I’m New Here: Gil Scott-Heron — a review by Thom Jurek

[posted from the ALLMUSIC blog. Read other articles by Thom Jurek by clicking on his byline]

Gil Scott-Heron – I’m New Here

February 5th, 2010 | 12:45 pm est | Thom Jurek

I’m New Here is a shock. It’s a wallop filled with big nasty beats, a wide range of sonic atmospheres, and more — sometimes unintentional — autobiographical intimacy than we’ve heard from Gil Scott-Heron than ever before. Produced by XL Recordings head Richard Russell, I’m New Here is his first record in 16 years. It is a scant 28 minutes and doesn’t need to be a second longer. It’s unlike anything he’s previously recorded, though there is metaphoric precedence in his earliest, largely spoken-word, albums. Its production pushes forcefully at the margins and Scott-Heron embraces it without a hint of nostalgia.

It opens with “On Coming from a Broken Home,” the first of a two-part poem that bookends the album. Over a piano and a sampled string loop (from Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights”), he reflects on his upbringing filled with strong female figures and an unconventional structure, with a startling epiphany at the end. It segues immediately into a slamming read of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil,” with enormous hip-hop drums, sampled strings, and sonic effects that create a sense of brooding menace as Scott-Heron wails with bracing rawness to hair-raising effect. Just as quickly, the album shifts dramatically. A lone acoustic guitar introduces the Bill Callahan-penned title track. Scott-Heron recites the verse but sings its refrain: “No matter how far wrong gone/You can always turn around.” It feels like he’s speaking into a mirror with a dawning awareness of who — and what — he’s become and accepts it. He now owns this song. A Burial-like wall of effects over a cello loop introduces “Your Soul and Mine.” It’s Scott-Heron’s unflinching look at death, and the way it feeds, yet it ends with a warrior’s words: “So if you see the vulture coming/Flying circles in your mind/Remember there is no escaping/For he will follow close behind/Only promise me a battle/For your soul, and mine.” It’s not all darkness, however. A reading of Bobby Blue Bland’s “I’ll Take Care of You” features Gil’s soulful piano with a small string section. He sings it tenderly, in a now-raspier but still deeply expressive voice; it stands out sonically, but belongs here because of its intimacy. “New York Is Killing Me,” based on a John Lee Hooker blues, has been reinvented with almost entirely new lyrics and an arrangement. Singers from the Harlem Gospel Choir; handclaps, bass drums, cymbals, synths, and guitar are treated spatially by Russell; Scott-Heron’s lead vocal roars from the center. “The Crutch” is a burning atmospheric poem about a junkie’s life. Scott-Heron doesn’t distance himself from his subject; it isn’t mere observation, but an empathic elegy, and Russell’s suffocatingly close production brings it home.

Forty years after his debut, I’m New Here contains the artful immediacy that distinguishes Scott-Heron’s best art. The modern production on it adds immeasurably to that quality, underscores his continued relevance in reflecting the times, and opens his work to a new generation of listeners while giving older ones a righteous jolt.

Too Broke to Bury the Dead — Poppy Harlow for CNN news

[This story is not an Onion parody.  It is another element in the periodic table of Detroit's decay;  another reason that underscores how appropriate it is for the US Social Forum to be meeting in Detroit in June.  - -  LewRosenbaum]

Detroit: Too broke to bury their dead

Money to bury Detroit’s poor has dried up, forcing struggling families to abandon their loved ones in the morgue freezer.

CNNMoney.com

By Poppy Harlow, CNNMoney.com anchor

Last Updated: October 1, 2009: 10:19 AM ET

Unclaimed bodies piling up in the Detroit morgue.

DETROIT (CNNMoney.com) — At 1300 E. Warren St., you can smell the plight of Detroit.

Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer.

Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the morgue, said he has never seen anything like it during his 13 years on the job. “Some people don’t come forward even though they know the people are here,” said the former Detroit cop. “They don’t have the money.”

Lifelong Detroit residents Darrell and Cheryl Vickers understand this firsthand. On a chilly September morning they had to visit the freezer to identify the body of Darrell’s aunt, Nancy Graham — and say their goodbyes.

The couple, already financially strained, don’t have the $695 needed to cremate her. Other family members, mostly in Florida, don’t have the means to contribute, either. In fact, when Darrell’s grandmother passed recently, his father paid for the cremation on a credit card — at 21% interest.

So the Vickers had to leave their aunt behind. Body number 67.

“It’s devastating to a family not to be able to take care of their own,” said Darrell. “But there’s really no way to come up with that kind of cash in today’s society. There’s just no way.”

The number of unclaimed corpses at the Wayne County morgue is at a record high, having tripled since 2000. The reason for the pile-up is twofold: One, unemployment in the area is approaching 28%, and many people, like the Vickers, can’t afford last rites; two, the county’s $21,000 annual budget to bury unclaimed bodies ran out in June.

“One way we look back at a culture is how they dispose of their dead,” said the county’s chief medical examiner, Carl Schmidt, who has been in his position for 15 years. “We see people here that society was not taking care of before they died — and society is having difficulty taking care of them after they are dead.”

Detroit’s dead pile up

Detroit is not alone. The Los Angeles coroner’s office said it, too, has seen an increase in the number of bodies abandoned. That’s not surprising at a time when unemployment tops 10% in many cities and the median cost of a funeral in America hovers around $7,000. Cremation can cost $2,000.

Little help available

This is an issue of concern, said the Detroit mayor’s office, but the city can’t afford to offer any assistance. “The failure, through inability or choice, to bury the deceased is a reflection of the economic conditions that have arrested this region, where people are now forced to make emotionally compromised choices,” said a spokesman in a prepared statement.

The state, however, does have some funds available to assist with burial costs. For fiscal year 2009, Michigan allocated $4.9 million for assistance, and of that, approximately $135,500 remains. Those in need of assistance can find grant applications at Michigan Department of Human Services offices, most funeral homes, and at Michigan.gov/dhs.

The Vickers did not know about the funds until CNNMoney notified them. But, fortunately, they were eventually able to scrape together the $695 and will be able to cremate their aunt with help from Social Security, social services and their aunt’s church.

The way Darrell sees it, the stimulus package should have helped people in situations like this, rather than to “spark the economy and sell cars. We can’t take care of our own when it comes to laying them to rest and letting them rest in peace.”

‘Reflection of the economy’

Believe it or not, the Vickers are among the fortunate.

Dozens of other bodies remain, some never identified. And they can’t be disposed of until their families come forward or the county’s burial fund is replenished when the 2010 budget is approved. There were 66 bodies before Aunt Nancy’s, and they’ll be interred on a first-arrived-first-buried basis.

“There are many people with sad lives,” said Schmidt. “But it is even sadder when even after you are dead, there is no one to pick you up.”

And in a town with so much need, Schmidt noted one more cause for concern: The increase in unclaimed bodies is not due to an increase in murders — though the rate remains high — but due to natural causes. Schmidt speculated that many of the deceased didn’t have health insurance or could no longer afford medication for the chronic medical conditions.

“If anything is a reflection of the economy, that is a reflection of the economy,” he said.

But this messy reality is shielded behind the Wayne County morgue’s perfectly trimmed hedges and pristine brick walls.

“I feel sadness because I can recall when it [Detroit] was really booming,” said investigator Samuels. “I don’t think a lot of people are really aware that these types of things are happening in such a wide area.” 

First Published: October 1, 2009: 9:58 AM ET

Haiti Brings Baseball to Life — John Pilger

[Roxanne Amico,who sent this article, is an artist and an activist: a visual artist, a writer, an independent audio & radio producer, with an online radio podcast. She writes: "Only WILLFULL IGNORANCE could facetiously ask the question, 'What could the US 'possibly' want in Haiti?' The evidence is EVERYwhere..."  "When I was last in Haiti," John Pilger tells us in the article below, "I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing binding machines at the Superior baseball plant in Port-au-Prince. Many had swollen eyes... and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the town and jerry-built housing. Year after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their speciality from the Philippines to Afghanistan. Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN's man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as "Mr Nice Guy . . . bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land", Clinton is Haiti's most notorious privateer, demanding deregulation that benefits the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed "tourist playground"." ]

The kidnapping of Haiti

John Pilger

Published 28 January 2010

With US troops in control of their country, the outlook for the people of Haiti is bleak

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in a US naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now a US military base and relief flights have been rerouted to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US air force dropped bottled water to people suffering dehydration.

A very American coup

The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter despatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilating as he brayed about the “violence” and need for “security”. In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even a US general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten”.

Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of America’s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East . . . is now increasingly tied up with military power.”

In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W Bush’s policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700bn. He has become, in effect, the spokes­man for a military coup.

For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed Bush to the “relief effort”: a parody lifted from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, set in Papa Doc’s Haiti. Bush’s relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans’s black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him to Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti’s sweatshops.

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing binding machines at the Superior baseball plant in Port-au-Prince. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the town and jerry-built housing. Year after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their speciality from the Philippines to Afghanistan. Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr Nice Guy . . . bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land”, Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer, demanding deregulation that benefits the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed “tourist playground”.

Not for tourists is the US building its fifth-biggest embassy. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant petroleum reserves, and sabotage of the growing regional co-operation long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

Obama’s next war?

The first rollback success came last year with the coup against the Honduran president José Manuel Zelaya, who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama’s secret support for the illegal regime in Honduras carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the Americans seven military bases to “combat anti-US governments in the region”.

Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama’s next war. In December, researchers at the University of the West of England published first findings of a ten-year study of BBC reporting on Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of Hugo Chávez’s government, while the majority denigrated his extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.

Such distortion and servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American media. People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.

Movie Favorites from the Secretary of Defense — Tom Engelhardt comments on Robert Gates’ taste in cinema.

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Movie Favorites from the Secretary of Defense

Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 7:30pm, January 31, 2010.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers:  In May 2005, Howard Zinn graduated TomDispatchers into the world via a commencement address posted at this site.  He had delivered it at Spelman College, the school that, decades earlier, fired him as chair of its history department because of his civil rights activities.  It had the perfect Zinnian title that summed up the man: “Against Discouragement.” When, that September, I sat down with him to conduct the first ever TomDispatch interview, I wrote: “At 83 (though he looks a decade younger), he is… a veteran of a rugged century and yet there's nothing backward looking about him. His voice is quiet and he clearly takes himself with a grain of salt, chuckling wryly on occasion at his own comments. From time to time, when a thought pleases him and his well-used face lights up or breaks out in a bona fide grin, he looks positively boyish.”

In August 2009, when I last saw the man who put Americans back in their own history, he seemed thinner and a little more stooped, but no less vibrantly alive, no less eager to face the world to come.  He was talking with gusto and amusement about a TV show based on his classic book A People’s History of the United States, which he lived to see broadcast.  He spoke about being amazed that the History channel would agree to do such a show -- until he met its new chief, a woman who told him she had been in a class of his 30 years earlier.  That was Howard.  He had an everyday way of inspiring and he stuck with you.  He died last Thursday at 87.  I can almost see him now and I feel filled with sadness.  Tom]

Seven Days in January
How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington
By Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it.  You know, the irresistible bit that doesn’t fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass.

So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip to Pakistan.  Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out.”

In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller’s parting January 23^rd piece on the trip:

Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country’s ‘trust deficit’ with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.

His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching ‘Seven Days in May,’ the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.”

Just in case you’ve forgotten, three major cautionary political films came out in the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so long after the Cuban Missile crisis — of which only Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s classic vision of the end of the world, American-style, is much remembered today.  (“I don’t say we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed.”)

All three concerned nuclear politics, “oops” moments, and Washington.  The second was Fail Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing an American president to save the world by nuking New York City.  It was basically Dr. Strangelove done straight (though it’s worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in their fantasies long before 9/11).

The third was the Secretary of Defense’s top pick, Seven Days in May, which came with this tagline: “You are soon to be shaken by the most awesome seven days in your life!”  In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to an incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out a coup d’état against a dovish president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union.  The plot is uncovered and defused by a Marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas.  (“I’m suggesting, Mr. President, there’s a military plot to take over the government, and it may occur sometime this coming Sunday…”)

These were, of course, the liberal worries of a long-gone time.  Now, one of the films is iconic and the other two clunky hoots.  All three would make a perfect film festival for a Secretary of Defense with 14 hours to spare.  Just the sort of retro fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a couple of rocky days on the road, especially if you were headed for a “homeland” where no one had a bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you.  After all, in the last two decades our fantasies about nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far more localized scale, and a military plot to take over the government is entertainingly outré exactly because, in the Washington of 2010, such a thought is ludicrous.  After all, every week in Washington is now the twenty-first century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.

Think of the week after the Secretary of Defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.

After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark.  He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen.  He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.

Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest “budget outlook” indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight.  Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn’t even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).

Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count.  Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington.  Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.

To put just the president’s domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context:  If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes.  The president’s team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years.  On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion.  (And keep in mind that that figure doesn’t include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.)  That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending.  American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.”  That’s what seven days in January really means.

Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police.  Forget, for a moment, all the obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to 400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it’s ours to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars may go to Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) or other mercenary private contracting companies.  Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the Union Address offered not a hint that a single further dollar would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything whatsoever.

Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the Secretary of Defense’s movie tastes:  do as he did and get the old Seven Days in May from Netflix.  Unlike Star Trek, James Bond, Bewitched, and other sixties “classics,” Seven Days isn’t likely to come back, not even if Matt Damon were available to play the Marine colonel who saves the country from a military takeover, because these days there’s little left to save — and every week is the Pentagon’s week in Washington.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note: My thanks to Chris Hellman, director of research for the National Priorities Project, and Jo Comerford, its executive director, for checking on, and crunching, some Pentagon numbers for me.  A small bow as well to TomDispatch regular William Astore for first bringing up the issue of military coups at this site in mid-January and beating the Secretary of Defense to the punch with this sentence:  “Don’t expect a Seven Days in May scenario.”]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

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Tomdispatch.com is for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our post-9/11 world and a clear sense of how our imperial globe actually works. Read more about the site’s founder and editor Tom Engelhardt and his guest authors. Click here to e-mail Tom.

Distrust of Political Parties: The Winter of Our Discontent — by Tim Rutten in the NYT

[From my perspective, the democratic party loss in Massachusetts was both understandable and yet shocking.  Understandable because of the Congressional behavior of democrats in the year since they  gained "power." Shocking because we had come to expect to see a Kennedy in that seat; if not a Kennedy, at least a democrat; and not the least because the old man had become the symbol for (the spirit of previously failed) health care reform for decades. " It has been more than four decades since the Congress of the United States has been able to summon the will to pass a major piece of social legislation.”  So says Tim Rutten to start off his essay below. Throwing out the democrats is viewed as tantamount to a rejection of what the old man stood for.  And perhaps it was. If you believe, as I do, that Kennedy would be in the forefront of a “bipartisan” attempt to create a health care reform bill — in other words to construct something that would feed health care consumers into the giant and greedy maws of the sickness, insurance, and drug industries.  And thus we come to the debacle of the performance of Congress — and the reason that nearly everybody must try to get elected as an outsider.  How else can you explain the paradox/spectacle of John McCain running as a rebel?

The problem, of course, is that going from tweedle dum to tweedle dummer, as we inevitably do as we oscillate from one party to the other, is that we get another evil.  That is the logic of throw the bums out.  What is undeniable, however, is that Americans are thoroughly disillusioned with their choices.  In Illinois the usual off-year, early primary brought less than a third of registered voters to the polls.  The following article documents the decreasing confidence that ordinary people have with the political parties. The information points  to the possible opening toward a political party that represents the will of the poor and the remainder of the working class rapidly being driven down to the level of the poor; it points just as clearly toward the subversion of this opportunity by the corporate control of our national state.  Rutten argues in the New York Times that we are far from Weimar Germany.  I’d argue instead that this facile statement is built primarily upon political analysis. The economics that takes us so far from Weimar also makes the fascist solution not only different but more thoroughgoing. It is incumbent on us not simply to deride the “tea party” movement, because it can sweep up the disaffected with the same kinds of promises that won the people of Germany to fascism.  — Lew Rosenbaum)

Opinion

The winter of America’s discontent

Tim Rutten

• 

Dissatisfaction with both political parties runs deep.

By Tim RuttenFebruary 5, 2010 | 4:26 p.m.

It has been more than four decades since the Congress of the United States has been able to summon the will to pass a major piece of social legislation. Not since 1965, when Medicare and the Voting Rights Act both overcame decades of opposition to become law, has Congress proved itself up to the task.

Significant healthcare reform is all but dead for this session, and the chances of substantively addressing the regulatory breakdown that allowed Wall Street’s irresponsible speculation to precipitate the worst global financial crisis since the Depression seem to recede with each passing day. So too the prospects for passage of further stimulus measures to remedy the crisis of unemployment and underemployment that continues to ravage the lives of families in states from Michigan to California.

In the face of these daunting issues, what was it that preoccupied the Senate on the eve of its long weekend recess? The legislative drama du jour is the standoff between the White House and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who has put a personal hold on more than 70 executive branch appointments until the Obama administration agrees to fund a couple of pork-barrel projects he has earmarked for his state. One involves tens of millions of dollars for an FBI laboratory focusing on improvised explosives — something the bureau doesn’t think it needs. The other involves contract specifications for an aerial tanker that Northrop Grumman and Airbus would manufacture in Alabama, if they win the deal. (Boeing also is competing for the plane, which it would build in Topeka, Kan., and Seattle.)

Unless the administration agrees to give Shelby what he wants, he intends to invoke an archaic senatorial privilege that allows him to prevent the chamber from considering any of the administration’s nominees to executive branch vacancies, no matter how crucial. Without the 60 votes to force cloture — another archaic convention — there’s nothing the Democrats or the White House can do.

Outside the Senate, Shelby’s conduct would be called extortion; inside the chamber, it’s a “parliamentary tactic.”

It’s also the sort of shabby situation that brings into sharp focus both the sources of congressional dysfunction and the popular discontent on both the left and right with the congressional parties. Earmarks and pork are anathema to a majority of conservatives and independents; the Senate’s outdated, made-for-obstruction rules and susceptibility to special interests are a source of increasing frustration to liberals and some independents. Yet, here we have one senator from one Southern state obstructing with impunity an entire nation’s business — purely for his narrow constituency’s financial interests.

You don’t have to attend a “tea party” convention to see the corrosive effect this sort of otherworldly political navel-gazing has on American attitudes toward the institutions of national government and the parties vying to control them. Evidence of the damage is scattered throughout the recent polls:

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, for example, found that although 52% of the nation’s voters retain a favorable view of President Obama, only 38% have a similar appraisal of the Democratic Party. The Republicans fare even worse; just 30%, fewer than

1 in 3 voters, view the GOP favorably.

A recent CBS News poll found that nearly half of all Republicans, 45%, disapprove of their party’s congressional delegation.

A national Washington Post/ABC News poll found that just 24% of Americans, fewer than 1 in 4, trust congressional Republicans, like Shelby, “to make the right decisions for the country’s future.” (Wonder why?) The House and Senate Democrats didn’t fare all that better, and are trusted by just 32%. Forty-seven percent of those polled — still less than half — have confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions.

When people’s mistrust of their elected officials and the parties reaches these levels, there is little for political leaders to do but take counsel from their own anger and anxieties — and, these days, the popular mood fairly seethes with both those things. Discontent with the present and apprehension about the future have become the background noise of our politics, yet both sides of the congressional aisle seem deaf to the din.

In one of his magisterial explorations of German politics between the wars, the historian Ian Kershaw mused that “there are times — they mark the danger point for a political system — when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing.”

It would be reckless not to insist that this country and its politics remain, in crucial ways, far distant from Weimar. It would be rash, though, to pretend that the distance remains as great as it once was.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

Help Save Sylvia

[This post came from our friends at Women & Children First Bookstore.  Nicole Hollander has been a staunch friend of Guild Books and Guild Complex.  She designed a shirt for Guild and together with bookstore staff came up with the name and original graphic for the Guild Complex.  She is a Chicago original and a syndicated cartoonist.  The Chicago Tribune, her "home town" newspaper, gave her a nasty joke for a valentine:  a pink slip ending her relation with the Tribune.  I have known Nicole from the December in 1987 when I arrived at Guild to find her signing calendars and books for old and new friends and admirers.  Please take the time to respond by forwarding this information and going to the links in this message, below. -- Lew Rosenbaum]

Help Save Sylvia

Here’s How You can help:

1. Email Triubune editors,

Jane Hirt and Geoff Brown, telling them how you can’t live without her.  And be sure to copy Nicole, nhollander@earthlink.net, so she can keep you close to her heart and updated on her struggle!

2. Forward this email to all your friends who love Sylvia as much as you do.

Nicole Hollander’s (and Sylvia’s) home page is http://www.nicolehollander.com/

Remembering Howard Zinn and Appreciating Him — from The Progressive Magazine On Line

Many obituaries and remembrances have paid tribute to the life of Howard Zinn.  Sadness is not for the dead but for the living, who would like (as Elizabeth di Novella says) to have read Zinn’s writings on such stuff as the recent Supreme Court decision on campaign funding.  Matthew Rothschild and Elizabeth di Novella have written a celebration of Howard Zinn’s life and contributions, words that will help us recognize that Zinn’s presence will be felt as long as we remember, as long as his writings survive to teach other generations about our history — Lew Rosenbaum]

Thank You, Howard Zinn

By Matthew Rothschild, January 28, 2010

Thank You, Howard Zinn, for being there during the civil rights movement, for teaching at Spelman, for walking the picket lines, and for inspiring such students as Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for being there during the Vietnam War, for writing “The Logic of Withdrawal,” and for going to Hanoi.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for always being there.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for being a man who supported the women’s liberation movement, early on.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for being a straight who supported the gay and lesbian rights movement, early on.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for being a Jew who dared to criticize Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, early on.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for being a great man who didn’t believe in the “Great Man Theory of History.”

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for taking the time to write your landmark work, “A People’s History of the United States,” and for educating two generations now in the radical history of this country, a history, as you stressed, of class conflict.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for grasping the importance of transforming this book into “The People Speak,” the History Channel special that ran in December and that should be used by secondary, high school and college classes for as long as U.S. history is taught.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for opposing war, all wars, including our own “good wars,” our own “holy wars,” as you called them—and for pointing out that a “just cause” does not lead to a “just war.”

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for pointing out that soldiers don’t die for their country, but that they die for their political leaders who dupe them or conscript them into wars. And that they die for the corporations that profit from war.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for urging us to “renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.”

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for stressing that change comes from below, and that it comes at surprising times, even when things seem bleakest, if we organize to make it happen.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for stressing the value of engaging in action to make this world a better place, even if we don’t get there.

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for this amazing, inspiring paragraph, which I’ve had on my wall for years now:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Thank you, Howard Zinn, for recognizing the beauty and power of culture, and for exalting the poet, the singer, the actor, the artist.

Thank you, Howard, for being kind enough to write your columns this last decade for a relatively obscure magazine called The Progressive, and for doing so with the utmost intelligence and grace.

Thank you, Howard, for calling me your editor.

Thank you, Howard, for your wry and self-deprecating sense of humor.

Thank you, Howard, for your kindness.

Thank you, Howard, for your friendship.

Thank you, Howard.

Thank you.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

Remembering Howard Zinn

By Elizabeth DiNovella, January 27, 2010

I am deeply saddened by the news of the death of Howard Zinn. He was a longtime columnist for The Progressive, and his most recent piece, “The Nobel’s Feeble Gesture,” expressed his dismay about President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Here’s an excerpt:

“I think some progressives have forgotten the history of the Democratic Party, to which people have turned again and again in desperate search for saviors, later to be disappointed. Our political history shows us that only great popular movements, carrying out bold actions that awakened the nation and threatened the Establishment, as in the Thirties and the Sixties, have been able to shake that pyramid of corporate and military power and at least temporarily changed course.”

It was a “classic” Zinn piece—piercing but playful, saying in no uncertain terms what needed to be said. It’s not surprising he was a favorite columnist for many of our subscribers. He was my favorite, too.

On matters of war and peace, he was absolute. In our July 2009 issue, he wrote, “We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what. No matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate. . . . We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.”

What I loved most about Zinn was his sense of humor, which didn’t always translate onto the page. I didn’t know how funny he was until I heard him speak at our 95th anniversary party six years ago. He was gracious enough to attend our recent 100th birthday bash, too.

When I was a just becoming politicized, I read A People’s History of the United States and it blew my mind away. Reading Zinn’s book was a rite of passage in my activist circles, and I hope it still is.

It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve read A People’s History, and it is no small thrill to be at a magazine that regularly publishes the work of a peace mongering historian, a World War II soldier who flew bombing missions over Europe but later staunchly advocated for peace. That was thing about Zinn—when he spoke of war, he knew what he was talking about.

Back in 2003 when George W. Bush was gunning for Saddam Hussein, Zinn wrote a cover story for The Progressive called “A Chorus Against War.”

This is how it ends:

“If Bush starts a war, he will be responsible for the lives lost, the children crippled, the terrorizing of millions of ordinary people, the American GIs not returning to their families. And all of use will be responsible for bringing that to a halt.

Men who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.”

I would have loved to read what Zinn thought about the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing even more money into our political system. Or what he would have written after hearing Obama’s first State of the Union Address. The President’s speech hasn’t even started yet tonight, but this much I do know: Zinn would have reminded us, as he did over and over, that we need to organize our neighborhoods and workplaces and schools in order to create change, and not leave it up to the politicians.

“Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war,” Zinn wrote in a piece called, “Election Madness” back in March 2008. “Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”

Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor of The Progressive.

The Road To Detroit

[The American "rust belt" is devastated.  No news there.  What is news is that Detroit, epicenter of the rust belt, both the symbol and the practical effect of corporate rule, will host the second U.S. Social Forum June 22-26.  Please check the web site at the right (under U.S. Social Forum - Chicago) for the Chicago progress toward organizing for this very important confluence of active people.  It is an opportunity to meet and strategize with others who envision a cooperative world.  The national web site for the forum is <http://www.ussf2010.org/>. This post contains an overview article on the USSF and its implications; an invitation to the Feb. 2 meeting in Chicago to find out more about Chicago plans for participating in the USSF; the announcement of the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign march from New Orleans, LA to culminate in Detroit for the USSF; Information on the film The Water Front, along with a poetry video on the water devastation; and links to articles in the Peoples Tribune on the economic devastation in Detroit. -- Lew Rosenbaum]

1. http://www.lrna.org/2-pt/v19ed6art4.html
The U.S. Social Forum on the Road to Detroit
Twenty thousand movement organizers and activists from diverse organizations and fronts of struggle across the United States, Canada, and the world are expected to converge at the second United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit, Michigan, from June 22 to June 26, 2010.
A virtual “ground zero” for the global economic meltdown and social destruction wreaking havoc throughout our communities, Detroit and Michigan are today a battleground around concrete political questions about whom the U.S. government is going to serve. The questions of whether people are going to have housing, water, and schools, and of nationalization of auto and health care, are immediate and real there.
Just like the people of Detroit, Michigan, and the whole United States, participants in the U.S. Social Forum are going to be grappling with the question, “which way forward?” Read more . . .

2.  Chicago USSF Info Session

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Mon, 2010-01-25 22:11

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Date:  Wed, 2010-02-03 02:00 – 04:00

US Social Forum Info Session
Tuesday, February 2nd
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Access Living
115 W. Chicago Ave.Organizers and activists across the country are building for the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit June 22-26, 2010.

This is the follow-up to the USSF in Atlanta in 2007, which drew some 15,000 people to hundreds of workshops and meetings on how to organize for progressive social change.

In Chicago, activists and organizations are networking not only to attend the forum, but also to strengthen our own organizing in and around our city. With a deep economic crisis, government budget cuts, and rising unemployment and poverty, we need to come together to support each other?s efforts. We?ll strategize together about how to work for a Chicago that puts peoples needs first?now and beyond the USSF.

This meeting will provide an orientation to the World Social Forum movement for those learning about it for the first time. We?ll work together to fundraise, coordinate travel, and plan events to support the participation of youth, low-income, people of color, workers and neighborhood folk from affected communities. Come to the session to see how we can link up and build a Chicago that works for everyone.

For information about Chicago?s road to Detroit visit:
http://roadtodetroit.blogspot.com/2010/01/chicago-info-session-15.html

3. Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign
“The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967
The March to Fulfill the Dream launches on April 4, 2010. This significant date is Easter Sunday, as well as the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. We begin in New Orleans, Louisiana and finish our march in Detroit, Michigan on June 20, 2010 for the U.S. Social Forum.

We demand guaranteed healthcare and housing for everyone in the United States.

Rising from the ruins of economic storms, we unite – poor people, homeless people, social workers, activists, artists, musicians, people of faith, students, healthcare workers, lawyers, and more – we rebuild!

Join us. Build the movement to end poverty! click here to go to the march site.

4. The Water Front and Water Warriors are two cinematic approaches to document the severe fresh water crisis that has been facing the Detroit area. This is from the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization web site, which also has links to the the documentary film The Water Front and the poetry video, Water Warriors:

The Detroit area, was a natural venue for the opening of the 6-month tour of The Water Front throughout the Great Lakes region. “With the recent passage of the Great Lakes Compact and the approaching elections, this couldn’t be timelier” said Sam Finkelstein, the tour organizer, as he introduced the film. Residents from the area gathered in Marygrove College, a leader in urban social justice education. “This film shouldn’t just touch you,” said Marian Kramer, who is featured in the film and was at the screening, “it should grab you” – and she gestured as if she was choking. And it did just that, the viewers were grabbed by this film and the subsequent discussions. “How can our water be defined as a product?” asked Lynna Kaucheck of Clean Water Action, as she highlighted the underlying economic and political issues that result in situations such as those we experienced in Highland Park. This screening was a great way to launch this historic tour to over 30 cities!
Sam Finkelstein, Food & Water Watch
September 26, 2008

5.  Links to articles on the Detroit US Social Forum

http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2009.10/PT.2009.10.05.html   A Call to Participate

http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2010.01/PT.2010.01.06.html  Detroit Fights Utility Shut Offs (Voices from the Rust Belt); and Detroot We Do Mind Dying.

http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2010.01/PT.2010.01.06.html#three   Crisis in Funding Michigan Education

http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2010.01/PT.2010.01.12.html#four  Voices from Benton Harbor, MI

When Are Copyrights Wrong? — music writer Bill Glahn explains

photo by Bill Glahn

[Bill Glahn writes on copyrights and wrongs. . . published on the Big O website ... he reflets on digitization, downloads, and who the real criminals are, while stepping on the clay feet of some artists like Billy Bragg  --  Lew Rosenbaum]

Note: After Live! Music Review closed up shop, I wrote a series of articles for Counterpunch called RIAA Watch. For purposes of relevance, I’ll defer to one of those articles for this edition of The Best of Live! Music Review. Many updates follow which should be of interest to any in the p2p community who value fair use and developing artists who value the freedom to establish their audience without industry interference.
The RIAA – Artist Friend or Artist Foe? (Part 2)
RIAA Watch [July 1, 2003]
No, No Bono
By Bill Glahn
When Hilary Rosen announced in January that she would be stepping down as head honcho of the RIAA at the end of the year, the spin was that she wanted to spend more time with her children. Since then she has announced a new career with CNBC in which she will appear on no less than three political talk shows and provide coverage of the 2004 elections. That’s a taxing schedule by any measure. So much for the kids.
Ah, but let’s be fair. Rosen’s recent profile has been low key by her normal standards, leaving a bevy of underlings to handle the press’ questions regarding the RIAA’s recent announcements that they intend to alienate music fans on a massive scale. Maybe she is easing into the role of proud papa, at least until she gets her TV gig going.
The speculation over Rosen’s replacement at the RIAA got a fresh injection recently when a spokeswoman for Republican Congresswoman Mary Bono told the Associated Press that the CEO job at the RIAA would be the “perfect job” for Bono. No doubt. A couple of years ago the Human Rights Campaign gave Bono a dismal nine percent positive vote rating. Nothing about her voting record has changed since. Rosen’s assessment of Bono? “I think she’s great.”
Judging by Rosen’s attempts to stifle culture, not only in the U.S. arena, but throughout the globe, that assessment is not surprising. On another level, however, it is. Part of Mary Bono’s voting record includes a vote against same sex partnerships and a vote against gay adoptions. Rosen’s family incorporates both. Rosen has earned a reputation as a team player, but apparently that doesn’t include the “home” team.
Bono has since denied any serious pursuit of the RIAA job. Not that they would hire her anyway. She’s too valuable to them right where she is. She’s already bought. The entertainment industry is her single largest campaign contributor. It’s already paying dividends.
Bono has a reputation as being a follower, not a leader. While she frequently votes as a staunch conservative, she rarely initiates legislation. That could be changing. She has recently formed a Congressional caucus on intellectual property rights which, considering her close ties to the industry (her personal income is largely dependent on royalties from late husband Sonny Bono’s compositions and recordings) will probably end up introducing legislation giving the death penalty for unauthorized downloads. Or maybe extending copyrights to 5 millenniums before they enter the public domain.

Considering the RIAA’s top priority, Internet “piracy”, a more logical candidate for the job of CEO might be Frank Creighton, the head of the organization’s anti-piracy division and a loyal policeman for that organization since 1985. But Creighton has shown little in the way of political savvy and mainly serves as the organization’s media face (a handsome and accomplished speaker when the cameras are on). My money is on lobbyist Mitch Glazier, who has experience at getting the RIAA’s agenda turned into law under cover of darkness. He comes from the same cesspool that launched Rosen’s career. He’s an accomplished bagman. But for now, the RIAA aren’t giving any clues.
[2010 update]
Mitch Glazier did, in fact, inherit Hilary Rosen’s seat at the RIAA where he remains to this day and oversaw the disastrous “sue ‘em all” campaign. Mary Bono has headed the Congressional Caucus on Intellectual Property for the last six-plus years and a supporter of far right conservative policies. Hilary Rosen is currently an editor at The Huffington Post and a CNN commentator and a supporter of status quo liberal politics. On issues like intellectual property, they march in lockstep.

When the Whip Comes Down
With CEO Glazier and RIAA president Cary “Sue” Sherman’s alienation of music fans proving to be something far less than a productive strategy, they came up with another one. If the whip isn’t working, get a bigger whip.
In 2007, under lobbying from the RIAA and the MPAA, Mary Bono announced negotiations for a new trade agreement called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). From a Bono press release; “·”I am encouraged by this agreement because it indicates the countries involved in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement acknowledge the importance of strong intellectual property rights protections. Hopefully the days of turning a blind eye to the criminal interests involved in piracy and counterfeiting are becoming less acceptable. If this agreement is able to strengthen property rights, it will be seen as an important turning point in the global struggle for stronger intellectual property rights protections.”
President Bush kept the negotiations secret under the cloak of “national security.” President Obama has chosen to follow Bush’s lead.
So now we have the head of the Congressional Caucus on Intellectual Property, a person who refers to the Fair Use Doctrine as “unfair takings,” a person who also benefits economically from extended copyright, steering an international agreement that for all intents and purposes is self-serving.
Bono uses the same “protect the creator” strategies as the RIAA in her quest to protect her largest contributors and an important income source.
Says Bono, “Everyone who knows me understands that I am a strong supporter of technological innovation, but I believe that the only way an electronic marketplace can continue to sustain growth is if copyrights are protected. After all, the latest and greatest High-Definition television sets and endless amounts of bandwidth are useless if no one is creating content.”
This begs a couple of questions. “Were there no creators before copyright existed?” And “How many songs has Mary Bono been induced to write as a result of her IP holdings?”
But it’s not only Fair Use that Bono is willing to sacrifice in her quest to protect the money streams for her corporate clients. Next up? Due process.
The Whipping Post

Despite the secret nature of the ACTA negotiations, there have been leaks. On November 30, 2009, Dr. Michael Geist posted the following on his blog site. “The European Commission analysis of ACTA’s Internet chapter has leaked, indicating that the U.S. is seeking to push laws that extend beyond the WIPO* Internet treaties and beyond current European Union law. The document contains detailed comments on the U.S. proposal, confirming the U.S. desire to promote a three-strikes and you’re out policy, a Global DMCA**, harmonized contributory copyright infringement rules, and the establishment of an international notice-and-takedown policy.”

* the United Nation’s World Intellectual Property Organization
** the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act which went a long way in stripping Fair Use Doctrine
Dr. Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. Speaking in this capacity, he goes on·
“ACTA would render current Canadian copyright law virtually unrecognizable as the required changes go far beyond our current rules (and even those contemplated in prior reform bills).”
It is not only in ACTA negotiations where the MAFIAA, in it’s various international configurations, is actively pursuing three-strikes legislation – the removal of Internet service to anyone deemed guilty of transporting, uploading, or downloading copyrighted content. Under Big Music pressure the governments of Great Britain and France (so far) have proposed three-strikes legislation. Say good-bye to You Tube as we now know it. Watch out for the disappearing blog. Don’t dare e-mail that song lyric to your sweetie that best exemplifies your affection for her/him. Say hello to mandated snooping by your ISP – the proposed policeman in this draconian scheme. Say good-bye to privacy. Say good-bye to due process. And don’t think for a minute that because you have already been handed down a punishment (loss of Internet service), that you cannot be sued in civil court or criminally charged. Say hello to double jeopardy.

Tell It to the Judge on Sunday
“How could such a plan pass Constitutional muster?” an American basking in the notion of guaranteed liberties might ask. Well it could if there was a Supreme Court that is stacked with judges pre-disposed to protecting corporate interests rather than individual liberties. The 1985 version of the Supremes clearly stated that copyright infringement is not theft. The 2010 version, however, seems more sided with Mary Bono’s interpretation. And then here’s the Department of Justice.
As reported by p2pnet·
Thomas Perrelli
, nominated as Associate Attorney General on January 5, confirmed March 12. Perrelli’s position is second-in-command in the DoJ, behind Attorney General Eric Holder. He was one of the leading RIAA lawyers on file-sharing DMCA cases. In one case, he argued for the release of ISP customer information without a subpoena.
Donald Verrilli
, nominated as Associated Deputy Attorney General on Feburary 4. Verrilli’s position is third-in-command in the DoJ, behind Perrelli. He was the chief RIAA attorney in Jammie Thomas case of last year, which was won by the RIAA before being declared a mistrial.
Brian Hauck
, appointed as Counsel to the AAG in February 4. Hauck’s position is to serve as Perrelli’s lawyer. He represented the RIAA in the historic Supreme Court case MGM Studios v. Grokster in 2005, won by the industry. He also donated a combined $1500 to the Obama campaign in 2007 and 2008.
Ginger Anders
, appointed as Assistant to Solicitor General Elena Kagan in March. The Solicitor General represents the government in Supreme Court cases. Anders was one of the litigators in last year’s Cablevision case, which the content industry intended to block the cable company from allowing it to store customers’ recorded programs on its servers.
Ian Gershengorn
, appointed Deputy Assistant Attorney of the Civil Division of the DoJ on April 13. Gershengorn’s position entails overseeing the Federal Programs Branch, which recently announced support for $150,000 monetary damages for pirated files during a copyright case. He also represented the RIAA in the MGM Studios v. Grokster case.
The Public Knowledge website states “Either Jenner and Block lawyers are looking for something to do in this economic downturn, or the RIAA has a direct pipeline to the Justice Department” when reporting the Gershengorn hiring.
The New York Law Journal adds another Jenner and Block name to the mix, Samual Hirsh, “who joined as deputy associate attorney general.”
Don’t be looking for the Department of Justice to pursue price-fixing charges against the MAFIAA with any type of vigor. Do look for them to go after file-sharers and ISPs.

Joseph Goebbels, Step Forward
Any campaign designed to take away human rights and needs a clever minister of propaganda. Big Music has apparently found one in a Bono of a different gender. Paul O’Neil’s buddy, in a Jan. 2, 2010 guest editorial column for the New York Times, claims, “A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators.” Bono uses a false premise to criminalize vast segments of the population. And to give the green light for snooping· “it’s perfectly possible to track content.”
OK – so it’s possible. But is it moral? Perhaps Bono is looking to keep the music industry as “sexy” as he finds Africa – where intellectual property agreements continue to keep the price of AIDS medicine artificially high and the people dependent on the mercy of Bono and his IP cronies.
Apparently, the man who believes Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in the morning has as little grasp on Irish history as he does on American history. From wikipedia’s biography on Turlough Carolan – “the last great Irish harper-composer and is considered by many to be Ireland’s national composer”:

“At the age of twenty-one, being given a horse and a guide, he set out to travel Ireland and compose songs for patrons. For almost fifty years, Carolan journeyed from one end of the country to the other, composing and performing his tunes.” Imagine that – a fifty-year career  pre-copyright.
But Jesus Bono isn’t the only label-affiliated musician looking to preserve copyright privilege. In Great Britain, FAC (Featured Artists Coalition) was formed in March 2009 stating a desire to “give artists a collective voice to campaign for effective laws and regulations, as well as transparent and equitable business practices.” That is label-affiliated artists.
In this Billboard magazine article they also stated “concern about any legal body taking action against fans who were involved in file-sharing and preventing them getting broadband access to be informed about the activities of their favorite acts.” Then FAC did a turnaround and overwhelmingly supported measures in Britain’s proposed Digital Economy bill to include three-strikes measures and a 20 year copyright extension. P2p proponents felt betrayed. P2pnet’s Jon Newton summarizes the situation in an open letter to FAC board member Ed O’Brien (of Radiohead). States Newton, “Well, Ed, it’s not only the recording industry that’s dragging it’s feet. You and your fellow FAC board members are doing the same thing and while you prevaricate, the corporate music industry is driving its wedge ever more deeply between you and the fans you admit you can’t do without. You, (Billy) Bragg, (Blur drummer Dave) Rowntree, (Pink Floyd’s Nick) Mason, and anyone else on the FAC board (Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B, Kate Nash, Marillion’s Mark Kelly and rapper Master Shortie) MUST convince it and other members to revert to the coalition’s original position.”
In October 2009, Billy Bragg, a member of FAC’s board of directors, and Newton initiated a2f2a.com, a website intended to connect artists with fans. In his initial posting to artists Bragg stated “My participation in this initiative is based on my understanding of two principles that are central to the beliefs of the p2p community. Firstly, that there is no technological solution to the problems that artists face as a result of the digitisation of music and, secondly, that p2p users are willing to pay for music if they can be sure that the money is going to the artists whose work they enjoy.”
In Newton’s initial posting referring to fans: “On a2f2a, they’ll be able to do something that’s never been possible before, on- or offline. They’ll talk directly with artists to cut through the lies and disinformation perpetuated by the corporate music industry.”
While encouraging, things didn’t work out as originally envisioned. Bragg stood steadfastly that a 20-year copyright extension (beyond the 50 years past death privilege now granted in British law) was needed. FAC continues to support three-strikes. Bragg has disappeared from the discussion after issuing an “either or” ultimatum. Indiana Gregg, an artist without label affiliation, has been the most active artist participant in recent months. Gregg seems to have shifting and seemingly contradictory alliances. Gregg initiated Kerchoonz in 2008, a social networking site that shares advertising revenue with artists that contribute free downloads. Probably the most beneficial aspect of a2f2a has been the highlighting of new artists who’s careers have been advanced by exploring new business models not dependent on copyright or for-pay downloads.

It is these artists that consistently disprove the dire predictions of Mary Bono, the other Bono, the RIAA, the MPAA, and Billy Bragg. Creators will continue to create. Fans will continue to support them. Three-strikes will fail when the results become apparent to those even outside of the artist and fan contingencies. The only question is how much damage will be done to both emerging artists and their fans before that failure is complete.

Students Bring THEIR Bill of Rights to the School Board – by Jim Vail, in Substance News

[Jim Vail writing for Substance News describes the January 27 School Board Meeting: Go to the Substance News website to get the story.
"Especially moving was the testimony of the students from Julian, Social Justice and Clemente. One student asked Mr. Huberman directly 'why is there only a bill of rights for students after their school is closed, not all the time?' It took the Board by surprise, and they had to admit their testimony was strong, powerful and convincing. "   -- Lew Rosenbaum]
January 27, 2010 Chicago Board of Education meeting… More Demanding an End to Renaissance Closings

Jim Vail – January 28, 2010

"Bill of Rights" for students at schools to be closed, unveiled Jan. 17 by Schools CEO Ron Huberman. Photo by George Schmidt for Substance News.

The heat was turned up at the Chicago Board of Education meeting Wednesday, January 27, 2010, as parents, students, teachers and other community members spoke out against Mayor Richard Daley’s plan to continue closing public schools. The latest list of schools facing closings, consolidations, phase outs and “turnaround” — 14 schools in all — was announced by CEO Ron Huberman, Daley’s latest appointee, on January 19, and people began mobilizing in opposition to the actions immediately. The January 27 meeting was the first indication of how widespread the opposition was going to be.
Read More. . .