Uruguay sends a message

The torturers don't always prevail forever.


Montevideo, Uruguay: A living woman's hand emerges from the ground during events to celebrate the opening of the Memory Museum, symbolising the people disappeared during the 1973-1985 military dictatorship. Photograph: Marcelo Hernandez/AP

This item from Monday's news isn't likely to make much of a ripple in North America, but it should.

A former Uruguayan dictator was arrested on Monday and charged with secretly transferring political prisoners who later disappeared and are presumed dead, a prosecutor said.

Gregorio Alvarez, a former army general, led Uruguay from 1981 until 1985, when the country returned to democracy after 12 years of military rule. ...

Reuters

Why should we care about Alvarez being locked up? Alvarez's arrest is the equivalent of what many of us devoutly hope will happen someday, even if it takes 20 years: some court will haul George W. Bush and Don Rumsfeld in to stand trial for turning the United States into a torture state. (We'll assume that by then the Dick will have gone on to his Maker.)

The story of how Uruguay lost its democracy and suffered 12 years under dictatorship is little remembered here, though U.S. covert national security operatives certainly had a role in this horror story. According to Human Rights Watch, Uruguay under its generals was "a society which, in the late 1970s, had the highest ratio of political prisoners to population in the world, where torture was practiced at a highly sophisticated level, for months or years on certain prisoners." Even when the generals returned the country to civilian rule, for many years most people were eager to put an ugly part of the past behind them. But what was done in Uruguay under the dictatorship, and the fact that even three decades later some perpetrators are finally being brought to court, should matter to anyone horrified by the current ascendancy of the torture regime in the United States.

Lawrence Weschler chronicled the Uruguayan story in A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers. The book's narrative ends in 1989 with Uruguayans voting down an attempt to overturn amnesty for torturers including Alvarez. It is extraordinarily detailed, thoughtful and terrifying.

Under the guise of fighting Communism, the Uruguayan military overthrew their politicians in 1973 and imposed a system of classifying all citizens.

...the military authorities assigned each and every Uruguayan citizen one of three classifications, the designation being stamped into his or her files at the central archive. "A" citizens were politically trustworthy and hence could be employed by the state (the country's principle employer), could travel freely, and were extended certain minimal freedoms. "B" citizens were deemed ideologically suspect and hence could be employed privately but not by the state (tens of thousands were sacked); their travel privileges were severely limited and they faced continuous petty (and sometimes not so petty) harassment by the security services. "C" citizens weren't citizens: they were pariahs pure and simple; they'd been utterly stripped of their rights and even the possibility of employment... . And the point was that anyone at any time could find himself reclassified as "C" -- because after all, they [the rulers] knew everything.

Couldn't happen here, could it? That's a long topic, but I'll just note that our "Homeland Security" spooks are working with academics to develop software to conduct "sentiment analysis" on written material. They say this project is meant to understand the foreign press, but since we know they grab up all the electronic communications they can capture, one wonders. Apparently they also assign all travelers a "risk assessment" score. Hmmm....

Weschler interviewed one of the generals' thousands of victims, Dr. Liber Mandressi.

"All of us were hooded all the time," he recalled. "And all of us were tortured for days on end, without even being interrogated at first. There must have been a hundred fifty, two hundred people there; you could hear breathing, coughing, moaning -- we weren't allowed to talk to each other ...

Eventually they'd take us in for their interrogations -- beatings, shocks, submarino [waterboarding] immersions. They weren't really after any information. They knew everything already, had everybody's name. It was just a part of the process. Once I became aware that a seven-year-old boy had been brought in and was being forced to witness his parents being tortured. "

Those who survived this treatment -- and it was so carefully calibrated that most did survive -- ended up in Libertad [yeah, they called it that] Prison. There, psychologists helped the military continue mental destruction of their captives. Weschler writes:

The regime at Libertad ... was more subtle. Major A. Maciel, who was a director of Libertad, observed at one point, regarding the prisoners under his charge, "We didn't get rid of them when we had the chance, and one day we'll have to let them go, so we'll have to take advantage of the time we have left to drive them mad."

...[An] International Red Cross delegation noted in its report, "The implementation of every sanction is connected with a violation of the rules. The problem, however, is that such rules undergo daily changes, so that sanctions are never predictable. Every privilege many suddenly become a crime and therefore give rise to a sanction."

When civilian rule was restored in 1985, Libertad was closed down. The price the generals extracted from civil society for returning to their bases was an amnesty from any legal sanction for anything done under their rule. Over tremendous odds, former prisoners and their families forced a nationwide up or down vote on maintaining this amnesty in 1989 -- and lost the vote because the majority still feared above all that "the Fascism" might return or simply wanted to look forward, not back. That is, those who sought to expose and punish the torturers were rejected by their own people after it was all "over."

The torturers must have thought they were off the hook forever. That is what is inspiring about the news of the arrest and charges against Gregorio Alvarez, now an old man.

The tortured and their supporters never gave up. They continued to demand that crimes against them and against humanity be exposed. We need to learn their lesson well: never give up.

A momentarily loquacious Feinstein

I think Senator Feinstein is worried. So far, in the last two days I have received six copies of her defensive email about FISA legislation, now postponed, that would retroactively legalize cooperation from telecommunications companies with Bush administration spooks spying on us, U.S. persons. As thousands of constituents have been shouting, the "oversight" the likes of Feinstein promise in their bill amounts to a blank check for warrantless wiretapping of just about everyone. She writes:

I am keeping an open mind to whether some other legislative approach besides immunity [for telecommunication companies] would be best.

Rest assured that I will make every effort to ensure that new FISA legislation will protect the privacy rights of all Americans without restricting the intelligence community's ability to protect us from attack.

Actually, "rest" is the last thing we need. We need a lot more hollering in opposition to the administration, along with its Democratic enablers, subverting our expectation that our privacy is protected unless the government can show why it shouldn't be. We need a lot more demanding that our government should be subject to the rule of law, not making up the rules as it goes along for its convenience.

Meanwhile, the Dems are apparently going to give Bush anything he wants to keep the occupation of Iraq going. More hollering required. Feinstein doesn't yet even answer on the war.

Just was polled ...

Looks like we may face a vote on a $195 parcel tax for the San Francisco schools in June.

Since California voters have made it nearly impossible for the legislature or local governments to raise the tax revenue needed for the services we want, parcel taxes are a common expedient used by school boards to keep our education system alive, especially in years like the coming one when state contributions to school funding will likely be cut to balance the state budget. The California School Finance website explains:

California law allows school districts to assess parcel taxes on local residents if they can secure a two-thirds approval from voters. Parcel taxes are a ... flat fee on each parcel rather than on the assessed value of property. [This is a way around property tax limitations we have passed by initiative.] The ballot proposal prepared by the school district governing board describes the purpose the money will be used for.

[Through 2006], 210 school districts out of nearly 1,000 have even attempted to pass a parcel tax, but some districts have passed multiple levies. ... [A] disproportionate number of these elections have been in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition, about 90 percent of the elections were held in districts that were below the state average of 49 percent low-income students. A common explanation for this is that wealthier communities are either better able or more willing to tax themselves to improve their schools. Just five districts that have passed parcel taxes since 2000 -- all in the Bay Area -- serve a higher-than-average proportion of low income students.

That is, the requirement for a two thirds vote for approval from an electorate that skews older and without children in the home makes passing a parcel tax very hard. Economically comfortable voters have been more willing to tax themselves.

Making school boards repeatedly go to the polls begging for money and requiring them to win 66 percent in order to do their jobs is no way to educate future Californians.

The arguments tested by the pollster interviewing me tonight were conventional. On the "yes" side, the line went that good teachers make for good schools and we need to pay teachers better if we want to attract and retain the best. Against this was suggested the (to me silly) notion that more money doesn't make for better schools. Also I was reminded that the SFUSD hasn't always managed its funds well. That last has some truth behind it and will probably play well in some quarters. It is going to be tough selling this tax, especially if voters feel the economy is hurting, as seems likely.

Some campaign -- Leno? Migden? -- tossed a question on the end of the poll about the June primary for the State Senate seat.

Responding to the harm done by our rulers

The photo above and the story below both come from the Collateral Repair Project, which describes itself as "an attempt to respond to harm caused by one's government by collaborating with injured persons and communities." Working with Iraqis who were themselves displaced by the U.S. invasion, CRP supports human scale assistance to a few of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis now stranded in Jordan. These folks may be physically safe, but they have no income and live in fear of being deported back to death in Iraq. This is one family's story.

Um and Abu Shahed [the mother and father of son Shahed] left Iraq in March of 2005. They have 2 children, a boy age 5 and a 1/2 in kindergarten and a girl in 3rd grade. They pay 130 dinars per month rent and have no source of income other than small amounts their parents are sometimes able to send from Iraq. Abu Shahed is afraid to seek work in Amman for fear of being arrested and deported back to Iraq, a certain death sentence for him.

Um Shahed was a college administrator in Baghdad prior to the invasion. She is a seamstress, and also a professional cook and wants to be part of the Collateral Repair Project cook book project. Their daughter wants to be a teacher and smiles, openly proud, when she tells us that she has the highest grades in her class. The boy, just 5 1⁄2, already knows what he wants to be when he grows up: "a painter" he says without hesitation.

Abu Shahed worked for American forces as a translator in a police academy from July 2004 to February 2005, when insurgents issued a threat to his wife, telling her "this curse has to be removed ". "We had just purchased a small house near my parents," Abu Shahed tells us, "in the area of Baghdad that was a popular, thriving shopping area." After the death threat delivered to Um Shahed, "we were seeing armed, masked men posted on our street, watching our house and decided it was time to leave." Had they asked for American protection, he adds, his whole family would have become targets for the militia. "They would have all been killed. So I quit my job, sold the car and most of our possessions" he says. "We had money, but it is all gone now."

He describes his once thriving neighborhood in Baghdad as a ghost town since the Americans walled it in. "People came from all over Baghdad to shop for specialty foods and items." Sunni and Shia lived side by side and, as is common throughout Iraq, inter-married. Most of the shops are closed now, and only people who live in the area can enter through the checkpoints." He remembers saying prior to the American invasion "I would have welcomed the devil" to be rid of Sadaam" ...

To read more reports from a U.S. team that recently visited Amman, go here.

The U.S. certainly hasn't been taking any serious responsibility for the human tragedy on-going inside and outside Iraq. In July according to the Washington Post, the U.S had admitted only 133 Iraqis applying for visas to come here over the previous 9 months, despite promising to take in at least 7000 by September. And 7000 itself amounts to nothing, given that the United Nations estimates that 2 million Iraqis have fled their county. Most are in Syria and Jordan, both poor countries that fear being overwhelmed by the influx.

For a personal account of an Iraqi's flight to Syria, check out Riverbend at Baghdad Burning.

In the summer of 2006, the delegation I was part of to Amman and Damascus met with Faiza who is now one of the main collaborators in the Collateral Repair project. In this "season of sharing" please consider a gift to this very personal humanitarian intervention. You can click on the picture of Faiza on the blog's sidebar or on this link.

"Uniter" brings opposites together

Click on picture to see larger version.

One wonders whether the owners of this vehicle spotted in San Francisco talk about the Democratic presidential primary choices. At least they have one evident point of agreement.

Nurses rally for a contract and to save their hospital

The Mission District community was out in force at St. Luke's Hospital this afternoon. Sutter Health -- doing business locally as California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) -- has refused since last spring to negotiate a contract with their nurses who are represented by the California Nurses Association (CNA). So for the last two days nurses have struck and picketed the hospital chain's 13 local facilities.


Nurse Jane Sandoval leads chants. The St. Luke's nurses face an even greater theat than most of Sutter's employees: Sutter wants to shut the community hospital down altogether, shifting all of its facilities north of Market Street to the whiter, more affluent side of San Francisco.


A spirited group of nurses and community members said a loud "no" to these plans today.




Connie Ford from the Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) and the San Francisco Labor Council brought greetings. Neighborhood leaders and politicians were out in force.


Eric Quesada, executive director of Dolores Street Community Services and a candidate for District 9 supervisor, is a long time Mission activist.


Assemblyman Mark Leno, embroiled in a primary run against incumbent State Senator Carol Migden, is making the rounds of events like this. Good for him. Let these candidates compete at supporting their constituents who need this hospital, the only place besides County General that treats uninsured San Franciscans.


Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi made a rousing speech.

Several speakers reminded listeners that Sutter hopes, and expects, that if they talk nice for a few months and chip away at services at St. Luke's, we'll forget our outrage and go away. Sutter has got this wrong -- the neighborhood needs St. Luke's and will fight long and hard to keep it open.

The struggle to keep the hospital open lives online at Save St. Lukes. Check in there often.

California is different

At least it seems our state is different. We have learned some things about living with our neighbors since Republican Governor Pete Wilson exploited racial panic in the 1990s. The latest Public Policy Institute of California statewide survey of opinion has some interesting findings.

Item: the nativists may be loud, but they are not close to a majority.

Most state residents (61 percent) and half of likely voters (51 percent) think immigrants are a benefit to California because of their hard work and job skills, while fewer (32 percent residents, 42 percent likely voters) say they are a burden because they use public services. The belief that immigrants benefit the state has become more widespread over the past decade (from 46 percent in April 1998 to 61 percent today).

One contentious policy issue today is how to handle illegal immigrants who have been living and working in the United States for at least two years. A strong majority of California residents (72 percent) and 63 percent of likely voters believe these immigrants should be given a chance to keep their jobs and eventually apply for legal status. Twenty-four percent of residents and 32 percent of likely voters believe these immigrants should be deported back to their native countries.

This state has been adding population by in-migration for a long time. Like other states, we can get caught up in an immigration panic -- but at overall we know better and don't want to go there again as we did in the past. The rest of the country has not yet caught up on this.

Item: California also seems to be a little ahead on the Iraq war: we want out now, if not yesterday.

A majority of residents (60 percent) believe the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible, while 35 percent believe troops should be kept in Iraq until the situation has stabilized. ... Californians are pessimistic about the war's outcome: Six in 10 residents and likely voters (59 percent each) believe the U.S. goal of achieving victory in Iraq is no longer possible.

Peace movement activists need to devise tactics around the good news that it is not the people who are prolonging the U.S. occupation of Iraq -- it is politicians of both parties who are stonewalling popular majorities in favor of a U.S. pullout.

President Scrooge and some seasonal heroes

Is it Christmas yet?

Today, while Pres. George W. Scrooge was vetoing health insurance for 10 million poor children, Congress took up a truly important matter: a resolution recognizing the " importance of Christmas and the Christian faith."

Only nine lawmakers, all Democrats, had the guts to vote against this radical right loyalty test. They were:

• Jim McDermott-WA
• Gary Ackerman-NY
• Yvette Clarke-NY
• Barbara Lee-CA
• Pete Stark-CA
• Lynn Woolsey-CA
• Diana DeGette-CO
• Alcee Hastings-FL
• Bobby Scott-VA

The final tally on the resolution was 372-9 (50 members were MIA for the vote.)

Buffalo thrice

Back side of Buffalo's magnificent art-deco city hall.

Mark Goldman has chewed over the same ground three times. In 1983, he published High Hopes: The Rise and Decline of Buffalo, New York. In 1990, he followed up with City on the Lake: The Challenge of Change in Buffalo, New York. And this year, he has added City on the Edge: Buffalo, New York.

As you may have guessed, Goldman is a Buffalonian. So am I by birth, though I haven't lived in the city for 40 years. But until 1999 I visited regularly because my folks lived there and I traveled back through just last spring. Like Goldman, I've spent much of my life asking myself, what's wrong with Buffalo? How could a city which was one of the nation's most prosperous, forward looking metropolises in 1900 become a prime example of urban hopelessness one hundred years later?

High Hopes is pretty much a straight history of major historical landmarks over the first seven decades of the 20th Century. Approaching the end of that period, Goldman is using chapter titles like "The Fear of Outsiders and Radicals" and "Praying for a Miracle" to describe the mood of the city. Buffalo had lost its main industries, its role as a transshipment point, and an increasing fraction of its population to rising suburbs.

City on the Lake is a far more positive look at the city; it describes how white Buffalo tried to come to terms with African American demands for inclusion in the admittedly segregated public schools in the 1980s. For a time courageous Catholic local leaders responded imaginatively and somewhat successfully. Racial tensions, continued deindustrialization and poor political leadership didn't help. But Goldman emerged from the decade cautiously hopeful.

City on the Edge goes over much of the same terrain again reaching through the depressing 1990s to the present. By 2000, the city's population fell below 300,000 for the first time since 1900. Goldman highlights downtown's obsession with accommodating autos to the detriment of communities. He reports that "the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, in what they said was the most comprehensive survey ever done, ranked Buffalo and New Orleans as the two worst run cities in the nation." Like most urban school systems, the public schools provide a snapshot of who was left in town: "the poor, the blacks and the Hispanics."

You don't write exhaustive, intelligent histories of a place if you don't care. Goldman cares about Buffalo. Although the city's history over the last half century comes across in his telling as bleak beyond relief, he reaches out for hope.

At the turn of the [21st] century, Buffalo did not need to be rebuilt; it needed to be healed. Its people needed comfort and reassurance that somehow something would be done to restore the root systems of their daily lives, which been weakened so badly by the effects of the past fifty years. ...Certainly history had been rough on Buffalo, and so much had been lost: neighborhoods, downtown, people, jobs, schools, elm trees, sidewalks, front porches, and all of those comforting qualities that are associated with the city as it was in the days before cars, suburbs, television, street crime, broken schools, and broken promises. ...

Community exists in the space where history and hope meet, where an awareness of the past and a belief in the future inspire people to identify with a place and dedicate themselves to its improvement. ...

That's an almost un-American idea, that community lives in a place and time dimension, that people might find each other in caring for a place. Much of our lives are organized around the illusion that unique places and particular moments don't matter; our settings are interchangeable. Try visiting any mall -- just like any other mall -- if you doubt this. For novelty we construct faux-historical, replica, buildings, clean, unweathered. Goldman's love of Buffalo seems an unhappy anachronism in our culture.

Yet as our unsustainable resource extraction economy trashes the planet, perhaps we'll learn that cherishing places can be an engine of community -- and that community trumps having, having, having more. A long shot, but what else is there?

Why I will not vote for Hillary Clinton

Right on time it has started coming: campaign mail from candidate Hillary Clinton. It's a nice 16-page 4-color brochure. Since I'm a Democratic California "permanent absentee" -- and female, over 60, and single as far as the government is concerned -- I must be in the Clinton's target demographic. So why am I so sure she won't get my vote in the February primary?

For a long time, I let myself slide on this question. Not liking Clinton was reflexive. The company she keeps is unsavory. Her chief strategist is the odious Mark Penn, who made his political chops encouraging President Bill to throw poor women under the onrushing train wreck called "welfare reform." Penn also specializes in union busting and lobbying for energy companies. Besides, unlike many Democrats, I don't look back fondly to Bill's term; long before he derailed any meaningful policy agenda because he couldn't keep his dick in his pants, he was willing to trash Black people to pacify a white audience (see Bill's Sister Souljah moment) and to prove his toughness by presiding over the execution of a retarded criminal. I'm no Bill fan.

A post by "eriposte" at The Left Coaster reminded me that my picture of Senator Clinton fit all too well with several narratives that hostile males, especially conservative ones, commonly throw at powerful women -- and anyone crazy enough to want to be President is certainly ambitious and potent in some ways.

1. Strong woman meets powerful, insecure men.
There has always been a glass ceiling for women. ... Breaking the ceiling can be a challenging exercise even for strong and accomplished women because of insecure men in positions of power who cannot deal with them. Women sometimes have to do a lot more and appear stronger than a man in a comparable position to command the same amount of respect or achieve the same career success. Yet, women who do even the exact same things that most men do are sometimes portrayed negatively despite and because of that.

According to this portrayal, when a man does it, it is a sign of self-confidence, vision, and strength of character but when a woman does it, it is the opposite - she's labeled cold, harsh, calculating, overbearing, or non-feminine. The reason I'm bringing this up is that Senator Clinton has long been portrayed in the media as having a somewhat cold or calculating persona who would do anything to stay in power ...

2. Strong woman meets the vast and powerful Republican misinformation machine.
... Soon after former President Bill Clinton and then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in D.C., Clinton-hatred became the de facto operating philosophy of the self-crowned media elite in the country. ...The result was that Sen. Clinton was dealt a double-whammy. She was in the unfortunate position of:

* Being a strong woman detested by powerful, sometimes insecure, often conservative men in Congress, and
* Being irrationally hated by the even more insecure charlatans occupying powerful positions in the media ...

All of this rings true. Of course Clinton is a tough cookie and that is not an adequate reason to critique her.


If I'm to be principled in my distaste for her candidacy, my distrust has be about what she (not her husband) stands for. And on some issues I care about, she is as good as the competition and maybe better. Her version of health care provided through insurance profiteers seems more plausible than Obama's, though not as good as Edward's. She seems solidly opposed to torture.

However, on Iraq and U.S. empire, she is just not believable. After all, though she says she'll end the war, she also plans

a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.

New York Times,
March 15, 2007

She voted in favor of Bush's designation of part of the Iranian armed forces as "terrorists," precisely the sort of meaningless school yard taunting passed off as foreign policy that any serious leader would avoid. If that's not triangulation -- weaseling with people's lives for political gain -- I don't know what is.

Yet there is an appeal to the idea of a woman president. Gennifer Flowers, who once had an affair with Bill Clinton, feels it.

The one-time other woman in Hillary Clinton's life says she's considering casting her vote for the former first lady.

"I can't help but want to support my own gender, and she's as experienced as any of the others, except maybe Joe Biden," Gennifer Flowers said in a recent phone interview from her home in Las Vegas.

Flowers said she is still undecided about whom to vote for, supports abortion rights and long has wanted to see a woman in the White House.

Las Vegas Review Journal,
December 7, 2007
H/t Las Vegas Gleaner.

But that wise woman, Molly Ivins, shortly before she died last year, perfectly expressed the opposite thought which dictates finally that I cannot vote for Clinton in the primary.

Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone ... Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her.

Oh yeah -- if she's the nominee, I'll probably vote for her in November 2008. But I'm not going to work for this one. There are better things to do in a general election than work for another bad President.

Corruption

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more.

Historian Barbara Tuchman

The quotation is most likely from March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, her Vietnam book. In a conversation today on Daily Kos, a commenter offered it to explain the behavior of Congressional Democrats who once again apparently intend to give Bush funding for the Iraq war with no strings or conditions. Seems very descriptive of the current leadership of the Dem party. Could Democrats behave otherwise? Possibly, if we make them.

Another "homeless crisis" -- where's the plan?

Perhaps this guy served his country once upon a time.

Since last week I bashed the SF Chronicle's C.V. Nevius about his columns bashing the homeless, I should mention that he wrote a more realistic column today about the next "homeless emergency" we can anticipate.

Bobby Rosenthal, regional manager for homeless programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, estimates that one third of the more than 6,000 homeless people - about 2,100 - in San Francisco are veterans. [Homeless advocates would say those numbers were a gross undercount.]

And no wonder the number is so high. California leads the nation in homeless veterans by a mile, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. The 2006 numbers showed 49,724 homeless vets in California. The next nearest state was New York with 21,147.

Now here's the scary part. Compared with what's coming, that's nothing. ...

Yup, the Iraq vets who'll end up on the streets are on the way, juiced up on meth, disoriented, traumatized -- and swept out of sight by the government that shipped them off to fight an unnecessary war.

"You know what scares me?" asks [Swords to Ploughshares counselor Tyrone Boyd.] "I haven't heard a plan (from the federal government) about what they are going to do when the troops come home. What's the plan?"

Now why would he think there would be a plan? There wasn't a plan for Iraq when they conquered it -- why would they care about the broken human lives they spit out from this adventure or the cities that will absorb them?

Pelosi signed off on torture

So my Congresswoman was among the scared Democratic rabbits briefed by our spooks in 2002 on their torture plans. No wonder she can't make any real effort to rein them in.

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. ... With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter.

... [Representative Jane] Harman [who later wrote a letter objecting] said she had been prevented from publicly discussing the letter or the CIA's program because of strict rules of secrecy.

"When you serve on intelligence committee you sign a second oath -- one of secrecy," she said. "I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything."

Washington Post,
December 9, 2007

It should be noted that Harman famously doesn't like Pelosi and vice versa, so there may be more to this story.

Of course there is a bit of 20/20 hindsight in thinking these wimps should have protested shaming their country. They were not only scared of the muscular men of spookland and GWB's faux-macho, they also thought dangerous Saudi and Taliban fundies might be hiding under beds. Still, the revelation is disgusting.

Not going along with the unthinkable requires thinking about it in advance and training oneself to recognize what lines should never be crossed. These practices are not much part of rising in politics. Apparently Nancy Pelosi's much ballyhooed Catholic education by Notre Dame nuns and Trinity College did not serve her when push came to shove.

Warnings

Recently these signs have been turning up along one of my regular running routes adjacent to San Francisco's beachfront. I have to admit, I figured they were some kind of bureaucratic ass-covering. Along most of the ocean perimeter, a 20 to 30 foot mound carries the four-lane Great Highway and hides the city's sewer system. The houses of the Sunset District sit behind that barrier. Since I've run the path hundreds of times over the years, I admit I sometimes day dream about how far a tsunami would carry into that pleasant, but somewhat landmark-free, neighborhood. It find it hard to imagine a wave carrying far after it cleared the berm.


Apparently I was wrong to be so confident that a tsunami striking the coast would not get far onto the land. On March 27, 1964, an earthquake off Alaska set off a wave that not only caused massive damage in the far north, but also killed in Crescent City in northern California. Story here. After the 2004 Asian tsunami, some scientists who studied it claimed that a West Coast earthquake might produce "waves that send water surging up the coast to much greater heights than previously anticipated..."

In 2005, the California Seismic Safety Commission warned that we should consider ourselves vulnerable.

There have been 80 tsunamis in California during the past 150 years, and geological records show previous waves reached heights of 60 feet or more.

The indications are simple, said Lucy Jones, scientist-in-charge for the U.S. Geological Survey in Southern California -- a long earthquake after which the water recedes.

Jones says beachgoers seeing the water recede should run far inland and stay away from the beach for at least 12 hours, since tsunamis are actually a series of waves that can last for hours.

"You need to know that if you have a five-minute earthquake, there will be a tsunami," Jones told the Times. "That's inevitable.... The really terror scenario is that it's a summer day and there's a million people on the beach."

Maybe those proliferating blue tsunami signs really will help us be more aware of a threat that could become reality any day. If the siren ever goes off when I'm down there, I'm not going to hang around looking for a wave.

Latinos move toward Dems

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Republicans are losing whatever success Texan George W. once had drawing Latinos to his party.

After spending the first part of this decade loosening their historic ties to the Democratic Party, Hispanic voters have reversed course in the past year, a new nationwide survey of Latinos by the Pew Hispanic Center has found.

Some 57 percent of Hispanic registered voters now call themselves Democrats or say they lean to the Democratic Party, while just 23 percent align with the Republican Party – meaning there is now a 34 percentage point gap in partisan affiliation among Latinos. In July, 2006, the same gap was just 21 percentage points – whereas back in 1999, it had been 33 percentage points.

Well duh -- when Republican candidates use televised debates to call your uncle or your child or your brother bad names, you probably won't cozy up to them. Democrats may not be perfect, but their leaders are usually not obviously vicious.

What our Republican nativists don't understand is that hardly any family in our low-wage, newcomer work force is all on the above-board citizenship track or entirely undocumented. The reality is usually a mix of people in a mix of statuses -- and nobody takes kindly to having their relatives dissed by a bunch of dumb old white men who never did a lick of dirty work in their lives. And more and more Latinos can vote, so it is getting to be pay back time for Republican racists.

A choice we make for others

One of my neighbors, asleep.

Way at the end of yet another column painting Mayor Newsom as God's gift to the homeless and the people who actually work with people on the streets -- or are the people on the streets -- as pessimistic losers, San Francisco Chronicle columnist CV Nevius reports this exchange:

As I left the Homeless Connect event, I encountered a young man squatting on the sidewalk. I asked him if he'd gone inside. He had, he said, and it was very valuable, lots of services and referrals. He thought it was great.

And then he had a question for me.

"Spare change?"

That just about encapsulates homeless situation in San Francisco. The homeless will get housed when they get two things we as a society cannot or will not provide them:

• Money.

• Housing they can afford.

Yeah, some people on the streets are nuts or drugged up. Wouldn't you be if you had to be studied and talked about and patronized and serviced by a very comfortable bureaucracy -- but not housed? If they weren't crazy or addicted when they started, homeless people can hardly be blamed deteriorating until they fit our stereotypes.

None of us can take care of them individually, but if this were a country that cared, we certainly are wealthy enough to provide for them collectively. Guess we don't want to.

Consumption season underway...

Is it Christmas?

Much ado about not much: California's convenience voters

Chris Phan photo.

Last week just about every newspaper in the state and some online media reported on a Field Research profile of convenience voters in California -- that is, a study of folks long designated "permanent absentees" who will soon be called "vote-by-mail" voters in accordance with a new state law. Guess what? These folks are not just like to the other people who go to the polls.

While Democrats outnumber Republicans 42 percent to 34 percent among all California voters, the GOP holds a 41 percent to 40 percent edge with permanent mail voters.

While Bay Area counties have 21 percent of California's voters, they have 29 percent of permanent mail voters....[ Election officials in Los Angeles County, concerned that a flood of mailed-in ballots could overwhelm the system, have been reluctant to encourage people to sign up for permanent mail status.]

Nearly a third of the permanent mail voters are age 65 or older, far more than the 19 percent among all California voters. Three-quarters of the mail voters are non-Hispanic whites, compared with 66 percent overall.

Homeowners make up 75 percent of the permanent mail voters and 68 percent of the overall electorate. While women outnumber men 53 percent to 47 percent among all registered voters, the gap widens to 56 percent to 44 percent among permanent mail voters.

San Francisco Chronicle,
November 30, 2007

***
What does the typical absentee voter look like?

She's a white, well-to-do, educated woman who is older than 65 living in the Bay Area in a home that she owns.

Stockton Record,
November 30, 2007

No one who works in campaigns will be surprised by these findings -- for a political junkie's jaded reaction see this short item by Brian Leubitz.

So, does it matter that convenience voting attracts an electorate so skewed away from demographic pattern of the general voting public? Perhaps. Let's tease it out.

The state of Oregon chose to go to all mail balloting through an initiative passed in 1998. In Washington State, 34 of the state's 34 counties use vote-by-mail. They provide some experience to look at. On the positive side of the ledger, voters who vote by mail by and large say they like it. Once the kinks get worked out, voting by mail seems to be at the very least "fraud-resistant" -- it certainly leaves an auditable paper trail, unlike computer polling systems that reputable researchers fear are vulnerable to hacking. Mail voting is cheaper to run than polling place voting, although the Oregon version does still provide some physical drop off points.

On the other hand, political scientists are largely convinced that convenience voting does not increase turnout among unlikely or infrequent voters. (Research discussed here.) The Field study adds data supporting that conclusion -- those old white Republicans are already likely voters.

In his contribution to the frenzy of commentary last week, venerable Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters sought to remind his readers that expanding convenience voting may not work out entirely as they expect:

It used to be quite difficult in California for someone to vote via mail, rather than in person at the polls, but about 30 years ago, a Democratic Legislature and a Democratic governor decided to loosen up on what was called "absentee voting."

The Democrats believed that it, along with easier voter registration, would counteract Republicans' edge in voter turnout.

The maneuver backfired big time in 1982 when Republicans mounted a strong -- albeit somewhat stealthy -- drive to increase absentee voting among party loyalists and help their candidate for governor, George Deukmejian, in what shaped up as a close contest with Democrat Tom Bradley. ... Bradley won among Election Day voters, as exit polls accurately confirmed. ... As the mailed ballots were tallied, however, the tide began to turn. It soon became apparent that Deukmejian had won the governorship.

... going to all-mail elections... would alter political dynamics even more in ways -- as demonstrated a quarter-century ago -- that could not be easily foreseen.

He's not going to go out on a limb with a prediction about how vote by mail would play out -- but he's sharp enough to flag the question.

What irks me about this discussion is the tendency of progressives to assume that getting more people to vote by mail will somehow automatically benefit our causes. This is magical thinking of the same sort as San Francisco's embrace of rank choice voting. Too many of us get seduced by the happy idea: "change the mechanics and that will give us different [better] outcomes."

Last fall when the label for California convenience voting was changed from "permanent absentee voting" to "vote by mail", Steven J. Ybarra , of Hispanic Vista.com provided a sample of the kind of magical thinking that doesn't help.

I am beginning a campaign to change every Latino voter to VBM!

It is about political power. It is about ending the control of the media vampires. Now we need a real 58 county strategy in California now that every voter does really count!

California needs Ybarra's campaign, but we aren't going to get it through a mechanical fix. Bringing Latinos into the electorate will take the laborious person-to-person organizing that community groups and unions have done for decades. There is no magic fix.

The Field study actually demonstrates that voluntarily adopted convenience voting skews the electorate away from the people who form the progressive base: away from Democrats, the young, renters, inexperienced voters, non-whites. The state may eventually decide to conduct elections by mail. If we do, progressives need to think creatively about how to neutralize the present inclination in our constituencies to avoid this method of casting their ballots. If we don't work on this, we aren't going to be happy with the results.

Bully nips back

Michael Savage, like many bullies, can't take it when the people he kicks stand up and talk back. The Muslim civil rights organization CAIR has been encouraging the hate radio host's advertisers to pay attention to what's being said with their money. Quite a few don't like the racial and religious slurs they've been hearing and have canceled their sponsorships.

Now Savage is suing CAIR for publicizing recordings of his on-air attacks on the Quran and Muslims. Hey buddy -- the name for the thing you do is broadcasting. You say it; you are stuck with it. That's how broadcasting works.

CAIR responds more judiciously, calling Savage's law suit

"bizarre, sloppy and baseless."

"We expect to prevail based on the facts, the law and the Constitution," Amina Rubin said.

Associated Press.

Privatization's benefits

Citizenship ceremony, Los Angeles. Rick Friedman photo from the New York Times.

File this one under "strategic incompetence"* -- seemingly everyday corruption and maladministration that has, for our rulers, the happy by-product of impeding popular participation in elections and the legal system that protects employees.

Workers who help process millions of visa and citizenship applications for a federal immigration agency are getting pay reductions just as the agency is facing an enormous surge in those applications....

Immigration officials said the agency granted a contract to Stanley [Inc.], after competitive bidding last year, to manage mailroom and data entry work at the two centers, in an effort to speed handling of the vast paperwork of the applications. ...

Officials at the immigration agency said last week that they received 2.5 million applications for visas and for naturalization in July and August, more than double the applications in the same period last year. Many immigrants rushed to file applications before large fee increases took effect July 30, officials said. ...

[Employee Jeremy Murray] said he had worked at the Vermont center for more than six years sorting incoming applications, making $14.54 an hour. Starting Monday, he said, he will make $12.84 an hour and will no longer be able to work overtime. He will lose as much as $400 a month. ...

Mr. Murray said some of the guidelines for procedures he performed were 40 pages long. If applications are misfiled, he said, errors can take months or longer to fix.

New York Times,
December 2, 2007

No reason why clerical drones should be paid a living wage. And if (mostly) brown people can't get through the citizenship maze, they will remain in legal limbo with second class rights -- and they won't be voting. That's okay, they mostly become Democrats anyway.

*I first heard the term "strategic incompetence" from Salvadoran activists who were dealing with the failure of their right wing authorities to register large parts of the population prior to a general election.

"War fatigue" and the peace movement

The term "war fatigue" comes from a superb Nation magazine article, quoted repeatedly in this post, by Ari Berman about the Iowa primary campaigns. The accompanying photos come from recent discussion sessions hosted by War Times/Tiempo de Guerras about why the antiwar movement seems stalled.


Numerous polls agree that a majority in the U.S. want the troops home from Iraq. And even though U.S. casualties are down the last couple of months and many believe the current anti-insurgency campaign is "working," the same majority wants the troops out as felt that way in February 2007 when the war was very obviously a complete disaster. (Pew Center poll.) So why hasn't the antiwar movement gathered enough force to end the war or even produce a serious antiwar candidate in the Democratic primaries? (Sorry, that perennial loser Dennis Kucinich doesn't count.)

"They marched, wrote letters, elected a Democratic Congress and now Congress is funding the war -- and Hillary is giving the President the authority to go into Iran!" says Nicholas Johnson, a University of Iowa law professor and former FCC commissioner who leans toward Richardson. "What's a voter to do?"

I'm not going to claim I have answers, but here are some thoughts, many arising from our recent War Times forums.

Iraq is very far away; its language, religion, and culture are very remote from most of us. It was interesting to realize that we held a couple of fairly well-attended, thoughtful, public meetings in the very diverse San Francisco Bay Area and there was no one that I was aware of who attended either who came from Iraq or from anywhere in the current arc of imperial wars from Egypt through Afghanistan. There were not even any U.S.-origin Muslims eager to talk about ending Bush's "crusade." The closest any of us in the rooms had been to Iraq (again as far as I know) was to Jordan and Syria.

This would not have been the case during the 1980s when a very similar set of people mobilized to oppose U.S. interventions in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Central Americans lived in U.S. cities; many North Americans had seen the effects of U.S. domination themselves.

It has been very hard for antiwar activists to focus public attention on the human devastation caused by the U.S. war. Because that reality is so physically and intellectually distant (except among the vets who have become a vibrant antiwar sector), we end up discussing the machinations of our rulers when we need to keep Iraqi suffering at the front of our consciousness.

If we understood more viscerally what a sophisticated civilization the U.S. is crashing around in, we might be able to cut off sterile debates about what we think ought to happen in Iraq when the U.S. leaves, realizing that the Iraqis will work out their solutions on their own terms. Our work is in this country.


A Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club activist speaks up.

The war is playing out in domestic U.S. politics in ways that are hard for the antiwar movement to influence. Old timers from era of the Vietnam war tend not to trust the Democratic party as the vehicle for antiwar agitation -- Vietnam was LBJ's war for far too long. As a consequence of that imperial defeat, the Democratic party and many individual Democrats have become more cautious about imperial adventures since. And as Ari Berman explains

Like Hurricane Katrina, the war is a metaphor for all that has gone wrong under George W. Bush.

Because the combination of Bush's tainted 2000 victory with 9/11 gave a partisan Republican executive almost unchallenged power, Iraq has been "a Republican war." In fact, a majority of Democratic Congresscritters voted against the authorizing legislation in 2002. So the war is generally understood in partisan terms and in the two-party system, people jump to the conclusion that the counter to a Republican war should be a revived Democratic party.

Many of the most practical efforts to counter the anti-democratic, crony capitalist project of which the Iraq war is a part have gone into critiquing and propping up a better Democratic opposition. The Dean campaign in 2004, vibrant Democratic online activism, and extensive efforts to create new messaging and new media have mostly operated within a Democratic party politics frame, alongside, but not particularly in sync with, antiwar agitation. If the Republicans were the problem, Democrats had to be the solution.

If, as seems possible and even likely, Democrats elect a President and more Congress members in 2008 and the war still drags on, the antiwar movement needs to help people understand the new configuration of forces. Elites within the Democratic party will not easily behave as much differently from the Bush regime as we would like. They all share the assumption of the innocent rightness of U.S. world power.

But we may be more able to exert some influence on Democrats in power. The project for the antiwar movement will then be to work more closely with progressive Democratic activists who are likely to find themselves pushed to the margins of the party they've been building. These folks will face a choice (actually they already do) between limited access to the real powers and their principles. Many will share in the antiwar effort to force the party in power to cut U.S. losses in Iraq. After all, many got into Democratic activism for that purpose. It is very important that antiwar activists understand that this "they" is part of "us". The antiwar movement will only benefit from closer cooperation with the practical organizing sophistication of a lot of people who have been very focused for the last few years on reinventing the Democratic party. And if the antiwar movement is serious about democracy (small "d") we will have to find a way to use the Democratic party put our principles into action.



Just because the dominant crony capitalism of Wall Street operates on a time horizon that don't reach beyond six months, that doesn't mean that the peace movement has to. In fact, we're going to have to understand our work for peace as a long-term struggle. The U.S. lurches into imperial wars to maintain its hegemony; to secure resources for an economy of unsustainable though, unequally distributed, wealth; and ultimately because the regime in power can get away with it. Though in historic terms we live in a rather young empire, this one has clearly reached its zenith. The struggle for peace is a struggle to manage imperial decline with the minimum pain to folks in the rest of the world and at home. It is not going to be quick or easy.

Getting the U.S. out of Iraq may take years -- restraining imperial ambitions will take even longer. But there aren't any alternatives that point to a democratic society or a sustainable planet. We're in for a long haul.

"Sometimes I think a lot of people forget about the war," [an Iowa activist] admits. "But then they see a pin, or a sticker, or a sign, and it brings it all back."

We will simply have to keep bringing it back until we get the U.S. out of Iraq and out of the empire business.