Where's the U.S. army now?

Map based on publicly accessible sources. Errors and especially omissions are likely.

Is it any wonder that the United States is unable to find the cash to take care of our needs at home? Not when you consider that we've got very expensive troops all over the globe.

Let's see -- there are a host of allegedly friendly countries where the United States has military installations: South Korea, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Greece, Israel, Australia ... probably more. Do we have installations in Canada? I imagine so.

And then there are couple of places where our soldiers are currently fighting increasingly pointless wars: Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then there are the places we consider trouble spots according to Nick Turse:

According to Pentagon documents released earlier this year, the U.S. has personnel -- some in token numbers, some in more sizeable contingents -- deployed in 76 other nations sometimes counted in the arc of instability:

• Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire,

• Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia,

• Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda,

• Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo,

• Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Syria,

• Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba,

• the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras,

• Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru,

• Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela,

• Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia,

• Romania, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,

• Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,

• Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

This is simply unsustainable. The only question is whether we'll notice we can't afford it and pull back back or whether many of these people will simply throw us out.

Our anti-democratic Democratic leader

Our frustrating President is reported as remarking something the other day that says to me his political smarts are again asserting themselves.

“And I just have to remind people that — here’s one thing I know for certain,” he continued. “The odds of me being reelected are much higher than the odds of me being elected in the first place.”

Now he is talking sense. It seems plausible to me that winning the 2008 Presidential nod among Democratic contenders in a year when whoever got it was highly likely to triumph was indeed a stunning feat of political fancy footwork. The skinny Black guy with a thin resume and a funny name had enormous hurdles to jump to prove to Democratic voters and their "leaders" that he could be the candidate. He showed the managerial acumen to hire people who would create a plan to get him there, then largely used his time to playing the role (its a theater piece) to acting "the candidate", while being ready to step in at difficult moments. Winning in the nomination was a bravura performance and it is why he is in the job. It's good to hear he still knows that -- it would be easy in his current role to forget it.

At the same talk to donors, he apparently said something else equally telling:

The “campaign has not yet begun,” Obama told his well-heeled audience, adding he’s going to stick to his “day job” of governing for the “next several months.”

And therein is a glimpse of the man's weakness in his current role. Yes, he was dealt an atrocious hand: managing economic collapse in the midst of hegemonic decline. Nobody was going to look suave. But that offhand remark shows he considers his political necessities -- convincing, cajoling, assembling majority support, swinging his political party behind his policy prescriptions -- as something separate from doing the nation's business. (And not something he relishes it seems.)

This is a technocratic picture of government. The wise will install good policies -- the people are a noisy audience, perhaps worth managing at times, but without the capacity to know what's good for us.

This is a deeply anti-democratic (small "d") vision of our politics, one probably shared by most of our major political figures. And it doesn't work, at least it hasn't in the past. Presidents who remembered as wise and good -- I think of Lincoln, of FDR -- have been party builders, canny even if unscrupulous assemblers of majority coalitions that enabled them to get through enormously hard times. Even Lyndon Johnson deserves some credit here for knowing that his Vietnam war would destroy his party if he sought re-election. (The war's ramifications did anyway for many years.) These leaders knew that corralling the fractious masses was part of the "day job." That's what government "by the people" means in this nation's political system. The incumbent doesn't seem to get it.

UPDATE: Sounds like Obama was in full political campaign mode today in his deficit message. Good for him -- and for us for communicating by way of opinion polling that nothing else will work.

***And yes, I will of course be voting for and pulling for the guy to get re-elected. The alternatives are even more puny figures. But we're all in for a long run of hard times.

Artifacts from a happier sports era

We're cleaning out obscure corners of our kitchen preparatory to long overdue remodeling and came across these improbable items: once upon a time, our sad sack pro football team was highly sought after advertising partner. Wonder if that "training table bread" was as spongy white as looks likely from its plastic wrapper?


Those were the days, the last time the local gladiators were dominant. Watching the 49ers flounder has become a painful weekend ritual -- just perhaps can the current assemblage bring them back from zombie-land? Time will tell. We fans have practiced modulating our hopes so the lows won't be so low.***Over the next week or so, a combination of trying to work adjacent to the remodeling and dental surgery is likely to reduce my attention to this blog. Regular posting will resume as the dust settles.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Neighbors running

Every summer in the town of Chilmark Massachusetts, the 5k road race passes down the road near where we are staying. There are a few hot shots up front: high cross country runners and serious competitors. But mostly, this local event is just the town afoot.

This year I played at photographing the faces in the crowd. Here are a few:

We'll see how this works out

This message either adopts just the right tone when the cloud generates a glitch -- or it is the prelude to extreme frustration. We'll see; I don't know yet, though a preliminary check suggests all is well.

We expect immediate, perfect service from our web interactions. Can anyone remember that 10 years ago we expected long delays and intricate journeys into interface mazes?

The prompt for this reflection is that I am reading Steven Levy's In the Plex: How Google thinks, works and shapes our lives. It is a treat.

#Toomuchdoubt

The state of Georgia has set next Wednesday, September 21 as the execution date for Troy Davis. Davis denies committing the murder 20 years ago for which he was convicted. Most of the people who testified at the trial have now recanted their testimony. The leading witness who still says Davis was the killer is the person who nine people have charged was the actual shooter. As Amnesty International maintains, this is a case with "too much doubt."

USA Today marvels at the scale of the grassroots campaign to encourage the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to choose clemency. Over 600000 people across the globe have signed petitions.

The case has attracted attention for years. Former president Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu are among the prominent figures who have urged that Davis' life be spared.

...The latest effort, triggered when a new execution date was set last week, includes celebrities John Legend, Mia Farrow and the Indigo Girls. All are tweeting under #TooMuchDoubt, a search term or hash tag devised by Amnesty International and the NAACP. Davis supporters also have created Facebook pages.

"In the moment, when our nation stumbles toward complete failure of its justice system, we have to give every citizen the opportunity to express their outrage and their intention that the state not do this in their name," NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous says. "When the state executes an innocent person, every citizen is implicated in that act."

In San Francisco, people concerned about the Davis case will be collecting signatures in Union Square today, Friday September 16. You too can sign a clemency petition; click this link.

He was there when the United States adopted torture ...

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

If you've been following this story, you already know what FBI special agent Ali Soufan explains in this interview: this experienced interrogator was making good headway with getting an al-Qaeda prisoner to talk -- until the CIA insisted on bringing in a contractor to torture the guy. The Bureau ordered Soufan to leave the investigation -- to get away from the scene of the crime, as it were.

Soufan has a new book about this and other investigations of terrorism in which he has been a central figure. A Lebanese-America, he was one of only eight Arabic speakers in his agency before 9/11. In one of his promotional interviews (can't find a transcript), he was asked whether the United States now has more Arabic speakers in its security apparatus. Very quietly, he said that many had been sent to language school, but he wasn't sure if there were really any more native speakers today than in the early 2000s when he played an investigative role.

The full Frontline episode is available at the link. H/t Andrew Sullivan.

Warming Wednesdays: Al Gore steps up again, with an internationalist project

One of the features that distinguishes much climate change activism from all the other clamoring activisms around us is that it frequently seeks to be carefully and consciously internationalist. This only makes sense; the threat that human activity is on the way to frying the planet obviously doesn't respect borders. Though rich societies have contributed the most to the problem, everyone's lives are on the line.

Still, this focus on building an international movement is something a little new, an effort to spark a kind of populism that is has only weak antecedents. Various iterations of popular demands for peace, such as nuclear disarmament campaigns and the February 13, 2003 outpouring against the Iraq invasion, have mounted sporadic coordinated transnational actions. The anti-neo-liberal, anti-globalization movement is also, of necessity, multi-national. But an assumption that campaigns must be international strikes me as new -- at least since socialism proved unable to unite the workers against the nationalist war-makers in Europe in 1914.

Today the Climate Reality Project, founded and chaired by Al Gore, is trying to make entire world "focus its attention on the truth about the climate crisis." A series of web talks in various languages will go on over a a 24 hour period. You can see the whole schedule and links here. The effort claims 5 million members.

It is guided by one simple truth: The climate crisis is real and we know how to solve it.

Who knows, maybe a former U.S. vice-president can launch (or relaunch) an international sense of urgency about man made global danger and the hope for global solutions. It seems a long shot, but campaigns like this must explore all possibilities.

Since I would do almost anything before I'd watch a webinar (it's a personal prejudice), I'm just glad that promoting this has Gore back in circulation, giving interesting interviews. Here he is talking with Bradford Plummer:

BP: ... taking that opposition is a given, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether something more is needed to fight it than yet another recital of climate science facts.

AG: Right, you hear a lot of people giving advice on how to talk about climate science—how you need to dress differently or stand on your head and deliver the message in rhyme. And I respect all that, and I hope a lot of people will present the message in their own way. But my message is about presenting the reality. I have faith in the United States and our ability to make good decisions based on the facts. And I believe Mother Nature is speaking very loudly and clearly. We’ve had ten disasters in the United States this year alone costing more than $1 billion and which were climate-related. It’s only a matter of time before reality sinks in, and we need both parties involved. And the only way to get the right answer is to understand the question.

BP: What about the folks who say that environmentalists should drop the emphasis on climate change and instead just talk about the benefits of energy independence or the virtue of green jobs or whatnot?

AG: Well, I think the opportunities for tens of thousands of good new jobs and building infrastructure—that’s a powerful economic argument. Reducing our dependence on expensive dirty oil in a market dominated by the most unstable region of the world—that’s also important. But I think these arguments and others are far more effective when they are coupled with the main reason for doing this, which is to save the future of civilization. And I think when the right wing and carbon polluters intimidate people into avoiding the word climate or the subject of the climate crisis, that does not help in the long run. The core of the message still has to be about the reality we’re facing.

I don't know whether Al Gore's reality-insistent presentations can make a difference, but there is something attractive about his giving the presenting of simple information another try.

An unambiguous yarn about World War I

Popular historian Barbara Tuchman's 1958 effort, The Zimmermann Telegram, is the sort of thing that "serious" historians seldom write these days: it's a good yarn. In later years Tuchman established her reputation with more substantial volumes, but this early World War I tale is more like a thriller than most history.

In 1916, the British (and the French but they don't play in this tale) were on the ropes -- broke and exhausted after two years of bloody and massively mismanaged war against Germany. Their only hope was intervention from the reluctant United States led by President Woodrow Wilson who was re-elected that year with the slogan "he kept us out of war!" Their prospects look bad.

But professorial code breakers in the basement of the British Admiralty had cracked the German codes, so the British were reading German diplomatic correspondence. Learning from these cables that the Germans were intriguing with Mexico and Japan to encourage an attack on the United States through the southwest, the British finally had a smoking gun that would force Wilson to bring his country into the European war. But how to use the diplomatic communication -- the "Zimmermann telegram" of the title -- without leaking its source and revealing to the Germans that Britain was reading its mail? The solution to that problem of "protecting intelligence assets" forms the guts of Tuchman's narrative of how the U.S. finally came into the war. It is a good story (some of which has been amplified by subsequent releases from period archives.)

When you read a lot of books about the same period, as I am doing these days about World War I (see here and here), you begin to catalog their similarities and differences and to feel they are talking with each other. Though this is a slight book about a minor episode, I found myself approaching it this way.

World War I was such a clearly mad enterprise that every author touching on it vies to describe its horrors. Here's a snippet of Tuchman's scene setting about the third winter of the war:

The ghastly losses on the Somme -- sixty thousand British casualties in a single mad day, over a million Allied and enemy losses in the five month battle --had been for nothing. The Hindenburg Line was still unbreached. The whole war had been like that, regiments of lives spent like water, half a million at Verdun alone, without either side's winning a strategic advantage, but only being riveted together like two fighting elks who have locked horns. Now the French were drained, the Russians dying, Rumania, a late entry on the Allied side, already ruined and overrun.

The enemy was no better off. Germans were living on a diet of potatoes, conscripting fifteen-year-olds for the army, gumming up the cracks that were beginning to appear in the authority of Kaiserdom with ever harsher measures. ... England had fortitude left, but no money and, what was worse, no ideas. New commanders stumbled forward in the old rut, not questioning whether to assault the Western Front again, but merely where along its wall to bang their heads. No prospect of any end was visible.

Tuchman makes no bones about her belief that defeating Germany amounted to holding up the cause of civilization and that Britain's efforts to persuade the United States to jump into the fray were completely proper and justified. She portrays President Wilson as an irritatingly stubborn impediment to this country's doing the right thing:

War stifles reform and, if the United States was sucked in, all plans for the New Freedom would be thwarted. He was lured, too, by a vision of the New World, through himself, bringing to the Old the gift of peace and a league of nations to enforce peace, an old idea newly in vogue, which Wilson now embraced as his own. If he could stop the war he could save his own program and save Europe from itself. ...

... Although no two men in any one period of history were more unlike, Wilson shared one characteristic with the Kaiser -- he would not listen to opinions he did not welcome. Wilhelm was afraid of them, but Wilson considered opinions which opposed his as simply a waste of. time. Intent upon saving Europe, he ignored the mood of the Europeans.

... Wilson saw the world caught in a berserk carnage endlessly continuing unless stopped by a disinterested outsider -- himself. The question of rights and wrongs he would not look at or professed, at this time, not to see.

Reading these repeated disparaging descriptions of the man, I was reminded of a passage from Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars, a narrative of Britain's warriors and resisters:

... if the leaders of any one of the major European powers had been able to look forward in time and see the full consequences, would they still have so quickly sent their soldiers marching off to battle in 1914?

Two years later, the leader of the United States did foresee terrible consequences and he tried mightily to "keep us out of war," perhaps not always wisely but certainly fervently.

Would the course of the 20th century have been different if the United States somehow had not gone in? Our fresh troops and above all our financing made the French and British victory of 1918 possible. The U.S. came out of that war the world's essential economic power and henceforth its imperial reach penetrated not only the colonial periphery in South America and Asia, but also the European center. The long truce of 1918-1939 in Europe ended in barbarity that made the "First World War" look a far smaller catastrophe.

Contrafactual questions are always fruitless -- and remain suggestive and intriguing. This little Tuchman volume brings them to fore starkly because it avoids any pretense of neutrality about the war's essential necessity. In later works Tuchman showed much more ambivalence, but here her story is interesting precisely because it is constructed without any such questioning.

Why are we still in Afghanistan?

What if we went to war and in the country where the shooting was happening people had no idea why we had invaded? The United States' ten year long incursion and sporadic attempt to remake Afghanistan has achieved that end, if not much else.

Nearly half of all Afghans are under the age of 15, too young to have a firsthand recollection of [the 9/11 attacks], or the U.S.-led invasion that began less than a month later. Among older people, even those grateful that the invasion ended Taliban rule, there is a sense that the conflict has moved far beyond its original impetus.

The war is widely regarded now as being driven by many other factors, including foreign self-interest and internal power struggles. ...

"At the beginning of the U.S. invasion, we hoped for security and stability," said Abdul Raziq, a 53-year-old real estate agent living in Kabul, the capital. "But 9/11 brought calamity and misfortune to Afghanistan."

... A survey last year by a think tank, the International Council on Security and Development, found that fewer than one in 10 respondents in the key southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar [where the strongest contingent of U.S. troops are killing and dying] were aware that the West's war with the Taliban was triggered by the events of Sept. 11.

Los Angeles Times, 9/10/11

Since they don't know why we are there now, Afghans are unlikely to take up any notions we might want them to assimilate when we leave.

And we will leave sooner or later -- the Afghan war is both unaffordable and unwinnable. To continue a purposeless war is also immoral.

Photo by way of ISAF Media. Taken in Helmand province, December, 2010.

Art is just so dangerous ...

Some children are ... children. Others are just small Palestinians. I guess Palestinian children can't make worthy drawings from their lives.

An Oakland children's museum, citing pressure from the community, canceled a planned exhibit of artwork by Palestinian youth that depicted the Israeli assault during the 2008-09 Gaza conflict.

The Museum of Children's Art was scheduled to display the art from Sept. 24 to Nov. 13. The exhibit had been in the works for several months, with an opening reception to feature poetry and special art activities for children. The drawings in the exhibit were created by children ranging in age from about 9 to 11 and included bombs dropping, tanks and people getting shot. ...

"The pressure was ... well, we were getting calls from constituents that were concerned about the situation," [museum board member Randolph] Bell said. "We don't have any political stake in this thing. It just became apparent that we needed to rethink this."

...Yet it wouldn't have been the first time the museum has featured wartime art by children.

In 2007, it exhibited paintings made during World War II by American children in the Kaiser shipyard child care center. The art featured images of Hitler, burning airplanes, sinking battleships, empty houses and a sad girl next to a Star of David.

In 2004, art by Iraqi children hung on the museum's walls. The pictures, made shortly after the U.S. invasion, included a picture of a helicopter shooting into a field of flowers.

The art by the Palestinian children was similar in content.

San Francisco Chronicle, 9/9/11

Enough killing

My ATM tells me it's a day to reflect. Since we've learned of late that the banks are our masters, I'll comply.

On September 11, 2001, the accepted numbers for deaths are:

• 246 on the four planes (includes hijackers)

• 2606 in the World Trade Center towers

• 125 at the Pentagon.

And then, we went to war in Afghanistan and things get a little harder to count. According to iCasualties

• 1762 U.S. soldiers have died there and nearby

• and 948 other NATO troops.

Nobody (except their relatives) much bothers to count dead Afghans. The U.S. and the Taliban accuse each other of causing most of the deaths. In 2009, Harvard professor Stephen Walt guessed civilian deaths numbered between 12000 and 32000. The rate of killing of civilians has only risen in the two years since.

And then, for no reason that had anything to do with the attacks of 9/11, but because unscrupulous men took advantage our impulse to seek revenge, we charged off the invade and occupy Iraq. Again according to iCasualties,

• 4475 U.S. troops have died in Iraq
  

• as well as 318 from allied forces.

There have been several international efforts to quantify Iraqi deaths subsequent to our invasion. There are vast discrepancies between the totals various researchers arrived at. Their estimates range from 150000 to about 1.5 million. The wide variation stems, in part, from whether we should count infants and elders who would have survived if the occupation hadn't led to the destruction of the Iraqi state's health, sanitation and other modern infrastructure. The invasion and occupation provided the spark for an Iraqi civil war; the lower figures disclaim responsibility for what we touched off.

There's somewhat less argument about the human displacement that followed on the invasion: more than one million Iraqis left the country and several million more became internal refugees. Very few of these people will ever be made whole.

Oh yeah -- this long orgy of revenge and death cost the United States several trillion dollars in debt and now we're arguing about how much to cut into the safety net for veterans, the poor and old people. The United States has indulged its worst self in a low dishonest decade. Enough killing already!


My partner and I gave away these signs to anyone who would take one in the days after 9/11. I still see one every once in awhile.

9/11 remembrance weekend

Who has a more immediate sense of the lessons of 9/11 than New Yorkers?



What keeps New Yorkers together? Maybe "... being too busy to care about being closed minded ..."

"Being tolerant isn't always easy, but it is right ..."



It's going to be a long weekend of flag waving and posturing, but I prefer to listen to these people.

Residue of 9/11

Bathrooms are still locked in the parts of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system that run underground. Might be a bomb in there. No trash cans are allowed on train platforms either.

Osama bin Laden's murderous made-for-TV-movie has left us a more fearful, suspicious and generally ignorantly anxious society.

Successive administrations -- this doesn't seem to be a matter of political party -- have manipulated our anxiety to undermine our expectations of personal freedom under transparent, fairly applied laws.

September 11 was tragic in many ways, and it marked the beginning of the greatest decline in democracy in our country since the Japanese internment during World War II and the Red Scare of the 1950s.

It was the day we began to let fear erode our belief in our own system of government, with all its checks and balances and laws and treaties. Playing on that fear, our government began to operate outside the law and in the process destroyed many more lives than those lost in the attack.

Vincent Warren, Center for Constitutional Rights

We're in the international assassination business now.

Targeted killing poses an even graver threat to human rights and the international rule of law because the government claims the unchecked authority to impose an extrajudicial death sentence on people located far from any battlefield. In an actual war, the government's use of lethal force may be lawful, of course, but outside that context, the intentional killing of a civilian without prior judicial process is illegal, except in the narrowest and most extraordinary circumstances – as a last resort to prevent concrete, specific and imminent threats that are likely to cause death or serious physical injury.

Under the targeted killing programme begun by the Bush administration and vastly expanded by the Obama administration, the government now compiles secret "kill lists" of people who remain on those lists for months at a time – and so, by definition, cannot always pose "imminent" threats. And it has refused to disclose the legal criteria it uses to make its targeted killing decisions. There is no way for the American public or the world to know whether the targeted killing programme is lawful, let alone whether the people our government kills truly present an imminent threat to our nation. We do know, though, that in the decade since 9/11, the government has repeatedly labelled people as terrorists – including at Guantánamo – only for us to find out later, or for a court to find, that the government's evidence was exaggerated, wrong, or nonexistent.

Hina Shamsi, ACLU attorney, in the U.K. Guardian

In the words of an ACLU report Reclaiming Our Liberties (also linked in the sidebar for reference), successive administrations have stoked "the fear of terrorism to divide Americans by religion, race, and belief" -- must be those dangerous Muslims and creepy immigrants that are undermining our living standards.

Coupled with rapidly evolving and improving technology of surveillance and social control, we can only wonder when and under what perceived threat elites might advance from collecting our email, selling our data we give them on social networks, and surveilling our shopping behavior to using their more advanced toys to ensure "stability" -- that is, to forcibly further lock in their continued unchallenged enjoyment of inequitable wealth and power. They stole it fair and square and they aim to keep it. ***Against all this, it's nice to hear an occasional voice of sanity, in this case from a BART director suggesting maybe it's time to reopen the bathrooms.

... Tom Radulovich said it’s time to rethink what he termed a “bit of an overreaction." Radulovich said that security has just become a convenient excuse for keeping them closed.

“Reading between the lines, it’s just that they don't want to pay to clean them,” said Radulovich. “I think that’s the real story, so they’re hiding behind this ‘Osama is going to use them to kill people.'”

Bay Citizen

This is one way fightback starts. Ridicule is often harder to contain than protest.

On effectual political pandering

When the President announced last month that immigration authorities should shift their enforcement priorities toward deportation only of people considered a security or public safety threat, it seemed a step toward a saner, more humane policy.


It also seemed like a good idea for the President's re-election campaign, since he was losing the trust of Latinos who see their relatives and friends arbitrarily kicked out of the country. The chart shows the gradual fall in the President's approval among Latinos. He's sitting well under 50 percent, a cumulative fall of about 15 points in the last year.

The shift in immigration enforcement policy seemed designed to shore up Obama's re-election numbers and that's fine. That's what applied pressure is supposed to get people in a democracy. The bums don't like the idea of being thrown out.

But of course there's a bureaucracy involved, not to mention thousands of immigration cops whose practices and attitudes may not be quite so malleable as those of politicians. And so, lo and behold, cruel and unnecessary deportations are still the story for too many people.

[Roxann] Lara, originally from Delicias, Chihuahua, is five months pregnant and the mother of two U.S. citizen children. She is in the country illegally because she overstayed a visa. Her attorney says she’s the “poster child” for leniency under the June directive.

Instead, Lara was detained and processed by immigration authorities in Anthony, N.M., last week after she admitted to having expired documents when local police and U.S. Border Patrol agents came to the door looking for her sister.

It means the “left hand isn’t aware of what the right hand is doing,” said Carlos Spector, Lara’s El Paso-based attorney. "I think it’s important to note that this [directive] has not reached the lowest levels of ICE ... because [Border Patrol agents] are still picking up pregnant women."

...In Lara's case, Agent Ramiro Cordero said, the Border Patrol "did exactly what we were supposed to do. If the courts grant that person some type of legal document, then the system works." ...

Texas Tribune, September 7, 2012

Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the Daily Kos political blog, who is decidedly not a poor immigrant scratching a living anonymously, explained why a cruel immigration policy cuts so deeply among Latinos, even those who are well established and politically active citizens.

Every time someone rails against immigrants, it's an attack on our very self-identity as Americans, it's an attack on our families, and it's an attack on our broader community. While jobs may impact the community more directly, rationally speaking, immigration hits us at an emotional level.

Elsewhere Moulitsas called the President's immigration shift "the good kind of political pandering." That's apt. Obama needs Latino support and he has to offer something to get it. But words without action aren't going to cut it.

The entire nation is likely to be having similar thoughts when Obama talks about the economy and jobs tonight.

On Rick Perry and Superman

That undocumented immigrant was actually a refugee seeking asylum, but we know how that would have gone. "Send him back," too many would scream, "he just wants to rob us!"

Let's hope the 2012 campaign is punctuated by many such eruptions of creative commentary.

Warming Wednesdays: it's about values

I continue to be bemused by Republicans' refusal to believe the findings of climate science that something drastic is changing on the planet and that human beings are causing those changes. The Times cataloged the more extreme variations on this denial today:

The most vocal denier is Rick Perry, the Texas governor and longtime friend of the oil industry, who insists that climate change is an unproven theory created by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

... The others flatly repudiate the science. Ron Paul of Texas calls global warming “the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years.” Michele Bachmann of Minnesota once said that carbon dioxide was nothing to fear because it is a “natural byproduct of nature” and has complained of “manufactured science.” Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, has called climate change “a beautifully concocted scheme” that is “just an excuse for more government control of your life.”

Romney may -- or may not -- be a little better; the man apparently wants to be President so badly that he'll say whatever listeners seem to want. Huntsman is irrelevant, as no Republican voters like him, just the media.

So where in the world do these people -- and "the base" they cater too -- come from? Someone named Oran Switzer provided a theory at the Dot Earth blog:

There is not one climate dispute. There are two, and the solutions are not the same. First, we need to separate the two. The science debate does not work in politics. If you study the conservative approach to climate change policy long enough, the implication that they are trying to participate in a scientific conversation starts to fade away and you realize the underlying logic they are using actually starts from the conclusion that regulation and government intervention are bad and proceeds to the premise that there is no real problem with climate change, at which point, they pick around for snippets to support their premise. This allows them to make big, bold, statements about their identity and character and values rather than wallowing around in overly-precise, overly-pedantic language and data.

The center-left in the U.S. has a persistent problem with this dynamic because they see every situation where they have a factual advantage as proof of their superiority and then they proceed to hammer people with logic while ignoring the repeated lessons of political strategy. The debate needs to start with values! Science has no values. Science only describes the physical world.

To win the scientific debate about climate change, we just… oh wait, we already did. But to win the political debate, we need to spend less time on the details of the scientific debate and much more on the underlying values — the costs to humanity, society, and the economy of extreme weather, local floods, local droughts, freshwater scarcity, infectious disease, food security, coastline loss, biodiversity loss, etc., etc. It sounds backwards since the political challengers are denying the possibility of those dangers, one might think we need to respond to their challenge.

We do not. That’s what science is for.

Oh, I see. They have lousy values -- selfishness, greed that takes no thought for tomorrow, and a phony confidence in individual security (perhaps hugging their Glock?) that makes them believe the moon is made of green cheese and the seas aren't rising?

I've just probably provided an example of how not to talk about climate change denial. As Switzer says, we already have won the climate change debate. What we haven't won is much deeper. Our society has messed up values. We are all dependent on an economic system that thrives on "greed is good" and "devil take the hindmost." Greed can contribute to some kinds of positive changes: insurance companies will demand better seawalls; less carbon-intensive energy solutions that profit their inventors will come on line as we deplete existing resources.

But what's really missing is a general understanding that, unavoidably, we're all in this together. We don't have to like it. We just have to live with it. Very few of us here in the world's richest capitalist nation find it natural to know that. But we need to learn.

Not with a bang, but a whimper ....

U.S. Embassy in Bagdhad

A little good news for a change.

Obama to dramatically reduce troops in Iraq
The Obama administration "has decided to drop the number of U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of the year down to 3,000, marking a major downgrade in force strength," Fox News reports.

"Senior commanders are said to be livid at the decision, which has already been signed off by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. The generals on the ground had requested that the number of troops remaining in Iraq at the end of the year reach about 27,000."

Political Wire

Oh I know -- they all should be leaving. And we're probably aiming to leave tens of thousands of spooks and contractors, but somehow I think the Iraqis can deal with them. Other countries do. And we owe reparations for trashing Iraqi society that we'll never pay. But this is good news, a right path taken where the U.S. has been doing wrong for eight long years.

***Bill Keller, former oped writer and later executive editor at the New York Times has a wordy and self-serving pseudo-apology in today's paper for his enthusiasm for the Bush Administration's excellent Iraq adventure. He still doesn't admit that there were lots of people around who, if the Times had looked beyond official sources, could have told him that there were no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein presented no threat to the United States. Maybe they were always going to brush off an individual like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter who worked diligently to try to get their attention. But Keller and Co. might have attended to the eminent Swedish diplomat Hans Blix in charge of the United Nations inspection agency. And then there were dissenters in the U.S. military like Army General Eric Shinseki. But no -- even Keller admits he and his other "liberal hawk" buddies were "a little drugged by testosterone." Too bad for Iraqis ...

***An article by a former Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, "Goodbye to all that: reflections of a GOP operative who left the cult," is getting a lot of play around the blogosphere today. It's a scary picture of a political party so mad with power lust that it is willing to tear down our democracy while defending the super rich. One of Lofgren's core observations is getting a lot less play than other parts, but it is totally relevant to the aggressive war on Iraq. He is very aware of how war profiteering drives a lot of Washington's military obsessions. But he wants us to understand that there's more:

They worship at the altar of Mars. ...

Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.

The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it, have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.

The future he foresees here -- a broken United States financially and spiritually -- may look better for much of the world than what we've lately lived. But the citizens of this country have to understand that it won't be a smooth ride on the way to bankruptcy. How low we go and how badly our rulers will behave will be determined to some extent by the strength of whatever political movements can be built for democracy, against militarism, and for international equity. Yes, we still need a peace movement, even when it seems as if no one is listening.

What's to love about cities? And why Republicans hate them

Cities are full of people who don't look like most Republicans. Here's a stark reminder of the demographic facts:

WASHINGTON — Minorities accounted for 98 percent of the population growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, according to a new report, as the country’s white population continued to stagnate, and in many places, decline.

Hispanics and Asians led population growth in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, growing by 41 percent and 43 percent respectively. The population of blacks grew by 12 percent, and the aging white population was largely flat, increasing by less than 1 percent.

... In large metropolitan areas, the white population represented 57 percent of the total in 2010, down from 71 percent in 1990. Whites accounted for a bigger share in smaller cities, at 73 percent, and in rural areas, at 80 percent, Dr. Frey said. In all, the white population shrank in 42 out of the top 100 cities. ...

New York Times, August 31, 2011

But cities are the country's economic engines. Cities are where people can live, and live well, while free to develop in all our very individual avenues. Yes, free! Economist Ryan Avent explains how dense cities offer opportunities that can't develop smaller places:

What is it exactly that dense cities are doing? Consider a simple example. Suppose that within a population one person in 100 develops a taste for Vietnamese cuisine, and suppose that a Vietnamese restaurant needs a customer base of 1,000 people to operate profitably. In a city of 10,000 residents, there aren’t enough people to support a Vietnamese restaurant. The only restaurants that can operate profitably are those appealing to considerably more than one in 100 people — restaurants offering less daring fare. In a city of 10,000 people, there is little room for specialization, and less for experimentation.

A city of one million people, by contrast, can support multiple Vietnamese restaurants. Not only will this larger city enjoy a specialty cuisine unavailable in less populous places, but its ability to support multiple producers of this cuisine allows for competition, improving the price and quality.

A city with multiple Vietnamese restaurants may attract sellers of the fresh ingredients used in Vietnamese cooking, who then invest in distribution of those products in the larger city. This, in turn, attracts the sort of discerning eaters who favor authentic, high-quality Vietnamese food, reinforcing the concentration of Vietnamese eateries. The larger market facilitates competition, which again boosts quality and reduces prices. This is good for consumers. But competition also means better service from suppliers and growth in the consumer market, which is good for the restaurants. The result is a stronger, more productive and higher-quality microeconomy than in the city of 100,000, where only one Vietnamese restaurant can survive, or the town of 10,000, where there is none at all.

It's not just Vietnamese restaurants. It's about all the different interests, projects and activities that each of us chooses to pursue -- cities make it possible for us to devote ourselves to following our enthusiasms. The internet is great for meeting like-minded others, but cities are where we can find live communities of interest.

A search for room to spread out was in the DNA this country as settlers spread across the continent, eventually occupying it all. I too can feel the pull of open spaces; I instinctively head for the hills when I need to recharge. But cities are where life abounds. We need to treasure them!

Labor Day

"They said, we are not important workers."

Here's an offering for the day. If labor is to make a comeback, it will be led by workers like these, workers who have no choice but to struggle as if their lives depend on it, because their lives do. And they can find friends who know they are important workers because we all are.

When we imagine a union member these days, we think of a teacher, a nurse's aide, maybe an electrician. All these people would be far worse off without their unions, getting lower wages and few or no benefits, and be subject to arbitrary bosses. But these are not the kind of folks who made unionism in the United States possible.


September 11, 2001 was not the first time New York City saw trapped people leap to their deaths from a burning building. Here, in 1911, police officers look up at the fire while standing beside of the bodies of young, mostly immigrant, working women who have jumped from the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building which housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Management had locked the stairwells and exits to prevent theft by workers.

For the very existence of labor unions, we have to thank people who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century under what we consider horrific conditions, whose bosses literally didn't care whether they lived or died -- miners, steel fabricators, women in the sewing sweat shops. For a little while in the middle of the last century, their victories and the union structure they built made possible the emergence of a middle class. Because of their struggles and the norms they established, many of us won better working conditions, better housing, educational opportunity and a chance at a secure retirement if we lived long enough. We even got weekends off from work.

As we all know, rich financial magnates and their Republican allies want to shove the middle class back to the bottom rather than pay their fair share of taxes in a decent, more equitable society. And today's labor movement is a prime subject of their attack, often seeming weak, unimaginative and even just plain timid. Under constant presure, it's all existing unions can do to try to hold on to scraps for their current members.

If labor is to make a comeback, the impetus will have to come, once again, from unexpected and neglected outsiders to society, the excluded workers.

Many of us don't notice these people unless we make an effort to look for them. Who is staffing the car wash, washing the dishes in the back of the restaurant, changing beds in the hotel, emptying garbage for that private contractor the city hired? Like the ancestors of the current middle class, they are often immigrants, "different," "foreign," and considered racially apart.

The threatened current middle class' best chance of survival requires making common cause with these folks: we need their grit, their determination, their hope for a better future. We're tired, but they are rising because they know that solidarity can evoke the good in people. That's what Labor Day is all about.

A tale of a horrible murder, two children, and a jury

The "facts" of the case seemed all too simple. Prosecutors and defendant's lawyers agreed on this much:

[Brian] McInerney was 14 when he walked into a morning computer lab at E.O. Green Junior High, pulled a .22-caliber handgun from his backpack, put the gun to Larry King's head and pulled the trigger twice. King was 15.

L A Times, 9/2/011

Despite the agreed facts, jurors couldn't agree on what the killing meant. Seven jurors thought this was a case of voluntary manslaughter -- a crime of impulsive passion; five that this was murder, either first-degree (premeditated; hate motivated) or second-degree (still murder, but less culpable). A mistrial, meaning the possibility of another trial, was declared.

The slain boy, Larry King, was gay and not shy about flaunting it. In fact, he sounds like many a teenage boy whose new feelings of potency make him ready to get in the face of his schoolmates. The defense brought testimony about this before the jury.

In the months before the shooting, King began wearing makeup and women's spike-heeled boots and seemed to relish making boys squirm with comments such as "I know you want me," teachers said.

Larry King wouldn't or couldn't play by the rules that gay boys are supposed to hide their feelings. This evidence was used by the defense to appeal to whatever horror might exist in the jurors at publicly expressed gay sexuality.

I have to ask, would the jurors have been as horrified if some football jock claimed his right to comment on female classmates and taunt them with how much he wanted to get in their pants? Though I can imagine as a girl wanting to do it, I don't think that sort of affront would give a girl a right to shoot the offender.

I'm a huge fan of juries. It doesn't always work this way, but I think they often bring wisdom from life experience to the circumstances they are shown -- wisdom that is invisible to the practitioners of criminal "justice." See for example this.


This case -- if news accounts are fairly accurate, always an "if" -- seems to have become a contest between prosecution and defense as to who was a child. The prosecution insisted that the shooter be tried as an adult; after all, if he'd been found guilty as a juvenile, he'd be free by age 25. Yet the crime had the elements of premeditation and the shooter also possessed hate literature. The defense, properly doing their job, humanized the killer as the victim himself of a violent home.

Most adults are easily distressed by how early in life kids come into their sexual feelings. We've forgotten or repressed that period when we were tossed about like flotsam by our hormones. If the members of the jury were straight -- were they? the news coverage doesn't say and we shy away from such questions -- gay hormonally-induced stupidity can seem alien, maybe diabolic, certainly threatening. For some, a Larry King can't have been a child. Children don't express those feelings.

On the other hand, children don't hide a gun in their back pack and slip past security in order to shoot a classmate in the back of the head. At least I am not ready to think that is childish behavior.It's hard for me to consider Brian McInerney a child.

The prosecutors were probably unwise to try the shooter as an adult, no matter how much some gay rights advocates, including me, would have felt that Larry King was being done an injustice by the short sentence that was all he could receive in the juvenile court. There's a reason that we used to have juvenile justice system that tried to do something besides just lock criminals up and throw away the key. Kids just aren't adults, yet.

Though I don't like the success of what amounts to a homophobic "gay panic" defense in this trial, I think I'm willing to admit that the jury did it's best with the choices they had. They needed better options. That's not the children's job -- that's our job.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Candlestick Point State Recreation Area

Would you believe that spit of land is within San Francisco's city limits? It's Candlestick Point, out behind the aging football stadium. Though I've lived here nearly 40 years, I'd never been there until I learned that it was one of the 70 state parks slated for closure because California Republicans refuse to pay taxes to maintain the state's well-being.


It's not a very developed place as the motley typography on the entrance sign reveals.


Not surprisingly, there are shorebirds.


A lone egret stalks an inlet.


Mostly the ground squirrels seem shy. They haven't learned to beg from picnickers.


That is, they were shy until they met this guy. He played the pied-piper of squirrel-land on his walk.


The park has breathtaking picnic sites -- note each comes with a windbreak. Candlestick Point is where a sort of wind tunnel from the ocean blows across the peninsula's narrowest point.


The prevailing semi-gale is just right for the board sailers who launch here -- drivers can see in them surfing the Bay when driving Rte. 101.


Many people are here to fish in the Bay, toting their gear in carts. I don't know why they wanted the masks, though I would not be surprised if at times the adjacent garbage company facility puts out a stink.


At the far end of the point, there's a newish and much used fishing pier.


Others fish from the steep shore.


This fellow was hanging out near the pier, perhaps waiting for someone's rejects.


Inland, there's an interesting musical installation.


Some of the "drums' have interesting tones.


The north side of the point is remarkably sheltered. Who'd have thought you could do this within sight of the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard?

The park closures will begin this fall. People will still get in, of course, but I have to wonder what corporations are salivating over this land, especially once the football stadium moves to Santa Clara.

School responds to budget cuts

You have to admire the ingenuity.

In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, students at two local schools will be greeted this fall by something unusual on the grounds: sheep. Rather than spend money on cutting grass, the Carlisle School District has brought in 7 Romney sheep to tend the fields. “They’ve done a good job so far,” says Superintendent John Friend.

The sheep come free of charge, since they belong to the principal of the middle school. Friend estimates that they will save the district about $15,000 this year in mowing costs. That makes up for only a small amount of the district’s $2 million reduction in state support following what has been described as Pennsylvania’s deepest education budget cuts in a generation.

Stateline

Cuts, cuts, everywhere cuts -- in education, they amount to cutting the future.

If you have any interest in the future of higher education in this country, I cannot recommend too highly The Washington Monthly's college features. There's a lot to read; the features are totally worth exploring.

Bertrand Russell: hero of war resistance

This book introduced me to the story of a person whose heroism I'd never before appreciated -- heroes are rare enough to be very prized finds indeed.

Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 recounts the swath of horror World War I cut through British culture, British families and every aspect of British life. He weaves together the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people -- grieving relatives, trade unionists, politicians, soldiers, socialists, and imperialists -- to give readers a human-scale sense of the war's enormity.

It's not easy for us to take in the sheer awfulness it all. Every World War I historian I read tries to convey the horror and they all seem daunted. Here's a sample from Hochschild's summary description:

For more than three years the armies on the Western Front were virtually locked in place, burrowed into trenches with dugouts sometimes 40 feet below ground, periodically emerging for terrible battles that gained at best a few miles of muddy, shell-blasted wasteland.

The destructiveness of those battles still seems beyond belief. In addition to the dead, on the first day of the Somme offensive another 36,000 British troops were wounded. The magnitude of slaughter in the war's entire span was beyond anything in European experience: more than 35 percent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out, for example, were killed in the next four and a half years, and many of the remainder grievously wounded. For France, the total was proportionately even higher: one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war's outbreak were dead when it was over.

... British stonemasons in Belgium were still at work carving the names of their nation's missing onto memorials when the Germans invaded for the next war, more than 20 years later. Cities and towns in the armies' path were reduced to jagged rubble, forests and farms to charred ruins. "This is not war," a wounded soldier among Britain's Indian troops wrote home from Europe. "It is the ending of the world."

While this madness raged on the continent, in Britain, there remained a (very) few who resisted the war fever. At the war's outset, most people set aside any qualms. Perhaps most surprisingly, socialist trade unionists who had been proclaiming working class solidarity across borders quickly signed up for the national fight as did advocates for "votes for women" who had been throwing rocks at the Prime Minister's residence shortly before.

The prominent Cambridge academic philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell kept a perspective on the nationalist delirium.

Over the more than four years of fighting to come, he never yielded in his belief that "this war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. . . . , The English and French say they are fighting in defense of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta."

For his pains, he and the little band of war resisters with whom he collaborated were subjected first to ostracism, then verbal and physical attack, and finally imprisonment. Anyone who resisted the national impulse to take revenge in the days immediately after 9/11 will recognize this description of the environment they found themselves in:

... Antiwar beliefs were severely tested by the mass patriotic hysteria of the war's first months. "One by one, the people with whom one had been in the habit of agreeing politically went over to the side of the war," as Russell put it, "and as yet the exceptional people . . . had not yet found each other." How hard it was, he wrote, to resist "when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. As much effort was required to avoid sharing this excitement as would have been needed to stand out against the extreme of hunger or sexual passion, and there was the same feeling of going against instinct."

What's fascinating about Hochschild's account of the role of this eminent man was the extent to which he was willing not just to be a spokesman, but to share the work of building what seems to have been pretty efficient resistance under extremely difficult circumstances.

... the longer the war went on, the more it was militarizing Britain in Germany's image, while killing and maiming men by the millions and making certain an embittered and dangerous postwar world. He not only lent his enormous prestige to the No-Conscription Fellowship; for much of the war his thick shock of graying hair was a familiar sight at the NCF headquarters each day, for he became the group's acting chairman when its head went to prison for refusing the call-up. He attended the courts-martial of COs, visited them in prison, and devoted hours to the most mundane office tasks, writing numerous "Dear Comrade" letters to branches around the country, signed "Fraternally Yours, Bertrand Russell."

And he made clear to all that he was as willing to sacrifice his freedom for what he believed as were the younger men and women around him. When the government began prosecuting people for distributing an NCF leaflet, he immediately wrote to the Times: "Six men have been condemned to varying terms of imprisonment with hard labour for distributing this leaflet. I wish to make it known that I am the author of this leaflet, and that if anyone is to be prosecuted, I am the person primarily responsible." For this he was fined £100 (which he refused to pay, forcing the authorities to seize some of his property), dismissed from his post at Cambridge, and denied a passport for a trip to lecture at Harvard. ...

... Believing -- correctly -- that sooner or later most of its leaders would be arrested, the NCF set up a "shadow" structure... If any officer was jailed, someone else, designated in advance, would automatically take his or her job. Similarly, wrote one member, "in various secret places, buried in an orchard in Surrey, or locked in an unsuspecting city merchant's safe, or at the back of the bookshelf in the house of a remote sympathiser . . . were duplicates of every document likely to be seized." These included a daily bulletin on the numbers of men arrested, courtmartialed, and imprisoned, and file cards showing the whereabouts of every CO. Any instance of their mistreatment was recorded and turned over to one of the small band of sympathetic MPs willing to ask questions in the House of Commons. Communications were often in code: if a telegram said that a meeting was to be at Manchester, it in fact meant Newcastle. ...

I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be," wrote Russell decades later. " I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show that they stood firm."

Of course, the war protesters couldn't stop that war -- or any of our subsequent wars. Though millions of men in the French army staged a brief mutiny and the Russian tzar was overthrown while his army melted away, the war ground on. Hochschild reflects on the resisters' all too minor part in the tapestry he weaves for us:

I wish theirs was a victorious story, but it is not. Unlike, say, witch-burning, slavery, and apartheid, which were once taken for granted and are now officially outlawed, war is still with us. Uniforms, parades, and martial music continue to cast their allure, and the appeal of high technology has been added to that; throughout the world boys and men still dream of military glory as much as they did a century ago.

Yes -- and no. There are suggestive arguments that we live in a world in which war is far less frequent, widespread and legitimate than in the past. We do momentarily see the U.S. empire becoming less willing to endure U.S. casualties and to spend unlimited treasure on world dominance than in the recent past.

Just as World War I set many terrible developments in motion at the beginning of the last century, the British resisters to the "Great War" created a template for future anti-war movements. Adam Hochschild's volume brings both these figures and their antagonists to life.