kerry lobel | living water

Presdential survey on executive powers

Glenn Greenwald's article, posted on Common Dreams, led me to a must read article by Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe. In his article " Candidates on executive power: a full spectrum" Savage asks the Presidential candidates their views on 12 key questions regarding executive power. As Savage writes, we weren't even really thinking about executive power (even though it was widely used by other Presidents) until the Bush/Cheney administration revealed its ugly excesses.

He says:

In 2000, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were not asked about presidential power, and they volunteered nothing about their attitude toward the issue to voters. Yet once in office, they immediately began seeking out ways to concentrate more unchecked power in the White House - not just for themselves, but also for their successors.

Bush has bypassed laws and treaties that he said infringed on his wartime powers, expanded his right to keep information secret from Congress and the courts, centralized greater control over the government in the White House, imprisoned US citizens without charges, and used signing statements to challenge more laws than all predecessors combined.

Legal specialists say decisions by the next president - either to keep using the expanded powers Bush and Cheney developed, or to abandon their legal and political precedents - will help determine whether a stronger presidency becomes permanent.

The articles raise important issues as we move into the first two primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Evangelical Rebellion

I admire Chris Hedges. His writing with others at the New York Times about global terrorism won a Pulitzer Prize.  In his book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Hedges writes " “War gives us a distorted sense of self. It gives us meaning. It creates a feeling of comradeship that obliterates our alienation and makes us feel, for perhaps the first time in our lives, that we belong.”  I found his recent article about the rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate to be chilling, especially to those of us that have witnessed the rise of the radical Christian right for the last 25 years.

Published on Monday, December 24, 2007 by TruthDig.com

by Chris Hedges

The rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate represents a seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the radical Christian right. Huckabee may stumble and falter in later primaries, but his right-wing Christian populism is here to stay. Huckabee represents a new and potent force in American politics, and the neocons and corporate elite, who once viewed the yahoos of the Christian right as the useful idiots, are now confronted with the fact that they themselves are the ones who have been taken for a ride. Members of the Christian right, recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated to vote against their own interests around the issues of abortion and family values, are in rebellion. They are taking the party into new, uncharted territory. And they presage, especially with looming economic turmoil, the rise of a mass movement that could demolish what is left of American democracy and set the stage for a Christian fascism.

The corporate establishment, whose plundering of the country created fertile ground for a radical, right-wing backlash, is sounding the alarm bells. It is scrambling to bolster Mitt Romney, who, like Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, will continue to slash and burn on behalf of corporate profits. Columnist George Will called Huckabee’s populism “a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs.” He wrote that Huckabee’s candidacy “broadly repudiates core Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America’s corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.” National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote that “like [Howard] Dean, his nomination would represent an act of suicide by his party.”

Huckabee spoke of this revolt on the “Today” show. “There’s a sense in which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the Republican Party,” he said. “They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day one of us actually runs and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh, now they’re serious.’ They [evangelicals] don’t want to just show up and vote, they actually would want to be a part of the discussion.”

George Bush is a happy stooge of his corporate handlers. He blithely enriches the oligarchy, defends a war that is the worst foreign policy blunder in American history and callously denies medical benefits to children. Huckabee is different. He has tapped into the rage and fury of the working class, dispossessed and abandoned by the mainstream Democrats and Republicans. And he refuses to make the ideology of the Christian right, with its dark contempt for democratic traditions and intolerance of nonbelievers, a handmaiden of the corporate establishment. This makes him a much more lethal and radical political force.

The Christian right is the most potent and dangerous mass movement in American history. It has been controlled and led, until now, by those who submit to the demands of the corporate state. But the grass roots are tired of being taken for rubes. They are tired of candidates, like Bush or Bill Clinton, who roll out the same clichés about working men and women every four years and then spend their terms enriching their corporate backers. The majority of American citizens have spent the last two decades watching their government services and benefits vanish. They have seen their jobs go overseas and are watching as their communities crumble and their houses are foreclosed. It is their kids who are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The old guard in the Christian right, the Pat Robertsons, who used their pulpits to deliver the votes of naive followers to the corporatists, is a spent force. Huckabee’s Christian populism represents the maturation of the movement. It signals the rise of a truly radical, even revolutionary force in American politics, of which Huckabee may be one of the tamer and less frightening examples.

Hints of Huckabee’s bizarre worldview seep out now and then. Bob Vander Plaats, Huckabee’s Iowa campaign manager, for example, when asked about his candidate’s lack of foreign policy experience, told MSNBC: “Well, I think Gov. Huckabee has a lot of resources that he goes to on national security matters. Here’s a guy, a former pastor, who understands a theological nature of this war as we’re fighting a radical religion in Islam.”

Robert Novak noted that Huckabee held a fundraiser last week at the Houston home of Dr. Steven Hotze. As Novak wrote, Hotze is “a leader in the highly conservative Christian Reconstruction movement.”

Huckabee has close ties with the Christian Reconstructionist or Dominionist branch of the Christian right. The Dominionist movement, which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the Christian faith and American patriotism, is small in numbers but influential. It departs from traditional evangelicalism. It seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power. It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements, at least as such movements are defined by the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Dominionism, born out of Christian Reconstructionism, seeks to politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians. It also has, like fascist movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which contradict each other. Paxton argues that the best way to understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist in all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the ideas that underlie fascist movements “remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language” and “many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”

Dominionism teaches that American Christians have been mandated by God to make America a Christian state. A decades-long refusal by most American fundamentalists to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the Earth itself. Dominionism preaches that Jesus has called on Christians to actively build the kingdom of God on Earth. America becomes, in this militant Biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, in which creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Labor unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the work force to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.

Baptist minister Rick Scarborough, founder of Vision America and a self-described “Christocrat,” who attended the Texas fundraiser, has endorsed Huckabee. Scarborough, along with holding other bizarre stances, opposes the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine on grounds that it interferes with God’s punishment of sexual license. And Huckabee, who once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public and opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure, comes out of this frightening mold. He justified his call to quarantine those with AIDS because they could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”

“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee wrote. “It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”

Huckabee has publicly backed off from this extreme position, but he remains deeply hostile to gays. He has used wit and humor to deflect reporters from his radical views about marriage, abortion, damnation, biblical law, creationism and the holy war he believes we are fighting with Islam. But his stances represent a huge step, should they ever become policy, toward a theocratic state and the death of our open society. In the end, however, I do not blame Huckabee or the tens of millions of hapless Christians-40 percent of the Republican electorate-who hear his words and rejoice. I blame the corporate state, those who thought they could disempower and abuse the working class, rape the country, build a rapacious oligarchy and never pay a political price.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“

Prayer for peace

Last night I brought a Christmas tree to a simple trailer. The tree joined a smaller one and a wonderful scene of the Nativity, not unlike the one on the mantle of my home, made by local women.

I've befriended a family of five and together we've shared some simple pleasures. They've fallen on difficult times, not unusual for migrant families, but their situation was compounded by errors made by a nonprofit in a nearby town that assisted them with their various applications for US status. I can only imagine the sleepless nights spent by the family as they wait for resolution of their immigration status.

I've slept much less easily this past year myself as I've seen first hand the devastating toll that our government's immigration policies have taken on the lives of real people. As the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates continue to scapegoat immigrants, to ignore the plight of thousands in New Orleans, and to sidestep the war in Iraq, I can only see the result -- honest, hardworking people suffering day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

My prayer for the New Year is that our country comes to its senses and realizes that the borders that divide countries are man-made. Mexico, US, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Serbia, Kosovo, and countless other man-made borders continue to divide families. Borders and boundaries make profits for those that police them, and wreak havoc for millions of people around the world.

My prayer for the New Year is for peace. For justice. For quiet. For a new way.

Blessings to you and yours.

Teeth, Toll of Poverty and Neglect

Last night, I attended the Posada for the organization where I work, Puente de la Costa Sur. One of the program participants told me that he was grateful for the meal of tamales, turkey mole, and desserts, because as he said, "with my teeth, I can only eat soft foods." He showed us his mouth, inflamed and obviously very painful. We're fortunate that there is a nonprofit dental clinic in a nearby town, but even their highly trained staff will be unable to fully address his dental needs.

This reminded me about an August, 2005, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker that I simply have been unable to forget. In it he writes about the staggering toll that poor dental care takes in this country. He writes:

Several years ago, two Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, "Uninsured in America." They talked to as many kinds of people as they could find, collecting stories of untreated depression and struggling single mothers and chronically injured laborers—and the most common complaint they heard was about teeth.  Gina, a hairdresser in Idaho, whose husband worked as a freight manager at a chain store, had "a peculiar mannerism of keeping her mouth closed even when speaking." It turned out that she hadn't been able to afford dental care for three years, and one of her front teeth was rotting.  Daniel, a construction worker, pulled out his bad teeth with pliers.  Then, there was Loretta, who worked nights at a university research center in Mississippi, and was missing most of her teeth.  "They'll break off after a while, and then you just grab a hold of them, and they work their way out," she explained to Sered and Fernandopulle.  "It hurts so bad, because the tooth aches.  Then it's a relief just to get it out of there.  The hole closes up itself anyway.  So it's so much better."

People without health insurance have bad teeth because, if you're paying for everything out of your own pocket, going to the dentist for a checkup seems like a luxury.  It isn't, of course.  The loss of teeth makes eating fresh fruits and vegetables difficult, and a diet heavy in soft, processed foods exacerbates more serious health problems, like diabetes.  The pain of tooth decay leads many people to use alcohol as a salve.  And those struggling to get ahead in the job market quickly find that the unsightliness of bad teeth, and the self-consciousness that results, can become a major barrier.  If your teeth are bad, you're not going to get a job as a receptionist, say, or a cashier.  You're going to be put in the back somewhere, far from the public eye.  What Loretta, Gina, and Daniel understand, the two authors tell us, is that bad teeth have come to be seen as a marker of "poor parenting, low educational achievement and slow or faulty intellectual development." They are an outward marker of caste.  "Almost every time we asked interviewees what their first priority would be if the president established universal health coverage tomorrow," Sered and Fernandopulle write, "the immediate answer was 'my teeth.' "

Blackwater's Bu$ine$$

I continue to be entirely too interested in the adventures of the firm, Blackwater. In his article in the Nation, Jeremy Cahill writes about the branding of the so-called security company -- a half time show at the San Diego/BYU football game earlier this month and a special edition handgun are just two recent event to popularize the company charged with gunning down Iraqi civilians and with the wrongful death of its employees and US soldiers.

by JEREMY SCAHILL

[from the December 24, 2007 issue of the Nation]

Gunning down seventeen Iraqi civilians in an incident the military has labeled "criminal." Multiple Congressional investigations. A federal grand jury. Allegations of illegal arms smuggling. Wrongful death lawsuits brought by families of dead employees and US soldiers. A federal lawsuit alleging war crimes. Charges of steroid use by trigger-happy mercenaries. Allegations of "significant tax evasion." The US-installed government in Iraq labeling its forces "murderers." With a new scandal breaking practically every day, one would think Blackwater security would be on the ropes, facing a corporate meltdown or even a total wipeout. But it seems that business for the company has never been better, as it continues to pull in major federal contracts. And its public demeanor grows bolder and cockier by the day.

Rather than hiding out and hoping for the scandals to fade, the Bush Administration's preferred mercenary company has launched a major rebranding campaign, changing its name to Blackwater Worldwide and softening its logo: once a bear paw in the site of a sniper scope, it's now a bear claw wrapped in two half ovals--sort of like the outline of a globe with a United Nations feel. Its website boasts of a corporate vision "guided by integrity, innovation, and a desire for a safer world." Blackwater mercenaries are now referred to as "global stabilization professionals." Blackwater's 38-year-old owner, Erik Prince, was No. 11 in Details magazine's "Power 50," the men "who control your viewing patterns, your buying habits, your anxieties, your lust.... the people who have taken over the space in your head."

In one of the company's most bizarre recent actions, on December 1 Blackwater paratroopers staged a dramatic aerial landing, complete with Blackwater flags and parachutes--not in Baghdad or Kabul but in San Diego at Qualcomm Stadium during the halftime show at the San Diego State/BYU football game. The location was interesting, given that Blackwater is fighting fierce local opposition to its attempt to open a new camp--Blackwater West--on 824 acres in the small rural community of Potrero, just outside San Diego. Blackwater's parachute squad plans to land at the Armed Forces Bowl in Texas this month and the Virginia Gold Cup in May. The company recently sponsored a NASCAR racer, and it has teamed up with gun manufacturer Sig Sauer to create a Blackwater Special Edition full-sized 9-millimeter pistol with the company logo on the grip. It comes with a Limited Lifetime Warranty. For $18, parents can purchase infant onesies with the company logo.

In recent weeks, Blackwater has indicated it might quit Iraq. "We see the security market diminishing," Prince told the Wall Street Journal in October. Yet on December 3 Blackwater posted job listings for "security specialists" and snipers as a result of its State Department diplomatic security "contract expansion." While its name may be mud in the human rights world, Blackwater has not only made big money in Iraq (about $1 billion in State Department contracts); it has secured a reputation as a company that keeps US officials alive by any means necessary. The dirty open secret in Washington is that Blackwater has done its job in Iraq, even if it has done so by valuing the lives of Iraqis much lower than those of US VIPs. That badass image will serve it well as it expands globally.

Prince promises that Blackwater "is going to be more of a full spectrum" operation. Amid the cornucopia of scandals, Blackwater is bidding for a share of a five-year, $15 billion contract with the Pentagon to "fight terrorists with drug-trade ties." Perhaps the firm will join the mercenary giant DynCorp in Colombia or Bolivia or be sent into Mexico on a "training" mission. This "war on drugs" contract would put Blackwater in the arena with the godfathers of the war business, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.

In addition to its robust business in law enforcement, military and homeland security training, Blackwater is branching out. Here are some of its current projects and initiatives:

§ Blackwater affiliate Greystone Ltd., registered offshore in Barbados, is an old-fashioned mercenary operation offering "personnel from the best militaries throughout the world" for hire by governments and private organizations. It also boasts of a "multi-national peacekeeping program," with forces "specializing in crowd control and less than lethal techniques and military personnel for the less stable areas of operation."

§ Prince's Total Intelligence Solutions, headed by three CIA veterans (among them Blackwater's number two, Cofer Black), puts CIA-type services on the open market for hire by corporations or governments.

§ Blackwater is launching an armored vehicle called the Grizzly, which the company characterizes as the most versatile in history. Blackwater intends to modify it to be legal for use on US highways.

§ Blackwater's aviation division has some forty aircraft, including turboprop planes that can be used for unorthodox landings. It has ordered a Super Tucano paramilitary plane from Brazil, which can be used in counterinsurgency operations. In August the aviation division won a $92 million contract with the Pentagon to operate flights in Central Asia.

§ It recently flight-tested the unmanned Polar 400 airship, which may be marketed to the Department of Homeland Security for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border and to "military, law enforcement, and non-government customers."

§ A fast-growing maritime division has a new, 184-foot vessel that has been fitted for potential paramilitary use.

Meanwhile, Blackwater is deep in the camp of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Cofer Black is Romney's senior adviser on counterterrorism. At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, when Romney refused to call waterboarding torture, he said, "I'm not going to specify the specific means of what is and what is not torture so that the people that we capture will know what things we're able to do and what things we're not able to do. And I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some thirty-five years." That was an exaggeration of Black's career at the CIA (he was there twenty-eight years and head of counterterrorism for only three), but a Romney presidency could make Blackwater's business under Bush look like a church bake sale.

In short, Blackwater is moving ahead at full steam. Individual scandals clearly aren't enough to slow it down. The company's critics in the Democratic-controlled Congress must confront the root of the problem: the government is in the midst of its most radical privatization in history, and companies like Blackwater are becoming ever more deeply embedded in the war apparatus. Until this system is brought down, the world's the limit for Blackwater Worldwide--and as its rebranding campaign shows, Blackwater knows it.

Shock and Tasers in New Orleans

Since I began blogging, I've been drawn again and again to the devastation that continues in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast. News this week that city officials used tasers to subdue those that were protesting the demolition of New Orleans public housing units, reinforces my view that New Orleans has provided a text book example of disaster capitalism. Once again, Naomi Klein, writes beautifully about what is happening.

By Naomi Klein, HuffingtonPost.com, posted on December 22, 2007

Readers of my book The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.

The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.

- First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.

- Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city's public services and spaces, most notably it's homes, schools and hospitals.

-Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.

Democracy Now! has been covering this fight all week, with amazing reports from filmmakers Jacquie Soohen and Rick Rowley (Rick was arrested in the crackdown). Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here.

And footage from yesterday's police crackdown and Tasering of protestors inside and outside city hall here.

That last segment contains a terrific interview with Kali Akuno, executive director of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. Akuno puts the demolitions in the big picture, telling Amy Goodman:

This is just one particular piece of this whole program. Public hospitals are also being shut down and set to be demolished and destroyed in New Orleans. And they've systematically dismantled the public education system and beginning demolition on many of the schools in New Orleans--that's on the agenda right now--and trying to totally turn that system over to a charter and a voucher system, to privatize and just really go forward with a major experiment, which was initially laid out by the Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative think tanks shortly after the storm. So this is just really the fulfillment of this program.

Akuno is referring to the Heritage Foundation's infamous post-Katrina meeting with the Republican Study Group in which participants laid out their plans to turn New Orleans into a Petri dish for every policy they can't ram through without a disaster. Read the minutes on my website:.

For more context, here are couple of related excerpts from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:

The news racing around the shelter [in Baton Rouge] that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican Congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities." All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller, safer city"--which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets," you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway.

Over at the shelter, Jamar Perry, a young resident of New Orleans, could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn't have died."

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us in the food line overheard and whipped around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?"

A mother with two kids chimed in. "No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."

...

At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.

It happened in New Orleans. After the flood, an already divided city turned into a battleground between gated green zones and raging red zones--the result not of water damage but of the "free-market solutions" embraced by the president. The Bush administration refused to allow emergency funds to pay public sector salaries, and the City of New Orleans, which lost its tax base, had to fire three thousand workers in the months after Katrina. Among them were sixteen of the city's planning staff--with shades of "de Baathification," laid off at the precise moment when New Orleans was in desperate need of planners. Instead, millions of public dollars went to outside consultants, many of whom were powerful real estate developers. And of course thousands of teachers were also fired, paving the way for the conversion of dozens of public schools into charter schools, just as Friedman had called for.

Almost two years after the storm, Charity Hospital was still closed. The court system was barely functioning, and the privatized electricity company, Entergy, had failed to get the whole city back online. After threatening to raise rates dramatically, the company managed to extract a controversial $200 million bailout from the federal government. The public transit system was gutted and lost almost half its workers. The vast majority of publicly owned housing projects stood boarded up and empty, with five thousand units slotted for demolition by the federal housing authority. Much as the tourism lobby in Asia had longed to be rid of the beachfront fishing villages, New Orleans' powerful tourism lobby had been eyeing the housing projects, several of them on prime land close to the French Quarter, the city's tourism magnet.

Endesha Juakali helped set up a protest camp outside one of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining that "they've had an agenda for St. Bernard a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn't do it. So they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighbourhood when the neighbourhood is weakest. ... This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it!"

Amid the schools, the homes, the hospitals, the transit system and the lack of clean water in many parts of town, New Orleans' public sphere was not being rebuilt, it was being erased, with the storm used as the excuse. At an earlier stage of capitalist "creative destruction," large swaths of the United States lost their manufacturing bases and degenerated into rust belts of shuttered factories and neglected neighborhoods. Post-Katrina New Orleans may be providing the first Western-world image of a new kind of wasted urban landscape: the mould belt, destroyed by the deadly combination of weathered public infrastructure and extreme weather.

Naomi Klein's latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Happy Camp-er

If you really want to know about Mike Huckabee and his record on HIV/AIDS, ask Eric Camp. His blog, Happy Camp'er provides a powerful record of the Arkansas years -- the Clinton, Tucker and Huckabee legacies on HIV/AIDS.

Here's the latest post from his blog:

Bite Me, Huckabee

Candidate Huckabee admits he was so confused about how HIV was transmitted in 1992 that he believed people infected with HIV should be "isolated from the rest of society." To be clear, this was not 1982, but 1992. In 1992, it was obvious HIV could not be transmitted casually. As I recall, people with AIDS addressed both the Democratic & Republican National Conventions in 1992. Guess Huckabee missed the memo. You know, the one sent out in 1985 to every American household saying HIV was not spread by casual contact.

More fresh from the ministry then, Huckabee was more than willing to kick around the sick and dying in 1992. Just to twist the knife a bit, Mike also said queers are "aberrant, unnatural, and sinful."

Yes ladies and gentlemen, Mike Huckabee was an ignorant homophobic sombitch in 1992, and went a-courtin' the "God Hates Fags" vote with vigor. As effective treatment for HIV became available in America, it was a damn hard fight to make them available in Arkansas. "Waiting Lists" were the norm here for medications under Huckabee.

If Mike Huckabee really didn't know HIV couldn't be spread by casual contact in 1992, it was the same willful ignorance that infected Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Willful ignorance (under the guise of national intelligence) also started the Iraq War. The same willful ignorance allows the words "compassionate" and "conservative" to be linked.

Like the Rev. Pat Robertson (R) before him, I hope Huckabee's political ambitions get quarantined in Iowa.

Blackwater splits California Town

This post in the New York Times highlights the growing influence and scope of Blackwater, the private security firm. Their core business is now shifting from providing private security in countries like Iraq to an increasing menu of services provided through contracts with the US, state and county governments. For those of us that fear the increasing militarization in the US and the increasing privatization of community services, Blackwater provides a text book example of the wave of the future. We should be afraid, very afraid.

New York Times, December 11, 2007

by Solomon Moore

POTRERO, Calif. — The scandal in Iraq involving Blackwater, the private security firm, is a world away from this tiny town near the Mexican border. But five members of the community’s planning group are expected to lose their posts on Tuesday for approving a Blackwater training camp on an old chicken farm here.

Results of a mail-in-ballot recall election against the members are scheduled to be announced on Tuesday. Three of the group’s nine members have already been removed because Blackwater opponents revealed they had been improperly appointed.

Like many Potrero residents, Carl Meyer, 51, a local farmer and environmental activist, never gave much thought to Iraq or private security firms until Blackwater came to town last year. Ever since, he has been opposed to the company’s proposal for 800 acres of rifle ranges, dormitories, classrooms and an armory.

“Having them here wouldn’t be in keeping with our rural character,” said Mr. Meyer, who has helped organize the recall effort. “But it’s more than that for me. They’re not good for our country.”

A federal grand jury is investigating Blackwater for various events in Iraq including the shooting deaths in September of 17 Iraqi civilians by the company’s security guards while driving through Baghdad.

An unincorporated community of 850 on the southeastern edge of San Diego County, Potrero is a scrubby nexus of military veterans, border guards, ranchers and recluses who live so close to the nightclubs in Tecate, Mexico, that on quiet nights they can hear Nortec music pulsing over the voices of coyotes.

The controversy about Blackwater has riven the community’s social fabric, leading to arguments among longtime neighbors and acquaintances, and at least two anti-Blackwater rallies.

Gordon Hammers, a retired businessman who is chairman of the Potrero Community Planning Group, is among those facing the recall, which both sides expect to be successful. Mr. Hammers steered Blackwater’s proposal into the county’s standard environmental review process, with the backing of seven of the board’s eight other members.

When Blackwater first approached the planning group in September 2006, Mr. Hammers said, he had never heard of the company.

“Once I found out more about them, I thought: ‘I need this like I need a hole in my head,’” Mr. Hammers said. “But I also thought they would bring jobs.”

Jan Hedlun, the sole member of the planning group to oppose Blackwater and to avoid a recall threat, said she never expected to be taking on such weighty issues when she volunteered.

“I came into this planning group because I wanted to know about a separate proposal to build a few houses near my home,” Ms. Hedlun said. “And all of a sudden I’m here tussling with this powerful company. It’s just overwhelming.”

Diane Jacob, who represents Potrero on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, which will ultimately decide whether the Blackwater campus will be built, declined to comment about the proposal or the recall drive. The planning group’s vote sent the proposal to the supervisors, who will act after reviewing an environmental impact report.

For the better part of the last year, Blackwater has maintained a conspicuous presence in Potrero. Company officials have attended planning group meetings, established a shelter and relief center after wildfires burned down 17 Potrero homes in October — and have attracted some supporters.

Sitting at the 94 Cafe, the town’s only diner, Andrew Lindsay, 82, and his wife Inez, 74, counted themselves among those supporters. Mr. Lindsay wore a pin with the firm’s bear paw logo on his cap.

“We need a good little bit of industry and employment out here, it’ll be good for the economy,” said Mr. Lindsay, praising the company’s ability to deliver food and propane to residents in the aftermath of wildfires. “Blackwater is very community-minded.”

But Mr. Meyer, the farmer, was among the residents who picked up supplies at the fire station after the wildfires. Once he learned that Blackwater had provided the gas tanks, Mr. Meyer said, he tried to return the items or at least pay for them, but a neighbor at the first station who supported Blackwater’s relief effort turned him away.

“‘Get out of my face, Carl,’” Mr. Meyer recalled the neighbor saying. “‘Nobody likes you around here.’”

Company officials said the proposed training camp — in a secluded, mountain-protected site — is part of an unfolding business strategy to diversify beyond the kind of dangerous, controversial operations that have attracted so much unwelcome attention in Iraq.

Each year, according to company figures, more than 25,000 law enforcement officers and military personnel take courses at Blackwater’s campus in Moyock, N.C., which is about 30 miles south of Norfolk, Va. Blackwater West, as the facility here would be called, would train law enforcement officials from Western states, said Marty Strong, Blackwater’s vice president for communications. The firm recently opened an 80-acre regional training facility in Illinois to serve Midwestern customers.

The proximity of so many military installations in Southern California, borders, ports, and several of the nation’s largest local law enforcement agencies make the area an ideal market for Blackwater, Mr. Strong said.

“It seemed like a real logical place to go and build a facility,” he said.

Blackwater’s new training camps are only one aspect of the company’s shifting business strategy.

In August, Blackwater and four other contractors landed what could be its biggest job ever, a series of projects that could total $15 billion for the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office at the Pentagon. The contract calls for unspecified technologies, training, logistics, and procurement services to fight narcotics trafficking and terrorism.

“The fact is we use Blackwater to do a lot of our training of counternarcotics police in Afghanistan,” said Richard J. Douglas, a deputy assistant secretary of defense. “I have to say that Blackwater has done a very good job.”

Blackwater is testing an unmanned aerial vehicle, the Polar 400, a remote-controlled dirigible that can be outfitted with various sensors. Unlike traditional drones, the Polar 400 is designed to remain aloft for several days at a time.

Mr. Strong said that the high-altitude blimp would be ideal for border surveillance operations or drug interdiction. He said the company wanted to win more Homeland Security contracts focused on border security training, and in choosing the location here, just eight miles from the border, Blackwater was banking on an increase in the number of border guards.

Scrooge delivers Dec. 21 eviction dates to New Orleans homeless

Just when things seemed like they couldn't get worse for poor people in New Orleans, Scrooge has delivered another blow. Officials announced yesterday that would start putting a fence around a park that currently serves as home to more than 200 individuals and families on December 21. With low-income housing buildings targeted for demolition, the closure of this park, and the threatened eviction of hundreds from FEMA trailers next May, poor and middle-income residents literally have no place to go. This story yesterday on National Public Radio, reflects not only the desperation of the displaced but the commitent of nonprofit workers who have stepped in to try and remedy an almost impossible situation.

Move-Out Date Looms for New Orleans' Homess by Joseph Shapiro

Listen Now [7 min 38 sec] add to playlist

All Things Considered, December 10, 2007 · Since Hurricane Katrina, the number of homeless people living in New Orleans has doubled. Many are people who had a place to live before the storm. But many of them were just barely getting by — and were dealing with physical and mental disabilities. Now, they cannot afford the price of housing.

On Tuesday, the state is planning to begin building a fence around a city park that has become an encampment for homeless people. They'll have until Dec. 21 to move out, and that may not be enough time for groups that help the homeless to find them permanent housing.

New York Times calls on Pelosi to explain hate crimes bill strategy

Congress just can't seem to get it right. It is unable to stop the war in Iraq, pass comprehensive legislation to ban employment discrimination, or pass hate crimes legislation. For those following the "let the transgenders wait" story with ENDA, it should be noted that women were asked to wait their turn when the original hate crimes legislation was passed by Congress in 1999. We're still waiting.

I found this New York Times editorial interesting, perhaps you will as well.

The New York Times: EDITORIAL: Caving In on Hate Crimes
Monday 12.10.07

Congressional leaders, who have disappointed frequently this year, have done it again. This time, the House leadership has failed to find a way to get a bipartisan law against hate crimes passed and signed into law. Racial, religious, sexual and other minorities have waited long enough. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has to do more than just express her support for the bill; she must find a way to make it the law.

The Matthew Shepard Act would expand the definition of hate crimes and make important improvements in the federal response. To categories already covered by federal law, which include race and religion, it would add crimes committed because of the victim’s sexual orientation, gender identity, gender or disability. It would also broaden the federal government’s authority to investigate these hateful acts.

The bill has been a top priority of civil rights groups since Mr. Shepard, who was gay, was beaten to death in Laramie, Wyo., in 1998. It also has strong support from law enforcement, including the National Sheriffs’ Association and the National District Attorneys Association. The House passed it 237-180, with significant Republican support, and the Senate passed a similar bill by voice vote, after a 60-39 cloture vote.

President Bush has suggested he would veto the bill. It’s an unfortunate threat, but one he is certainly capable of carrying out. House and Senate leaders planned to get around that threat by attaching it to a Department of Defense Authorization bill, which Mr. Bush would have had trouble vetoing. But House leaders decided last week that since some liberals did not want to vote for the defense bill and some conservatives did not want to vote for the hate crimes bill, they could not piece together a majority to get it through.

Ms. Pelosi says she is still committed to getting the Matthew Shepard Act passed, perhaps early next year. That’s nice, but it is time for her to explain how she intends to do it — and then to make it happen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/opinion/10mon3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Mental Illnesses Reported by 17% of New Orleans Residents After Hurricane Katrina, Study Finds

In my last post on New Orleans, I reported that the acute rental housing shortage there has led to a staggering incidence of homeless. Now a recent study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry has revealed that 17% of the city's residents reported serious mental illness in the first month after Hurricane Katrina.

The study found that nearly half of New Orleans residents reported significant signs of anxiety in the first month after the storm and that women, young adults and people with lower incomes were hardest hit. The study found that most of the mental problems were caused by post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD symptoms often were associated with incidents that occurred after the storm, including robberies, assaults and property loss.

The study's author said, "The main message here is that the primary drivers of mental health risk were social and financial circumstances. So if we're intent on minimizing psychopathology, it means mitigating those stressors quickly."

An abstract of the study is available online.

Obama candidacy: clash of centuries?

I love Frank Rich at the New York Time and his keen insights into our culture. His post yesterday was one of the best mainstream analyses yet about the role that race is playing in the Presidential campaign.

Rich writes:

Part of the Republicans’ difficulty in countering Mr. Obama, should they have to, is their own cynical racial politics. For the most part, race has been the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign despite the (largely) white press’s endless fretting about whether the Illinois senator is too white for black voters and too black for white voters. Most Americans aren’t racist, most Republicans included. (Those who are won’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it’s not Mr. Obama.) But the G.O.P., by its own doing, is nonetheless saddled with a history that most recently includes “macaca” and Katrina, Mr. Bush’s appearance at Bob Jones University in 2000 and the nonexistent black population of its Congressional delegation.

As the Republican leadership knows, this record is an albatross, driving away not just black voters but crucial white swing voters, too. Ken Mehlman, the former G.O.P. chairman, and Mr. Rove, as recently as in that Newsweek column, have implored their party to reach out to minorities. So have Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. But not even conservative leaders of this stature could persuade their party’s top 2008 presidential contenders to show up for a September debate moderated by Tavis Smiley for PBS at the historically black Morgan State University.

It’s not because those no-shows are racists; it’s because they are defensive and out of touch. With the notable exception of Mike Huckabee, most of the party’s candidates have barricaded themselves from African-Americans for so long that they don’t know how to speak to or about them. As sure-footed as these Republicans are in attacking the Clintons and Streisand — or in exchanging fire with Al Sharpton and hip-hop moguls — they are strangers to the mainstream multiracial and multicultural America exemplified by an Obama or an Oprah.

An Obama candidacy would force them to engage. Or try to. A matchup between Mr. Obama and Mr. Giuliani, who was forged in the racial crucible of New York’s police brutality nightmares of the 1990s, or between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, who was shaped by a religion that didn’t give blacks equal membership until 1978, would be less a clash of races than of centuries.

I very much appreciate this positioning of the race in terms of our shifting culture. Those who would view the Presidential campaign as solely about the "best woman or man for the job" have got it wrong. The real question is who is best positioned to recognize the profound changes in our worldwide cultures and navigate within them without the fear of trying something new, something bold, something fresh.

New Orleans Hurt by Acute Rental Shortage

I'm reposting this article by Susan Saulny from the New York Times because the measure of any society is how it treats its poor and its marginalized. Just when it seems that the situation in New Orleans cannot get any worse, it does. Before the hurricane, housing advocates estimated there were about 6,300 homeless people in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Today, the count is 12,000 and growing. Experts said it was hard to ignore the link between the housing situation and homelessness.

Inside trailer No. 27 here at the A. L. Davis Playground, where the government set up a camp last year for displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Bernard’s meager possessions are all packed up, even though she has nowhere to go.

About a month ago, workers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency swept through her trailer park, a bleak tableau of housing of the last resort, taping eviction notices on the flimsy aluminum doors. Thousands of other trailer residents across Louisiana were informed by FEMA last week that they too would be evicted in the next six months.

But few of them will be able to return to the city from which they were flooded out 27 months ago.

More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city, threatening the recovery of the region and the well-being of many residents who decided to return against the odds. Before the storm, more than half of the city’s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant.

In some core middle- and lower-income areas, blighted dwellings stretch for blocks on end, and the city has been slow to come up with ideas for what to do with those that have been abandoned. Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents.

Although repairs are being made and more housing is available now than a year ago, demand is still outpacing supply.

Ms. Bernard, a veteran worker for the local public transportation agency who has to move by Monday, has been scouring the city for a place to rent. Properties in her price range, if they exist at all, routinely come without finished walls or stoves. In New Orleans, decent affordable housing remains a casualty of the storm.

“A lot of the city is still boarded up,” said Ms. Bernard, who rented a one-bedroom house in eastern New Orleans for $300 a month before Hurricane Katrina. “Where are we supposed to go?”

One of the more striking changes to appear lately in New Orleans is the highly visible number of homeless men and women living under bridges and in parks. Social service groups say about 12,000 homeless people are living in the city, about double the number before the storm.

The sense of an impending housing crisis grew stronger last week with FEMA’s announcement on Wednesday that it would close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes on varying schedules by the end of May. More than 900 families are living in FEMA trailer parks around the city.

The agency said its action was intended to hasten the move of residents to permanent housing from trailers. It said counselors would assist every resident in the transition. “We’re with them every step of the way,” Diane L. W. Perry, a FEMA spokeswoman, said Wednesday.

But in interviews at trailer parks last week, a reporter found that some residents had not spoken with a caseworker in weeks, even though they were scheduled to be evicted within days.

“The caseworker is very hard to get in touch with,” said Martin Blossom, a pizza cook who lives in a trailer and who is not sure where he will move in the next few days. “I haven’t talked with the caseworker for two weeks.”

Others said the information they got from caseworkers was useless. Ramona Jones said her counselor gave her several listings, but some of the apartments were not ready for habitation by her eviction date — or they were, in her words, “rat holes.” Landlords are asking $1,100 a month or more. Though Ms. Jones and others are eligible for financial assistance to help pay the high rents, many are reluctant, knowing that, like the trailers, the assistance could disappear, leaving them stranded with huge bills.

“We done been through so much with FEMA till where it’s easy for the federal government to back out on their word,” Ms. Jones, a factory worker, said. “They did it before. Everybody’s looking at, ‘What if?’ ”

Time has already run out for some. Ms. Bernard, 40, and her two daughters got the final word on Friday that they were evicted, cast out of the only home they have had since the storm to whereabouts unknown. And they were not alone.

“I don’t know what’s going to become of us,” said Tiffany Farbe, who lives in a trailer park near the Mississippi River in the Uptown part of New Orleans with her son and mother. “They said get out. I’ve explained to them over and over again our situation. FEMA just makes you feel like dirt.”

The agency objects to that characterization, and says it is only trying to help.

“It’s the next step in the recovery,” said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman. “It’s the individual’s responsibility to go out and find what’s suitable for them.”

While the agency provides listings, Mr. Simpson said it did not necessarily endorse the properties or know much about them beyond their locations and the basics, such as the number of bedrooms.

“We know it’s a tough decision, and that’s not lost on us,” he said, but “more and more housing becomes available every day, that’s a fact. The sooner you begin the process, the better. You want to start early and pick what’s right for your family.” He added: “We’re very sensitive to the fact that this isn’t an easy move. But it’s a necessary move.”

Before the hurricane, housing advocates estimated there were about 6,300 homeless people in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Today, the count is 12,000 and growing. Experts said it was hard to ignore the link between the housing situation and homelessness.

“FEMA and the federal bureaucracy seem oblivious to the fact that virtually no new affordable rental housing has yet appeared in New Orleans to replace what was lost,” said Martha J. Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a group of 60 agencies that house and feed the homeless. “It will take a long time for enough replacement affordable housing to be built. To withdraw housing assistance to the neediest people is a shirking of federal responsibility for the design failure of the federal levees in New Orleans, which was the cause of most of the destruction of affordable housing here.”

In the past several months, a homeless encampment has sprung up on the steps of City Hall — partly because it is a safe open space and partly because it is a political statement. Tents and sleeping bags are aligned in rows. The crowd of hundreds is a mix of young and old, white and black.

Michael Reeves, 45, sleeps on the grass outside City Hall. He used to rent a one-bedroom in the Ninth Ward for $350 before the storm. “Ain’t nothing left but the ground,” he said. “We didn’t have nowhere to go so we came here.”

Not everyone in the park is a native of New Orleans. Some people came here after the storm to do construction work without realizing they would not be able to find a place to live. Some sleep on-site in unfinished buildings; others have taken up residence in abandoned buildings or in parks.

Ken Cimino, 48, sleeps outside of City Hall, too. He does odd jobs at the Superdome, mostly picking up trash after Saints football games. Mr. Cimino drove to New Orleans recently from New Haven, Conn.

“I came here for construction work, and found the situation wasn’t quite what I expected,” he said. “I thought I’d live out of my car for a few weeks until I found a place. Used up my savings. I just got caught off balance.”

Now, Mr. Cimino says he cannot afford to drive back to Connecticut. He is just one of many laborers who find themselves without options.

Ms. Bernard said she might end up on a friend’s mother’s couch until she wears out her welcome. Then what?

“I know I’m going to find something,” she said. “I have faith. I know God’s going to work something out for us.”

ONLINE: A video report on the housing crisis in New Orleans. nytimes.com/national

 

We remember

Today we observe World AIDS Day. But every day around the world is World AIDS Day.

Today and every day I remember my beloveds and my comrades, lost to me, lost to us, forever.

I remember standing at the Capitol, when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was unveiled for the first time. Suzanne Pharr and I stood there with Eric Rofes (now also lost us unexpectedly). Name after name was read, and I was so struck by Eric saying, "I knew him, I knew him, I knew him." Suzanne and I lived in Arkansas then, and the HIV epidemic was just starting to hit us full force.

My friend Eric Kamp reminded me of the losses of our Arkansas friends just recently, by sending along a videotape with the  photos and stories of our lost ones. The tape was also an important reminder of all the ways we fought for our friends and loved ones -- for respect, for medication, for care, for housing, and for dignity.

My friends like Eric, living with HIV all these years later, are still fighting. We're still dogging Presidential candidates to make a firm commitment to end the HIV epidemic. We're still fighting to get no and low-cost medications to those that need them. We're still fighting battles around employment, housing and hospital care. We're still fighting, all around the world.

As the toll of HIV infection and HIV-related deaths continues to rise, as homophobia, sexism, and racism, continue to rise, we must remain vigilant. Not just today, but everyday.