Green Marie Unleashed

I love this book...

2008-01-21T00:55:09Z

"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes- a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood not desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

- The Great Gatsby, pg. 189

Saturday Afternoon Fitzgerald

2008-01-05T22:52:42Z

"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

- The Great Gatsby, pgs. 61-62

greenmarie @ 2008-01-04T18:34:00

2008-01-05T00:35:56Z

i saw on the news

there was a fire

in my complex last night

someone’s refuge charred to ash

as I slept, oblivious

and if I hadn’t seen it on TV,

i ‘d have never known.

the fire station is a block away

so I hear the alarms

dressing for work

cooking breakfast

folding clothes

so often that I don’t

hear them anymore

except just now,

as I stepped out

on my balcony to smoke,

and my mind assailed me with

isolation en masse

The FCC's Christmas Gift to Big Media

2007-12-27T19:48:04Z

By Amy Goodman
Truthdig.com

Monday 24 December 2007

On Dec. 18, the five commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission met in Washington, D.C., and, by a 3 to 2 vote, passed new regulations that would allow more media consolidation. This, despite the U.S. public’s increasing concern over the nation’s media being controlled by a few giant corporations.

Dissident FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said of the decision: "We generously ask big media to sit on Santa’s knee, tell us what it wants for Christmas, and then push through whatever of these wishes are politically and practically feasible. No test to see if anyone’s been naughty or nice. Just another big, shiny present for the favored few who already hold an FCC license—and a lump of coal for the rest of us. Happy holidays!"

It was Bush-appointed FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, now just 41 years old, who rammed through the rule changes. He has served President Bush well. As deputy general counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000, he was active during the Florida recount. Before that he worked for Kenneth Starr at the Office of Independent Counsel during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Rumor has it that he may run for governor of his native North Carolina. His wife, Cathie Martin, was a spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney in the midst of the scandal around the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. She now works on Bush’s communications staff.

The federal regulation in question is the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban. It has for decades prevented the same company from owning both a television or radio station in a town as well as a newspaper. Underlying this ban is the core concept of the public interest. Copps couldn’t have been clearer: "Today’s decision would make George Orwell proud. We claim to be giving the news industry a shot in the arm—but the real effect is to reduce total newsgathering." Mergers will result in newsroom layoffs and less, not more, coverage of local issues.

Martin’s new rule is also going to hurt the diversity of the U.S. media. Juan Gonzalez, former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, recently testified at a congressional hearing on media ownership. He said, "Even as our nation has become ever more diverse racially and ethnically ... minority ownership of the broadcast companies ... has remained at shockingly low levels. ..... Direct experience has shown us that ownership matters when it comes to ... a diversity of voices and meeting the news and information needs of minority communities."

Gonzalez pointed out that the new rule will allow the 19 minority-owned TV stations in the country’s top 20 cities to be targeted for takeovers by newspapers, further reducing minority ownership.

There is a reason that journalism is the sole profession explicitly protected in the U.S. Constitution. As a check and balance on government, it is essential to the functioning of a democratic society. As Thomas Jefferson famously stated, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

By eliminating the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban, Martin claims to be saving newspapers. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece, he writes: "In many towns and cities, the newspaper is an endangered species. ... If we don’t act to improve the health of the newspaper industry, we will see newspapers wither and die." As Copps pointed out in his scathing dissent to the rule change, "We shed crocodile tears for the financial plight of newspapers—yet the truth is that newspaper profits are about double the S&P 500 average."

The problem facing Martin and his big media friends isn’t that newspapers are unprofitable; it’s that they are simply not as profitable as they used to be. This is in part because of the Internet. People no longer have to rely on the newspaper to post or read classified ads, for example, with free online outlets like Craigslist.

The media system in the United States is too highly concentrated and serves not the public interest but rather the interests of moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, who controls CBS/Viacom. Media corporations that will benefit from Martin’s handout are the same ones that acted as a conveyor belt for the lies of the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We need a media that challenges the government, that acts as a fourth estate, not for the state. We need a diverse media. The U.S. Congress has a chance to overrule Martin and the FCC, and to keep the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban in place. It should do so immediately, before the consolidated press leads us into another war.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.

What do you think????

2007-11-04T04:55:42Z

So here's the thing, I've been trying to watch "Super Size Me", a 98 minute documentary, for over 3 hours now. As of this moment, I have not been able to watch the entire film. It's taking me so long because I keep feeling nauseated, and periodically I have stop the DVD in order not to yack. If you've seen this movie you know its premise, if not, here goes: this guy eats nothing but McDonald's for a month, all the while having a team of doctors analyze the repercussions of this diet on his health.

So here's the question: If you've seen this documentary, did it make you feel like you were going to vomit? Were you utterly disgusted while watching it?

And if I am completely revolted by scenes of enormously overweight individuals gorging themselves on McDonald's, is this a reasonable reaction? Should I instead make more of an effort to be sympathetic for these people? Should those who eat fast food and subsequently become morbidly obese be treated as addicts who need help? Part of me wants to say yes. Although I repeatedly come to this conclusion theoretically, why is it that I still have so much difficulty conjuring even the slightest amount of sympathy for these people? I mean, they're fat because they eat excessive amounts of horrible food- like substances. They do still have the ability to choose what they eat, right? Or do you believe that some people are truly addicted to the food served in these establishments?

greenmarie @ 2007-11-02T21:32:00

2007-11-03T02:34:33Z

greenmarie @ 2007-10-09T22:39:00

2007-10-10T03:47:33Z

Got lost in Ginsberg photographs down at the museum today and it felt really damn good.

Cosmopolitan Greetings

Stand up against governments, against God.

Stay irresponsible.

Say only what we know & imagine.

Absolutes are coercion.

Change is absolute.

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.

Observe what’s vivid.

Notice what you notice.

Catch yourself thinking.

Vividness is self-selecting.

If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.

Remember the future.

Asvise only yourself.

Don’t drink yourself to death.

Two molecules clanking against each other require an observer to
become scientific data.

The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the
phenomenal world after Einstein.

The universe is subjective..

Walt Whitman celebrated Person.

We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.

Universe is Person.

Inside skull vast as outside skull.

Mind is outer space.

"Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound."

“First thought, best thought.”

Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.

Maximum information, minimum number of syllables.

Syntax condensed, sound is solid.

Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.

Consonants around vowels make sense.

Savor vowels, appreciate consonants.

Subject is known by what she sees.

Others can measure their vision by what we see.

Candor ends paranoia.

- A. Ginsberg, 1986

greenmarie @ 2007-10-06T17:08:00

2007-10-06T21:59:57Z

An old man is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old man simply replied, "The one you feed."

greenmarie @ 2007-09-29T12:47:00

2007-09-29T17:40:53Z

Data- mining in publiic schools...what will Americans tolerate next?

The Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein on the Rise of Disaster Capitalism

2007-09-18T13:04:12Z

From DemocracyNow.org:

AMY GOODMAN: Pinochet’s coup in Chile, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11th, the war on Iraq, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Award-winning investigative journalist Naomi Klein brings together all these world-changing events in her new book. It’s called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Economist Milton Friedman once said, “Only a crisis produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Naomi Klein examines some of what she considers the most dangerous ideas -- Friedmanite economics -- and exposes how catastrophic events are both extremely profitable to corporations and have also allowed governments to push through what she calls “disaster capitalism.”

Naomi Klein writes in the introduction to Shock Doctrine the quote, “The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks.” She argues, “Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms.”

I want to begin by playing excerpts from a short documentary co-written by Naomi Klein and Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron. It’s directed by Cuaron’s son Jonas. It’s also called The Shock Doctrine. It premiered last week at film festivals in Venice and Toronto.

NEWSREEL: The 1940s have been a decade of breakthroughs and developments in medicine and psychiatry. Scientists have developed a new technology to cure mentally ill adults. With the use of electroshocks, the minds of sick patients are being wiped clean, giving them a fresh start. On this blank slate, physicians then imprint a new healthy personality.

NAOMI KLEIN: Remaking people, shocking them into obedience. This is a story about that powerful idea. In the 1950s, it caught the attention of the CIA. The agency funded a series of experiments. Out of them was produced a secret handbook on how to break down prisoners. The key was using shock to reduce adults to a childlike state.

TEXT: The following narration is excerpted from the CIA's 1963 and 1983 interrogation manuals.

NARRATION: It’s a fundamental hypothesis of this handbook that these are techniques are, in essence, methods of inducing regression of the personality. There is an interval, which may be extremely brief, of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock.

NAOMI KLEIN: But these techniques don't only work on individuals; they can work on whole societies: a collective trauma, a war, a coup, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack puts us all into a state of shock. And in the aftermath, like the prisoner in the interrogation chamber, we, too, become childlike, more inclined to follow leaders who claim to protect us.

One person who understood this phenomenon early on was the famous economist of our era, Milton Friedman. Friedman believed in a radical vision of society in which profit and the market drive every aspect of life, from schools to healthcare, even the army. He called for abolishing all trade protections, deregulating all prices and eviscerating government services.

These ideas have always been tremendously unpopular, and understandably so. They cause waves of unemployment, send prices soaring, and make life more precarious for millions. Unable to advance their agenda democratically, Friedman and his disciples were drawn to the power of shock.

NARRATION: The subject should be rudely awakened and immediately blindfolded and handcuffed. When arrested at this time, most subjects experience intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress. The idea is to prevent the subject from relaxing and recovering from shock.

NAOMI KLEIN: Friedman understood that just as prisoners are softened up for interrogation by the shock of their capture, massive disasters could serve to soften us up for his radical free-market crusade. He advised politicians that immediately after a crisis, they should push through all the painful policies at once, before people could regain their footing. He called this method “economic shock treatment.” I call it “the shock doctrine.”

Take a second look at the iconic events of our era, and behind many you will find its logic at work. This is the secret history of the free market. It wasn't born in freedom and democracy; it was born in shock.

NARRATION: Isolation, both physical and psychological, must be maintained from the moment of apprehension. The capacity for resistance is diminished by disorientation. Prisoners should maintain silence at all times. They should never be allowed to speak to each other.

NAOMI KLEIN: There’s one other thing I’ve learned from my study of states of shock: shock wears off. It is, by definition, a temporary state. And the best way to stay oriented, to resist shock, is to know what is happening to you and why.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of The Shock Doctrine, directed by Jonas Cuaron, co-written by Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron with Naomi Klein. You can watch the entire film online. We’ll link to it at democracynow.org. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, the bestselling author of No Logo and the co-director of the film The Take. Her latest book is called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Naomi Klein joins me for the hour in our firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

NAOMI KLEIN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Why don't you start off by talking about exactly what you consider to be the shock doctrine?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, the shock doctrine, like all doctrines, is a philosophy of power. It’s a philosophy about how to achieve your political and economic goals. And this is a philosophy that holds that the best way, the best time, to push through radical free-market ideas is in the aftermath of a major shock. Now, that shock could be an economic meltdown. It could be a natural disaster. It could be a terrorist attack. It could be a war. But the idea, as you just saw in the film, is that these crises, these disasters, these shocks soften up whole societies. They discombobulate them. People lose their bearings. And a window opens up, just like the window in the interrogation chamber. And in that window, you can push through what economists call “economic shock therapy.” That’s sort of extreme country makeovers. It’s everything all at once. It’s not, you know, one reform here, one reform there, but the kind of radical change that we saw in Russia in the 1990s, that Paul Bremer tried to push through in Iraq after the invasion. So that’s the shock doctrine.

And it’s not claiming that right-wingers in a contemporary age are the only people who have ever exploited crisis, because this idea of exploiting a crisis is not unique to this particular ideology. Fascists have done it. State communists have done it. But this is an attempt to better understand the ideology that we live with, the dominant ideology of our time, which is unfettered market economics.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who Milton Friedman is, who you take on in a big way in this book.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I take on Milton Friedman because he is the symbol of the history that I am trying to challenge. Milton Friedman died last year. He died in 2006. And when he died, we heard him described in very lavish tributes as probably the most important intellectual of the post-war period, not just the most important economist, but the most important intellectual. And I think that a strong argument can be made for that. This was an adviser to Thatcher, to Nixon, to Reagan, to the current Bush administration. He tutored Donald Rumsfeld in the early days of his career. He advised Pinochet in the 1970s. He also advised the Communist Party of China in the key reform period in the late 1980s. So he had enormous influence. And I was talking to somebody the other day who described him as the Karl Marx for capitalism. And I think that’s not a bad description, although I’m sure Marx wouldn’t have liked it very much. But he was really a popularizer of these ideas.

He had a vision of society, in which the only acceptable role for the state was to enforce contracts and to protect borders. Everything else should be completely left to the market, whether education, national parks, the post office; everything that could be performed at a profit should be. And he really saw, I guess, shopping -- buying and selling -- as the highest form of democracy, as the highest form of freedom. And his best-known book was Capitalism and Freedom.

So, you know, when he died last year, we were all treated to a retelling of the official version of how these radical free-market ideas came to dominate the globe, how they swept through the former Soviet Union, Latin America, Africa, you know, how these ideas triumphed over the past thirty-five years. And I was so struck, because I was in the middle of writing this book, that we never heard about violence, and we never heard about crises, and we never heard about shocks. I mean, the official story is that these ideas triumphed because we wanted them to, that the Berlin Wall fell and people demanded their Big Macs along with their democracy. And, you know, the official story of the rise of this ideology goes through Margaret Thatcher saying, “There is no alternative,” to Francis Fukuyama saying, “History has ended. Capitalism and freedom go hand in hand.”

And so, what I’m trying to do with this book is tell that same story, the key junctures where this ideology has leapt forward, but I’m reinserting the violence, I’m reinserting the shocks, and I’m saying that there is a relationship between massacres, between crises, between major shocks and body blows to countries and the ability to impose policies that are actually rejected by the vast majority of the people on this planet.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein. Her new book is called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. We'll be back with her in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is Naomi Klein. She took the world by storm with her first book, No Logo. Now she is back with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Naomi, you’re talking about Milton Friedman. Expand it to the “Chicago School.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. So the influence of Milton Friedman comes from his role in really being the popularizer of what’s known as the “Chicago School of Economics.” He taught at the University of Chicago. He studied, actually, at the University of Chicago, and then he went on to be a professor there. He was mentored by one of the most radical free-market economists of our time, Friedrich von Hayek, who also taught for a time at the University of Chicago.

And the Chicago School of Economics really stands for this counterrevolution against the welfare state. In the 1950s, Harvard and Yale and the Ivy League schools tended to be dominated by Keynesian economists, people like the late John Kenneth Galbraith, who believe strongly that after the Great Depression, it was crucial that economics serve as a moderating force of the market, that it soften its edges. And this was really the birth of the New Deal, the welfare state, all of those things that actually make the market less brutal, whether it’s some kind of public healthcare system, unemployment insurance, welfare and so on. This was actually -- the post-war period was a period of tremendous economic growth and prosperity in this country and around the world, but it really did eat into the profit margins of the wealthiest people in the United States, because this was the period where the middle class really grew and exploded.

So the importance of the University of Chicago Economics Department is that it really was a tool for Wall Street, who funded the University of Chicago very, very heavily. Walter Wriston, the head of Citibank, was very close friends with Milton Friedman, and the University of Chicago became kind of ground zero for this counterrevolution against Keynesianism and the New Deal to dismantle the New Deal. So in the ’50s and ’60s, it was seen as very, very marginal in the United States, because big government and the welfare state and all of these things that have become sort of dirty words in our lexicon thanks to the Chicago School -- they didn't have access to the halls of power.

But that began to change. It began to change when Nixon was elected, because Nixon was very close with Milton Friedman, although Nixon decided not to embrace these policies domestically, because he realized he would lose the next election. And this is where I think you first see the incompatibility of these free-market policies with a democracy, with peace, because when Nixon was elected, Friedman was brought in as an adviser -- he hired a whole bunch of Chicago School economists. And Milton Friedman writes in his memoirs that he thought, you know, finally their time had come. They were being brought in from the margins, and this sort of revolutionary group of these counterrevolutionaries were finally going to dismantle the welfare state in the USA. And what actually happened is that Nixon, you know, looked around, looked at the polls and realized that if he did what Milton Friedman was advising, he would absolutely lose the next election. And so, he did the worst thing possible, according to the Chicago School, which is impose wage and price controls.

And the irony is that two key Chicago School figures, Donald Rumsfeld, who had studied with Friedman as a sort of -- I guess he kind of audited his courses; he wasn’t enrolled as a student, but he describes this time as studying at the feet of geniuses, and he describes himself as the “young pup” at the University of Chicago -- and George Shultz were the two people who imposed wage and price controls under Nixon and when Nixon declared, “We’re all Keynesians now.” So for Friedman this was a terrible betrayal, and it also made him think that maybe you couldn't impose these policies in a democracy. And, you know, Nixon famously said, “We’re all Keynesians now,” but the catch was he wouldn’t impose these policies at home, because it would have cost him the next election, and Nixon was reelected with a 60% margin after he imposed wage and price controls. But he unleashed the school on Latin America and turned Chile, under Augusto Pinochet, into a laboratory for these radical ideas, which were not compatible with democracy in the United States but were infinitely possible under a dictatorship in Latin America.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened in Chile.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think Democracy Now! viewers and listeners know this chapter in history, which was that after Salvador Allende was elected, a democratic socialist was elected, in 1970, there was a plot to overthrow him. Nixon famously said, “Make the economy scream.” And the plot had many elements, an embargo and so on, and finally the support for Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973. And we often hear about the Chicago Boys in Chile, but we don't hear that many details about who they actually were.

And so, what I do in the book is I retell this chapter of history, but, for me, the economic agenda of the Pinochet government is much more front and center, because I think we do know the human rights abuses, we know about Pinochet rounding up people, taking them to stadiums, the summary executions, the torture. We know a little bit less about the economic program that he pushed in in the window of opportunity that opened up after the shock of that coup. And this is where it fits into the shock doctrine thesis.

I think if you look at Chile -- and this is why I spend some time in the book looking at it and examining it -- we see Iraq. We see Iraq today. We see so many similarities between the intersection of a manufactured crisis and the imposition of radical economic shock therapy right afterward. So I’m thinking about the sort of parallels between Paul Bremer's period in Iraq, when he went into Baghdad with the city still burning and just -- you know, I came on the show at the time talking about how he had torn up the whole economic architecture of the country and turned it into this laboratory for the most radical free-market policies possible.

Well, in Chile, on September 11, 1973, while the tanks were rolling in the streets of Santiago, while the presidential palace was burning and Salvador Allende lay dead, there was a group of so-called “Chicago Boys,” who were Chilean economists who had been brought to the University of Chicago to study on full scholarship by the US government as part of a deliberate strategy to try to move Latin America to the right, after it had moved so far to the left. So this was a very ideological government-funded program, part of what Chile’s former foreign minister calls “a project of deliberate ideological transfer,” i.e. bringing these students to this very extreme school at the University of Chicago and indoctrinating them in a brand of economics that was marginal in the United States at the time and then sending them home as ideological warriors.

So this group of economists, who had failed to sway Chileans to their point of view when it was just part of, you know, an open debate, stayed up all night that night, on September 11, 1973, and they were photocopying a document called “the brick.” It’s known as “the brick.” And what it was was the economic program for Pinochet’s government. And it has these striking similarities, Amy, with George Bush's 2000 election strategy -- election platform. It talks about an ownership society, privatizing Social Security, charter schools, a flat tax. This is all straight out of Milton Friedman's playbook. This document was on the desk of the generals on September the 12th, when they reported for work the day after the coup, and it was the program for Pinochet’s government.

So what I’m doing in the book is saying, you know, these two things are not coincidental. You know, when Pinochet died -- he died the same -- shortly before Milton Friedman -- we heard -- or, actually, he died shortly after Milton Friedman --we heard this narrative, you know, in places like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, of, “Of course, we disapprove of his human rights violations,” and this sort of, you know, shaking of fingers at the atrocities that we know about in Chile, “but on the economy he was terrific,” as if there was no connection between the free-market revolution that he was able to push through and the extraordinary human rights violations that took place at the same time. And what I’m doing in the book and what many Latin Americans do in their work is obviously connect the two and say it would have been impossible to push through this economic program without the extraordinary repression and the demolition of democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about shock in the sense of torture. It’s where you begin: “Blank is Beautiful.” Talk about that.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I start the book looking at the two laboratories for the shock doctrine. As I said, I look at different forms of shock. One is the economic shock, and another is body shock, shocks to people. And they aren't always there, but they have been there at key junctures. This is the shock of torture.

So one of the laboratories for this doctrine was the University of Chicago in the 1950s, when all of these Latin American economists were trained to become economic shock therapists. Another one -- and, you know, this isn't some sort of grand conspiracy that it was all planned, but there was another school, which served as a different kind of shock laboratory, which was McGill University in the 1950s. McGill University was ground zero for the experiments that the CIA funded in order to understand how to -- basically how to torture.

I mean, it was called “mind control” at the time or “brainwashing” at the time, but now we understand, thanks to the work of people like Alfred McCoy, who has been a guest on your program, that actually what was being researched in the 1950s under the MK-ULTRA program, when there were these experiments in extreme electroshock, LSD, PCP, extreme sensory deprivation, sensory overload, that actually what was being developed was the manual that we can now see at use in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. This is a manual for unmaking personalities, for total regression of personalities, and creating that window of opportunity where people are very suggestible, as we saw in the film. So McGill, in part because I think it was seen by the CIA as easier to perform these experiments outside the US --

AMY GOODMAN: McGill in Montreal.

NAOMI KLEIN: McGill in Montreal. At the time, the head of psychiatry was a man named Ewen Cameron. He was actually an American citizen. He was formerly head of the American Psychiatric Association, which I think is quite relevant to the debates going on right now about complicity in the psychiatric profession with current interrogation techniques. Ewen Cameron was head of the American Psychiatric Association. He moved to McGill to be head of psychiatry and to head up a hospital called the Allan Memorial Hospital, which was a psychiatric hospital.

He got funding from the CIA, and he turned the Allan Memorial Hospital into this extraordinary laboratory for what we now understand as alternative interrogation techniques. He dosed his patients with these odd cocktails of drugs, like LSD and PCP. He put them to sleep, sort of into a comatose state for up to a month. He put some of his patients into extreme sensory deprivation, and the point was to make them lose track of time and space.

And what Ewen Cameron believed, or at least what he said he believed, was that all mental illness was taught later in life, that these were patterns that set in later in life. He was a behavioral psychologist. And so, rather than getting at the root of those problems and trying to understand them, he believed that the way to treat mental illness was to take adult patients and reduce them to a childlike state. And it's been well known -- it was well known at the time -- that one of the side effects of electroshock therapy was memory loss. And this was something that was seen, actually, by most doctors as a problem, because patients were treated, they may have reported some positive results, but they forgot all kinds of things about their life. Ewen Cameron looked at this research and thought, “Aha, this is good,” because he believed that it was the patterns that -- because he believed that it was the patterns that were set in later in life, that if he could take his patients back to an infantile state, before they even had language, before they knew who they were, then he could essentially re-mother them, and he could turn them into healthy people. So this is the idea that caught the attention of the CIA, this idea of deliberately inducing extreme regression.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the woman you visited in the nursing home who had gone through this.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. I start the book with a profile of a woman name Gail Kastner. Gail Kastner was one of Ewen Cameron’s patients. And I read about her because she successfully sued the Canadian government, which was also funding Ewen Cameron. I read about her lawsuit, that she had just won an important victory: she had gotten a settlement, because she had been used as a guinea pig in these experiments without her knowledge.

So I called her, actually just got her number from the phone book. And she was very, very reticent to talk at first. She said she hated journalists, and it was very difficult for her to talk about it, because she would relive all these experiences. And I said, well -- she said, “What do you want to talk to me about?” And I said, “Well, I just got back from Iraq” -- and this was 2004 -- “and I feel like something that was done to you, the philosophy of what was done to you, has something to do with what I saw in Iraq, which was this desire to wipe clean a country and to start over from scratch. And I even think that some of what we’re seeing at Guantanamo with this attempt to regress prisoners through sensory deprivation and remake them is also related to what happened to you.” And there was this long pause. And she said, “OK, come and see me.”

So I flew to Montreal, and we spent the day talking, and she shared her story with me. She talks about her electric dreams, which is, she doesn't have very many memories of what happened to her in this period, because she underwent such extraordinary shock and it did wipe out her memory. She regressed to the point where she sucked her thumb, urinated on the floor, didn't know who she was, and she didn't have any memory of this, any memory at all that she had ever been hospitalized. She only realized it, I think, twenty years later, when she read an article about a group of fellow patients who had successfully sued the CIA. And she picked out a few lines in the newspaper articles -- regression, loss of language -- and she thought, “Wait a minute, this sounds like me. This sounds like what I’ve heard about myself.” And so, she went and she asked her family, “Was I ever at the Allan Memorial Hospital?” And at first they denied it, and then they admitted it. She requested her file, and she read that, yes, she had been admitted by Dr. Ewen Cameron, and she saw all of these extraordinary treatments that had been done to her.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, but when we come back, we’re going to move from shocking the individual, shocking the body, to shocking the body politic, whether in Chile or in Iraq. We’re talking to Naomi Klein. Her book is being released today. It’s called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour, Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine -- it’s coming out today -- The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I want to move from the individual body being shocked to the body politic. You talked about Chile, let's talk about Iraq, the privatization of war in Iraq.

We have this breaking news out of Iraq today: The Iraqi government says it’s pulling the license of the US security company Blackwater over its involvement in a fatal shooting in Baghdad on Sunday. Interior Ministry spokesperson Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight civilians were killed and thirteen wounded, when security contractors believed to be working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad. Khalaf said, “We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities.” It was not immediately clear if the measure against Blackwater is intended to be temporary or permanent. Naomi Klein, take it from there.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, that’s an extraordinary piece of news. I mean, this is really the first time that one of these mercenary firms may actually be held accountable. You know, as Jeremy Scahill has written in his incredible book Blackwater: The Rise of the [World's] Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the real problem is, there haven't been prosecutions. These companies work in this absolute gray zone, and, you know, they’re either boy scouts and nothing has going wrong, which completely doesn't mesh with what we know about the way they’re behaving in Iraq and all of the sort of videos that we’ve seen online of just target practice on Iraqi civilians, or the lawlessness and the immunity in which they work has protected them. So, you know, if this is -- if the Iraqi government is actually going to kick Blackwater out of Iraq, it could really be a turning point in terms of pulling these companies into the law and questioning the whole premise of why this level of privatization and lawlessness has been allowed to take place.

But, you know, I mentioned how Donald Rumsfeld was a student of Milton Friedman’s in the ’60s, actually, and the thing about Donald Rumsfeld is he really went beyond his mentor, because Milton Friedman, as I said earlier, he believed that the only acceptable role for government was policing, was the military. That was the only thing he really thought the government should do; every thing else should be privatized. Donald Rumsfeld studied with Friedman, saw him as a mentor, celebrated his birthday every year with him, but he really took this one step further, because Rumsfeld believed that, actually, the work of policing and of war fighting could also be privatized and outsourced. And he made this very clear.

This was really his mission of a transformation, which I think is really not understood, how radical it was. You know, we hear this phrase, and we hear Bush praising Rumsfeld for his radical vision of transformation of the military, and it’s all these sort of buzzwords that are hard to understand, but if we look at what Rumsfeld’s record was, it was that -- you know, I write in the book that really what he did is -- this is somebody who, after he left the Ford administration, spent a couple of decades working in business and really saw himself as a man of the new economy.

And, you know, this is somewhere where I think that the research I did for No Logo really intersects with this disaster capitalism stage that we’re in right now, because Rumsfeld took the 1990s revolution in branding, in corporate branding, where -- and this is what I wrote about in No Logo, where you had all of these companies that used to produce products announcing with great fanfare that they don't produce products anymore, they produce brands, they produce images, and they can let other people, sort of lesser contractors, do the dirty work of actually making stuff. And that was the sort of revolution in outsourcing, and that was the paradigm of the hollow corporation.

Rumsfeld very much comes out of that tradition. And when he came on board as Defense Secretary, he rode in like a new economy CEO that was going to do one of these radical restructurings. But what he was doing is he was taking this philosophy of this revolution in the corporate world and applying it to the military. And what he oversaw was the hollowing out of the American military, where essentially the role of the Army is branding, is marketing, is projecting the image of strength and dominance on the globe, and then -- but outsourcing every function, from healthcare –- providing healthcare to soldiers to the building of military bases, which was already happening under the Clinton administration, to the extraordinary role that Blackwater has played and companies like DynCorp, where we -- you know, as Jeremy has reported, they’re actually engaged in combat.

AMY GOODMAN: And, in fact, Blackwater working with Pinochet’s soldiers, but in Iraq.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, and, I mean, this is -- we see these layers of continuity. I mean, Paul Bremer was the assistant to Kissinger during the Nixon administration when the support for Pinochet was so strong. So you have all of these layers of historical continuity. And, you know, that's why, I guess, my motivation for writing the book was -- there has been no accountability for these crimes. And in Latin America, there have been truth commissions, there have been trials. The people who were at the heart of this very violent transformation, many of them have actually been held accountable. Not all of them, but many of them have actually been held accountable, if not in the courts, then certainly in a deep and important public discussion of truth and reconciliation. But this country, that has never happened, despite the fact that there has been a great deal of wonderful investigative reporting. And because there has never been any accountability, the same players are really at it again.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about, Naomi Klein, the destruction of Iraq. Talk about “Shock and Awe,” the shock economic therapy of Paul Bremer, the shock of torture, as well, putting them all together in Iraq.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, well, as I said, you know, in Chile we see this triple-shock formula and torture as an enforcement of these policies. And I think we see the same triple-shock formula in Iraq. The first was the invasion, the shock-and-awe military invasion of Iraq. And if you read the manual, the military manual that explained the theory of shock and awe -- a lot of people think of it as just like a lot of bombs, a lot of missiles, but it’s really a psychological doctrine, which in itself is a war crime, because it says very bluntly that during the first Gulf War the goal was to attack Saddam's military infrastructure, but under a shock-and-awe campaign, the target is the society writ large. That’s a quote from the shock-and-awe doctrine.

Now, targeting societies writ large is collective punishment, which is a war crime. Militaries are not allowed to target societies writ large; they’re only allowed to target military. So this was -- the doctrine is actually quite amazing, because it talks about -- it talks about sensory deprivation on a mass scale. It talks about a blinding, cutting off the senses, of a whole population. And we saw that during the invasion, the lights going out, cutting off of all communication, and the phones going out, and then the looting, which I don't actually believe was part of the strategy, but I think doing nothing in some ways was part of the strategy, because, of course, we know that there were all kinds of warnings that the museums and libraries needed to be protected and no action was taken. And then you had the famous statement from Donald Rumsfeld when he was confronted with this: “Stuff happens.”

So, it was, I think -- it was this idea that because the goal was, in New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s famous phrase, not nation-building, but “nation-creating,” you know, which is an extraordinarily violent idea, if you stop and think about what it means to create a nation in a nation that already exists, something has to happen to the nation that was already there, and we’re talking about a culture as old as civilization. So I think that because there was this idea that we were starting from scratch and this idea that is often portrayed, you know, in the US media as idealistic, of wanting to build a model nation in the heart of the Arab world that would spread to neighboring countries and lead to an opening up, this idea of building a model nation is -- you know, it has all kinds of colonial echoes. It really can't be done without some kind of a cleansing. And so, I think that the ease, the comfort level with the looting, with the erasing of Iraq's history, has to be seen within that vision of, OK, well, we’re starting over from scratch. So anything that’s already there is really just getting in the way. So if it’s loaded onto trucks and it’s sold in Syria and Jordan, that sort of just makes the job easier. And so, I think we saw that on many, many levels.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, how does Abu Ghraib fit into this picture?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I quote Richard Armitage in the book, saying that the theory -- that the working theory in Iraq was that Iraqis would be so disoriented by the war and by the fall of Saddam that they would be easily marshaled from point A to point B. Now, as we know, that was not the case. And as Paul Bremer -- when Paul Bremer rode in and did his radical country makeover, fired the entire Iraqi -- much of the Iraqi civil service, as well as the army, declared Iraq open for business, cheap imports flooded the country. Iraqi businesses couldn't compete. That first summer, there was a huge amount of peaceful protest outside the Green Zone, and it became clear that it was just simply not going to be possible to marshal Iraqis from point A to point B.

And it was after that, when the first armed resistance emerged in Iraq, that the war was brought to the prisons. And this also comes back to Donald Rumsfeld's vision of being this sort of CEO Defense Secretary, because, of course, like any CEO, he understaffed the war. And he was not in a position, or the US occupying force was not in a position, to deal with this drastic miscalculation and this sort of fantasy that Iraqis would just behave and accept this economic shock therapy and this -- really this looting of their country. So when Iraqis began to resist, the suppression of that resistance couldn't take place in the streets, because there simply wasn't the person power.

So people were rounded up and brought to the jails, and torture was used, as it was in Latin America, to send a message to the entire country. And torture is always -- it’s both private and public at the same time. And this is true no matter who is using it, that for torture to work as a tool of state terror, it’s not just about what happens between an interrogator and a prisoner; it’s also about sending a message to the broader society: this is what happens if you step out of line. And I believe torture was used by the US occupation in that way, not just to get information, but also as a warning to the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi, I want to end this part of our conversation by taking a reverse trip. President Bush just went from the Bayou, from New Orleans to Baghdad. Let's go back. Both you and I were just in New Orleans. I saw you last two years ago in New Orleans, as well, just after the hurricane. Fit Katrina and the US response to the drowning of the American city into this picture.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, New Orleans is a classic example of what I’m calling the shock doctrine or disaster capitalism, because you had that first shock, which was the drowning of the city. And as you know, having just returning from New Orleans, it was not -- this was not a natural disaster. And the great irony here is that it really was a disaster of this very ideology that we’re talking about, the systematic neglect of the public sphere.

And I think, increasingly, we’re going to see this, where you have twenty-five years of steady neglect of the public infrastructure, and the bones of the state -- the transportation system, the roads, the levees -- are weak and frail. And the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that it would take $1.5 trillion to bring the bones of the state up to standard, because they’re so weakened, the bridges and the roads and the levees.

And so, what we have is a kind of a perfect storm, where the weakened frail state is intersecting with increasingly heavy weather, which I would argue is also part of this same ideological frenzy for short-term profit and short-term growth. And when these two collide, you have a disaster. And that’s what happened in New Orleans. The frail levees intersected with heavy weather, although not even that heavy weather. The Category Five hurricane didn't actually hit.

And I think, you know, just as an aside, since we’re in New York, that another really powerful example of exactly that happened this summer when the subways flooded, that it was -- everyone was shocked, because it didn't rain that hard. But the infrastructure was so weakened because of the steady neglect. And what was the headline in the New York Sun? “Sell the Subways.”

So you -- first the ideology weakens, creates the disaster, and then it’s used as an excuse to finish the job, to privatize everything, and that is what happened in New Orleans. Immediately after the city flooded, you had this ideological campaign, ground zero of which was the Heritage Foundation in Washington, which has always been, I guess, the most powerful engine for this radical free-market vision, announcing that, you know, this is a tragedy, but it’s also an opportunity to completely remake the state, i.e. eliminate it, so an explosion of charter schools -- the public schools were not reopened. They were converted to charter schools. The public hospital, like Charity Hospital, remains boarded up. The public housing --and this is the most dramatic example -- that horrible quote from a Republican congressperson: “We couldn't clean out the housing projects, but God did it ten days after the levees broke.” This is what I mean by the shock doctrine, this idea of harnessing a disaster to push through radical privatization.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi, as we wrap up this hour, what were you most shocked by in researching the shock doctrine?

NAOMI KLEIN: I was shocked that there is this cache of literature out there, which I didn't know existed, where the economists admit it. You know, and this is what I guess I’m most excited about in the book is how many quotes I have from very high-level advocates of free-market economics, everyone from Milton Friedman to John Williamson, who’s the man who coined the phrase “the Washington Consensus,” admitting amongst themselves, not publicly, but amongst themselves, in sort of technocratic documents, that they have never been able to push through a radical free-market makeover in the absence of a large-scale crisis, i.e. the central myth of our time that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand is known to be a lie by the very people who are advancing it, and they will admit it on the record.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, folks, there is more to come. We'll continue this conversation afterwards and bring it to you on a later broadcast. Naomi Klein, our guest, in her first national broadcast interview on the release of her book today, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Tonight, we’ll be at the Ethical Culture Society at 2 West 64th Street in New York. Naomi will be launching her book, and you can look at her book tour at shockdoctrine.com to see where she will be in the coming months, a very extensive tour around this country. Thank you, Naomi.

NAOMI KLEIN: Thank you so much, Amy.

last night i dreamt my death

2007-09-09T16:53:08Z

my arms filleted from crease to wrist

i imbibed the blood with drunken fervor

bathed in its scarlet insidiousness

but it never ceased to flow

and then a protean figure

arrived to share it with me

my brother collected some

from the pool that had formed around me

saying he was going to use it

to paint the grand canyon for his daughter

my mother drew some into a pen

and began to write

her eulogy in iambic pentameter

my father stood back

contemplating whether or not

he could process it

into cattle feed

and for an instant

you were there too

but I couldn’t decipher

your intentions
before everything was gone

FYI

2007-09-06T12:31:25Z

grad school = no life

In remembrance:

2007-08-30T00:43:47Z

greenmarie @ 2007-08-25T21:05:00

2007-08-26T02:49:28Z

presently

a respite from the baneful yen

just in time too

compulsion all but destroyed her

and still might

“you’re an addict for life” they say

and she knows it

An interview I listened to this morning:

2007-08-23T15:04:45Z

You Have No Rights

Once again, I'm disgusted:

2007-08-23T14:48:53Z

Psychologists in Denial About Torture

My sentiments exactly...

2007-08-20T20:47:55Z

Television

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don't climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink --
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'What used the darling ones to do?
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read!
Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales
Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales
And treasure isles, and distant shores
Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars,
And pirates wearing purple pants,
And sailing ships and elephants,
And cannibals crouching 'round the pot,
Stirring away at something hot.
(It smells so good, what can it be?
Good gracious, it's Penelope.)
The younger ones had Beatrix Potter
With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter,
And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland,
And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and-
Just How The Camel Got His Hump,
And How the Monkey Lost His Rump,
And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul,
There's Mr. Rate and Mr. Mole-
Oh, books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books,
Ignoring all the dirty looks,
The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,
And children hitting you with sticks-
Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do,
They'll now begin to feel the need
Of having something to read.
And once they start -- oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They'll grow so keen
They'll wonder what they'd ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did.

- Roald Dahl

The end of my final summer is upon me...

2007-08-15T22:45:04Z

I start my Master's program in 6 days! Which means year- round school for at least the next 2 years...BLAH!

Not to mention that I'll be working 2 part- time jobs for my first year! I'm currently working as an SLP- Assistant (using that Bachelor's does feel good though...) and once classes start I'll be a Graduate Research Assistant too!

So please forgive me if I don't post regularly... I'm reading more than I'm writing these days....

HELL YEAH!! It's the Sunday Concert Series Fall 2007!!!

2007-07-24T03:06:49Z

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO:

I just ordered my ACL Ticket!!!! Among many others, the one and only BOB DYLAN, live, Sunday, September 16th!!!!!!!

(I'm convulsing as a try to type this...)

Oh, and as if that wasn't enough....I also confirmed my order for RILO KILEY, Sunday, October 7th at Stubbs!

Respect!
(not hate hate hate hate hate)

:)

greenmarie @ 2007-07-09T12:02:00

2007-07-09T17:04:48Z

She's let it go too long, and as she sits on my couch, sobbing and shaking, I hardly recognize her. What began as a small wound has since become gangrenous, consuming her mercilessly. When she first came to me a year ago, needing to relay what he had told her about "wanting time to figure things out", I saw myself in her tear- stained face. But even then as we spoke, I knew she wouldn't heed my words of caution. Because even when we can feel ourselves rotting from the inside out, we'll do almost anything not to have to be the one wielding the machete.

Stream of Consciousness #5

2007-06-19T20:51:41Z

everyday angels please be gentle moving moving work heat summer fun too much packing to do wait wait not time yet stop looking over here no no no jogging swimming disk golf and sun always sun no rest for the wicked no rest at all Sharon were are you? whatcha doing now? wish you'd come to texas where the sun always blisters our backs beer and sweat dripping into my eyes tired but happy tired but happy no i still have time still a few more minutes sun hat lady i like your hat wish i had one like that only much bigger much! oh little ones with your innocent smiles when i was that small i danced on my fathers feet he was so tall then

Mahmood Mamdani on Darfur: "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency"

2007-06-06T00:41:21Z

Found this at www.democracynow.org- check it out:

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Darfur. President Bush has ordered new sanctions to be placed on the Sudanese government for its role in the violence in Darfur. Last week's announcement blocks thirty-one companies tied to the Sudanese government from using the US banking system.

The sanctions were seen as a victory for the Save Darfur Coalition, a US group leading a vocal campaign pressuring the White House to take action. But the New York Times reported Saturday some of Save Darfur's public efforts have angered aid groups working on the ground in Sudan. The aid groups say Save Darfur's call for imposing a no-flight zone could lead to a halt in aid flights and put their workers at risk. Aid groups have also criticized Save Darfur for not spending its multi-million dollar budget on aid to Darfur's refugees.

Mahmood Mamdani is one of the world's most prominent Africa scholars. Earlier this year, he wrote a major piece for the London Review of Books called “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency.” He was born in Uganda and now splits his time between Uganda and New York, where he is a professor at Columbia University. Mahmood Mamdani stopped by our firehouse studio Friday. I began by asking him about the name of his article, “The Politics of Naming.”

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: I think the larger question is the names -- genocide, in particular -- come into being against a background of the twentieth century and mass slaughter of the twentieth century, and particularly the Holocaust. And against that background, Lemkin convinced the international community, and particularly states in the international community, have an obligation to intervene when there is genocide. He’s successful in getting the international community to adopt a resolution on this.

Then follows the politics around genocide. And the politics around genocide is, when is the slaughter of civilians a genocide or not? Which particular slaughter is going to be named genocide, and which one is not going to be named genocide? So if you look at the last ten years and take some examples of mass slaughter -- for example, the mass slaughter in Iraq, which is -- in terms of numbers, at least -- no less than what is going on in Sudan; or the mass slaughter in Congo, which, in terms of numbers, is probably ten times what happened, what has been happening in Darfur. But none of these have been named as genocide. Only the slaughter in Darfur has been named as genocide. So there is obviously a politics around this naming, and that’s the politics that I was interested in.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think this politics is?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I think that what’s happening is that genocide is being instrumentalized by the biggest power on the earth today, which is the United States. It is being instrumentalized in a way that mass slaughters which implicate its adversaries are being named as genocide and those which implicate its friends or its proxies are not being named as genocide. And that is not what Lemkin had in mind.

AMY GOODMAN: The simplifying of the conflict by the US media, you write extensively about this, who the sides are.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I was struck by the fact -- because I live nine months in New York and three months in Kampala, and every morning I open the New York Times, and I read about sort of violence against civilians, atrocities against civilians, and there are two places that I read about -- one is Iraq, and the other is Darfur -- sort of constantly, day after day, and week after week. And I’m struck by the fact that the largest political movement against mass violence on US campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq. And it puzzles me, because most of these students, almost all of these students, are American citizens, and I had always thought that they should have greater responsibility, they should feel responsibility, for mass violence which is the result of their own government's policies. And I ask myself, “Why not?” I ask myself, “How do they discuss mass violence in Iraq and options in Iraq?” And they discuss it by asking -- agonizing over what would happen if American troops withdrew from Iraq. Would there be more violence? Less violence? But there is no such agonizing over Darfur, because Darfur is a place without history, Darfur is a place without politics. Darfur is simply a dot on the map. It is simply a place, a site, where perpetrator confronts victim. And the perpetrator’s name is Arab, and the victim’s name is African. And it is easy to demonize. It is easy to hold a moral position which is emptied of its political content. This bothered me, and so I wrote about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world’s most prominent Africa scholars, speaking about Darfur in relation to other conflicts around the world.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, let’s begin with the numbers of the dead, OK? The only group in a position to estimate how many people have died in Darfur is UNICEF, because UNICEF is the only one that did a comprehensive survey in 2005 in Darfur. Everybody else only knows the piece of ground on which they work and will then extrapolate from it, like any other NGO, like Oxfam or Medecins Sans Frontieres or World Food Program. The WFP estimate was 200,000. Out of these 200,000, the WPF report tells you that roughly about 20% died of actually being killed, of violence, and 80% died mainly from starvation and from diseases. And normally in our understanding of genocide, we put both those together and look at them as a result of the violence, because the violence prevents the medicine going in, etc., except in the case of Darfur, it’s not a single-cause situation.

Darfur is also the place which has been hit hard by global warming. The UN commission which sat on global warming very recently spoke of Darfur as the first major crisis of global warming. In other words, from the late 1970s you have had a significant desertification, and you’ve been having in the north of Darfur basically a situation where people’s simply entire livelihoods are destroyed, and which has been one of the elements, because it has driven the nomadic population in the north down into the south. So how many people are dying from desertification? How many people are dying from the violence that has been unleashed through this civil war in Darfur?

Second element in this is that there’s a civil war going on in Darfur. There are two rebel movements, and both rebel movements were born in the aftermath of the peace in the south. And those who were unwilling to accept the peace in the south, who thought the peace in the south should have included a resolution for all of Sudan, particularly for Darfur and not simply for the south, they were the inspiration behind the two movements that developed. One movement, the Sudan Liberation Army, was a movement strongly connected with the SPLA in the south, especially with those sections of the SPLA who were not happy with the partial nature of the settlement in the south.

And the other movement --

AMY GOODMAN: The SPLA is…?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: The SPLA, sorry, is the Sudan People's Liberation Army, which had organized and led the guerrilla war in the south for several decades under John Garang.

The second movement was the Justice and Equality Movement. The Justice and Equality Movement, unlike the SLA, which is a secular movement, Justice and Equality is an Islamist movement. And it was a break-off from the regime in the Sudan. It was a break-off between two sections of the regime, the military and the civilian section, and particularly the section led by the chief ideologue, Hassan al-Turabi, who split from the military wing and was the inspiration behind the formation of the Justice and Equality Movement. So you have, in a way, a very strong Islamist rebel movement and you have a strong secular rebel movement, and these two began their operations in 2003.

The government's response -- and I saw the ambassador's response there, which was as disingenuous as Bush's response, in a sense, because he’s claiming that it’s just a civil war inside, the government has nothing to do with it. It’s not true. The government's response was to pick a proxy and arm it. And the government was, in a way, smart enough to pick those who were the worst victims of the desertification and the drought. It picked the poorest of the nomads from the north whose livelihoods had been entirely destroyed and who had simply no survival strategy at hand and gave them weapons. And these guys went down south, and their object was not to kill the peasants in the south, but to drive them off their land.

The government’s response was also to pick a second group, and that second group are the nomads from Chad who have come into Darfur. And to understand that, one has to look at the third dimension of the conflict, which is that over the last twenty-five, thirty years there has been a civil war going on in Chad. Chad, during the Cold War, was a bone of contention, first and foremost between the US and France, and both had their allies in the region. France allied with Libya. The US allied with the military dictatorship in Sudan, with the Numeri dictatorship in Sudan. And every oppositional movement in Chad had a base in Darfur, and they armed themselves, organized themselves in Darfur. So Darfur was awash with weapons for two decades, OK. And those who ran away from the civil war in Chad came into Darfur. So the other wing of those who were armed, whether by the government or whether by this weaponry which was awash, were the Chad refugees in Darfur. So what we call the Janjaweed are two groups. They are the Chad refugees in Darfur, and they are the poorest of the northern camel -- the pastoralists divide into two: the camel pastoralists and the cattle pastoralists. And the camel pastoralists, because the camel is the only game which will survive in the worst conditions where even cattle will not survive, they are the poorest of the poor. So these are what are called the Janjaweed.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip for you from John Prendergast. He is the senior adviser for the International Crisis Group, leader of the Save Darfur Coalition, has argued that genocide is occurring in Darfur, that the Sudanese government is trying to mask what’s really happening.

JOHN PRENDERGAST: This policy of divide and conquer, which has been in place since the early part of this decade, had as its objective the creation of anarchy in Darfur. So when people take a snapshot today and see Darfur and go, “My god, all these groups are fighting against each other. It seems like it’s chaos,” it’s precisely what the government intended.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: We need to keep in mind, and John Prendergast needs to keep in mind, that the history of state-sponsored terrorism in that part of Africa begins with the US providing a political umbrella to South Africa to create a state-sponsored terrorist movement in Mozambique: RENAMO. And it is after a full decade of that impunity that others learn the experience, and Charles Taylor begins it in Liberia, and the Sudanese government begins it in the south. But this is the second thing, which builds on this history of political violence.

The third thing is that when the rebel movements begin in 2003 in Darfur, the Khartoum government responds in the same way, which is it looks at the scene, and it picks the weakest, the most vulnerable, the ones that they can bring under their wing, it arms them and says, “Go for it,” and they go for the land.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mamdani, you quote the saying, “Out of Iraq, into Darfur.” What about intervention?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, look, the question in Darfur is really, how do we stop the fighting, because if we want to stop the killing of civilians, we have to stop the fighting. We have -- and the only way to stop the fighting is a political resolution. In 2005, African Union troops came into Darfur. I interviewed the Ghanaian general who was deputy to Dallaire in Rwanda and who is the chief of the UN nucleus force in Darfur. And he said to me that the African Union troops were spectacularly successful in 2005. The killing came down dramatically.

And then, he said, two things happened. Both happened around the question of finances, because African countries can provide troops but they don’t have finances to provide salaries or logistics. So the first shift was around salaries. The salaries of African troops were being paid by the European Union, which paid them from an emergency fund, and it shifted the payment to quarterly payments, so they would make payment every three months, and they would only make the next three-month payment if the paperwork was done properly, if there was accountability. So, as I speak now, African Union troops have not been paid for four months, because the EU says there hasn’t been proper accountability.

Second is about logistics. The troops have to work with planes, and the planes provided are not military planes. They are planes flown by civilian pilots. And civilian pilots have the right to refuse to fly in areas which they consider dangerous. Now, of course, all these areas are dangerous. So you’re operating with logistics that you don’t control. Civilian pilots will not. The Ghanaian general said to me -- I asked him, I said, “Why do you think these changes happened?” He said, “I don’t know. But the only thing I can think is that the reason would only be political.” I had the same response when I heard President Bush’s speech.

AMY GOODMAN: Meaning to make the African Union troops ineffective.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Ineffective, exactly, because --

AMY GOODMAN: Incapacitate them.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: -- the contention has been over who has political control over the troops in Darfur. OK. The African Union troops are under the political control of African Union. And there is a concerted attempt being made to shift the political control of any intervention force inside Darfur from inside Africa to outside Africa. The second thing is that the African Union is convinced that they cannot go in and fight. They can only go in with the agreement of both sides, so they can only intervene consensually. And that is crucial and important, because if they go in with the two sides not agreeing, the fighting will simply increase and the slaughter of civilians will increase.

President Bush's speech yesterday -- the response of the UN, the UN Secretary General, was, “Look, we’re just arriving at an agreement. We’ve been working for the last four, five months, and the Sudan government is agreeing.” The South African response was the same. Why sanctions now when we are about to arrive at an agreement? Any sane thinking person would think that, intended or unintended, the consequence of these imposition of sanctions is to torpedo that process on the ground. And that process is the political process which is absolutely vital to stopping the fighting.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Congo. What about the comparison of the conflicts and the attention given to each?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, no two comparisons are exactly alike, of course. We know that. But to the extent that numbers are being highlighted, the numbers are huge in Congo. The Congo estimates are four million-plus over several years. The Darfur estimates go from 200,000 to 400,000. So why no concern about Congo? Congo involves, again, multiple causes, like Darfur. It’s a huge place. But in Kivu province, where I have been, the conflict has been very Darfur-like, in the sense that you’ve had proxies being fed from the outside, the Hema and the Lendu. You have the recruitment of child soldiers. You have two states in the region arming these proxies: Uganda and Rwanda. But both states are allies of the US in the region, so there's nothing said about it.

The most recent example is Somalia. We can see that the civilian suffering is going up dramatically in Somalia since the intervention, Ethiopian intervention force. And we know that the Ethiopian intervention force had at least the blessings of the US, if not more than that -- I’m not privy to the information. And nothing is being said about it. So one arrives back at the question: what is the politics around it? And I’m struck by the innocence of those who are part of the Save Darfur -- of the foot soldiers in the Save Darfur Coalition, not the leadership, simply because this is not discussed.

Let me tell you, when I went to Sudan in Khartoum, I had interviews with the UN humanitarian officer, the political officer, etc., and I asked them, I said, “What assistance does the Save Darfur Coalition give?” He said, “Nothing.” I said, “Nothing?” He said, “No.” And I would like to know. The Save Darfur Coalition raises an enormous amount of money in this country. Where does that money go? Does it go to other organizations which are operative in Sudan, or does it go simply to fund the advertising campaign?

AMY GOODMAN: To make people aware of what’s going on in Darfur.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: To make people aware of what is going on, but people who then, out of awareness, give money not to fuel a commercial campaign, but expecting that this money will go to do something about the pain and suffering of those who are the victims in Darfur, so how much of that money is going to actually -- how much of it translates into food or medicine or shelter? And how much of it is being recycled?

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the UN process, if allowed to carry forward, would be the answer right now?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, the answer has to be a political process. The African Union, if its hands are not tied -- if this money was translated into salaries and logistics for the African Union force, it would untie those hands. If the governments who claim to be speaking and acting for the people of Darfur, if they actually directed the money they intend to spend on intervention to paying salaries for the African Union forces, to providing the logistics without these constraints, the problem would be much closer to solving.

AMY GOODMAN: Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani. His article, “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency” appeared in the London Review of Books. He’s the author of many books, including Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.

greenmarie @ 2007-06-03T16:40:00

2007-06-03T22:20:23Z

Monday 7:57 am freeway
construction, traffic, gridlock, & the rush
for cubicles across the city
i'm Jameson paining, running late

and San Pedro always backs up to 410 east
because just before the exit they narrow 2 lanes into 1
people know this; bright orange signs, arrows everywhere
plus they drive to work this way every fucking day
and have for the last 3, 13, 30 years
clutching their 5 dollar coffee and shiny phones
yet they still refuse to move over
and abandon that ending lane

anything to get ahead of the other guy

they purposely stay in it and cruise by
as i'm inching forward in the merge to lane,
50 yards later they cut others off at the last minute
and every time i see this i wonder to myself

do they feel ahead?

this particular day
as i'm sitting in my car wondering about them,
i look to my right and see a bunch of sunflowers
growing out of the tiny little crevasse
between the concrete of the exit ramp and the barrier wall
they move and sway with the morning breeze
tall, delicate, brilliantly out of place
with tears creeping up i speak to them

how is it that we are constantly surrounded, yet still so alone?

Summer Reading List

2007-05-22T22:07:53Z

Post Office- Bukowski

Human, All Too Human- Nietzsche

A People's History of the United States: 1492- Present- Howard Zinn

Me Talk Pretty One Day- David Sedaris

Why Christianity Must Change or Die- John Shelby Spong

What Every American Should Know About Who's Really Running the World- Melissa Rossi

After 4 long years...

2007-05-14T17:14:19Z

I just took the last exam of my undergraduate career!

This Saturday my degree will be conferred!

I'm done, baby! It's fucking over!