Economics, take over style

Democracy Now! recently interviewed John Perkins, author of the book “Confessions of an Economic Hit man”. The book details the systematic corporate plundering of poor countries by United States, using economics to keep Latin American countries poor by lending them more money than they can pay back. Once the interest rates spike, the United States simply demands its money back. The book highlights what G20 protesters have been saying for years, that the United States and other rich countries of the world have used their wealth against poorer nations, using economic elitism to fatten the bellies of the already obese while the majority of the world starves. In Latin America, the United States has used the economic system to strangle growth and keep disadvantaged countries out of the rapidly globalized market. John Perkins represents the point of the spear of capitalism, essentially using the system to accumulate more wealth for the richest nations of the world while ransacking countries that don’t have enough power on the economic world stage.

 

Democracy Now Interview

John Stewart: investigative journalist

John Stewart called out Sean Hannity on Tuesday for misusing video, again. This time Hannity spliced bits of health care protestors together with video of the much larger tea-party protests. The differences in the videos are easy to catch, the trees have leaves and then abruptly don’t, and the sky is sunny in one instance and cloudy in another. The Daily Show has crossed over into the media watchdog relm, catching an inaccuracy that forced Hannity to later admit, “It pains me to say: Jon Stewart was right.” John Stewart is in a position to call out some of the glaring misrepresentations at Fox News, and so the Daily Show finds itself in a more important role, both in politics and in keeping a large part of this country sane and laughing. Hannity confession here.

John Stewart video here

Violence on the home front

The attack on Fort Hood remains profoundly disturbing to me. My phone vibrated with the news on Thursday, as I pulled the short simple facts out of my pocket I felt paralyzed, unwilling to think too deeply into the events and feeling lost to ask any of the important questions. 12 Dead, 25 wounded it read. “Jesus,” I said over and over. The information wasn’t satisfying, turning my stomach as more and more facts began to bleed in. I turned to local news for any kind of direction, looking for a quick explanation to an event that remains foggy.  I suspect that most of those around the base felt the same way, lost in the wake of violence. The ironies still give me shivers, inconceivable, as if looking at the heart of absurdity.  A mental health professional that snapped. Soldiers going off to war, uncertain of survival, gunned down before they even left their home. My father, safer in a war zone than in Texas.

He is deployed to Iraq as I sit here, but last Thursday my first thoughts were with him. Could he be there? Had he gotten home early as a joke, ready to surprise my mom? The rational didn’t really strike me right away. And seeing shots of the town I graduated high school in, a small community I thought I would never have to see again, gave me a surreal lucid experience, a nightmare being played out on TV and explained by Wolf Blitzer.

The lives of those that live around the base are intertwined with violence. We could all feel it, even years ago when I graduated high school in the small town of Belton, a short 20 minute drive from Fort Hood. The rumble of artillery fire would shake my house and keep me awake late at night. The conversations in math class turned to relatives waking up screaming, victims of PTSD.  It’s hard to explain how short stories of death affect you on a daily basis. When importing violence is a local reality, the immediacy of a war thousands of miles away becomes inevitable. And the burden of the military is something that is hard to understand outside the Army community.  I can only really explain it as a hardening of the nerves. Even in New York I could feel the pull toward Texas.

Fort Hood is the largest military complex in the United States, it is home to more than 50,000 active duty soldiers and the communities around the base are economically tied to the spending power of soldiers. The great industries of the area remain prisons and consumer-soldiers. So an event as destructive as this shooting is sure to affect central Texas like no other place. These communities take the good and the bad of the base. The spiking domestic violence rates, the suicides of young soldiers, robberies, drug use. But also the pride of being a military community, the broad overarching dedication to freedom that rolls throughout the south, but especially in Bell County, Texas.

In high school I hated living in the middle of no where. I thought I had gone back in time, where the football star and his Camero got all the women. Where racism was still overt and methamphetamine destroyed the lives of some of my best friends. Where the long expanses of land, unbroken, except for the repeating strip malls along I-90 seemed to go on forever. I came to believe that those Texans never needed to leave that little area, because they could already see all the way to the end of the earth. “Why even bother. I’ve already seen it,” I imagined them saying.

I hardened to that place instantly, but after this shooting I find myself with an eerie, new sense of solidarity with the people of my former home. It remains impossible for me to make sense of it all, and yet the stories still file out. One revelation after another. All I can feel is the absurdity, the images of raw violence superimposed over my memories of Fort Hood. I think of the soldiers from the 1st Calvary Division, and all the other divisions stations there, returning from a war zone and being accepted by a building that hosted its own war, once. I think specifically of my father, who will cycle through that building in December, and what his thoughts will be, what ghosts will touch him when he steps out into the heat and the sand and the violence, not in Iraq but in the middle of Texas.

NYT Profile

Come Support the SOA Watch (more to come)

Tues. Nov. 10 Benefit Latin Dinner
to Close the School of the Americas!
Change U.S. Policy toward Latin America
http://soaw.org/

@ OASIS Dance Club
formerly “Common Ground”
by La Cocina Latina Catering
call for your reservations & tickets now!
607-273-7437

Co-sponsored by CUSLAR (Commitee on US-Latin American Relations) www.cuslar.org

Come for delicious Latin food, fun, music, & dancing,
while supporting a great cause!

3 Seatings: 6:00 pm, 7:30 pm & 9 pm

Help to close the military facility located in Fort Benning, Georgia; the SOA, now named the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is funded by U.S. taxpayers and trains hundreds of soldiers from Latin America in combat skills. Many brutal Latin American dictators who have ordered and committed brutal killings were trained in these facilities.

Send Donations to:
Cornell University,
Attention:Comittee on US Latin American Relations (CUSLAR), rm 316
Anabel Taylor Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14850
1-607-255-7293

Tickets sold @
Pizza Aroma -128 S. Cayuga St. (across library) 273-6165
Autumn Leaves Bookstore 115 The Commons 273-8239
Cornell -Durland Alternative Library in Anabelle Taylor Hall – 255-6486
CUSLAR office 4th fl. @ Anabelle Taylor Hall, Cornell  255-7293
Where? OASIS Dance Club; 1230 Danby Rd.
Ithaca NY (on right on Rt. 96-past IC)

When? Tuesday November 10, 2009
!!MARK YOUR CALENDARS!!

Tickets: $12.00 per person or $25/family rate Special! $9 student rate!
(call 273-7437 for sliding scale)

Tickets on sale (also at the door- but call ahead
so we know how much to cook.
Mary Anne Grady Flores
607-273-7437).

Menu:
Caribbean Yellow Rice (vegan)
Cuban Style Black Beans (vegan)
Garlic Marinated Roast Pork
Caribbean Spiced Roasted Chicken
Vegan Caribbean Spiced Fried Tofu
Tossed Green Salad with Home Made Cilantro Garlic Dressing
Fresh Tomato & Cilantro & Lime Salsa
Tortilla Chips

Desserts: Flan (Caramel Custard), Rum Cake and Tembleque (vegan Coconut Custard)
Beverages sold separately by Oasis Dance Club

Google pledges to make public libraries digital, legal fight heats up

Time magazine recently reported on a project started by Internet giant Google that would begin to digitize the great forgotten works of the dusty American library. The idea is revolutionary. To the lofty dreamer it opens up the possibility of discovering new works and rediscovering old jewels that have been long lost on library shelves. But it also gives us a window into the untethered power of Google as a company. The digital library has become a monster of an anti-trust case, resulting from the profit Google is sure to make from classic books that can’t be found anywhere else but the proposed Google database. Is Google screwing the authors and publishers of these works or simply bringing to light treasures that wouldn’t be found otherwise?

There are strong positions on both sides, with authors, artists, and publishers split. I’ve found that the Google database (parts of which are already online) is a tool that helped me to understand bits of journalism that I wouldn’t be able to look into otherwise. I used the database to look at a scanned copy of McClure’s magazine, an old muckraking monthly that has been mostly forgotten, for a paper I was researching. I wouldn’t have been able  to find the magazine in its entirety otherwise. I searched through Internet databases for a few hours until I found the Google library. When I stumbled on this new Google library it seemed to be a revolution, another turning of the minds made possible by the Internet. Nerds rejoice!

The trust issue never entered my mind, but I think that the idea of one company distributing works is an obviously monopoly. Although, the questions still swirl; can a for-profit company be trusted with literature, art, or any kind of individual expression? Are we fools for putting such a powerful tool in the hands of bottom-line worshipers? Either way, this database, assuming it continues, will be massive. It stands to become a great pool of information that has limitless potential. Here is an NPR radio piece that has a little more info.

Shep Smith Apologizes for not being Balanced?

Who even knows what was going on here, basically Shep Smith apologizes for a reporter that can only get an interview with the Republican candidate for governor in New Jersey. The reporter seems confused when Smith asks her when she will be interviewing the Democratic candidate. Ratings booster, or calculated company policy?

 

 

Net Neutrality, Internet Freedom Act: what do words even mean anymore?

Net neutrality seems like a pretty straight forward idea, right? Lets keep the Internet equal and make sure connection speed isn’t dependent on content or corporate influence. Who can argue with that? Apparently John McCain. In an Orwellian twist of word usage McCain has introduced the “Internet Freedom Act”. On the same day that the FCC started to move toward regulation that would keep the Internet free from corporate distortion, McCain introduced this bill that would “keep the Internet free from government control and regulation,” he said. Why is John McCain so concerned with free enterprise on the Internet? Well, he is the number one recipient of campaign contributions from telecom corporations. (Links here and here) Full FCC story from the New York Times here.

I have to wonder if our words have been distorted to a point where now they mean absolutely nothing. Words like “freedom” and patriot” are only shells of their former meaning. The “Internet Freedom Act” is a label, a Halloween mask of a man with a monster underneath. Orwell warned of a world where words have two opposite definitions, where simple ideas become tangled in bureaucratic jargon for the sole purpose of inoculating the population. And here we are. I point to the Patriot Act and now the Internet Freedom Act. Don’t they sound like great ideas?

 

John Stewart says it best here

 

Conservative Activist misquote, Blogs Perpetuate

This weekend thousands of conservative activists, independents, and anti-government paranoids flooded into Washington to protest the Obama administration and to further muddle the definition of socialism. Their numbers were impressive, and any Democrat would be foolish to shrug these protesters off as just right wing freaks, but they weren’t anywhere near the 1.5 million that the president of the organizers, Matt Kibbe, attributed to ABC. The echo chamber reproduced and the story spread, highlighting one of the big problems of bloggers, spreading false information at a speed only possible on the internet.

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