About that Pakistan refugee crisis ...

An internally displaced woman fleeing a military offensive in the Swat valley holds her child as she stands in her tent at the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) Jalozai camp. May, 23 2009. Photo: REUTERS/Ali Imam (PAKISTAN POLITICS SOCIETY)

The other day I pointed out that the United States had just encouraged Pakistan's army to drive over a million people out of their homes. I'm trying to follow that story.

I do my homework and I try to figure out what is going on. Sometimes I just get more confused. [Emphasis mine.]

"A key aspect to the new strategy is to put more attention and resources toward Pakistan’s economic and governance challenges," Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to the region, told Congress last week. Yet Pakistan's prideful insistence on its sovereignty means, among other things, that the United States cannot provide relief directly to internally displaced civilians. Their fate will now depend on Pakistan's fragile and unpopular government, with support from charities and the United Nations; the Obama Administration must stand in the rear, urgently working its bellows.

Steve Coll
The New Yorker
May 25, 2009

Okay -- so Mr. Coll says the U.S. has good intentions about the displaced people, but Pakistan resists us tromping around. All understandable, though it does seem it would have been simpler (and easier for a lot of Pakistanis) if the U.S. had been inclined to discourage the sort of military operation that causes a refugee crisis. I am not yet ready to believe we want to make Pakistan more unstable. I hope.

Then I read this:

"It's our war against the extremes," says Marvi Memon, the most outspoken of the visiting delegation and a member of the Pakistan Muslim League. But she wants to know why the U.S. isn't doing more to aid the displaced persons. Why isn't there a number to call on television the way there was for the victims of Katrina? This week, the State Department had put in place a system for people to text $5 for Pakistani relief efforts. That morning, as Memon and the others in the delegation urged more assistance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood in the White House briefing room announcing a $110 million aid package.

Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
May 22, 2009

That reads like a vigorous request for help from a member of parliament.

So is Coll accurate? Or is Clift?

In general, the Clift article is both worth reading and pretty dopey. Dopey because it's an example of the wide-eyed, racist wonder genre: Oh gee, five Muslim women members of the Pakistan Parliament can actually talk, think and make demands -- who'd have thought it? Worth reading because the Pakistanis do have something to say about this Afghanistan-Pakistan war we're carrying on in their country -- and the fact they don't like it is liable to derail the effort.

We are warned.

Obama hanging on to torture option

The President's political guy, David Axelrod, refuses to say clearly that Obama has given up a Presidential claim to the right to torture. [2:47]

Found item III: Time moves on ...

Two weeks ago I noticed this alongside a trail while running.


Two weeks later, still there, but condition not improved.

Previous found items here and here.

Are "targeted killings" in Pakistan a crime?

Today President Obama spoke of what he thinks the U.S. needs to do to meet a threat he insists is a "war" and I strongly believe is actually a law enforcement challenge. He said that since 9/11 we have

... failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions ... failed to use our values as a compass.

He speaks of the rule of law. He promises to fix what he diagnoses as broken.

But what of those U.S. activities that are deeply questionable under international law that have become conventional actions at an accelerating rate since this president took office? Since January 20, 2009, there have been at least sixteen casualty-causing strikes by unmanned drone aircraft in Pakistan. According to one list, these shots from the sky have killed 199 people in that time. Very little is known about who they were. They may have been "militants" bent on killing Americans (if they had ever seen one). Or somebody in the spook world may have made a mistake and targeted some guys in a pickup or perhaps the largest house in a village.

David Kilcullen, a past counter-insurgency adviser to General Petraeus, and Andrew Exum, formerly an Army officer in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002-2004, tried to arrive at a balanced guess about who gets killed in the New York Times.:

Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent -- hardly "precision." American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan.

Nonetheless, they conclude we are making more "militants" than we deter, substituting a technological tactic for a strategy against our enemies.

But what law allows the U.S. to go shooting people in somebody else's country with which we are not at war?

(Yes, we are probably in league with the Pakistani military as Senator Feinstein leaked the other day, but officially they protest.)

It turns out that the legality of our attacks is very much contested.

The International Committee of the Red Cross refers the issue to a book on "targeted killings" by Nils Melzer.

The book argues that any targeted killing not directed against a legitimate military target remains subject to the law enforcement paradigm, which imposes extensive restraints on the practice. Even under the paradigm of hostilities, no person can be lawfully liquidated without further considerations. As a form of individualized or surgical warfare, the method of targeted killing requires a "microscopic" interpretation of the law regulating the conduct of hostilities which leads to nuanced results reflecting the fundamental principles underlying international humanitarian law.

That is, any country employing this tactic better have damn good evidence that the particular individual targeted is guilty of a capital offense -- and avoid "collateral damage."

Back when the U.S. was employing "targeted killings" far less frequently, there was much more and more nuanced discussion of the practice. In 1981, a U.S. executive order (E.O. 12333) barred our spooks from assassinating people. Eben Kaplan of the Council on Foreign Relations says President Clinton eased this order. President Bush the Younger set it aside altogether after 9/11, notably with a missile strike in 2002 in Yemen that killed a man thought to have master-mindeded the attack on the USS Cole -- and also four other people. Condi Rice fiercely defended this:

"I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here. There are authorities that the president can give to officials [and] he's well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority."

In 2006, already too overextended to get directly involved, the U.S. took up blowing away suspected al-Qaeda adherents in Somalia. Those killings inspired a dialogue between lawyers in Slate's legal blog, Convictions (here, here, and here). In the last contribution cited, the author, Marty Lederman, observes:

... apart from questions of detainee treatment and the like, the American public, press, and legislature appear to be completely oblivious to the idea that questions of war and military force raise any legal issues at all. It's not as if the public is indifferent to questions of whether and when military force is appropriate. To the contrary: It's simply that it seems never to occur to anyone that law's got anything to do with it.

That same Marty Lederman was appointed by President Obama to the Office of Legal Counsel. Does he still think law might have something to do with the drone program? Do we think so?

Obama's national security speech

A quick comment: civil libertarians have spent the last seven years trying to restore the rule of law in this country without having to counter any intellectually serious arguments from the people in power. The Cheney regime's stance was always just "Screw you! 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 ..."

Our shiny new leader argues on utilitarian/pragmatist grounds that some measures which might still be considered violations of national and international law are justified because we are at war. And if you grant that premise, he at least makes a case that goes beyond raw assertion of power.

I don't grant the premise and I don't think any of us who are serious about the rule of law, dismantling empire, or a sustainable planet can afford to grant the premise. The U.S. and the rest of the world are confronted with lawless actors of various sorts who do vicious things to impose themselves on and inflame the passions of vast, instinctively peaceful, majorities.

This conduct is vicious -- and it is criminal. Survival depends on a combination of coercing and persuading lawless actors to give it up. This isn't about war; it is about law enforcement nationally and internationally.

As for Obama's promises: we must watch what he does, not what he says.

I was heartened that he seemed to feel the need to respond, not only to rightwing fearmongers, but also to people who see view him as simply continuing Bushite lawlessness. We need to keep pushing him -- he is not immune to pressure.

Intemperate gun rant

National Parks Traveler

I need to say it: THIS IS INSANE. Why anyone should be allowed to tote a handgun, much bring it, concealed, into a national park, is beyond my comprehension.

To the frustration and discouragement of many Democrats, House and Senate lawmakers and aides say it now appears likely that President Obama will this week sign into law a provision allowing visitors to national parks and refuges to carry loaded and concealed weapons.

New York Times,
May 20, 2009

The conjunction of old law written for a very different society (we don't do "well regulated militias" anymore, boys) with blustering machismo that makes gun flaunting a sacred right of true Amurrican patriots is bullshit.

And so are the politicians, including our excellent President, who cowtow to the wannabee cowboys and mountain men.

I get the politics. Gotta quiet all the terrified gun nuts who think the Black guy is going to take their pride and joy.

Nonetheless, aside from a very few, very rural holdouts, nobody in this country needs or should be allowed a gun. (No, that firearm is not really your dick -- though I think a lot of you should be relieved of that too.)

Some climate polls

The polling outfit Rasmussen Reports decided to find out what people thought about proposals for a legislated "cap and trade" system. As you can see from the chart above, we don't have much of an idea at all.

Less than a quarter knew that it had something to do with the environment. More thought maybe it was a way to rein in financial crooks or reform the health insurance business. The rest knew they didn't know.

So-called "cap and trade" is a scheme to harness market mechanisms to make it profitable for polluters to reduce their CO2 emissions. It brings human greed into play on the side of the planet by way of government intervention. Sneaky, eh?

But obviously it's not something that makes intuitive sense to the population at large. For that matter, the urgency of trying to reduce global warming still doesn't make intuitive sense. Political scientists have discovered:

For each three degrees that local temperature rises above normal, Americans become one percentage point more likely to agree that there is 'solid evidence' that the earth is getting warmer.

The notion that humans -- however numerous we've become and however thoroughly we exploit the planet's resources -- could make the place uninhabitable is just too unbelievable to sink in. After all, such a development is outside human experience.



The other day on Daily Kos, Meteor Blades polled that exceptionally tuned-in community on whether they thought global warming was going to get to us in our lifetimes. About 75 percent of those under 65 thought so; even among those over 65, nearly 60 percent thought "yes."

The discrepancy between the understandings among the general public and among more informed citizens is a recipe for a political problem -- but global warming is a planetary problem. ***
In case you wanted a thorough explanation of "cap and trade,' here's the EcoGeek:


H/t Mr. Natural.

We didn't all have to be taught to torture

Metro Detention Center, Brooklyn

This morning came news of a Supreme Court decision that a Pakistani who charges he was imprisoned, beaten, and abused in New York after 9/11 cannot sue the former U.S. attorney general and the FBI director. He complained that he

was kept in solitary confinement at the center, denied medical care and subjected to daily body-cavity searches, beatings and extreme temperatures. He said that he had been called a terrorist and a “Muslim killer” and that he had lost 40 pounds during six months in the special unit.

There's lots of reason to believe Javaid Iqbal was abused. In June 2003, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine testified about his investigation of detentions of suspected immigrants before a Judiciary Committee hearing:

... we concluded that the evidence indicates a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the MDC [Metropolitan Detention Center] against some September 11 detainees, particularly during the first months after the attacks and during intake and movement of prisoners. This generally consisted of slamming some detainees into walls; dragging them by their arms; stepping on the chain between their ankle cuffs; twisting their arms, hands, wrists, and fingers; and making slurs and threats such as "you will feel pain" and "you're going to die here."

Several thousand immigrant men, mostly Arabs or Pakistani, were drawn into a mad vortex of suspicion in the months immediately after 9/11 -- from the point of view of their communities, they were simply disappeared.

Obsidian Wings links to a 2004 New York Times story by that excellent reporter of all matters related to immigration, Nina Bernstein, that lays out Iqbal's charges. Tram Nguyen's We Are All Suspects Now recounts a string of stories of abuse and intimidation mostly directed at Muslim and South Asian immigrants in the first years after 9/11. Since then, immigration authorities now under the Department of "Homeland Security" frequently replicate some of this conduct.

It seems important to be reminded of all this as the country focuses on the overt enthusiasm for torture of foreign captives that apparently emanated from Dick Cheney's office. Cheney wanted (false) evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. His band of hack lawyers made up an antiseptic maze of convoluted justifications for conduct that was quite obviously illegal as well as immoral. But their bizarre justifications couldn't contain what they set loose. Their "techniques" then leaked out to wherever the U.S. military pursued its "war on terror." Pretty soon the "techniques" were being used brutally in dark jails in Afghanistan and in holding pens in Iraq.

But as the Iqbal case and those of the 2001 immigrant detainees show, abuse of prisoners labeled terrorists was part of U.S. reaction to being attacked from the day after 9/11. We'd been hit and somebody had to pay. We wanted vengeance. Just a month ago we learned that "walling" became a "technique" used on the objects of the Cheney torture program -- but apparently ordinary prison guards in New York City in 2001 immediately employed a variant of it on their immigrant prisoners. The potential violence endemic in U.S. prisons was loosed.

Cheney et al. melded that covert but also conventional institutional abuse with a generalized injured assurance of U.S. rectitude to overcome some of the ordinary barriers to adopting the behavior of authoritarian regimes. They played the country's emotional dark side like the virtuoso abusers they chose to be.

And we wonder why they hate us...

Aid team with Pakistani families in Mardan and Swabi districts. Manzoor Hussain/Mercy Corps

Yesterday I got a call from a solicitor for a charity. It was not one I regularly give to, but a couple of years ago when a huge earthquake shook mountainous regions of Pakistan, I did some research and discovered that Mercy Corps seemed to have some ability to deliver aid, so I made a small donation. As a resident of San Francisco, I'm attuned to people needing help after earthquakes.

This time they sought cash to help the nearly one million people driven from their homes by the Pakistani Army's offensive in Pushtun areas of their country. The army proudly announces they killed 1000 "militants" and they won't rest until they've "flushed out" every Taliban adherent.

This offensive is something the Pakistan Army has undertaken under intense pressure from the United States. Pakistan's President Zardari visited Washington last week and evidently Obama laid down the law. The groups the U.S. lumps together as "Taliban" must go. So one million people -- people who used to have homes and lives -- are now on the move, many crowded in refugee camps, while Army tanks charge around trying (probably fruitlessly) to eliminate 15000 guerillas.

And we wonder why they hate us ...

Professor Juan Cole's popular book, Engaging the Muslim World, devotes a chapter to explaining, simply and clearly, some background realities that should give our bellicose rulers pause. Here's his summary of the misconceptions that drive our Afghanistan and Pakistan wars.

The Taliban create Islam anxiety in the West not only because they hosted al-Qaeda but also beause they dislike foreigners, oppress women, and practice extreme Puritanism. Westerners confuse the social conflict between urban and rural society in these two countries with mere terrorism and tend to assume that the deployment of military might by a praetorian state against tribal and rural peoples is synonymous with a war on terror. In fact, good policymaking would recognize the legitimate social and economic discontents of the rural population and seek to redress them with well considered aid programs instead of bombs.

Ooops. There we go again with the bombs. Furthermore:

It's a fool's errand. These rugged regions along the Afghan border are thinly populated by Pushtun tribesmen who are interested in reducing their isolation from the outside world only if they can see a benefit. ... The tribes' segmentary politics, whereby they pursue internal feuds with one another, can quickly be put aside to unite against a grasping or belligerent outsider. This makes the tribes a formidable obstacle to heavy-handed forms of governance imposed from the outside. Even the British Empire at the height of its power never subdued them.

Nor he goes on to point out, has the government of Pakistan. These people don't recognize the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And they are not necessarily a danger to us.

September 11 was launched not from Khost in Afghanistan but from Hamburg in Germany, not by tribal persons or seminarians [Taliban] but by engineers trained in the West. Even in their heyday in the 1990s, the Taliban were seldom directly involved in committing international terrorism. The conflation of Pushtuns, and their love of relative autonomy, with Talibanism frequently obscures the local politics that drive militancy.

Pakistan is a huge country, with an area the size of the states of California, Oregon and Washington, and a population of about 170 million people. It has a prosperous urban middle class that is sick of both military dictators and corrupt politicians. This democratic group drove the last military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, from office, forced the reinstatement of a deposed chief justice of the Supreme Court, and is proud of the country's freely elected government if perhaps not entirely happy with their political leadership.

And guess what? Pakistanis don't look at the world through American eyes. A few more facts from Professor Cole:

• Pakistan has fought three wars with India since independence in 1947. Pakistanis tend to suspect any threat to their country comes from the Hindu-majority colossus to the south.

• Since the U.S. pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan and propped up the Karzai government there, Afghanistan has become friendly to their enemy, India.

• About half of all Pakistanis blame the United States for most of the violence in their country, while 14 percent think India is stirring things up.

• Historically U.S. aid to Pakistan has gone almost exclusively to the military, not civil society.

• Pakistanis suspect, with reason, that the U.S. has preferred to deal with military rulers, rather than support their struggling democratic efforts.

And we wonder why they hate us ...

President Obama owns his Afghanistan/Pakistan war now. Success, whatever that means and the powers-that-be don't seem to know, is very unlikely. What to do?

Inform ourselves. Cole's Engaging the Muslim World is one source, as is his blog, Informed Comment. Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos is also totally worth the effort.

Support the early rumblings in Congress asking the Administration to name an endgame. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) has put in a bill asking to hear an exit strategy.

Make a donation to help the latest wave of U.S. created war refugees. We're breaking their country; it's the least we can do. Mercy Corps is one place to start.

An exercise in democracy, Chinese-style

The video below is the trailer for a documentary exploring what happens when middle-class, urban Chinese eight-year olds campaign in an election for the office of "Class Monitor." [1:57]



Neither the students nor their very involved parents have any experience with elections; that's not how these things have been decided in their past, so they are making it up as they go along. They definitely get into the spirit of the competition.

I don't want to give anything away here (you can and should rent this). But let's just say the twists and turns of the campaign will be familiar to U.S. viewers, though with Chinese cultural touches. In China as well as the United States, a girl running for office encounters gender-specific tests she must overcome, though the content of the tests may be different. Charm and glib verbal ease help too, but they encounter limits. Family privilege is an asset in Wuhan as well as Washington.

I had to wonder, how would this election have been different in the United States? I don't remember us having such contests in third grade -- that sort of thing came later. I remember thinking the school elections we did have were empty charades: the most popular kids would get all the offices. Not being one of them, I didn't applaud.

Almost certainly, the parents would not have been so prominent in the campaign. Even in the third grade, most of us didn't want our parents so intimately involved in our school lives. We may already have had a little of that annoying adolescent scorn for our families.

When I was in elementary school, one difference would have been certain: there would have been no girl in the running at all. Girls weren't even allowed to be crossing guards; that was a boy's job. Good little dyke-let that I was, I was pissed. I'm sure that has changed in the last 50 years.

Do check out these Chinese kids -- this is a film that sticks with you.

Found item II

I have no idea why people in the San Francisco Mission district put oddities in trees, but they do. Repeatedly. I encountered this one on an early morning walk.

If more TV were this honest, I might watch it

[4:57] Bravely done, David Waldman.

Obama, the dark side, and us

The President's about face on complying with a court order to release more torture pictures is unalloyed bad news. His various excuses for the changed posture are transparently feeble. Doubt this assertion? Read Dan Froomkin's careful point by point dissection.

Joan Walsh in Salon caught what so many of us hoped we'd never have to see:

For the first time in his presidency, I had the sick feeling that Obama was lying in his remarks on the photos...

Actually, I think Obama, like all politicians, tells falsehoods all the time on policy issues. To take one example, I don't think he is a "fierce advocate for equality of gay and lesbian Americans." Past behavior belies this. Instead, I think he knows what he has to say to stay well positioned on LGBT issues and he will do some fraction of it for us, if it doesn't him cost too much. I don't consider that sort of posturing to be "lying" from a politician. Actual "lying" occurs when the politician asserts important things that are substantively untrue, knows it, and believes that the false statement is nonetheless necessary. Like Walsh, I think that was what we saw yesterday.

Withholding the photos is not the first and won't be the last dip by the Obama administration into the dark side. Apparently they've taken a decision to resuscitate the Bush-era kangaroo courts -- the so-called military commissions -- for Guantanamo inmates. Those are the lucky captives; the administration apparently intends to hold some large number of prisoners who have had no legal process at all in a black hole prison in Afghanistan. At home, they are hanging on for dear life to a "state secrets privilege" to deny people the chance to bring government misdeeds to court. With less notice, they are continuing the arbitrary anti-Muslim border policies of their predecessors, harassing visitors and citizens at entry and excluding a distinguished scholar in an apparent case of pure prejudice.

The ongoing allegiance to the dark side scares the crap out of so many of us who have supported Obama not only because it undermines the constitution, the historic rule of law, and chances for a more peaceful international order, but also because this administration came into office with such great prospects of doing real good for millions of us. We want universal health care, decent education, an economy that rewards its members, and a planet that humans can go on making civilization in. We want, and need, the good parts of Obama's program to succeed. And we don't want this attractive politician to fail.

Instead Obama's policies demonstrate that the President is likely to further mire us in a failed war of empire in Afghanistan and Pakistan. With no discernible end point and no exit strategy, that's a recipe for another failed presidency. Years of Republican battering about Democrats being weak on "national security" force any Democrat to prove he or she is "butch enough" to run a nice little war. The dark side stuff is the symbolic obeisance an aspiring warrior has to give to our authoritarians and military establishment.

So okay -- it's time to get used to some truths. We didn't elect a magician; we elected a very capable and attractive politician. He'll be as good a President for the citizens of this country as we make him. That means we -- the people who want a peaceful future and an equitable society -- don't get to go home and rest. We have work to do, as those who came before us have long known.

The professor rides off to work

In honor of Bike to Work Day, Thursday May 14.

The thing is, she doesn't teach on Thursdays, so I had to record the scene on Wednesday.


She extracts the bicycle, a cheap beater, from the garage.


She attaches massive panniers. That's a lot of student papers to drag around.


And she's off, helmeted and stunningly visible in her fluorescent lime green jacket. Let's hope the multi-ton steel competition for street space can see her. She says she feels safe.

I almost never feel safe riding my bike. I'm always on the lookout for danger -- and I think my wariness is appropriate. It's not much fun being so on guard.

But that's not the only reason why I don't ride much in the city. I'm lucky. I work from home, can walk to most stores I use, and go a lot of places by jumping on BART (the subway).

However there's one necessity for which I use a car at least four times a week: getting some place where I can run on softish (asphalt or dirt) surfaces without crossing traffic. The car serves as a mobile locker room, a repository for extra clothes and perhaps a post-run snack. You can't do that with a bike.

Perversely, if I didn't run many miles on foot for exercise and pure pleasure, I wouldn't need a car. What's wrong with this picture?

Elders rally against budget cuts

About 500 elder San Franciscans gathered in Civic Center Plaza Tuesday to protest city budget cuts to health and social service programs. The speaker above is Vera Haile, a retired agency manager who has been speaking out on the effects of the economic crisis on old people. She wanted the assembled crowd to understand that, though elders have many friends in City Hall, this year they are no longer "golden." Services really will be cut.


With the city getting squeezed by the state's dysfunction, dozens of programs are being chopped from health, housing and social services. Many less meals will be available; in-home help will be more expensive and sporadic; and crisis intervention more difficult. Perhaps as bad, the nonprofits that enable elders to navigate the maze of potentially available assistance are all getting slashed.


San Franciscans know how to put on a good rally. It was nice to see the folding chairs provided. The last time I saw that courtesy provided to elders at a rally was by the African National Congress in South Africa. As the "Silver Tsunami" rolls over the country in the coming decades, perhaps we'll get used to such amenities so more can participate?


Bobby Bogan of Seniors Organizing Seniors called on folks to help each other. He has organized elders to share their food supplies with the homeless.


And the homeless were there too.


As is true in the city in general, the largest ethnic group was people of various Asian origins.


Organizers made sure everyone who wanted one got a box lunch.


Folks from the 30th Street Senior Center singing group led choruses of "If I had a hammer," "De Colores," and "You are my sunshine."


Does all this raising a happy ruckus do any good? It certainly puts politicians on notice that there is an organized, voting constituency out there watching them. They know they'll take heat for failing the elders.

The Coalition of Agencies Serving the Elderly (CASE) which sponsored the rally fears that, on top of the direct cuts, the effect of current budgets will be to dismantle the intricate "continuum of care" we have collectively has created to meet elder's needs -- just as the Baby Boomer wave begins to rise. The need is great and will be greater. They point out that by 2030, demographers believe that one in five San Franciscans will be over 65. One in three people age 75 or older in San Francisco lives in poverty; 28 percent of San Franciscan elders speak English "not well" or "not at all."

We are challenged to maintain our community in hard times.

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.