Remembering the Sichuan earthquake

People light candles to commemorate last year's May 12 Sichuan earthquake at People Square in Shanghai May 12, 2009. Mourners crowded ruins in southwest China on Tuesday to mark one year since an earthquake shattered the region... REUTERS/Aly Song photo

It is not hard for me to identify with these Chinese mourners, living here on the San Andreas Fault. The "Big One" could happen any day -- but, of necessity, we act as if the earth will remain fixed and secure forever. It won't -- it hasn't even in my short memory. The other day a new acquaintance showed me her city issued "preparedness volunteer" badge as a sort of joke and we all laughed. Periodically we are swamped with instructions for bolting stuff down and assembling survival supplies for a time when outside aid may not be unavailable. We either get with the program -- or we don't.

It's hard to take in the sheer scale of what happened in China. Everything there is big.

the May 12 quake... left 80,000 dead and an estimated 5 million homeless ...

Reuters

I don't know what that means. None of us do.

An Alertnet blog post by Thin Lei Win reminds us a piece of the story that usually disappears from disaster narratives: what happens to the maimed survivors, especially elders. We instinctively focus on children, the future, looking for revived hope. But everyone doesn't die and some are old.

In earthquakes, the elderly usually account for a fifth of those affected, according to Francis Markus, spokesperson for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. ...

"The tradition of families looking after their elderly parents is already coming under economic and social pressure (in China) and the earthquake has further intensified this pressure," Markus says. "There is a growing need for provisions to look after those elderly."

With a rapidly aging population and a growing pattern of young people migrating to big cities, older people are often forced to carry on working in rural areas like Sichuan. Livelihoods are a major problem for all survivors of the quake with many people having lost crops, farmland and animals. But for the elderly, picking up the pieces again can be particularly hard.

"Many older people are, out of necessity, still economically active. A lot of these activities were disrupted heavily during the earthquake," said Peter Morrison, Help Age International's regional programme manager. "The earthquake has left many of these people to fend for themselves."

Meanwhile, the injured who survived number some 50000 people, many without legs or arms or needing rehabilitation.

On the more cheerful side, and concurrently a view of the magnitude of the damage, is this YouTube [9:48] about the relief project thought up by a couple of U.S. musicians resident in China.

H/t James Fallows.

Keep on pushing

MoveOn has a new video. Worth watching; only 35 seconds.



I find it a little tame. The investigation we need is almost certainly a prelude to prosecution for internationally recognized war crimes. The former Vice-President seems bent on self-incrimination through claiming torture "worked." Since the chief thing we know of that torture produced was a completely false assertion used by the Bush administration to justify its war from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda in Iraq, this seems both absurd -- and simply vicious.

But what's really interesting here is that MoveOn is guessing that the bone is worth continued gnawing. It is. Prosecutions for war crimes don't come easy or fast, but determined people make civilization by continuing to demand them.

"American presence: more the problem than the solution"

Graham E. Fuller was CIA station chief in Kabul. He knows what he is talking about. And he lays out why President Obama's plans for escalating war in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a recipe for more disaster. Some of the more devastating items in his critique:

-- Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

-- The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban -- like them or not -- as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

-- India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan -- in the intelligence, economic and political arenas -- that chills Islamabad. Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home. ...

-- Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. ... [emphasis added.]

My link for this article (reading the whole thing is totally worth it) is to a TV station in Arizona. Yet I am told that the piece appeared in the print edition of the International Herald Tribune in Europe. IHT has not put it online. I have to wonder, why?

Peace Action West is working to raise awareness of the deepening disaster in Afghanistan. Sign up here for updates. And do support Congressman Jim McDermott's bill asking that the administration explain its exit strategy for its Central Asian war.

San Francisco field trip

Though it seems a bit early in the season, the tourists were out in force on this lovely day.


At the base of Lombard St. -- the so-called crookedest street in the world -- many take pictures. Lombard Street's claim seems a con to me. There's a far more crooked street over on Potrero Hill. I'm not going to advertise where that is.

Little do these folks seem to know that they are only a block from a much more consequential landmark. In the late 1800s, at 2245 Jones St., a Chinese immigrant named Yick Wo ran a laundry. In those days, most laundries in the city were run by Chinese immigrants -- and nearly all laundries, regardless of the ethnicity of the owners, were located in wooden buildings.

In 1880, during one of white San Francisco's periodic anti-Chinese panics, the city fathers ordered all laundries located in wooden structures to obtain a special permit. According to the Wikipedia,

Although most of the city's wooden building laundry owners applied for a permit, none were granted to any Chinese owner, while only one out of approximately eighty non-Chinese applicants was denied a permit.

Yick Wo had been in business for 22 years; he kept working, was arrested, fined $10, and ordered jailed for 10 days for operating without a permit.

He appealed to the California Supreme Court but his conviction was upheld. However the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that he had a constitutional right to expect equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment. Even though the laundry ordinance was not discriminatory on its face, San Francisco's racially discriminatory application of the law violated the constitution. The decision was rendered on May 10, 1886.


Today there's an elementary school at the site of the laundry. I saw no historical plaque explaining the importance of the name.


Most likely it's the proximity of Lombard Street that creates the need for this prohibition on photos of the school children.

I was pointed to this item by Progressive Nation: A Travel Guide with 400+ Inspiring Landmarks and Left Turns. If I ever get a chance to do a lengthy road trip, I'll post about more of them.

News from Obama's imperial quagmire

These days I'm reading Juan Cole's enlightening book, Engaging the Muslim World. Probably I'll write more about this in the future.

This observation from Cole seemed relevant to the new central theatre of U.S. power projection:

One reason that the Middle East, and the Muslim world more generally, sees Iraq differently from Americans is that they have watched two different wars on their television sets.

We can now substitute Afghanistan for Iraq in that sentence. We may not realize it, but when, as our military is now admitting, our forces bomb Afghan civilians, much of the world sees the distress of the victims far more vividly than we do.

Take a look at this report [2:50] from Al-Jazeera English. I'd call it "fair and balanced," if that means allowing "all sides" a chance to comment. They interview our Army's dutiful press deflector in Kabul -- but his stilted comments are overwhelmed by the testimony of the International Red Cross's field officer and scenes of devastation.

President Obama's got himself his imperial quagmire to go with his banking morass.

Can we the people drag him back toward the change we believe in?

Friday cat blogging

Ripley's person is out of town so we're feeding her. She's beautiful.


And she quickly decided the hand that feeds is friendly.

A plea to Oprah

My friend Ronni Bennett at Times Goes By has thrown down with a campaign to ask Oprah to take a more realistic look at aging. The queen of syndicated TV is 55 herself (and so is her audience, if not upwards). Yet like most of our society, too many of the products and attitudes she promotes amount to a frantic, doomed search for the fountain of youth. Ain't gonna work any more for that remarkable cultural icon than for the rest of us.

Dr. Bill Thomas is a geriatrician who blogs at Changing Aging. He's the engaging guy in the short video. [2:45] Take a look.



A little schmaltzy, but culturally right on target I think. Recently the Rev. Ed Bacon, the awesome rector of All Saints Pasadena, told a listener to Oprah that "being gay is a gift from God." The conversation prompted by that one echoed for weeks, such is the ability of the program to reach an unlikely audience.

We need a good, realistic, conversation about aging. Let's help Dr. Thomas get through to Oprah.

Why we need labor law reform

Want a union at your job? Forget about it. It isn't going to happen. That's pretty much what most employees of private businesses are up against unless the government steps in to level the playing field. Learn how it works in 2:10.

Beyond "more Democrats" and even "better Democrats"

This is a tough one for me, but important. Having spent the last 15 years or so trying to get progressives to master the skills of pushing for change through the electoral system -- something we'd largely neglected for decades -- it's quite a shift to begin to imagine that the cutting edge of progress in the next period will require something else.

But it is worth imagining, because it might be true. With the improbable election of Obama, the marginalization and regionalization of the Republican Party, and nominal Democratic control of the elected federal government, any more gains in those arenas will be relatively small increments. So those of us who think what we need is more than incremental change need to figure out how to even get traction for our demands.

Chris Bowers of Open Left, who is a smart elections wonk among other talents, spelled some of this out the other day:

Surely we must maintain our efforts on the political front, but the leading edge of progressive change is coming in other areas. Things like the network neutral Internet, increasing immigration, increasing acceptance of the LGBT community, and shifting religious identification are making the country more progressive than any single or combination of political campaigns over the past two decades.

The best we can hope for from electoral politics is two-fold. First, in the short term (the next three to seven years) we can do a bit better, but not much, on the electoral and legislative fronts. Second, in the long-term, we can make sure that the federal government does not [get] in the way of the long-term engines of progressive change. Whatever immigration reform is passed, it can't reduce the number of people coming into this country. Whatever media reform is passed, the network neutral Internet must be preserved at all costs. And, nearly as importantly, the Employee Free Choice Act needs to be passed someday.

Given that the era of "more Democrats" has ended, progressive activists who are interested in sweeping change would probably be best off refocusing not primarily to "better Democrats," but to culturally progressive feedback loops like immigration, net neutrality, and the Employee Free Choice Act. That is where policy can further the leading edges of progressive change, and that is where we need to be.

I like his notion of "culturally progressive feedback loops." And I can think of two more that are worth cultivating.

For one, we need to do everything in our power to enable young people to get college educations and to experience some efficacy through the practice of collective action while in the diploma game. It's not impossible. The Obama era is going to primetime for what's known as "service learning" for college students. Let's get ourselves into those courses.

When Bowers refers to "shifting religious identification" I think he's referring to the growth of the religiously unaffiliated category in the population. But I think (and the recent Pew study agrees) that what is happening is not so much people leaving religion as people moving around between different loci of spiritual search and practice. In particular, younger folks are rejecting what they think of as censorious narrow-mindedness and bigotry, especially against gays. Progressive religious people should be a welcomed part of the wider progressive groundswell. Their activism within their own religious communities, especially on such issues as peace, anti-torture, environment and sustainability, creates links to folks who are too often untouched by overtly "political" activism. At the very least, religious progressives deprive the rightwing of its uncontested claim to have "God on their side." That's worth something while religion continues to hold some claim to moral authority.

Reclaiming the Bible for compassion

Karen Armstrong is an author whose many books have long left me both fascinated and slightly dissatisfied. I've read a lot of them including Islam: A Short History, Buddha, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, and now The Bible: A Biography.

The breadth and audacity of Armstrong's scholarship is awesome. I give her credit for popularizing what I consider one of the most useful ideas about our current world: that fundamentalism is no throwback to ancient beliefs, but a profoundly modern response to modern pressures -- one of the varieties of human invention that characterize our time. Our fundies aren't reaching back to old values -- they are creating an authoritarian bulwark against their own societies. This doesn't work and the result is painful and the pain often leads to violence.

But I've never quite been comfortable with Armstrong as an historian. Every once in a while, when she is writing on something I actually know something about (and mostly I can't claim that), I observe her arranging facts so artfully to fit her thesis that I fear some of the jagged particularity in historical events has been sanded off. But then I relax and enjoy her extraordinarily thoughtful constructions.

The latest Armstrong book I've read is like that. The Bible is a remarkable, quick romp through the Jewish-Christian Western scriptural book's history. It is broad-brushed and enlightening -- I knew least about the Jewish elaboration of textual meanings in the period after Romans sacked the Jerusalem temple, so I found that particularly fascinating.

Armstrong is in full flower describing the triumph of a conviction of Biblical inerrancy in the southern United States. She contends that, in 1925, Clarence Darrow did make a fool of William Jennings Bryan's Christian literalism in John Scopes' trial for teaching evolution -- and that humiliation only fed the worst aspects of fundamentalism, turning its adherents away from their prior progressive populism.

The press gleefully denounced the fundamentalists as hopeless anachronisms, who could take no part in the modern world. This had an effect that is instructive to us today. Before Dayton [the location of the trial], the conservatives were wary of evolution, but very few had espoused 'creation science,' which maintained that the first chapter of Genesis was factually true in every detail. After Scopes however, they become more vehemently literal in their interpretation of scripture, and creation science became the flagship of their movement. Before Scopes, fundamentalists had been willing to work for social reform with people on the left; after Scopes they swung to the far right of the political spectrum where they have remained.

I have to wonder: isn't the term "creation science" a far more modern invention by contemporary anti-evolutionists, read back here into the 1920s?

On the other hand, Armstrong is undoubtedly right that humiliation is no way to win over the fearful. In her epilogue, she argues that the world's monotheisms of the Book need to demonstrate a way to read their scriptures that repudiates its violent side.

The major religions all insist that the practice of daily, hourly compassion will introduce us to God, Nirvana, and the Dao. An exegesis based on the "principle of charity' would be a spiritual discipline that is deeply needed in our torn and fragmented world. The Bible is in danger of becoming a dead or irrelevant letter. It is being distorted by claims of literal infallibility; it is derided -- often unfairly -- by secular fundamentalists; it is also becoming a toxic arsenal that fuels hatred and sterile polemics. The development of a more compassionate hermeneutics could provide an important counter-narrative in our discordant world.

Pushing Obama

There's been some blogophere discussion, started I think by John Aravosis on America Blog, about the White House changing its "civil rights" policy website for a little while last week to read that they'd work to "change" rather than "repeal" the military's "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" rule. After some noise, the section now refers to "repealing" again.

I have no idea whether someone was just trying to express accurately the reality that "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" is a law: getting rid of it is not something the chief executive can do by fiat. Or perhaps they really did aim to soften the President's commitment in the face of macho bluster.

What's interesting about this little tempest in a teapot is what it suggests about the relationship between a president and a social movement.

The LGBT community is the one fraction of Obama's constituency that has had the most clearly adversarial relationship with him. Even before he was in office, he'd outraged us with the Rick Warren pick -- and heard our furious howls of protest reach way beyond our immediate members into other sections of his base.

In the states, our push for marriage is quickly outrunning his weak stance in favor of mere civil unions in a quite remarkable fashion. We may be the only popular "movement" that is not having its agenda circumscribed by his political balancing act. (That's a statement with sorry implications about the mass of the labor movement, but I think true.)

According to polls, most of us support Obama, but we do not make our progress dependent on him.

And that's how it ought to be with a genuinely insurgent "movement." Some politician doesn't set the agenda -- an aroused group of people do. And we shouldn't expect our politicians to win progress for us -- we win it; they codify it.

This seems a truism, but the country's fixation on the amazing figure of our improbable President is obscuring the obvious. Our excellent President will achieve far more for us all when we push for our own agendas rather than expecting him to deliver progress on his platter. It's still up to the people to push in a democracy.

This post started as a comment at the Washington Monthly but seemed worth amplification.

Some gratitude might be a good idea

Plaza in Mexico City, summer 2006.

Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations and a well-known authority on emerging infectious diseases ... made a very important but little appreciated point. Mexico has made a major national sacrifice for global public health by shutting down its country and interrupting transmission of disease. The cost to Mexico has already been enormous[;] it will continue to pay in other ways. ... There will continue to be a halo of risk and danger for an indeterminate time. And there will be the inevitable backlash against the government's actions, which went from cold to scalding hot in a week.

... The irony is that the overreaction backlash will be more severe the more successful the public health measures are.

Effect Measure - a public health blog

Public health measures succeed when "nothing happens." This is awfully difficult to sell in a 24-hour news cycle culture.

A morphing May Day

In most of the world, today is the holiday celebrating working people. Not Labor Day in September, but May 1.

It started as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 in Chicago. Police fired on strikers demanding the eight hour day, killing a dozen people. The holiday never caught on here, but in most countries May Day is the labor holiday. According to the Wikipedia, May Day is official in

Albania, Armenia, Argentina, Aruba, Austria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, China, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Iraq, Italy, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Lebanon, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Nigeria, North Korea, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Even a parochial U.S. resident might notice that is a lot of countries.

Meanwhile, here in San Francisco, May Day is morphing before our eyes. In this year of job losses and a "bailout" that sure looks like a giveaway of workers' taxes to Wall Street multi-millionaires, it wouldn't be surprising if workers were out in protest of government giveaways to the rich. (In fact, that's exactly what happened today in places like Berlin and Athens.) But here's the poster for today's march:


As in much of the country, the low-wage working class -- the people who shower after work, instead of before -- are more and more new immigrants. As such, they have different priorities than the more established workers: they have to worry about getting snatched up in raids looking for the undocumented, about racial profiling that criminalizes their efforts to find a job. They marched in millions in 2006; now the day commemorates that inspiriting upsurge among youthful protesters.

A few hundred folks rallied and marched today in San Francisco. They were young and mostly brown and quite spirited despite a steady rain. Here they have allies.


Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a gay office holder who has long made common cause with San Francisco workers, caught the mood of the crowd, leading chants of "open borders, open borders".

Our May Day has become the holiday that celebrates our immigrant workers. It's a strange time when Mr. Capitalism himself, former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, admitted that his glorious free-market wasn't working, when we collectively have just put a Black man in the White House, when our low wage working class, of necessity, is focused on nativism and racism as much as on bosses and banks. And none of us quite know what will happen next, what enthusiasm or anger will seize masses of people next.


Gary Younge, Guardian (U.K.) columnist and Nation magazine author, described the general uncertainty in a lecture last night:

The politics of this period are as volatile as the market.

That seems right -- it's a time when we don't know what will happen here.

It was all torture all the time

This is a guest post from Rebecca Gordon from War Times/Tiempo de Guerras. It is also our current "Month in Review" email. You can sign up to receive these informative overviews at the War Times website.

If it weren't for swine flu, Phil Specter's conviction and Arlen Specter's defection, the Bush Administration's torture regime would still be the lead story in this country. This month saw the release of four Justice Department memos about interrogation of detainees, one from 2002 and three from 2005, all addressed to CIA lawyer John Rizzo. The following week the Senate Armed Forces Committee declassified its November 2008 report on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. In addition, a 2006 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross on U.S. treatment of 14 "high value" detainees was leaked to the press.

You can download the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos from the ACLU, whose Freedom of Information Act suit shook them loose. Here's the link.

A searchable version of the 263-page Armed Forces Committee report is available from the New York Times.

The ICRC report can be downloaded from the New York Review of Books.

TORTURE AS INTENTIONAL POLICY

Some key points emerge from these documents:

• No reasonable person can doubt that the use of torture was an intentional Bush Administration policy, beginning at least as early as 2002. In August of that year, Jay Bybee wrote for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (the "OLC") that his office believed that none of 10 interrogation methods suggested by the CIA for use on their detainee Abu Zubaydah would violate the U.S. legal statute prohibiting U.S. citizens from performing torture outside the United States. (Other laws cover this inside U.S. territory).
  
  These methods included stress positions, sleep deprivation, confinement in a very small box, confinement in a very small box with an insect, waterboarding and something called "walling." Walling consists of wrapping a towel around a prisoner's neck and using it to slam his back into a supposedly "flexible wall" -- In Abu Zubaydah's case, the wall was actually concrete, as he told the International Committee of the Red Cross. One day, after some hours spent in a box that was too small for him to sit or stand, he was released for another session of walling. A piece of plywood had been affixed to the concrete wall in the interim, presumably to make it "flexible." The ICRC calls walling "beating by use of a collar."
  
  Each of the method approved by the OLC qualifies as torture under the definitions in U.S. law and the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment. Sleep deprivation, to take just one example, can cause extreme disorientation, paranoia, and hallucinations in a short period of time. The CIA's method of preventing sleep was to shackle the prisoner in a standing position, with his arms suspended from above. If the prisoner fell asleep, the jerking on his wrists would wake him up. Prisoners spent days at a time in this position, and were fitted with diapers to that they could defecate while standing. The ICRC reports that medical personnel routinely measured detainees' legs, to make sure that the swelling this treatment provoked was within some "acceptable" limit.

• The purpose of the four OLC memos was not to provide legal advice, but to give legal cover for CIA operatives involved in interrogations. The three Bradbury memos from 2005 evaluate a similar list of interrogation "techniques," explaining why none of them violates either U.S. law or the Convention against Torture. One memo dealing with the Convention begins by arguing that nothing the CIA does in a foreign country can violate the treaty, because the CIA is not acting in "territory under U.S. jurisdiction."
  
  The memos examine each proposed interrogation procedure in turn, concluding that none of them rise to the legal standard of "shocking the conscience," or involve the infliction of sufficiently severe physical or mental pain or suffering to violate the law. One memo bemoans "the imprecision in the statutory standard and the lack of guidance from the courts," on the question of how much pain or suffering is too much.
  
  Here is a taste of the OLC arguments: The CIA would be legally covered, Bradbury wrote, even if sleep deprivation causes hallucinations, because the U.S. law prohibits treatment calculated "to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality." Because hallucinations are merely a by-product of sleep deprivation, not its purpose, "any hallucination on the part of a detainee undergoing sleep deprivation is not something that would be a 'calculated' result of the use of this technique"--and so would be perfectly legal!

• The purpose of torture was not to extract the truth so much as to establish it. Major Charles Burney, a former U.S. Army psychiatrist told the Senate Armed Services Committee, that interrogators at Guantánamo were under pressure to get detainees to say there was a link between Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq and Al Qaeda. Since no such link existed, this proved difficult to do. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link..." said Burney, "there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

• Torture wasn't necessary anyway. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been making the news-talk rounds, arguing that not only was the treatment of detainees not torture, it produced very important information. But the information was already available. There was no reason to waterboard Abu Zubaydah 83 times to find out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded the 9/11 attacks. But former FBI agent Ali Soufan wrote in the New York Times that "KSM" had already revealed this -- back in March 2002, before the CIA began using its harsher methods.

PROSECUTE THE TORTURERS

When President Obama ordered the Justice Department memos released (a step bitterly opposed by the Bush-Cheney-McCain wing of the elite as well as virtually the entire national security establishment), he said that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

War Times disagrees. First, this particular "past" is not over. Guantánamo is still open, as are prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. The President has prohibited torture, but U.S. citizens cannot rest until we know the prohibition is sticking.

That is why the United States must prosecute the people who have ordered and sanctioned torture over the last seven years. Otherwise we will be constructing a culture of impunity no different from that which protected Latin American generals responsible for dirty wars in Chile or Argentina.

If the U.S. doesn't prosecute, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón may. He's bucking his own government to bring charges against Bush Administration officials, based in part on the newly declassified memos.

Article 2.2 of the Convention against Torture -- which the United States has signed and ratified -- says, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political in stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." We must do everything we can to prevent our nation from ever breaking the treaty again.

One thing you can do is join the ACLU's campaign for a special prosecutor. Here's the link.

War Times co-editor Rebecca Gordon teaches ethics to college students and is finishing a dissertation on torture in the post-9/11 United States.

Found item

For whatever reason, this neighborhood oddity posed for me.

OFA: listening and learning

Tonight I attended a listening session for the new Organizing For America (OFA) otherwise known as Obama 2.0. Well over 100 people, most but not all veterans of the Presidential campaign, turned out in San Francisco's Western Addition to see what state field director Mary Jane Stevenson had to say.

Here's the bare poop: OFA's mission is

• to support President Obama's agenda on education, health care and clean energy;

• to grow and strengthen our grassroots organization;

• and to train and empower our volunteers to effect change in our communities.

OFA lives under the umbrella of the Democratic National Committee, but Stevenson assured us, we didn't have to be Democrats to participate. She is the lone employee at present, but there will be regional field staff and offices.


We gathered in circles by neighborhood and talked organizing: what our communities need; what we have; what we'd like to see OFA look like by the end of the year. We brainstormed local projects -- and each neighborhood cluster set a next meeting time back in their area.

I came away with more questions than answers.

• Some people brought very specific local needs and grievances. For example, there was the woman who finds herself living in a building on top of a toxic dump. Can a national organization supporting the President really do anything for her?

• For that matter, does such a broad national outfit really want to assume any responsibility for that kind local specific problem?

• People in my little Mission neighborhood circle kept mentioning that there were lots of groups in the neighborhood working on health and education issues. How does OFA relate to all that existing infrastructure?

• Elected officials in San Francisco are all "liberals" in national politics. For goodness sakes, the Speaker is our Congresswoman. What does a national pressure group do with activists in such a district?

• How does OFA relate to existing political formations? In this city we have expensive, highly charged, participatory elections for the county Democratic committee, not to mention a plethora of political clubs. In the Presidential race, the Obama people could ignore these entities. Now OFA is somehow the Democratic Party.

• Or is OFA a Democratic Party entity? Stevenson did say that you didn't have to be a Democrat, that OFA welcomed everyone; how does that work?

• What if OFA folks don't agree with the President's policies? In my little group, most were actually in favor of single payer, government-run health care, not Obama's private enterprise solution to universal coverage. Is there any room for them to agitate? Won't they just walk away if there isn't any room?

I could go on and on with the questions.

What was pleasant about this meeting was the sense that everyone brought huge numbers of questions, including our leaders. Presumably answers and structure will emerge -- and if they don't work for this set of activists, people will vote with their feet. Meanwhile, OFA is interesting. I guess I'll go to my neighborhood meeting ...

James Fallows' glimpses of China

Earlier today I commented to a friend that for citizens of the United States, working to ease the country through imperial decline with as little damage to the rest of the world as possible seems a worthy project. James Fallows' Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China is an extremely helpful contribution to that mindset. Fallows was a speech writer for Jimmy Carter, went on to the Atlantic Monthly, and has written five journalistic books. Since 2006 he and his wife have lived in Beijing because locating in China provided the

opportunity for discovery [that] is the real payoff of life as a reporter: the chance to answer questions that you did not previously know you wanted to ask.

That's a way of approaching life I can relate to. Fallows is a fascinated observer of China's immense energy and variety.

He's at his best at describing China's participation in economic globalization: people in this country maxed out their credit to consume imported goods while the Asian colossus built its manufacturing base, improved its workers' living standards, and fended off any impulse toward popular rule. He wants us to understand that for most Chinese, life is getting better, despite ruthlessly exploitative early stage capitalist development, miserably polluted air, and corrupt or arbitrary officialdom. Until our credit froze up, Chinese labored incessantly and we consumed their products cheaply, while the Chinese government used currency regulations to capture much of their national surplus -- and parked a great deal of that in U.S. government bonds. It was a neat system, now endangered by the global recession.

And the United States seemed oblivious to the system's underlying meaning before the current downturn. Fallows points to U.S. follies:

American complaints about [China's unconvertible currency,] about subsidies, and about other Chinese practices have this in common: They assume that the solution to long-term tensions in the trading relationship lies in changes on China's side. I think that assumption is naïve. If the United States is unhappy with the effects of its interaction with China, that's America's problem, not China's. To imagine that the United States can stop China from pursuing its own economic ambitions through nagging, threats or enticements is to fool ourselves. If a country does not like the terms of its business dealings with the world, it needs to change its own policies, not expect the world to change. China has done just that, to its own benefit -- and, up until now, to America's.

Are we uncomfortable with the America that is being shaped by global economic forces? The inequality? The sense of entitlement for some? Of stifled opportunity for others? The widespread fear that today's trends -- borrowing, consuming, looking inward, using up infrastructure -- will make it hard to stay ahead tomorrow, particularly in regard to China? If so, those trends themselves and the American choices behind them, are what Americans can address. They're not China's problems ...

Maybe in the current rather dire economic context, this country can get on with correcting some of the inequalities we've built into our own society, rather than fixating on the log we see in China's eye.

Fallows wants us not to gloss over the hopefulness in China. It's not all bad -- the scale of the place is so large, that where something good is happening, it is very good indeed. A sample: he visited a cement plant where an engineer had figured out how to capture heat normally wasted in the process and convert it to electric power.

Here's what I learned by visiting the cement factory and by asking about many similar "green" project in China: China's environmental situation is disastrous. And it is improving. Everyone knows the first part. The second part is important too.

Chinese, not surprisingly, want a chance to live like people whose industrialization has already passed through its unchecked polluting phase -- and we can't stop them from trying, but we can join them in looking for technological solutions to enable the human species to survive trying to give far more of its members a better standard of living.

Postcards is an informative and easy read to ruminate on. James Fallows also writes a blog where, in addition to sharing stories of China, he opines on whatever interests him. Reading it is a great way to live in a somewhat wider world.

Spire by Goldsworthy

A week ago I walked the section the Bay Area Ridge Trail that runs through the Presidio of San Francisco and came upon this:


What the heck is that? Obviously tree trunks from the surrounding cypress forest stood upright against each other. I've wandered through here before and know the park is clearing out and replacing the magnificent forest planted in the late 1800s.

A little more research (notably here) revealed that the thing was "Spire" by the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy.

It's pretty magnificent.

In Building 49 on the Main Parade Ground of the old fort, there's a free exhibit showing more about the work.


Those are big tree trunks -- it took quite a crew and a crane to erect the piece, as recorded in this photo at the display.

Goldsworthy apparently goes in for outdoor sculpture, often ephemeral. I came away from watching this video with the understanding that he builds what amount to sandcastles in more durable materials.

Apparently when Goldsworthy visited the little exhibit in the Presidio, he felt it needed its own sculpture, homage to the old fashioned military buildings that give the former base its charm. This is the result:


The exhibit will only be up for one more week, though May 3. "Spire" will stand as long as it stands. There's a lot of concrete in that base and bolts through the tree trunks, so that will be awhile. Reach it via the Arguello Gate to the Presidio.

Grading OUR 100 days

These Obama votive candles* are readily available in my neighborhood.

This is the week we get to drown in "100 days" assessments of the new guy. I could do one myself, but I'm more interested in assessing us, the citizens. How are we doing at interacting with, responding to and influencing the new administration?

That is our job, after all. In this democracy, we didn't elect a miracle worker or a king, just a U.S. politician. He may be the most intellectually broad, most politically agile, and generally interesting one most of us have ever seen, but he is also the guy we put in office. Our responsibility didn't end when we marked our ballots. So how are we doing?

Many of us are probably just hoping he is doing his job (whatever we think that is; most likely trying to keep our jobs from going down the drain). That attitude can't be a crime. People participate in politics in a democracy mostly in order to keep things from going so sour that they have to participate more. And there is reasonably objective evidence that, despite a seriously worsening economy, many of us think the country is doing better. In December some 70 percent of us thought we were on the wrong track; that's down to something close to 50 percent now.

But how about the fraction of us who think we have to participate all the time on various issues? How are we doing?

On the economy and finance: On this core concern, there have been several levels of citizen effort to have our say. People are mad; we know we have been and are being ripped off by the financial sector through everything from credit cards to bank fees to the bailout with our taxes. The Right's noisy infrastructure for disseminating resentment has had some success in co-opting the push back via its nasty nativist Tea Parties. Not enjoying the same media megaphones, such left efforts as ACORN's foreclosure resistance, haven't commanded the same attention. Meanwhile, just about every publically vocal academic expert on high finance -- Krugman, Stiglitz, Galbraith, Reich, Johnson and Kwak among others -- has charged the stimulus with being too small and the bailout with being inadequate and wrongly executed. The Administration says "we're doing what we can" and spins. We the people get a C for effort; academics get a B for at least creating the need for a response from our rulers.

On war and peace: The urgent need to replace the Republicans took any wind we had out of the sails of those of us who have worked against the Iraq war. And we ourselves have been very tardy at coming to grips with escalation in Afghanistan, with the continued refusal of our rulers to deal with the festering sore of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and with U.S. military might spread across the globe, including the still-escalating war budget. Some of the usual suspects, including Code Pink and UFPJ, have tried to keep a peace movement alive. Commentators including Get Afghanistan Right have tried to lay the intellectual groundwork for the moment when people here notice we're embroiled in another disastrous occupation in Central Asia. Probably the best news on that front is the testimony of veteran Marine Cpl. Rick Reyes in a hearing last week. As usual, it is going to take people in the U.S. feeling the damage caused by our wars to get their attention. For these reasons, we applaud the fact that we have a President who seldom embarrasses us when he goes abroad, gives us reason to hope he's leaving a trashed Iraq to sort itself out, and doesn't cheer atrocities. We're pretty pathetic world citizens: D- in consideration of the faint stirrings in the embers.

On the torture and the rule of law: The usual suspects -- civil libertarians, investigative journalists, competent security professionals and parts of the legal profession -- are squawking like mad about issues on this front. Adam Server has written a convenient scorecard on the multiple rule of law issues the Obama people have confronted -- and frequently flunked. What's hard is to know is how large a constituency cares about these matters. The conventional wisdom is that nobody cares, to the extent of writing false headlines for polling results that show that substantial majorities of the people want some kind of accountability, some combination of prosecutions and/or investigations. (H/t Jim White and the indefatigable Glenn Greenwald.) It's possible to watch the administration gyrate to deflect unwanted calls for fast action from multiple directions. Just possibly the people, quite a few of whom in this instance are somewhat elite people, are pushing the new president around a bit. Give us (and the Prez) a B- so far. Time will tell...

On promoting the general welfare: This is the category that encompasses what most of us, except elites, think is the legitimate work of government: setting the rules and policies that enable the society to function -- the core stuff like health care, labor rights, full civil rights for all, educational opportunity. For historical reasons, we're not as good agitators for our own welfare as we need to be. Since 1980 we've pretty much been on the defensive, trying to prevent a series of robbers and con artists from completely dispensing with a frayed social contract. And we've evolved institutions suited for this kind of playing defense: single-issue, technocratic, professional advocacy groups, usually headquartered in Washington, whose idea of an involved activist base is, at best, a large set of individual donors. This kind of institution has a difficult time adjusting to new political circumstances, to a friendly context outside the experience of all but their oldest leaders. Meanwhile, most of us have gotten used to be being grateful that someone else specializes in understanding health financing or school testing policies; we have learned to abdicate any activist impulses to the pros. For an administration attempting substantive initiatives toward some kind of universal health care and investment in educational quality, these outfits won't serve -- the Obama folks need a mass social movement behind them. Instead they have non-profit silos. Obama for America looks designed to fill some of that void -- but can the person in power also serve as the focus for a movement? On the tough general welfare policy front, I grade the citizens a D.

Two sectors deserve slightly better marks. Labor has a real membership and substantial political capacity demonstrated in multiple elections. But after years of being hamstrung by labor law that turned insurgents into bureaucrats, it hasn't yet shown it can rouse its members to make fierce demands on a friendly government. Labor gets a C+. The LGBT movement is riding an historical wave of change in gender assumptions that give it a rapidly growing base among the new administration's core constituencies. And Obama inadvertently taught it to fire warning shots across his bow before he was even inaugurated (the Rick Warren episode). There's struggle ahead, but give LGBT forces a B+.

On sustainability of the planet: As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in this week's New Yorker,

... Earth Day has lost its edge and, with that, the sense that a different world is possible. Even more than in 1970, what's needed now is an outpouring that organizes itself -- with millions of people and, for good measure, some stinky dead fish in the streets.

The Pew Research Center found that, in the week Obama was inaugurated, concern about global warning had slipped to dead last among 20 policy problems. We, the citizens, can't seem to get interested. Some of the problem is like that with the other policy matters: it all seems incomprehensibly technical, impossible for otherwise responsible people to get involved with. And too many of us have the sneaking suspicion that probably it is all hopeless anyway -- the planet is going to fry and all we can do is mitigate and/or try to get ours. But Kolbert's right; we need to find hope that a different world is possible. So far, the people get an F.

For an overall grade, let's give ourselves a C- for Obama's 100 days. Lots of work to do.

***
*About those Obama votive candles: a quirk of my history makes me aware that the saint's body on which the President's head has been grafted belongs to Martin de Porres, a half-Spanish, half-Black African, Dominican brother in 17th century Peru. He was known for his good works for the poor -- and also for being able to "bilocate," to be in several places at once. I'm sure the President would find that ability useful in his job.

No-fly list turns aside French plane

That prize absurdity, the U.S. "no-fly list", re-routed an Air France plane last week -- the plane was not even trying to land in the United States.

Apparently somebody in the U.S. government doesn't like Franco-Colombian journalist Hernando Calvo Ospina, a leftist writer for the Le Monde Diplomatique. The French airline didn't furnish its passenger list to U.S. authorities for the Paris-Mexico flight, but did send the list to Mexico. As it approached U.S. airspace, the plane was diverted to the French Caribbean island of Martinique because someone listed was on board. Ospina was informed that he was the reason for the change by the co-pilot.

"I was speechless and my first reaction was to ask, 'Do you think I'm a terrorist?'," he said. "He replied 'no' and said that was why he told me about it, adding that it was extraordinary and the first time it had happened on an Air France plane."

Agence France Presse, via Actualite de la Bourse

Ospina seems to write about U.S. bad behavior in Central America and Cuba. His book Bacardi: The Hidden War recounts how the rum company uses its cash to support Cuban exiles who attack the Castro government.

Obviously, the writer Ospina must be a danger to the United States.

And some wonder why the U.S. president met with some skepticism from Latin Americans at the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain last week.