On June 30 in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, about 75 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents joined 50 county police officers in raiding the offices of Annapolis Painting Services Inc. and 15 single-family homes that authorities said were owned by the company and rented to employees. Agents arrested 50 or 51 workers from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nigeria and Panama on administrative immigration violations. Five women, including one who is pregnant, were allowed to remain free on humanitarian release pending removal proceedings because they are sole caregivers. The other 10 women and 35 or 36 men were detained. The company has more than 100 employees, county police said. [Baltimore Sun 7/1/08; Washington Post 7/1/08; Hometownannapolis.com (Capital Gazette Newspapers) 7/2/08 from AP]
Agents also seized five bank accounts, 11 vehicles and the raided homes as part of a criminal investigation into hiring and harboring unauthorized immigrants. The company’s owners were not arrested, but authorities said the investigation was continuing. [Baltimore Sun 7/1/08]
Secret report: biofuel caused food crisisInternal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive
Aditya Chakrabortty
The Guardian, Friday July 4, 2008
[This is particularly relevant given the prominent role offered bio-fuels in Obama's energy policy... and raises the question of what his actual policies would be in power.]
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated – according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.
The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil. Read the rest of this entry »
“Gotham’s latest menace, the Joker, is especially dangerous because he so clearly perceives and cannily exploits the moral rot creeping into both law enforcement and the larger society. . . otham City is a fun-house-mirror image of America, its democratic institutions crumbling and its people perched between anarchy and totalitarianism.“
As the Bush era drags on, I seem to be developing an irrational hatred of summer blockbusters, those gas-guzzling, road-hogging, radio-blasting Hummers of the entertainment business. The fact that they get worse and worse and still make tons of money doesn’t say much for the national character.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently conjured up an image of Americans flocking to the movies this summer to escape their woes, as if we were all dust bowl farmers hoping to banish the Great Depression from our thoughts with flickering images of Clark Gable and Mickey Mouse. But while our leaders are waging preemptive wars, torturing innocent people to death, tossing out habeas corpus, and gutting the Fourth Amendment, we probably don’t need to escape as much as the rest of the world needs to escape from us.
The evidence laid out in this article is detailed and outrageous. We are only publishing a few excerpts here. I am grateful to Harvard Magazine for granting permission, and i strongly encourage you to click below to read the whole piece.
by Elizabeth Gudrais (Harvard Magazine, July August 2008)
When Majid Ezzati thinks about declining life expectancy, he says, “I think of an epidemic like HIV, or I think of the collapse of a social system, like in the former Soviet Union.” But such a decline is happening right now in some parts of the United States. Between 1983 and 1999, men’s life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties, according to a recent study by Ezzati, associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues. For women, the news was even worse: life expectancy decreased in more than 900 counties—more than a quarter of the total. This means 4 percent of American men and 19 percent of American women can expect their lives to be shorter than or, at best, the same length as those of people in their home counties two decades ago.
The United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world’s longest life expectancy. It doesn’t even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Ezzati’s finding is unsettling on its face, but scholars find further cause for concern in the pattern of health disparities. Poor health is not distributed evenly across the population, but concentrated among the disadvantaged.
Disparities in health tend to fall along income lines everywhere: the poor generally get sicker and die sooner than the rich. But in the United States, the gap between the rich and the poor is far wider than in most other developed democracies, and it is getting wider. That is true both before and after taxes: the United States also does less than most other rich democracies to redistribute income from the rich to the poor.
Americans, on average, have a higher tolerance for income inequality than their European counterparts. American attitudes focus on equality of opportunity, while Europeans tend to see fairness in equal outcomes. Among Americans, differences of opinion about inequality can easily degenerate into partisan disputes over whether poor people deserve help and sympathy or should instead pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The study of inequality attempts to test inequality’s effects on society, and it is delivering findings that command both sides’ attention.
NASHVILLE, Tenn.–Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery–what we see with the “mind’s eye”–directly impacts our visual perception.
The research was published online June 26 by the journal Current Biology.
“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study, said. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”
“These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself,” Pearson and his co-authors wrote.
It is well known that a powerful perceptual experience can change the way a person sees things later. Just think of what can happen if you discover an unwanted pest in your kitchen, such as a mouse. Suddenly you see mice in every dust ball and dark corner–or think you do. Is it possible that imagining something, just once, might also change how you perceive things?
Kasama has been reporting, piece by piece, on the emerging positions of th Obama campaign — so that people can confront and debate his politics. This piece is excerpted from an article by Sarah Posner (Hat tip to L.P.’s always informative Marxmail)
1. Obama’s on Late-Term Abortion
Barack Obama set off a firestorm last week with his comment to Relevant
magazine editor Cameron Strang about abortion:
“I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to
restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict,
well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that
‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.”
Obama has been a critic of the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart upholding the
federal ban on the late-term intact dilation and extraction procedure (which
did not include an exception for the mother’s health). But by now his criticism takes place on a narrow and narrower basis — iin ways that clearly question the stand of Roe v. Wade…. and that go far from “abortion on demand.”
By January of this year, Obama took to religious news outlets to prove his
Christian credentials — and he shifted emphasis and began talking about his
support for late-term abortion bans.
He told Christianity Today that
“I think we can legitimately say — the state can legitimately say — that we
are prohibiting late-term abortions as long as there’s an exception for the
mother’s health.”
Ok, I admit it. I’m not your usual observer. When I heard that Budweiser had been bought by the Euro-capitalists InBev, I was not concerned.
I don’t care who owns the factories in the U.S. I don’t worry the U.S. heartland is being infiltrated by foreign interests. And certainly, I don’t consider Budweiser a national treasure. The truth is that it’s almost undrinkable.
But my ears perked up when I read how Budweiser’s maker, Anheuser-Busch had roots in St. Louis that went back before the Civil War. Ah, my friends, THERE is a story worth telling. And I’m going to sit back in the damp heat of this Chicago evening, sip on a couple of Fat Tires, and tell it to you, just because I hate patriotic bullshit and because I love revolution. Read the rest of this entry »
Some odd-looking fish fossils discovered in the bowels of several European museums may help solve a lingering question about evolutionary theory, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
The 50 million-year-old fossils — which have one eye near the top of their heads — help explain how flatfish such as flounder, sole and halibut developed the strange but useful trait of having both eyes on one side.
For flatfish, which lie on their sides at the bottom of the sea, this arrangement gives them the use of two watchful eyes.
But the trait has posed a problem for evolutionary biologists because no one had found any so-called transitional fossils — fossils showing intermediate steps in the evolution of this trait. Read the rest of this entry »
Pura Fé is a Native American [Tuscarora] artist who began her career as a founder of Ulali, the first Native American women’s a cappella group. In addition to this, she has a solo career. Here’s how her website describes her sound: “Her soulful voice and acoustic lap steel slide guitar, carries the ancestral message of the “Indigenous World” and the missing history that unified and separated the blood ties of Black and Indian people of the South. With a fresh new take, Pura Fe resurrects and elegantly states the common bond and the indigenous influence on the “birth of the blues”!”
This video was shot on the Tuscarora Reservation in North Carolina. Although the opening shot says “Familiar Joy”, the song is better known as “Rez Blues.”
July 24-27 the National Convention of SDS will be held at the University of Maryland.
Simply to the Point: We Want a National Student Movement.
by Freddy Bastone (CUNY Hunter SDS, shinethepath@gmail.com) Originally posted on Good Morning Revolution blog.
“He who by profession has become a slave of trivial details is the victim of bureaucracy.”
-Antonio Gramsci (Selections from Cultural Writings)
Imagine if all the boys in jail
Could get out now together
Whadda you think they’d want to say to us?
While we was being clever
-Joe Strummer (Bankrobber)
The 2008 National Convention of Students for a Democratic Society quickly approaches us as I am writing in the month of that coming convention. I am also one of a good many people who have put out a proposal for some sort of coherent national structure for SDS that goes beyond the work that is being done by the good volunteers who have kept our name relevant and let it have national importance for young people developing consciousness across this country. I, like many SDSers’ interested in building a national organization, have been engaged in this subject for about little over a year. That engagement was not just simple contemplation, but a painful but necessary struggle over our direction with fellow SDSers’. We all came to it with some clues, some thoughts, and some pretensions of what is needed to build a national student organization on the basis of egalitarianism and liberation vs. hyper-global capitalism and US Imperialism. The 2006 & 2007 National Convention served as a point of the necessary dialog and struggle in our movement about the direction that actively creates possible openings for serious systematic change. Undoubtedly the 2008 National Convention at College Park will be similar.
Electronica, in the broadest sense, has never broken through the surface of mainstream consciousness in the US, although it influenced popular artists such as U2 and Madonna. It is an amorphous term covering all sorts of synthesizer-based music, some danceable, some not. In the 1990′s it was a space where middle-brow experimentation co-existed with ecstatic [pun intended] dance forms and youth subcultures, most visibly in the form of raves. Due mainly to heavy repression, fueled by over-hyped drug hysteria, the rave scene has become largely marginalized. Mild forms of electronica have been assimilated into commercial culture in the US, while in the rest of the world it has continued grow, diversify, merge with other musical forms and transform musical boundaries.
One such subgenre of electronica, originating in the UK, dubstep has been evolving and gaining popularity over the last decade.
The important student organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is holding their National Convention from July 24th to the 27th in College Park, Maryland.
Kasama will be posting a series of articles relating to current controversies in the organization. Our aim is, as usual, not to endorse the perspectives of these articles, but to open them up for critical discussion. In particular Kasama is interested in discussing questions of how emerging student movements relate to the revolutionary movement that needs to be built.
And in this respect, a question posed directly by the developments in SDS is what makes a movement revolutionary? What is revolutionary work?
The following article, by Brian Kelly and Joshua Kahn Russell, gives a good overview of the developing controversies in SDS which look to be central to the upcoming National Convention, and give some context to the conditions in which a revolutionary politics will have to contend. This first article was first posted July 7, 2008 on Upping the Anti.
At a party recently, one of us was introduced as an organizer trying to launch the “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The person raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know anything about the new SDS,” she said, “but it makes me think of a Beatles reunion tour with none of the original members. Why would I want to see that?”
We were also skeptical of the idea at first. We knew we needed to learn from movements and organizing traditions that have come before us, and to root ourselves in history as part of moving forward. But do we really need a half-assed reunion tour or more Sixties worship? Surely, we thought, we should be building new organizations, not trying to reignite old ones. And why would we want to restart one with as fractious a history as SDS?
Lets just say so, straightforward, this is not a piece looking to defend Obama and establish how he is an American, Christian, and loves his country (probably all which is true), but here we are seeking to shine the light and expose White Supremacy as the hegemonic discourse in America. Whatever your thoughts on the Obama campaign per se, hasn’t this campaign been able to show the huge decrypt nature of this system and how a Black man and woman have to twist and turn in the wind in order to be viable for White America.
Today, the new episode of this awful series of racist events that have marked the Obama campaign is the appearance of the new issue of the New Yorker. The title cover is a satirical depiction of all the racist mongering drummed up by white racists and the media about the Obama’s, the concern that Barak Obama is a secret Muslim hiding as a Christian, that Michelle Obama is a radical black nationalist, that they give each other little gestures of black power or terrorist salutes. Google anything I have just said and you’ll find the myriad of fear mongering against Obama that is taken for legitimized discourse.
Today July 14, was quite a day for Obama’s clarifications of his stand on war and empire. Two different articles appeared in the same issue of the New York Times devoted to Obama’s views — one on Iraq, the other on Iran.
We are posting some key quotes here, but will include links to the original articles since they are worth reading carefully, for context and detail.
“Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country… As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.
If you have a cell phone, and a lot of people do, the phone company knows where you are. It has to. Otherwise it couldn’t get any phone calls to you. Your cell phone reports its position fairly often to the cell towers in its area, and the phone company keeps that information around.
That’s how the police were able to find Tanya Rider when she drove off the road. She didn’t use her cell phone, but it was on and the police were able to find out where she was before her battery died.
2. Cars have black boxes, too.
Get in an accident, tell the state trooper that you were going 35 mph in a 40-mph zone, and he or she may tap into the black box in your car to see if you’re lying. Many cars have them, and more will soon. These little devices record a host of facts about your driving: for example, how fast you were going and when you slammed on the brakes — and recovering the data doesn’t even require a search warrant.
3. Bits don’t go away.
Remember that tasteless text message you sent last month? The phone company remembers it, too. After all, text messages are “just bits”; they don’t take much space to store, so why not keep them forever, since you never know when someone will ask for them.
In June 2004, Kobe Bryant‘s attorneys gained access to the text messages of the woman who had accused him of raping her, including messages sent immediately after the encounter — and including messages to her former boyfriend.
As everyone probably knows, Jesse Jackson was overheard saying that Obama was “talking down to Black people” over Black fatherhood and religious faith, and adding that this made Jesse Jackson want to cut his nuts off.
The mainstream media jumped all over Jackson — saying he was outdated, eclipsed, wrong and spiteful.
Fox’s African American commentator Juan Williams said Jackson was expressing the politics of the past — blaming all the problems among Black people on discrimination and the government. this was typical, and gets at the political heart of this matter.
Obama was praised for being willing to blame black people for their own problems, promote “personal responsibility.” Jesse jackson, it was said, was expressing a view of the “older civil rights generation” that focused on “Black victimhood” — while Obama represented (finally) a fundamental and permanent break with that.
The press was filled with charts that showed how Black men abandon their children — leaving the home and reneging on child support payments. And that same press was devoid of any discussion of the economic changes that have swept over the lower tier of the working class (to which so many of black men have been confined). Young Black men are concentrated in a section of the economy that has been desperate to find and hold stabile work, and where wages (when they have work) have been less and less able to support the job holder (let alone a family). Reading the discussions of all this in the press, you would just think Obama had finally spoken an obvious truth, and Jackson was defending an outdated sense of self-pity.
In this discussion, let’s set aside the corrupt and pathetic figure of Jesse Jackson himself and focus on what this reveals about Obama:
In a separate thread, we have publish Michael Eric Dyson’s dissection of Barack Obama father’s day speech. Here is the text of that speech, originally posted on the Obama blog.
As prepared for delivery, Apostolic Church of God, Sunday, June 15th, 2009, Chicago, IL
Good morning. It’s good to be home on this Father’s Day with my girls, and it’s an honor to spend some time with all of you today in the house of our Lord.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus closes by saying, “Whoever hears these words of mine, and does them, shall be likened to a wise man who built his house upon a rock: the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock.” [Matthew 7: 24-25]
Here at Apostolic, you are blessed to worship in a house that has been founded on the rock of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. But it is also built on another rock, another foundation – and that rock is Bishop Arthur Brazier. In forty-eight years, he has built this congregation from just a few hundred to more than 20,000 strong – a congregation that, because of his leadership, has braved the fierce winds and heavy rains of violence and poverty; joblessness and hopelessness. Because of his work and his ministry, there are more graduates and fewer gang members in the neighborhoods surrounding this church. There are more homes and fewer homeless. There is more community and less chaos because Bishop Brazier continued the march for justice that he began by Dr. King’s side all those years ago. He is the reason this house has stood tall for half a century. And on this Father’s Day, it must make him proud to know that the man now charged with keeping its foundation strong is his son and your new pastor, Reverend Byron Brazier.
“I’m thinking to myself how marvellously civilised the US has become since the 1960s when soccer players were approached by slack jawed yokels who’d point at the lettering on their shirts and drawl: “So what’s saucer?” (true story). But then….”
by Steven Wells
[Originally published in the British guardian, thanks to the threewayfight blog for posting it.]
It’s been an odd Euro 2008 soccerfest-watching experience here in horribly sticky heatwave-hammered Philadelphia. The distractions are many. Go outside, you die. Stay inside without air-conditioning, you die. Forget to Tivo a game for the wife, you die. Then there’s the fact that the star player on the US women’s Olympic basketball team has been called a “traitor” for defecting to the Russians and that our local Jewish centre has just been daubed with swastikas, with shards of broken glass hidden in the sand in the playground.
Thankfully for Euro 2008 viewers in the US, ESPN has dropped the crew of stat-spewing incompetents who so royally screwed up the World Cup coverage (referring to “Michael Beckham” and repeatedly confusing
Austria with Australia). Unfortunately they’ve retained Tommy Smyth, an incredibly annoying fellow who uses the phrase “bulges the ole onion bag” at least once every game. And, alas, both Smyth and the imported Andy Gray have obviously been pressured to have at least one broadcastable opinion per game about the NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and the LA Lakers.
thanks to Paul L. who made this video of the IWD demonstration in LA. It gives a clear sense of a particular approach to a number of political questions.
Immigration News Briefs Vol. 11, No. 15 – July 5, 2008
