Redeye 12/01/10

Democracy fails on people’s needs

NYT, 10/20 — Millions of jobs would be created if we could bring ourselves to stop fighting wars and use some of those squandered billions to bring the nation’s infrastructure in the broadest sense up to 21^st-century standards.

The need is tremendous. The nation’s network of water systems was right at the bottom of the latest infrastructure grades handed out by the American Society of Civil Engineers….

“We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them. There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick. But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”…There are endless examples, tragic, costly and unnecessary.

Top imperialisms led in torture

NYT, 11/6 — A lawyer for 200 Iraqis demanding a public inquiry into what they have described as brutal mistreatment by British soldiers in a secret detention center near Basra told the High Court in London on Friday that the abuse amounted to “Britain’s Abu Ghraib.” The assertion was buttressed with video recordings…the former detainees said they had been subjected to beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, prolonged periods of nakedness and sexual humiliation by female soldiers...Their army training procedures throughout the British military role in Iraq sanctioned interrogation techniques that included threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness, and trainee interrogators were told that they should aim to provoke humiliation, disorientation, exhaustion and fear.

Destroy torture tapes, get praise!

NYT, 11/10 — Central Intelligence Agency officials will not face criminal charges for the destruction of dozens of videotapes depicting the brutal interrogation of terrorism suspects, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

…Jose A. Rodriquez, Jr., the former head of the agency’s clandestine service…, ordered his staff to destroy tapes of the interrogations….Mr.Rodriquez told another top C.I.A. official that if the images were disclosed “out of context, they would make us look terrible; it would be ‘devastating’ to us,” an e-mail said. The tapes showed hours of interrogation of…detainees, including the infliction of a technique called waterboarding that simulates drowning….Mr. Bush wrote:

“Our intelligence officers carried out their orders with skill and courage, and they deserve our gratitude for protecting our nation.”

New ways to harass immigrants

NYT, 11/10 — Under the program…,the fingerprints of everyone booked into a local or county jail will automatically be sent to the Department of Homeland Security and compared with prints in the agency’s databases…they might seek to deport him or her….immigrant advocates contend that the program has caught up a disproportionate number of immigrants charged with low-level offenses, rather than the dangerous criminals it was primarily intended to snag….Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security Secretary, has declared repeatedly that the program will be mandatory for the entire country by 2013.

Koran and bible both ok oppression

Otherwords.org, 9/28 — Let’s be frank. All of the great religions have exploited and oppressed women throughout their histories and, at the extreme orthodox end of the spectrum, still do. Tell me, which religions — again, in their most conservative form — treat women as equals?....There is no moral outrage committed in the name of Christianity that has not found its justification in the Bible, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, from slavery to the persecution of homosexuals and the subjugation of women. They were just doing God’s will. It’s the same with radical Islam.

Four more war years (half-truth)

NYT, 11/11 — The Obama administration is increasingly emphasized the idea that the United States will have forces in Afghanistan until at least the end of 2014….All cited 2014 this week as the key date for handing over the defense of Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves. Implicit in their message…was that the United States would be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for at least four more years….The message shirt is effectively a victory for the military, which has long said the July 2011 deadline undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work with troops perceived to be leaving shortly. “They say you’ll leave in 2011 and the Taliban will chop their heads off.”

Profit system really IS thievery!

NYT, 11/5 — Six oil and gas service companies and a prominent freight-forwarding company agreed to…penalties in one of the largest corporate bribery cases ever…

The largest penalty…will be paid by Panalpina, which made bribery payments on behalf of customers....Pride International…paid $800,000 in bribes to government officials in Venezuela, India and Mexico….Royal Dutch Shell…paid $2 million to subcontractors with the knowledge that some or all of the money would be used for bribes to Nigerian customs officials….Transocean…bribe Nigerian customs officials to import its deepwater oil rigs into Nigerian waters. Tidewater was involved in the payment of bribes to tax inspectors in Azerbaijan…Noble [had] bribery activity, while Global Santa Fe [made] payments to Nigerian customs officials….the companies…”resorted to lucrative arrangements behind the scenes to obtain phony paperwork and special favors.”

Elections pull us off real struggle

NYT, 11/6 — Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are offering voters the kind of change that they seem so desperately to want. We’re getting mind-numbing chatter about balanced budgets and smaller government and whether Mitch McConnell and his gang can chase President Obama out of the White House in 2012….

Neither party talked about the wards during the campaign because neither party has anything satisfactory to say about them….What this election tells me is that real leadership will have to come from elsewhere, from outside of Washington, perhaps from…community centers.

The civil rights pioneers did not wait for presidential or Congressional leaderships…[some early leaders] of the labor movement braved guns, bombs, imprisonment and heaven knows what else.

Of course BP didn’t ‘plan’ killings

NYT, 11/9 — The lead investigator of the presidential panel delving into the BP oil spill said…”To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decisions to favor dollars over safety.”...

Representative…Markey, who led a Congressional investigation into [Bp’s well] accident, said the company has consistently taken shortcuts to save money.

“When the culture of a company favors risk-taking and cutting corners above other concerns, systematic failures like this oil spill disaster result without direct decisions being made or trade-offs being considered,” he said. “What is fully evident…is that BP has a long and sordid history of cutting costs and pushing the limits in search for higher profits.”

Killer kop gets tiny sentence

NYT, 11/6 — In Oakland, tensions between the city’s sizable black population and its police force are longstanding, even though the city has a black mayor and police chief.

…Protesters vandalized storefronts and clashed with the police here on Friday night after a white former transit police officer was given what they considered to be a light sentence for killing an unarmed black man…

With time already served, Mr. Mehserle could be released from prison as early as next year. He was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Oscar Grant III, who was shot while lying face down on New Year’s Day 2009.

Free-flow $ hurts the weakest

NYT, 11/11 — …Over the years, foreign capital flowing into emerging markets has played a crucial role in helping finance….short-term investments….Once a core policy commandment of the so-called Washington consensus and held dear by the United States Treasury, the International Monetary Fund and global investment banks, the belief that unfretted capital flows are a boon for everyone — including the country on the receiving end — has been dealt a major blow….“The world has learned about the perils of free market finance — global financial liberalization just does not work as advertised.”

Profits: a surprise to union chiefs!

GW, 11/5 — The bosses of Britain’s largest companies are enjoying lavish pay rises despite the wobbly economic recovery….The findings aroused union fury. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber asked: “Don’t they know that this is meant to be austerity Britain?” Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said: “Boardroom greed is alive and well.”