Socrates Jesus Denisovich

The role of individuals in determining the course and effectiveness of social movements is, I believe, enormously overstated.  It’s convenient to conflate those who come to be identified as the leaders of group action with the group or the action themselves, but for every August Spies, Rebecca Edelsohn, or Big Bill Haywood in the history of American dissidence, there were countless others, faceless workers and sufferers, who not only shaped movements but, if they were to have any lasting effect, created a living organism that could not be simply steered by those at the front of the throng.  The phenomenon extends to what I’d call the anti-social movements:  e.g., Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan et al. should be thought of not as initiators or creators of what flowed from their positions of power but as of mere expressions of the narrow, largely similar, corporate and institutional interests that they served and were served by.  All that said, sometimes specific persons do do something of overwhelming significance.  Julian Assange will likely go down in the history books – not the ones that the victors write, of course – as the most important political figure of his generation.

I am not going to bother making the case for why Assange and WikiLeaks are astonishingly meaningful – if you don’t understand why the most comprehensive global effort to reveal what our elected and unelected governments are doing is valuable, then 1) I pity you; 2) I kind of envy you in the way that I envy the simplicity of purpose in a dog or junkie; and 3) fuck you.  No, what I am going to suggest is that the fate of Julian Assange is pretty much sealed and has been for some time:  He will ultimately rot away in a US prison for the rest of his life, and he has lived his last free day on this Earth.

I’ll caveat that by noting that what will happen with Assange, like any other US policy decision waiting to be carried out, is not necessarily a foregone conclusion in that it is somewhat dependent on the actions of, mainly, the American public.  While the US certainly isn’t a democracy – which explains the irrelevance of the public’s views on a host of important domestic and international issues being far to the left of both political parties, which are more accurately described as factions of the same, business party – there is at least some democratic quality to our servitude, and if the public is able to make the costs of state action outweigh the gains of such action yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah… Assange is going to die in a US prison.

Those beautifully, tragically optimistic souls who think it’ll be any day or even any year that Assange gets on a plane bound for Quito to a waiting gaggle of human rights/government transparency groupies may like to point out that, of course, Assange has committed no crime.  Well, yea.  As if the failure to commit a crime is a defense to indefinite detainment and torture in the US.  But what Assange has done is far worse in the eyes of the Behemoth, for it strikes at the heart of the empire; it reveals the currency of US diplomacy:  contempt for democracy, annoyance with the rule of law, and the use of force to achieve its aims.  It is true that no legitimate secrets came out of the WikiLeaks disclosures, and while none of the revelations were particularly surprising, a wide swath of important information has nonetheless been released.  For only one of many examples, we now unequivocally know, rather than just sensibly assuming, that before the Obama administration effectively supported the military coup in Honduras that kicked out the democratic government and put in what amounts to a military-backed government, the US embassy in Honduras had presented a detailed analysis concluding the coup was unconstitutional and illegal.  What angers the US so much about the release of such information is that it lays bare the mafia-style violence and intimidation employed to advance its interests; it illuminates the shadowy proclaimed support of democracy as little more than a diaphanous shawl to keep the obedient client states all fuzzy and warm; it confirms to the poor citizens of the world that it really is us versus them in the often unspoken scheme by the few to appropriate the resources of the many.  Ultimately, the disclosures have struck a major blow on behalf of democracy and government accountability while discrediting the US and making it just a bit more difficult to carry on the ruthless grift.  And for that, Assange will pay the ultimate price.

The seriousness with which the powers that be view acts of defiance can be understood from their response to them.  Glenn Greenwald, one of the few brave American journalists writing honestly about WikiLeaks, has detailed  Obama’s fanatical attack on whistleblowers, and WikiLeaks, as the mother of all whistleblowers, has generated a particularly viscous response.  WikiLeaks supporters have been targeted with invasive harassment, the twitter accounts of WikiLeaks associates have been subpoenaed, and despite never being charged with a single crime, WikiLeaks itself has had its financial accounts frozen across the globe, and credit card companies and payment processing sites have blocked essentially all means of donating to them, largely crippling the financial abilities of the organization.  It is far easier to donate to the KKK than WikiLeaks.  Focusing on whether the instructions from the US to these financial institutions were explicit or merely implicit would seem to ignore the specter of US ire hanging above it all. 

But the real venom has been reserved for Assange, and it is his head that will be the prized trophy on the mantle of US tyranny.  A congressman has called for his assassination, but indefinite detainment with maybe a bit of torture mixed in will serve US goals, which include a stark warning to other dissidents out there (see, e.g., the lessons being learned by potential whistleblowers), just as well while limiting the impact of his martyrdom.  Sweden, which had initially dropped the sexual assault case against him – he was not ever and still has not ever been charged with a crime in Sweden or anywhere else in the world – reinstated it after the intervention of a Swedish politician close to American diplomats.  Swedish prosecutors, who could easily travel to Britain to interrogate Assange, and who would certainly do just that if, hypothetically, Assange had instead leaked Russian documents revealing important information that Moscow wanted to conceal from the public, have nevertheless demanded his return to Sweden.  In the hypothetical, Sweden would be praised for its principled stand, and Assange would be praised for performing a public service.  However, Sweden, reminiscent of its cooperation with the Nazis during World War II, is fairly obviously taking its cues from the world hegemon and, whether there is a Swedish cultural affinity for service to power or just a pragmatic desire for stability and comfort, Sweden has clearly determined on which side its interests lie.  Similarly, the UK made a quite conscious and explicit decision following World War II, facing the prospects of disappearing global influence, to become what is euphemistically called in planning documents as a “junior partner” to the US, but what can be more accurately described as a lapdog.  It explains their tail-wagging forays behind the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a host of other actions, including but not limited to its perverse and highly illegal refusal to not allow Assange passage to Ecuador, where he has appropriately been granted asylum. 

The US has not gone to these lengths, and exerted this much diplomatic capital and whatever else it uses to get relatively more democratic nations to do its bidding, for just no reason.  It is not going to pack up and go home just because Rafael Correa has courageously entered the fray.  The vast reach and power of the US over supposedly sovereign states to support if not prompt illegal conduct has been made clear not only by the very documents published by WikiLeaks, but also in the machinations of the global banking community as well as the diplomatic/legal gymnastics of Sweden and the UK.  While the US builds its “case” against Assange, it orchestrates the actions of Sweden and the UK, and it patiently awaits his shipment to Sweden followed by a quick extradition to the US.  Ecuador has thrown a monkey wrench in the plans, but it’s of little consequence.  If Assange chooses to live out the rest of his life in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, then, perhaps, so be it.  But there’s really only one end to this story.

Addendum:  Greenwald has already made a pretty convincing case as to why Assange should fear extradition to Sweden, and why Assange's parents shouldn't expect him home anytime soon.

"Crime" and "Punishment" [FN1]

Semi-frequent commentator, political savant, and all around good guy Mark B., wait that's too obvious, let's call him M. Bell, has taken issue with IOZ's latest excoriation of Matt Yglesias, this time for Yglesias' statement that "[s]omewhat punitive post-arrest pre-trial measures are a kind of necessary evil, but the prolonged confinement of Manning under cruel conditions go beyond the necessary into straightforward evil." IOZ doesn't bother wading into the muck of the idea that "punitive [FN2] pre-trial," let alone pre-conviction, measures are a "kind of necessary evil," and notes simply that "[i]t is never necessary to do evil. It is always a choice." Yglesias either completely misunderstands a basic tenet of our criminal jurisprudence - specifically, that any pre-conviction limitations on the rights of the accused are not properly understood as "punishment" for misconduct, for by definition there has not been any misconduct so identified and adjudicated as such just yet, but rather they're more appropriately considered as a function of the criminal justice process [FN3] - or he is advocating for some kind of Panopticonally illiberal regime where things like evidence and trials and juries are not needed to punish people for crimes.

Regardless, Mark's and other commentators' point seems to be that "Yglesias is just arguing that Manning should receive the same kind of pre-trial detention that awaits other people facing charges." The position, it seems, is essentially that Manning shouldn't receive different treatment just because we may or may not support the particular potentially criminal act. I agree with this. In fact, I can't imagine anyone not agreeing with this.

IOZ clarifies his position a bit in a subsequent post:

The question "what is to be done with Private Manning," posed to me as if it presents an imponderable moral and practical conundrum that I have never considered, is irrelevant. It is, to use a phrase one of my regular commenter-critics recently reminded me of while criticizing me in comments, not even wrong. I do not care about the state's dilemma in dealing with Private Manning. I don't care about the state's dilemmas at all. The state will dispose of Private Manning as it sees fit. My interest is in the attitudes people take toward that state. Those who begin with the question of what the government should do with its enemies, even if their conclusion is some banal exhortation somehow to treat them humanely and fairly as it helps itself to their lives, are on the wrong side.

I don't think he explains himself or the idea very well, but the point is an important one. First, though it may be banal, the idea of bringing to justice those who commit criminal acts in a fair and humane way and only after the customary evaluation of evidence is rare enough to escape attention of many, our own Government as repeat, prime offender [FN4], and so is worth emphasis. Second, I think IOZ is making a different point, though. He's saying that because, perhaps generally but certainly specifically in this case, the State is illegitimate, because the State is driven by the narrow interests of unaccountable, private tyrannies (corporations) who endeavor to increase their own power and those of the State, because, as John Dewey put it, the State is "the shadow cast by business over society," because the State ultimately does what it wants, we the public should be less concerned with how the State chooses to punish the people who have brought to light its machinations and motivations and more concerned with the machinations and motivations themselves. Does the State have a right to prosecute those who have violated the terms of a confidentiality agreement it has entered into with? Absolutely. Does the State routinely violate international law and do a whole host of terrible things? Yes. While focus on these separate issues is not mutually exclusive, I am certainly more interested in one of these phenomena than the other.

Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are heroes who have shed light on a variety of State abuses and its fundamental role, function, and modus operandi. You can be sure that the State will punish them, brutally and accordingly.

FN1 - Alternate title - The Empire Strikes Back

FN2 - I won't even bother including reference to the totally useless and fairly comical modifier "somewhat" here. Light treason, anyone?

FN3 - This is all sort of related to the basic idea of "innocent before proven guilty."

FN4 - For example, the US made no real attempt to bring to justice the perpetrators behind the 9/11 attacks. Rather, their response was to bomb the fuck out of Afghanistan knowing it would kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians directly and create a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions that would kill many more. Conversely, after being the victim of CIA funded and sponsored attacks, Nicaragua did not set off bombs in Washington but rather appealed to the World Court for determination that the US was committing acts of terrorism, should stop such acts, and pay reparations for such acts. Of course, the US simply ignored the Court's order and intensified the violence.

The Wretched of the Earth, Indeed

The UN's annual A-to-Z of global wealth, poverty, health and education highlighted in its 20th anniversary edition that despite "growth surges" in the Asia-Pacific region, it is becoming ever more difficult to break into the rich club of nations.

Oil-rich Norway -- with its 81.0 years of life expectancy, average annual income of 58,810 dollars and 12.6 years of schooling -- has now topped the Human Development Index (HDI) for all but two years since 2001.

Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Ireland took the following places in the top five. Zimbabwe came bottom of the 169 nations ranked, behind Mozambique, Burundi, Niger and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Zimbabwe, where in stark contrast life expectancy is just 47 years and per capita income 176 dollars, has come bottom of the table for the past five years.

DR Congo, Zambia and Zimbabwe have seen their HDI value fall below 1970 levels in the four decades since, said the study.

"These countries offer lessons on the devastating impact of conflict, the AIDS epidemic and economic and political mismanagement," said UNDP administrator Helen Clarke, the former New Zealand prime minister.

Now, I understand that Ms. Clarke is referring to the reasons why those countries' HDI levels have fallen since 1970 and is not really commenting on how they got there in the first place, but isn't the more trenchant lesson on the devastating impact of being colonized by a European nation? I wonder what the HDI level would be for an aggregate of all peoples living in North American Native reservations?

Lesser of Evils Still Pandora-Level of Evil

A bunch of good folks I sincerely like and respect will take part in the farcical, biennial public relations competition that masquerades as representative democracy in this country. Most of the people I happen to know will vote for candidates of the Democratic Party. I think they are making a big mistake. If these people, like me, believe in things like that the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and its bombings and/or targeted assassinations - either way, war crimes - in Pakistan and Yemen are illegal and, more importantly, immoral; that the public should not subsidize business costs while corporations privatize profit; that the short-term interests of corporate shareholders in the US should not be placed above the long term interests of the larger community, especially with respect to climate change and the survival of the species; and that the "international community" is more than just Washington and whoever happens to agree with it, see, e.g., Iran's enriching of uranium and Israel's occupation of Palestine, etc. etc.; then they are voting for a party that holds fundamentally inconsistent views and goals. I don't understand the desire to do such a thing. Perhaps it's a desire to not feel small and inconsequential in the world, to not feel like you've been lied to your whole life, or worse, that you believed the lie. Maybe it's the desperate grab of the lever that retains some symbolic meaning in the face of increasing atomization and alienation, a silent cry that whispers, "things are not that bad, we're just a ways off from justice and egality, this act absolves me while at the same time keeping me safe from the consequences of real action." I don't know what the reasons are at this point, and I don't really care. I do know that there is one business party in the US, with two factions that are more different in personality than substance, and that this business party is fanatically committed to a highly sophisticated class war at home and a brutally violent imperial empire abroad (where corporations have replaced viceroys). And I think that the sooner the educated, white, liberal professional class that is my peer group comes to realize this, the sooner the cannibalization of the Democratic Party can occur and a new, legitimate opposition movement will foment. The only time I'm voting soon is for Palin/Beck 2014.

Welcoming Our Insect Overlords

Our concern is mostly with the threat to individuals, the threat to our people and our equipment, but in terms of the types of incidents that are captured in these reports, where innocent Iraqis have been killed, where there are allegations of detainee abuse, all of these things have been very well chronicled over time.

- Pentagon Spokesman Col. Dave Lapan

H/T Antiwar Blog

That's a pretty amazing statement. The government is attempting to preemptively downplay the effect of an imminent WikiLeaks release of 500,000 Iraq War documents, which have been subsequently published, by essentially noting that, "everyone already knows that we're killing innocent people and abusing detainees, nobody cares, so let's just ignore it and carry on." Some further thoughts on this completely typical and unextraordinary showing of the government's brazen contempt for its own citizens:

The Pentagon aka Where This Aggression Will Not Stand, Man is impliedly arguing against the dissemination of information to the American people because we've already made up our minds regarding the invading, destroying, and occupying of Iraq notwithstanding the existence of supposedly similar information in the public realm. And who gets to determine whether the new information is substantially similar, whether the content of the new documents has in fact been "well chronicled over time?" The people themselves? No, too big of a security threat to "to our people and our equipment." I would ask how the information increases the risk (and what the risk is, exactly), but I'm afraid those reasons have either been "well chronicled over time" or that answering the question would further increase the threat in some kind of mobious strip of unassailable, self-proclaimed justification. So, uhh, some sort of in camera review by a partial adjudicator? No, we are not in federal court, and "this is not 'Nam... there are rules." Well, there's mostly just one rule: "what we say goes." OK, who does get to decide on the materiality of the information vis-a-vis the security threat? The dudes with the hard-ons for killing people, of course! It is an astonishingly inadequate argument, and the analogous legal position, "not only can we not show you these documents because they are privileged and would harm our client, we can't tell you why they are privileged, how they would harm our client, or what kinds of information is contained in the documents, and we can't submit them to a judge for independent review to determine if they are privileged/prejudicial," would be laughed out of any court. Luckily for the U.S., and us, international or domestic courts don't have much sway over how the U.S. conducts its business, the business of killing, around the world.

Never go against the family

The US as Israel's Godfather.

What a Country, or Chomsky on Gaza

Chomsky weighs in with some wide-ranging thoughts. I've cherry-picked some useful excerpts below, but the whole thing is worth a read for those wishing to understand the events of the world we live in. For those content to assume the fictional but useful narrative of Western propaganda from the media/government-symbiosis, just ignore. Or focus on some other speech given by Clinton II today. Here are some of Noam's thoughts:

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.

In his retrospective "Parsing Gains of Gaza War," New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner cited this achievement as one of the most significant of the gains. Israel calculated that it would be advantageous to appear to "go crazy," causing vastly disproportionate terror, a doctrine that traces back to the 1950s. "The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day," Bronner wrote, "when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza." The tactic of "going crazy" appears to have been successful, Bronner concluded: there are "limited indications that the people of Gaza felt such pain from this war that they will seek to rein in Hamas," the elected government. That is another long-standing doctrine of state terror. I don't, incidentally, recall the Times retrospective "Parsing Gains of Chechnya War," though the gains were great.

The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes.

Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings were closed for the Sabbath. To honor the holy day, Palestinians at the edge of survival must be denied food and medicine, while hundreds can be slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters.

The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little if any notice. That makes sense. In the annals of US-Israeli criminality, such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote. They are too familiar. To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as the site of terrible massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defense" Forces). The bombing hit the local hospital -- the Gaza hospital -- and killed over 200 people, according to the eyewitness account of an American Middle East academic specialist. The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, proceeding with crucial US military and diplomatic support.

Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that "What Israeli officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society." Hence when they carry out their plans to destroy Hamas's "social wing," they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society.

Hamas is regularly described as "Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel." One will be hard put to find something like "democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus" -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.

As Maoz also reminds his Israeli readers, overflights with sonic booms to terrorize Lebanese are the least of Israeli crimes in Lebanon, even apart from its five invasions since 1978: "On July 28, 1988 Israeli Special Forces abducted Sheikh Obeid, and on May 21, 1994 Israel abducted Mustafa Dirani, who was responsible for capturing the Israeli pilot Ron Arad [when he was bombing Lebanon in 1986]. Israel held these and other 20 Lebanese who were captured under undisclosed circumstances in prison for prolonged periods without trial. They were held as human `bargaining chips.' Apparently, abduction of Israelis for the purpose of prisoners' exchange is morally reprehensible, and militarily punishable when it is the Hezbollah who does the abducting, but not if Israel is doing the very same thing," and on a far grander scale and over many years.

The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category -- except for the category of familiarity; I've just given several examples, and will return to others. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of "terrorism," but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called "aggression," because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes. In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Lords of the Land, Idit Zertal and Akiva Eldar point out that after Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in August 2005, the ruined territory was not released "for even a single day from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day ... Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might" -- exercised with extreme savagery, thanks to firm US support and participation.

Also a minor technicality is the fact that on December 31, while terrorized Gazans were desperately seeking shelter from the ruthless assault, Washington hired a German merchant ship to transport from Greece to Israel a huge shipment, 3000 tons, of unidentified "ammunition." The new shipment "follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip," Reuters reported. All of this is separate from the more than $21 billion in U.S. military aid provided by the Bush administration to Israel, almost all grants. "Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," said a briefing by the New America Foundation, which monitors the arms trade. The new shipment was hampered by the decision of the Greek government to bar the use of any port in Greece "for the supplying of the Israeli army."

There are good reasons why the voting record is consistently unreported and dispatched deep into the memory hole by the media and conformist intellectuals. It would not be wise to reveal to the public what the record implies about their elected representatives. In the present case it would plainly be unhelpful to let the public know that US-Israeli rejectionism, barring the peaceful settlement long advocated by the world, reaches such an extreme as to deny Palestinians even the abstract right to self-determination.

One of the heroic volunteers in Gaza, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, described the scene of horror as an "All out war against the civilian population of Gaza." He estimated that half the casualties are women and children. The men are almost all civilians as well, by civilized standards. Gilbert reports that he had scarcely seen a military casualty among the 100s of bodies. The IDF concurs. Hamas "made a point of fighting at a distance -- or not at all," Ethan Bronner reports while "parsing the gains" of the US-Israeli assault. So Hamas's manpower remains intact, and it was mostly civilians who suffered pain: a positive outcome, according to widely-held doctrine.

Returning from a visit to the Arab world, Fawwaz Gerges strongly affirmed what others on the scene have reported. The effect of the US-Israeli offensive in Gaza has been to infuriate the populations and to arouse bitter hatred of the aggressors and their collaborators. "Suffice it to say that the so-called moderate Arab states [that is, those that take their orders from Washington] are on the defensive, and that the resistance front led by Iran and Syria is the main beneficiary. Once again, Israel and the Bush administration have handed the Iranian leadership a sweet victory." Furthermore, "Hamas will likely emerge as a more powerful political force than before and will likely top Fatah, the ruling apparatus of President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority," Rice's favorites.

Israel abandoned Gaza in September 2005. Rational Israeli hardliners, like Ariel Sharon, the patron saint of the settlers movement, understood that it was senseless to subsidize a few thousand illegal Israeli settlers in the ruins of Gaza, protected by the IDF while they used much of the land and scarce resources. It made more sense to turn Gaza into the world's largest prison and to transfer settlers to the West Bank, much more valuable territory, where Israel is quite explicit about its intentions, in word and more importantly in deed. One goal is to annex the arable land, water supplies, and pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that lie within the separation wall, irrelevantly declared illegal by the World Court. That includes a vastly expanded Jerusalem, in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years, also irrelevant. Israel has also been taking over the Jordan Valley, about one-third of the West Bank. What remains is therefore imprisoned, and, furthermore, broken into fragments by salients of Jewish settlement that trisect the territory: one to the east of Greater Jerusalem through the town of Ma'aleh Adumim, developed through the Clinton years to split the West Bank; and two to the north, through the towns of Ariel and Kedumim. What remains to Palestinians is segregated by hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints.

The checkpoints have no relation to security of Israel, and if some are intended to safeguard settlers, they are flatly illegal, as the World Court ruled. In reality, their major goal is harass the Palestinian population and to fortify what Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control," designed to make life unbearable for the "two-legged beasts" who will be like "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" if they seek to remain in their homes and land. All of that is fair enough, because they are "like grasshoppers compared to us" so that their heads can be "smashed against the boulders and walls." The terminology is from the highest Israeli political and military leaders, in this case the revered "princes." And the attitudes shape policies.

Adding a few details, the "facility" was the UN compound in Gaza City, which contained the UNRWA warehouse. The shelling destroyed "hundreds of tons of emergency food and medicines set for distribution today to shelters, hospitals and feeding centres," according to UNRWA director John Ging. Military strikes at the same time destroyed two floors of the al-Quds hospital, setting it ablaze, and also a second warehouse run by the Palestinian Red Crescent society. The hospital in the densely-populated Tal-Hawa neighbourhood was destroyed by Israeli tanks "after hundreds of frightened Gazans had taken shelter inside as Israeli ground forces pushed into the neighbourhood," AP reported.

Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel. Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words.

After rejecting the June 2008 ceasefire it had formally accepted, Israel maintained its siege. We may recall that a siege is an act of war. In fact, Israel has always insisted on an even stronger principle: hampering access to the outside world, even well short of a siege, is an act of war, justifying massive violence in response. Interference with Israel's passage through the Straits of Tiran was part of the pretext for Israel's invasion of Egypt (with France and England) in 1956, and for its launching of the June 1967 war. The siege of Gaza is total, not partial, apart from occasional willingness of the occupiers to relax it slightly. And it is vastly more harmful to Gazans than closing the Straits of Tiran was to Israel. Supporters of Israeli doctrines and actions should therefore have no problem justifying rocket attacks on Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip.

Of course, again we run into the nullifying principle: This is us, that is them.

Despite the Israeli siege, rocketing sharply reduced. The ceasefire broke down on November 4 with an Israeli raid into Gaza, leading to the death of 6 Palestinians, and a retaliatory barrage of rockets (with no injuries). The pretext for the raid was that Israel had detected a tunnel in Gaza that might have been intended for use to capture another Israeli soldier. The pretext is transparently absurd, as a number of commentators have noted. If such a tunnel existed, and reached the border, Israel could easily have barred it right there. But as usual, the ludicrous Israeli pretext was deemed credible.

The civil war that left Hamas in control of Gaza is commonly described as a Hamas military coup, demonstrating again their evil nature. The real world is a little different. The civil war was incited by the US and Israel, in a crude attempt at a military coup to overturn the free elections that brought Hamas to power. That has been public knowledge at least since April 2008, when David Rose published in Vanity Fair a detailed and documented account of how Bush, Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams "backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever." The account was recently corroborated once again in the Christian Science Monitor (Jan. 12, 2009) by Norman Olsen, who served for 26 years in the Foreign Service, including four years working in the Gaza Strip and four years at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, and then moved on to become associate coordinator for counterterrorism at the Department of State. Olson and his son detail the State Department shenanigans intended to ensure that their candidate, Abbas, would win in the January 2006 elections -- in which case it would have been hailed as a triumph of democracy. After the election-fixing failed, they turned to punishment of the Palestinians and arming of a militia run by Fatah strong-man Muhammad Dahlan, but "Dahlan's thugs moved too soon" and a Hamas pre-emptive strike undermined the coup attempt, leading to far harsher US-Israeli measures to punish the disobedient people of Gaza. The Party Line is more acceptable.

In a front-page think-piece on the latest Gaza invasion, NYT correspondent Steven Lee Meyers writes that "In some ways, the Gaza attacks were reminiscent of the gamble Israel took, and largely lost, in Lebanon in 1982 [when] it invaded to eliminate the threat of Yasir Arafat's forces." Correct, but not in the sense he has in mind. In 1982, as in 2008, it was necessary to eliminate the threat of political settlement.

The hope of Israeli propagandists has been that Western intellectuals and media would buy the tale that Israel reacted to rockets raining on the Galilee, "intolerable acts of terror." And they have not been disappointed.

It is not that Israel does not want peace: everyone wants peace, even Hitler. The question is: on what terms? From its origins, the Zionist movement has understood that to achieve its goals, the best strategy would be to delay political settlement, meanwhile slowly building facts on the ground. Even the occasional agreements, as in 1947, were recognized by the leadership to be temporary steps towards further expansion. The 1982 Lebanon war was a dramatic example of the desperate fear of diplomacy. It was followed by Israeli support for Hamas so as to undermine the secular PLO and its irritating peace initiatives. Another case that should be familiar is Israeli provocations before the 1967 war designed to elicit a Syrian response that could be used as a pretext for violence and takeover of more land -- at least 80% of the incidents, according to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

An Amnesty International chronology reports that the June 2008 ceasefire had "brought enormous improvements in the quality of life in Sderot and other Israeli villages near Gaza, where before the ceasefire residents lived in fear of the next Palestinian rocket strike. However, nearby in the Gaza Strip the Israeli blockade remains in place and the population has so far seen few dividends from the ceasefire." But the gains in security for Israel towns near Gaza were evidently outweighed by the felt need to deter diplomatic moves that might impede West Bank expansion, and to crush any remaining resistance within Palestine.

Today, Israel could have security, normalization of relations, and integration into the region. But it very clearly prefers illegal expansion, conflict, and repeated exercise of violence, actions that are not only criminal, murderous and destructive but are also eroding its own long-term security. US military and Middle East specialist Andrew Cordesman writes that while Israel military force can surely crush defenseless Gaza, "neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces [a bitter] reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world, Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who said on January 6 that `The Bush administration has left [Obama] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza...Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza'."

One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory, "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel."

There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves "supporters of Israel" are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible.

Meanwhile we are quietly observing a rare event in history, what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called "politicide," the murder of a nation -- at our hands.

Enjoy your day of glorious self-congratulatory platitudes and good-feelings, fellow Americans. Know that they are accompanied by the death of a nation and the torture of a people. You are complicit in it all. Clap, clap.

An unbearable sadness of being

Sigh. I haven't posted in a while (even by my standards) as the end of the year brought too much work followed by the too much eating and drinking of the holiday season. But mostly I haven't posted because there's nothing that deserves discussion more than Israel's attack on Gaza, and frankly I didn't have the fortitude or courage (stomach or balls) to deal with the issues and facts head-on. I still don't. But in an attempt at securing just a sliver of piece of mind, I'll throw out some thoughts and useful links.

There is no aspect of Israel's actions that are rooted in or even related to self-defense. Any ideas otherwise are demonstrably false. Israel, not Palestine, broke the ceasefire on November 4, 2008 when it killed 6 Palestinians. That ceasefire, however, was not particularly sustainable as by its terms it continued the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Resources are not allowed to flow in, people are not allowed to flow out. Gaza is essentially a prison. I occasionally listen to uninformed blowhards on the radio ask, "well, what should a country do if it's neighboring country started firing rockets at them?" (and this is on NPR, I shudder to think what's being said elsewhere). Gaza is not a sovereign county, it is not recognized by Israel, it is an Occupied Territory. Israel should, and the US should make Israel (which it has the power to do of course), end the blockade, agree to the 1976 UN Security Council resolution for a two-state settlement, vetoed by the US and supported by the rest of the world (the vote was 150-3 in the General Assembly with only the US, Israel, and El Salvador(!) opposing it), and stop its attacks on and attempts to destabilize Hamas, the democratically elected governing party of Palestine. Bombing the fuck out of 1.5 million people trapped in a box before launching a ground invasion is a far different, far less acceptable course of action.

There's much more to say, but I just don't have the stregth to say it. These people do it better at these links:

• Justin Podur writes about Israel's actions in this "war."

• Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed discussed the causes of the attack and Israel's objectives. A must read.

• Justin Podur looks at the Canadian media's distortion in reporting on the attack. Good god, how much worse is it in the US?

• Chomsky talks about Israel's 2007 attacks on Gaza, which is obviously important background for what's happening now.

• Chomsky discusses the distinction between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism way back in the halcyon days of 2002. Chomsky has actually seen and felt real, institutional Anti-Semitism in his life, unlike anyone my age who grew up in this country.

• The International Middle East Media Center provides solid reporting from inside the Occupied Territories. Peruse their "Human Interest Stories" for 5 minutes and try not to cry.
  

To all the supporters of Israel who read this and won't want to talk to me again, I remind you of Chomsky's clarification that "supporters of Israel" should more aptly be called "supporters of the moral degradation and eventual destruction of Israel."

photo 7

This certainly gives new meaning to the idea of The Lizard King.

Crisis Continued

Two recent pieces on economic goings on from Uncle Noam, neither of course appearing in the mainstream US press, one article from The Irish Times, which includes an interesting discussion of the current US election, the other an interview with Simone Bruno that touches on Obama and McCain as well. He doesn't go into the who-did-what and what-should-the-Tresury-have-done specifics of the meltdown because, I imagine, the broader context is more important. The Cliff Notes stab at it is essentially that the US is a state-capitalist economy (despite the mythology, Ronald Reagan was the most protectionist, anti-free trade US President of the last century), the public subsidizes enormous profit for narrow sectors of society, the financial liberalization that took place around 30 years ago predictably increased the regularity and depth of financial crises, this is largely because financial markets systematically underprice risk (a feature built in to the system), there will inevitably be major reforms of the financial system (including increased regulation), however, the structure underlying the basic institutions will not be changed. As he grimly puts it:

There is no threat to state capitalism. Its core institutions will remain basically unchanged and even unshaken. They may rearrange themselves in various ways with some conglomerates taking over others and some even being semi-nationalized in a weak sense, without infringing much on private monopolization of decision making. Still, as things stand now, property relations and the distribution of power and wealth won't alter much though the era of neoliberalism operative for roughly thirty five years will surely be modified in a significant fashion.

It's not all doom and gloom, however. Chomsky offers some important perspective:

"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

An extraordinarily and historically sad day

Our government has dramatically increased the public's subsidization of the banking and financial services industry. A major victory for the business party comes shortly after another one of the coordinated, public-affairs events the business party's warring factions stage quadrennially. Some thoughts from former chief economist of the Senate Banking Committee, Robert Johnson (he also plays a mean guitar):

I think this bill, five weeks before an election, is illustrating for the American people, when there are two currencies of power—votes and money—that even at this time, when the power of votes is at its cyclical high, meaning just before the election, they are almost laughing at the American people, in the—by the nature and structure of this bill. This is a very sad result.

***

They can, what I would say, use the crisis anxiety of the market fragileness to, how would I say, accomplish their aims on behalf of money and do no service for the public. We have no mortgage relief in this bill whatsoever.

***

They always say in the headlines now, it was “heads they win, tails you lose,” like that’s something looking backwards. It’s heads, Wall Street won yesterday; tails, the taxpayer lose now. But the structure of this bill, which depends upon buying overpriced assets, means heads, tomorrow, in a recovery, the banking industry wins again, and the population, the taxpayers who supported them in this bill, don’t go with them.

***

[The bailout] went up by roughly $150 billion for those kinds of special pork-related projects. Now, what you’re seeing is the Congress and the Senate are daring the American people to get mad and throw them out. As David Sirota said in his first book, Hostile Takeover, this isn’t about choosing between Rs and Ds; this is about a bipartisan money machine working against the population. They’re daring you. They’re daring you to turn out in five weeks and, in essence, support challengers against incumbents, because the incumbents are the ones responsible for doing this bill.

John Kenneth Galbraith wasn't kidding when he said, "in America, the only respectable form of socialism is socialism for the rich."

photo 6 or video 1: the world's first perfect song or how i learned to stop worrying about state-sponsored class warfare and love dogs

Many goings on lately: an absolutely enlightening piece on Democracy Now! about the House's initial failure to pass the inevitable corporate bailout (PS - Bruce Marks is my new homey); NHL heavyweight the NY Rangers miraculously though predictably come from behind to defeat KHL also-ran Metallurg Magnitogorsk in the inaugural Victoria Cup in beautiful Bern (PS - the best KHL teams equal the good NHL teams on big ice and it makes for spectacular hockey); and perhaps most importantly (at least in terms of escapism), a new TV on the Radio album this week (PS - it is phenomenal and not hyperbolic to be deemed the best album I've heard in a long time). Special recognition for my current favorite song of all-time, "Love Dog" ("lonely little love dog, no one knows the name of"): my experimentally clunky yet sincere ode to this ridiculously great song and an even more ridiculous dog:

Socializing cost, privatizing profit, screwing everybody

Apparently, there's been something going on with the nation's economy lately. The BBC gave Noam Chomsky very limited time or space to make some broad points, all of which he has written on extensively in the past. Some snippets:

Markets have inherent and well-known inefficiencies. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. That is particularly true for financial institutions.

Their task is to take risks, calculating potential costs for themselves. But they do not take into account the consequences of their losses for the economy as a whole.

Hence the financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient," as John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalization and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and also proposing solutions, which have been ignored.

He also discusses the Clinton administration's repeal of the Glass-Steagall act of 1933,

thus freeing financial institutions "to innovate in the new economy," in Clinton's words -- and also "to self-destruct, taking down with them the general economy and international confidence in the US banking system," financial analyst Nomi Prins adds.

The more important point remains, however:

The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.

That is, of course, not limited to financial markets. The advanced economy as a whole relies heavily on the dynamic state sector, with much the same consequences with regard to risk, cost, profit, and decisions, crucial features of the economy and political system.

And just today Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have agreed to become bank-holding companies subject to tighter regulation, essentially bringing back Glass-Steagall.

USA! USA! USA!

U.S. apologizes for Afghan civilian deaths

"I offer all Afghans my sincere condolences and personal regrets for the recent loss of innocent life as a result of coalition air strikes," Gates said at a news conference outside the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

"While no military has ever done more to prevent civilian casualties, it is clear that we have to work even harder."

The U.N. mission said it found "convincing evidence" that 60 children, 15 women and 15 men were killed in the strike.

An initial investigation by the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, released this month, found that 30 to 35 Taliban militants and five to seven civilians were killed.

But when cell phone pictures were later provided to the U.S. military showing dozens of bodies at the scene of the strike, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, asked U.S. Central Command to review the initial investigation.

Damn cell phones.

The powerful and privileged may ignore history and its lessons with impunity. For others, it is not wise to succumb to illusions.

(this title has nothing to do with the post)



this picture got some press from the always morally elevated but more aptly defined as those utilized and paid for by companies to sell products to their readership and consumers, aka the commercial media. the initial reaction was for many, i imagine and confess, one of shock if not a distinct level of outrage. in the vein of, "ah those goddamn spaniards, so backwards, homogeneous, they cant even understand the offense, or are they demasiado arrogant to care?" i thought that and all and then some, and then began thinking about it out loud as i relayed it to a friend. it was as if the verbalization opened up a different, i think deeper, way of understanding.

"ain't it only offensive if there's an implication that there's something wrong, or offensive about, having, or being as represented as having, slanted eyes? isn't there some imputation on the part of the viewer that's required to make the gesture disrespectful/distasteful? can a pure descriptive comment carry any value judgment?" i don't know, i think i'm with the fucking wannabe guineas on this one.

this is the most sensible thing i've read about the olympics thus far.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=726005

It wasn't always the case, but these days, in general, public funds spent on Olympic athletes constitute a subsidy for people who have had stable and carefully planned family upbringings, who enjoy inherent genetic advantages over the rest of us and who are likely to go on to success in life whether they win a medal or no. It's the next thing to eugenics, and it makes less sense.

three meltdowns and one china syndrome

Tang Jie, a 28-year old Chinese graduate student and creator of the popular nationalist video above, discussed a broad range of topics in a recent New Yorker article, including the obvious prevalence of state censorship in his homeland. He noted, "[b]ecause we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed," he said. "We are always eager to get other information from different channels." Then he added, "But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed."

The ramp up to China's momentous showcase of its, inter alia, grand power, wealth, and athletic prowess has brought with it a ton of English language press. The New Yorker, the very best in non-hockey, non-Chomsky reading, has looked at the rapid ascent in the development of China's boxers, while the Times has denuded China's clever solution to the troubling presence of the devastatingly poor that inhabit the cracks of Beijing's colossus: just build a wall over them!

I find much of what's written in the American mainstream on China to be a healthy cocktail of equal parts condescension and ethnocentricity, topped off with a splash of good old fashioned ignorance (and a dash of cointreau). Of course, Chinese rule in Tibet deserves a harsh rebuke and threatens the very existence of the Olympiad, whereas American occupation in Iraq, with a far greater civilian death-toll and an almost complete destruction of civil society, deserves criticism within the noble, intellectual culture only in so far as it costs American lives and affects the American economy.

I'm not a fan of Chinese nationalism in the same way I don't support nationalism of any kind, not to mention the entire idea of nation-states. The only person I've known with a rational justification of patriotism came from a Baltic Republic, a country whose very cultural existence was threatened by its lack of political independence. Maintaining cultural identity, linguistic diversity, religious freedom are all to be respected and valued. Being proud of your community, way to go, bro. But a bias in favor of one's own political leaders and rights over those of another peoples? A cloak for self-interest and alternative to compassion and understanding. Patriotism is the last refuge for scoundrels indeed.

It's hard for me to say if Tie Jang and his retinue lean a little closer to the "good" kind of civic pride or the "bad" kind of mindless jingoism that enables rulers and elites to exploit in the name of country. But China, as a non-industrialized and globally uninfluential player over the course of the most recent geopolitical periods, has not given its people too much to cheer about over the last 50 years, singing songs and prayers to Mao notwithstanding. As the Middle Kingdom makes its steady climb towards industrialization and wealth accumulation, the young intellectuals in those obscenely massive urban centers are shunning the glossy enchantment of the West that other countries in similar states of development so hopelessly imbibe (hello, India); rather, they are looking inward and to the past to forge a unique and more concretely Chinese identity, one that appears be accompanied by the manpower and the economic muscle to flex that identity around the world. What does all of this mean? The naive hope in this beaten down corner is that any buttress against US global domination and its very non-democratizing efforts around the world has to be a positive step. The more likely result, however, based on even a cursory examination of the history of world affairs is that it will be business as usual, the names of oppressors slightly changed, but the list of crimes and victims always as long.

garbage goes in garbage can, makes sense

Noam Chomsky offers up some very insightful and succinct answers to thoughtful questions from Vincent Navarro.

http://zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18257

Topics range from the strict doctrinal requirements of a free but managed society, the PR campaign that masquerades as a Presidential election, the pressures of consumerism, the history behind American global dominance in world affairs, the joys of a state-based economy, and the possibility of an actual and semi-fledgling International. A brief excerpt has:

One of the reasons for the extraordinary pressure of consumerism, which goes back to the 1920s, is the recognition by the business world that unless it atomizes people, unless it drives them to what it calls the "superficial things of life, such as fashionable consumption," the population may turn on them. Right now, for example, about 80% of the U.S. population believes that the country is, in their words, run by "a few big interests looking out for themselves," not for the benefit of the population. About 95% of the population thinks that the government ought to pay regular attention to public opinion. The degree of alienation from institutions is enormous. As long as people are atomized, worried about maxing out their credit cards, separated from one another, and don't hear serious critical discussion, the ideas can be controlled.

ladies and gentlemen, the president of the united states of america

remember when you were in grade school and the teacher would be talking about something while you were daydreaming of playing in the superbowl, then all of a sudden she calls out your name, and all you can do is just repeat the last word you heard her say and stammer on and on, stringing words together that seem at least related to the topic, hoping that either the bell will ring or she'll just move on to someone else...

free speech is law of the land, except in land's highest court of law

This report, from the good folks at Democracy Now!, is pretty amazing. You'll remember Amy Goodman from this recent post. Who knew it was illegal to protest outside the Supreme Court. Justices are allowed to accept paid speaking engagements from highly partisan groups, but god forbid they see citizens expressing themselves via banners and signs as they walk to work. It is heartwarming to know that there are people out there like Matt Daloisio who are fighting diligently and sacrificing their own personal freedom to gain just a flicker of representation, dignity, and even hope to those who have been confined for years without an end in sight and with no voice (other than the screams and sobs that surely routinely fill their heads). I like to consider myself a martyr for my own attempts at looking out for the li'l guys, namely in feeding and caring for my dog, but I guess in a way, these protesters are the true heroes.

aguas con los cenotes

Akumal is a small, once-sleepy, and still beautiful seaside town with multiple bays that shape and contort the southern part of the Yucatan Pennisnula, Mexico. Akumal means “place of turtles” in the ancient Mayan language. Cleverly named as such because its beaches are the primary nesting zones for both the Caretta caretta (loggerhead sea turtles) and Chelonia mydas (green turtles), this divinely picturesque area cares for not only these cute li’l green guys scurrying around in oversized shells, but is also home to some of the most gorgeous and awe-inspiring feats of nature’s creation that these eyes have seen, to wit: an enormous and vibrant reef with all the brightly colored fishies and scuba-tourist dollars that followed (this is why you’ve heard of Cozumel), a dense and lush mangrove (this is the sub-tropical swamp version of a rainforest), and perhaps most amazingly, the cenotes. Cenotes are essentially a product of an intricate system of underground rivers. They were “discovered” in this area only less than 30 years ago, and with their various stalagmites, stalactites, and various other insane rock formations and nooks and crannies, comprise the best cave and cavern diving on the planet. Only a fraction of this 500-mile maze of cenotes has even been explored, and though they provide endless fun to adventurers willing to strap oxygen tanks to their backs, fins to their feet and lights to their heads, they actually serve an even greater and broader social purpose (that is, when we consider society to consist of more than just human life, which of course, in the modern world, we do not). The mangroves provide the water and nutrients that are carried through the cenotes out to the sea and the reef, providing for the beautiful plant and marine life the reef supports.

Almost anything that’s good on this god-forsaken planet must be usurped for profit and exploitation and thus face extinction, and this wonderfully small and peaceful beauty remains no exception to the golden-green rule of mankind. The larger culprits are all-inclusive mega-resorts, with no thoughts but of money, catering to stupid and miserable western tourists, with no thoughts but of themselves, and in bed with local governments, with very little thought to speak of (think Eichmann in Jerusalem). Specifically here, the culprit here is the Bahia Gran Principe Hotel in Akumal. Yes, they are creating an artificial beach through the use of sascab and destroying the nesting area of the sea turtles, violating Mexican federal law by building over the federally protected mangroves, dumping their sewage into the sea and into the reef, and building an ungodly and sadistically called-for 27- hole golf course by the pampered and lazy (stupid and dumb and hate-filled also work) western extravagants, but these can be all read about in more detail in the following letter. Perhaps their truer crimes are keeping a donkey on staff to chug a beer at the demand of the aforesaid pampered (and stupid) tourists (it’s not as sweet as it sounds, though it is basically my life at this point, take a guess at what happens to a donkey that’s pounding beers all day), and staining a once-beautiful beach with hundreds of obnoxious fold out lounge chairs accompanied by the even worse sight of fat Spanish pot-bellies (sometimes Italians), who do little but get brutally sunburnt, smoke non-filters, drink shitty campari, and ogle my girlfriend all day. These people are the scum of the fucking earth and they are ruining one of the last xanadus left.

Please visit http://saverivieramaya.org/ to learn more about what is going on down there and how you can help. There is a multimedia section which includes many informative videos, including a volunteer picking up trash along a public beach being assaulted by Bahia Principe’s employees, a crab trapped due to the artificial beach created by the sascab, and a video of the beach itself being attacked. Here’s a little fly-over of the region and an intro into the problems.

And here’s a letter we’ve delivered to some corporate-backed US politician that details some of the major violations going on in Akumal. I urge you to take the time out of your busy days refreshing your email and visiting espn.con, pitchfork, perezhilton, and whatever else it is you do to keep the systems of oppression intact and growing strong (see, I don't know do anything, so i can say this while looking down my nose) to watch the videos and read the letter, and please think about and do something that will help either this area of the world, another, or the broader society and planet that we are live off and contribute to. We’re all in this together, people.

Dear Senator Schumer,

I am writing to you about a matter of serious environmental concern. The Quintana Roo coastline of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico is currently experiencing an ecological crisis that threatens to permanently destroy its unique habitat and animal life. Though these activities are governed by Mexican Law, I hope that you, an influential US Senator with an impressive environmental record and a history of progressive advocacy, can help consolidate the support necessary to pressure the Mexican government to enforce its own laws and protect this land.

The chain of Gran Bahia Principe Hotels in Mexico is a prime culprit in this ongoing environmental destruction. Specifically, the Gran Bahia Principe Hotel in Akumal, Mexico has repeatedly engaged in acts violative of Mexican Federal Law, and continues to do so unabated. “Akumal” translates to “place of turtles” in Mayan Akumal’s beaches are the primary nesting zones of the Caretta caretta (loggerhead sea turtles) and Chelonia mydas (green turtles) – both are protected as endangered species under Mexican Federal law (NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2001). However, the Gran Bahia Principe is breaching this law by using a limestone-based material, sascab, to create artificial beaches on its nearby public shore. This material alters the habitat in a manner that prevents the sea turtles from nesting. The sascab kills coral and marine vegetation by impeding natural light through water. The US’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has clearly stated that the loss and degradation of nesting areas caused by erosion, devouring, modification and artificial light is a serious problem attacking sea turtles and their hatchlings.

The Gran Bahia’s abuse of the land extends into the mangroves that are the lifeblood of one of the areas most spectacular physical attractions, the extensive coral reef. The mangroves in the area feed the reef through an intricate system of underground rivers, known as cenotes. These mangroves are protected by Mexican Federal Law, however, the Gran Bahia Principe has simply built over much of them. At various times, the hotel has dumped sewage into adjacent mangroves, killing the diverse plant and animal life. The hotel has also dumped sewage into the sea from its property, as well as placed geotubes in the ocean to break up waves and create an artificial beach. At least one of their geotubes has ruptured and was found entangled in and covering the coral reef.

Perhaps even more threatening to the area’s land is the Gran Bahia Principe’s current project to build a large 27-hole golf course above the Aktun Chen System. Aktun Chen is an intricate 500-mile system of underground, water-filled caves and caverns. These cenotes comprise some of the world’s best cave and cavern scuba diving, and only a fraction of these cenotes have been fully explored. Moreover, these underground rivers transport the food to the coral reef allowing it to thrive, and they provide the area with much of the local fresh water supply. However, the chemicals necessary to sustain the golf course, over five tons per year, will undoubtedly seep into the this river system and have potentially devastating and irreparable consequences for the cenotes, the reef, and the diverse plant and animal life that they support.

I understand that it is not the US Senate’s job to protect the land or laws of other sovereign nations. However, Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, from Cancun to Playa del Carmen and Tulum, is a haven for American tourists and American investment. The Gran Bahia Principe Hotels advertise specifically to Americans. The demand and motivation for the golf-course’s construction in no small part comes from American, and consequently the Gran Bahia Principe Hotels feel the need to break a variety of Mexican laws. The flipside is that many future American tourists will not be able to enjoy the stunning natural beauty of the region if these activities continue. We are writing to you, Senator, for your support in our cause to save the Mayan Riviera. We ask that you put pressure on the President Felipe Calderon and the Mexican Government to enforce its own laws and protect its environment. You can learn more about our organization at http://www.saverivieramaya.org/. You can find more information about what we are trying to do to save this beautiful land, as well as photographic and video evidence of all of the various illegal actions committed by the Gran Bahia Principe Hotel discussed in this letter.