COLUMN FROM GEOV
PARRISH: Bombs away: Leaving Omnicide to the Free Market -- May 30,
2002
Suzanne's comments: Oh God, spare us. Geov is eloquent here about our folly. "[June
12] is the expiration of the six-month's notice...of the 1973 Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty. Ever since (literally) taking office, Bush has been
insisting, much to the slack-jawed disbelief of the rest of the world, that the
ABM Treaty should be discarded entirely as an outmoded relic that no longer
serves either the security needs or the technological developments of the 21st
Century. It would be far more accurate to say that the ABM Treaty does not serve
the financial interests of U.S. military contractors or the global conquest
fantasies of penthouse warriors like Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney. This prospect of
having the world's dominant military power walking away from limits on arms
control has left nuclear proliferation experts aghast."
Other quotes drawn from the
column:
Their logic has little to do with American security and everything to do
with the free market — namely, the application of capitalist theory to weapons
of mass destruction. America wants a monopoly, just as it wanted an A-bomb
monopoly after World War II. The assumption is that (particularly with
space-based weapons) the United States can keep potentially hostile countries
out of space entirely, thereby acquiring complete global military dominance.
(And this includes, not incidentally, selling a lot of the component technology
and hardware to lesser militaries around the world in the bargain.)
...what, in the wake of the United States' abandonment of the ABM
Treaty, the treaty banning weapons in outer space, and various others, will be
the simplest and most effective "defense"? Why, embracing whatever sort of
weapons of mass destruction that warrior can lay his hands on — nuclear,
chemical, biological, or others yet unimagined. It's open season. This creates a
feedback loop, justifying an infinite U.S. war on "terrorists" and "terror
states" (such states being anyone who might use against us the same sorts of
weapons we'd use against them)...
The calculations...seem to add up
threefold: first, that the United States will be so dominant militarily that it
can keep a lid on everyone, everywhere in the world, at all times, under all
circumstances; second, that any human costs incurred in the process (say, a few
million dead here and there) are well worth the resulting profits; and third,
that this will be seen as so inevitable that most Americans won't object and
nobody else's opinions will matter...
With open talk of American
development and casual battlefield use of "tactical" nukes, newly aggressive
U.S. military deployment around the world, and the lingering image of a
comparatively low-tech tragedy that killed a fraction of the number of people
such weapons can destroy, you'd think that fewer people would think George W.
Bush was stupid and more people would think he was clinically insane.
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COLUMN FROM ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Did The
Drug War Claim Another 3,056 Casualties On 9-11? -- June 3,
2002
Suzanne's comments: I keep feeling immense gratitude for how Arianna cuts through the
spin we're in to present us with clear pictures of what's going on in the
bureaucratic maze dominated by short term thinking and individual self-interest.
This is such an astute piece, which exposes the sexy underbelly of the
unwinnable drug war, to which we have sacrificed the less splashy-with-arrests
reality of what we should have been doing -- and must switch to doing now -- to
combat the threat of terrorism. "Director Robert Mueller seemed to consider the
FBI's tragedy of errors a question of flawed management flow charts, nothing
that a rejiggered PowerPoint presentation couldn't fix. But there was a much
more fundamental problem plaguing the bureau before Sept. 11. And it wasn't one
of office politics, but of office-wide priorities. Namely, the agency's
crippling addiction to America's war on drugs."
Other quotes drawn from the column:
Counterterrorism units were treated like the bureau's
ugly stepchildren, looked down upon by FBI management because they weren't
making the kind of high-profile arrests that spruce up a supervisor's resume and
make the evening news. Let's face it, canvassing flight schools in search of
suspicious students is nowhere near as sexy as one of those big drug busts with
the bags of coke or bales of pot piled high for the cameras...
And it
wasn't just the FBI. This Drug War Uber-Alles mindset infected the entire law
enforcement community, starting at the top. "I want to escalate the war on
drugs," said Attorney General John Ashcroft in his first interview after being
nominated for the post. "I want to renew it. I want to refresh it."
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Sent in by
Listmember Arjuna DaSilva:
But by far the most
encouraging event of the week was Peace Now's rally last night [May 11] in
Tel-Aviv, as some 100,000 Israelis turned out to demand, "Get Out of the
Territories Now!" This was the largest rally since the al-Aqsa Intifada began 20
months ago. (In fact, by the end of the rally, Peace Now announced that 150,000
were in attendance.)
The media have already begun to minimize it -
saying there were 'only' 60,000 or that many people showed up, but were not
enthusiastic. This is not true. Those of us who attended can celebrate what we
saw with our own eyes - Rabin Square, that huge plaza in Tel Aviv where Rabin
spoke his final public words before being assassinated - was filled to
overflowing with people from all corners of Israel who came to shout "Enough!"
about where the Sharon-Peres leadership is taking us - deeper into tragedy and
further than ever from peace...
And several emotional highlights (at
least for me): Yaffa Yarkoni, the singer roundly condemned by the media and
others for criticizing the army's behavior and supporting the refuseniks,
received an ovation when she appeared and sang...
Last night's
demonstration was critical in terms of affecting a broad swath of public
opinion. This effort must be reinforced by actions throughout the world, as well
as locally, by Israeli and Palestinian allies of peace. The occupation can - and
will - be stopped.
At-Home with Gila Svirsky -- Jerusalem, 12 May
2002 -- Subject: Tipping Point?
http://www.joannestle.com/livingrm/gila/gila020512tippingpoint.html
Also from
Arjuna. This is from an open
letter to Shimon Peres, 1/24/02,
from a former aide, asking him to
decry the Israeli government for "the evil
we are perpetrating with our own hands."
You have imprisoned an entire people for
over a year with a degree of cruelty unprecedented in the history of the Israeli
occupation. Your government is trampling three million people, leaving them with
no semblance of normal life. No going to the market, no going to work, no going
to school, no visiting a sick uncle. Nothing. No going anywhere, and no coming
back from anywhere. No day or night. Danger lurks everywhere, and everywhere
there is another checkpoint, choking off life...
[Palestine] has had its
fill of suffering, from the Nakba in 1948, through the 1967 occupation and the
siege of 2002, and it wants exactly the same things that Israelis want for
themselves - a little quiet, a little security and a drop of national pride. To
a man, this entire people now wakes up each morning to a gaping abyss of
despair, unemployment and deprivation - now with tanks parked at the end of the
street, too...we have a prime minister who only wants to occupy, to avenge, to
kill, to expel, to demolish and to uproot and he has no other plan in mind.
An Open Letter to Shimon Peres for Ha'aretz
Daily
Gideon Levy
http://www.palestine-pmc.com/press/press-30-1-2002.html
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FIVE STAR PIECE: The Fake
Persuaders, George Minibiot -- May 14, 2002
Suzanne's comments: This has
me agog. That the Internet could be used so deviously is testimony to the
supra-selfish streak that runs through humanity and makes for companies like
Enron, with a corporate culture where so many individuals are complicit. That is
scary. Remember the science journal, "Nature," for the first time had to retract
a paper about genetically modified crops fertilizing other fields? Well, just
look at how Monsanto and The Bivings Group, that specializes in "internet
lobbying" -- read "internet deception" -- engineered the campaign that got the
retraction. This is a heads up piece to alert us to how shrewd deceptions can be
in this brave new cyberworld. "Sometimes...real people have no idea that they
are being managed by fake ones."
Quotes drawn from the piece:
The most effective marketing worms its way into our consciousness,
leaving intact the perception that we have reached our opinions and made our
choices independently. As old as humankind itself, over the past few years this
approach has been refined, with the help of the internet, into a technique
called "viral marketing"...
Messages purporting to
come from disinterested punters are planted on listservers at critical moments,
disseminating misleading information...a PR firm contracted to the biotech
company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping
scientific discourse. An article on its website, entitled "Viral
Marketing: How to Infect the World," warns that "there are some campaigns where
it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your
organisation is directly involved...
On November 29
last year, two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley published a
paper in Nature magazine, which claimed that native maize in Mexico had
been contaminated, across vast distances, by GM pollen. The paper was a disaster
for the biotech companies seeking to persuade Mexico, Brazil and the European
Union to lift their embargos on GM crops...
On the day the paper was
published, messages started to appear on a biotechnology listserver used by more
than 3,000 scientists, called AgBioWorld...messages from Murphy and Smetacek
stimulated hundreds of others, some of which repeated or embellished the
accusations they had made...the pressure on Nature was so severe that
its editor did something unparalleled in its 133-year history: last month he
published...a retraction in which he wrote that their research should never have
been published...
"Sometimes," Bivings boasts, "we win
awards. Sometimes only the client knows the precise role we played." Sometimes,
in other words, real people have no idea that they are being managed by fake
ones.
FIVE STAR PIECE: Conspiracies Or
Institutions: 9-11 and Beyond, Stephen R. Shalom and Michael Albert -- June
2, 2002
Suzanne's comments: This is
the last part of an encyclopedic rundown of all you'd ever want to know about
conspiracy theorizing and its appeal to progressives. I think this is an
important sobering influence that will mitigate against what I think is an
unfortunate tendency. After years of grasping at explanations myself for my
aversion to this practice, I am relieved at finding such a clear rundown of a
position I agree with. It's not that any particular horror story couldn't be
true, but something beyond that, where there is this huge band of surging
conspiracy energy that fills my emails and the minds of many people who dwell on
these things. I think we by and large have better things to do, and my hat's off
to Stephen R. Shalom and Michael Albert for this first rate explanation of why
that's so.
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