided a statement that said the state continues to test its waters for oil and dispersants, and that it is testing for PAHs.

“Gulf seafood has consistently tested lower than the safety thresholds established by the FDA for the levels of oil and dispersant contamination that would pose a risk to human health,” the statement reads. “Louisiana seafood continues to go through extensive testing to ensure that seafood is safe for human consumption. More than 3,000 composite samples of seafood, sediment and water have been tested in Louisiana since the start of the spill.”

At the federal government level, the Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency - both federal agencies which have powers in the this area - insisted Al Jazeera talk with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NOAA won’t comment to the media because its involvement in collecting information for an ongoing lawsuit against BP.

BP refused Al Jazeera’s request to comment on this issue for a television interview, but provided a statement that read:

“Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world, and, according to the FDA and NOAA, it is as safe now as it was before the accident.”

BP claims that fish lesions are common, and that prior to the Deepwater Horizon accident there was documented evidence of lesions in the Gulf of Mexico caused by parasites and other agents.

The oil giant added:

“As part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, which is led by state and federal trustees, we are investigating the extent of injury to natural resources due to the accident.

“BP is funding multiple lines of scientific investigation to evaluate potential damage to fish, and these include: extensive seafood testing programs by the Gulf states; fish population monitoring conducted by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Auburn University and others; habitat and water quality monitoring by NOAA; and toxicity tests on regional species. The state and federal Trustees will complete an injury assessment and the need for environmental restoration will be determined.”

Before and after

But evidence of ongoing contamination continues to mount.

Crustacean biologist Darryl Felder, in the Department of Biology with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is in a unique position.

Felder has been monitoring the vicinity of BP’s blowout Macondo well both before and after the oil disaster began, because, as he told Al Jazeera, “the National Science Foundation was interested in these areas that are vulnerable due to all the drilling”.

“So we have before and after samples to compare to,” he added. “We have found seafood with lesions, missing appendages, and other abnormalities.”

Felder also has samples of inshore crabs with lesions. “Right here in Grand Isle we see lesions that are eroding down through their shell. We just got these samples last Thursday and are studying them now, because we have no idea what else to link this to as far as a natural event.”

According to Felder, there is an even higher incidence of shell disease with crabs in deeper waters.

“My fear is that these prior incidents of lesions might be traceable to microbes, and my questions are, did we alter microbial populations in the vicinity of the well by introducing this massive amount of petroleum and in so doing cause microbes to attack things other than oil?”

One hypothesis he has is that the waxy coatings around crab shells are being impaired by anthropogenic chemicals or microbes resulting from such chemicals.

“You create a site where a lesion can occur, and microbes attack. We see them with big black lesions, around where their appendages fall off, and all that is left is a big black ring.”

Felder added that his team is continuing to document the incidents: “And from what we can tell, there is a far higher incidence we’re finding after the spill.”

“We are also seeing much lower diversity of crustaceans,” he said. “We don’t have the same number of species as we did before [the spill].”

Felder has tested his samples for oil, but not found many cases where hydrocarbon traces tested positive. Instead, he believes what he is seeing in the deepwater around BP’s well is caused from the “huge amount” of drilling mud used during the effort to stop the gushing well.

“I was collecting deepwater shrimp with lesions on the side of their carapace. Under the lesions, the gills were black. The organ that propels the water through the gills, it too was jet-black. That impairs respiratory ability, and has a negative effect on them. It wasn’t hydrocarbons, but is largely manganese precipitates, which is really odd. There was a tremendous amount of drilling mud pumped out with Macondo, so this could be a link.”

Some drilling mud and oil well cement slurries used on oil extraction rigs contains up to 90 per cent by weight of manganomanganic (manganese) oxide particles.

Felder is also finding “odd staining” of animals that burrow into the mud that cause stain rings, and said: “It is consistently mineral deposits, possibly from microbial populations in [overly] high concentrations.”

A direct link

Dr Andrew Whitehead, an associate professor of biology at Louisiana State University, co-authored the report Genomic and physiological footprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on resident marsh fishes that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2011.

Whitehead’s work is of critical importance, as it shows a direct link between BP’s oil and the negative impacts on the Gulf’s food web evidenced by studies on killifish before, during and after the oil disaster.

“What we found is a very clear, genome-wide signal, a very clear signal of exposure to the toxic components of oil that coincided with the timing and the locations of the oil,” Whitehead told Al Jazeera during an interview in his lab.

According to Whitehead, the killifish is an important indicator species because they are the most abundant fish in the marshes, and are known to be the most important forage animal in their communities.

“That means that most of the large fish that we like to eat and that these are important fisheries for, actually feed on the killifish,” he explained. “So if there were to be a big impact on those animals, then there would probably be a cascading effect throughout the food web. I can’t think of a worse animal to knock out of the food chain than the killifish.”

But we may well be witnessing the beginnings of this worst-case scenario.

Whitehead is predicting that there could be reproductive impacts on the fish, and since the killifish is a “keystone” species in the food web of the marsh, “Impacts on those species are more than likely going to propagate out and effect other species. What this shows is a very direct link from exposure to DWH oil and a clear biological effect. And a clear biological effect that could translate to population level long-term consequences.”

Back on shore, troubled by what he had been seeing, Keath Ladner met with officials from the US Food and Drug Administration and asked them to promise that the government would protect him from litigation if someone was made sick from eating his seafood.

“They wouldn’t do it,” he said.

“I’m worried about the entire seafood industry of the Gulf being on the way out,” he added grimly.

‘Tar balls in their crab traps’

Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, has “great concern” about the hundreds of dolphin deaths he has seen in the region since BP’s disaster began, which he feels are likely directly related to the BP oil disaster.

“Adult dolphins’ systems are picking up whatever is in the system out there, and we know the oil is out there and working its way up the food chain through the food web - and dolphins are at the top of that food chain.”

Cake explained: “The chemicals then move into their lipids, fat, and then when they are pregnant, their young rely on this fat, and so it’s no wonder dolphins are having developmental issues and still births.”

Cake, who lives in Mississippi, added: “It has been more than 33 years since the 1979 Ixtoc-1 oil disaster in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche, and the oysters, clams, and mangrove forests have still not recovered in their oiled habitats in seaside estuaries of the Yucatan Peninsula. It has been 23 years since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska, and the herring fishery that failed in the wake of that disaster has still not returned.”

Cake believes we are still in the short-term impact stage of BP’s oil disaster.

“I will not be alive to see the Gulf of Mexico recover,” said Cake, who is 72 years old. “Without funding and serious commitment, these things will not come back to pre-April 2010 levels for decades.”

The physical signs of the disaster continue.

“We’re continuing to pull up oil in our nets,” Rooks said. “Think about losing everything that makes you happy, because that is exactly what happens when someone spills oil and sprays dispersants on it. People who live here know better than to swim in or eat what comes out of our waters.”

Khuns and her husband told Al Jazeera that fishermen continue to regularly find tar balls in their crab traps, and hundreds of pounds of tar balls continue to be found on beaches across the region on a daily basis.

Meanwhile Cowan continues his work, and remains concerned about what he is finding.

“We’ve also seen a decrease in biodiversity in fisheries in certain areas. We believe we are now seeing another outbreak of incidence increasing, and this makes sense, since waters are starting to warm again, so bacterial infections are really starting to take off again. We think this is a problem that will persist for as long as the oil is stored on the seafloor.”

Felder wants to continue his studies, but now is up against insufficient funding.

Regarding his funding, Cowan told Al Jazeera: “We are up against social and economic challenges that hamper our ability to get our information out, so the politics have been as daunting as the problem [we are studying] itself. But my funding is not coming from a source that requires me to be quiet.”

Note: Follow Dahr Jamail on Twitter: @DahrJamail.

Read more about the scientists in this article, and their findings:

Dr Darryl Felder, Department of Biology, University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Runs a research lab that studies the biology of marine crustaceans. Dr Felder has been monitoring the seafloor in the vicinity of BP’s blow-out Macondo oil-well both before and after the oil disaster began. He was studying samples from the seafloor in the Macondo area pre-spill via funding from the National Science Foundation, which provided him a grant to log the effects of all the drilling in the area. His funding now comes from the Gulf Research Initiative (GRI), which is funded by BP. Read his full biography here.

Dr Jim Cowan with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences has been studying Gulf seafood, specifically red snapper, for more than 20 years. Funding is through the State of Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Read his full biography here.

Dr Andrew Whitehead, LSU, his lab conducts experiments and studies on Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics. He recently published “Genomic and physiological footprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on resident marsh fishes” in the National Academy of Sciences. Much of his funding also comes from the Gulf Research Initiative. Read his full biography here.

Brief summary of scientists’ findings/studies:

Felder: Studies carried out from January 2010 to present in BP’s Macondo well area. Found abnormalities in shrimp post-spill, whereas pre-spill found none.

Cowan: Studies carried out from Nov 2010-present, from west Louisiana to west Florida, from coast to 250km out. Found lesions/sores/infections in 20 species of fish, as many as 50 per cent fish in some samples impacted. Pre spill levels were 1/10 1 per cent of fish.

Whitehead: Species such as the Gulf Killifish, in and around the Gulf of Mexico, will continue to be subject to negative effects of the BP oil spill disaster of 2010. The Killifish, which researchers consider a good indicator of water quality in the Gulf of Mexico, is showing signs that the oil spill is having a negative impact on its health. Tracked killifish for the first four months after spill across oil-impacted areas of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Posted in dahr jamail | No Comments »

THE RAPPER HEADPHONE CONSPIRACY

April 27, 2012 – 12:09 pm

Instead of the ear plugs that many music listeners grew up with and consider as standard earphones, the new rage is the over-exemplified use of cans, or headphone with the over-compensating design, or what Jason England of New Rising Media calls, The Rapper Headphone Conspiracy.

Allow me to propose a scenario to you.You purchase an iPod and begin listening to music through the earphones that come as standard with the product. Now that the minimalist white design isn’t such a fashion statement anymore, it’s lifted the veil on a search for audio quality, which is still driven by looks; but under a different rule to before: bigger is better.

No this isn’t an intended double entendrè for rambunctiously promiscuous females, it’s a trend that returns us to the use of cans. Over-exemplified headphones of the on-ear variety, with an over-compensating design ethic. Granted other smaller profile, in-ear models are on offer; but there is only one set of headphones that the subsequent rapper usually poses with in promotional photography.

This took Dr. Dre to the length and breadth of audiophile superstardom when his name was used for a branded series of headphones by Monster, simply dubbed “Beats by Dre.” This warranted an overblown design, a jaw dropping price and, to take ‘Steve Jobs’ terminology, a reality distortion field surrounding these bass-heavy headphones being the best sound quality that money can buy. Although these could also be the unquestionable demise of the high-end headphone market.

Here is where the conspiracy begins.

Quoting from Dre himself:

People aren’t hearing all the music.

Artists and producers work hard in the studio perfecting their sound. But people can’t really hear it with normal headphones. Most headphones can’t handle the bass, the detail, the dynamics. Bottom line, the music doesn’t move you.

With Beats, people are going to hear what the artists hear, and listen to the music the way they should: the way I do.

Just a quick, picky thing: you won’t hear ‘what the artists hear,’ as they’ll be embracing the uncompressed version on the recording desk, which when mixed together (before mastering) will give a far superior sound before being turned into whichever form of digitally compressed file you take your music nowadays. So Beats or no Beats, this is technically incorrect.

The frequency response of their original (and most promoted) headphones, the ‘Studio,’ is what you’d expect from most headphones of this size on the market: 20-20,000Hz; but with the use of ‘advanced materials’ to deliver undistorted highs and rich lows. They have a 115db dynamic range, and a respectable (but not the biggest) 40mm driver size. Of course, this may be all good quantitative statistics. However, we must also focus on the qualitative, because audio is something much more of a finely-tuned judgement, the same way that pixels don’t necessarily define the quality of a camera’s photograph. The sum of its parts.

For the Beats Studio, and many other headphones branded by rappers that match this product, I’m not sure how incorporated into the R&D and building process they were; but the bass exists far too much within the context of the sound. It swaps into the mid-range, the active noise cancellation offers a hiss that when you hear it never disappears, and there are just simply other headphones that cost less, yet have a similar or better sound signature.

The textured sound of these are next-to indistinguishable with a pair of Sennheiser HD 419s. They even manage to implement the same over-quantified bass that the Beats and many more love; but that’s where the conspiracy lies.

The on-ear, closed back headphones of old were celebrated by sound enthusiasts and constructed for that very purpose: providing a thoroughbred set of audio values that were simply unobtainable elsewhere. Now, however, in partnership with a rapper, we now have a set of bass-heavy, hip-hop reliant, over-visually branded and fashioned, over-priced cans that are supposed to be the representation of the ‘high-end’ market, when forty quid can get audiophiles the same quality.

And now that 50 Cent, Jay-Z and, most recently, Ludacris have entered the Rapper Headphone game, it seems that this is the final kiss of death heard all over the world through a pair of headphones valued close to £300. That is until Vanilla Ice has a go…

Note: Jason England is the Editor-in-Chief of “nerd journalism” site, New Rising Media, where they write about social media, technology, music, movies and games to anyone who’s interested.

+ + + + +

Posted in jason england | 2 Comments »