The Change They Believe In
Speech for Harlem Tenants Association, November 14, 2008
By Robert Fitch

Nellie asks us to foretell what an Obama Administration is going to do for cities, housing and neighborhoods. Of course we can’t really know what’s going to happen in the future. We can only know what’s already happened. So it’s an exercise that reminds me a little of Johnny Carson’s old late night TV routine with his sidekick Ed McMahon. Carson played Karnak the Magnificent. McMahon would give him an answer. And Karnak, wearing a giant turban, and holding an envelope to his forehead, would guess the question inside the envelope. Ed would give an answer like. “A B C D E F G.” Karnak would reply with the question: “Earlier versions of Preparation H.”

What’s President-elect Obama’s prescription for urban pains? I’m going to put on my urban turban and try to play Karnak. It’s a difficult role not only because the future is hard to predict; but because Obama himself is not easy to read. In my lifetime, we haven’t had a politician with his gifts: his writing talent; his eloquence; his charisma; his mastery of public policy; his ability to run a national campaign against formidable rivals. Obama projects so brilliant an aura that it’s almost blinding. He’s become the bearer of pride for forty-five million African Americans who want to be judged by the content of their character. He’s the prophet of hope; the apostle of change and the organizer of “Yes We Can.”

All this makes Obama’s actual politics very hard to put in any critical perspective. By actual politics I mean above all, the principal interests he represents; his authentic political philosophy. Where he fits on the on the Left-Right political spectrum. Obama resists being identified with either the Right or the Left. Even when he talks about his mom’s liberalism, it’s with a certain irony. “A lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for the New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” Obama is a partisan of the Third Way. In Europe, the Third Way means you’re neither socialist nor capitalist. In the U.S. it means you’re neither for liberalism nor conservatism. The Third Way is expressed very well in Obama’s 2004 convention speech.

“Well, I say…tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

“There’s not a black America and white America…there’s the United States of America.

“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too.

“We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

Are traditional political vocations now obsolete? The Left stands for the interests of those who have to work for a living; for the tenants and the poor. For the victims of discrimination. The Right in America stands for the interests of the employers and the

investing class. For those who own the land, the houses, the banks and the hedge funds. For Joe the plumber who was really Joe the plumbing contractor. And for those who see themselves as the victims of affirmative action.

In a way, though, the Left and the Right have more in common with each other than they do with the advocates of the Third Way. The Left and the Right argue that different interests matter. The Third Way says they don’t. According to them, the oppressed and the oppressors, the lions and the lambs should set down together and celebrate their unity in one great post-partisan, multi-cultural 4th of July picnic. One of Obama’s most repeated mantras resonates here: “a common good and a higher interest,” he says. “That’s the change I’m looking for.”

Where in the world most of us reside do we find that higher interest? I don’t know except perhaps in the higher interest rates that kicked in with variable rate mortgages.

What is the common good that tenants and landlords share? Not a lot I can think of. Maybe that the building doesn’t burn down? But some of you remember the ’70s when landlords burned down their buildings in poor neighborhoods to cash in on the insurance.

The haves and the have-nots have different and opposing interests—landlords want to get rid of rent stabilization; tenants have an interest in keeping it. Workers want to save their jobs; bosses want to save their capital, which means cutting workers. In pursuing their opposing interests, the have-nots are forced take up the weapons of the weak— demonstrations, direct action; filling the jails with conscientious objectors; taking personal risks. Who benefits when one side gives up without a struggle? The Haves or the Have nots? Frederick Douglass reminds us: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did. It never will.”

When the Third Way advocates insist that we share a common good; when they refuse to recognize that the interests of the oppressed and the interests of the oppressors don’t exist on the same moral plane; when they counsel us to stop being partisans of those interests—they’re not being non or post partisan; they’re siding with the powers that be.

In the same way, Obama’s notion of change claims to transcend the politics of interest while it steers sharply to the right. What kind of change does America need? Above all, America needs a change of heart: her people need to give up selfishness; all Americans rich and poor, white and black; the hod carrier and the hedge fund operator must give up self-interest; stop always asking “what’s in it for me?”

In a word, with his emphasis on change coming from people giving up group egoism and together pursuing the common good, while practicing old fashioned virtues, Senator Obama is a communitarian. In The Audacity of Hope he invokes the legacy of Ronald Reagan who, Obama believes, recognized America’s need to rediscover the traditional values of the American community: hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism and faith.

Communitarianism flows from belief that we all share a common good. What’s needed to achieve the common good, communitarians insist, is sacrifice. But some parts of

the community have to show the way in giving up their selfish, anti-communitarian habits. For communitarians, the first responders must be the poor. For black communitarians like Bill Cosby and Barack Obama it’s chiefly the black poor.

Obama insists that the key to change is not resistance to oppression; not a battle against the exploitation of workers; or against institutional racism, or the domination of unaccountable financial elites; or the interests promoting gentrification.

These all fade away compared to the need for community self-help, strengthening the community by building strong families; by the need to convince the African American poor to pull up their socks. And stop engaging in anti-social behavior. Speaking recently to a group of black legislators, Obama said, “In Chicago, sometimes when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I say, ‘You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we made sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars.’”[1]

In fact, as Obama knows very well, for most of the last two decades in Chicago there’s been in place a very specific economic development plan. The plan was to make the South Side like the North Side. Which is the same kind of project as making the land north of Central Park like the land south of Central Park. The North Side is the area north of the Loop—Chicago’s midtown central business district—where rich white people live; they root for the Cubs. They’re neighborhood is called the Gold Coast.

For almost a hundred years in Chicago blacks have lived on the South Side close to Chicago’s factories and slaughter houses. And Cellular Field, home of the White Sox. The area where they lived was called the Black Belt or Bronzeville—and it’s the largest concentration of African American people in the U.S.—nearly 600,000 people—about twice the size of Harlem.

In the 1950s, big swaths of urban renewal were ripped through the black belt, demolishing private housing on the south east side. The argument then was that the old low rise private housing was old and unsuitable. Black people needed to be housed in new, high-rise public housing which the city built just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway. The Administration of the Chicago Housing Authority was widely acclaimed as the most corrupt, racist and incompetent in America. Gradually only the poorest of the poor lived there. And in the 1980s, the argument began to be made that the public housing needed to be demolished and the people moved back into private housing.

For a while, the election of the city’s first black Mayor, Harold Washington, blocked the demolition. But Washington died of a heart attack while in office, and after a brief interregnum, the Mayor’s office was filled in 1989 by Richard M. Daley—whose father had carried out the first urban renewal. Daley was his father’s son in many ways. By 1993, with subsidies from the Clinton Administration’s HOPE VI program, the public housing units began to be destroyed. And by 2000 he’d put in place something called The Plan for Transformation. It targeted tens of thousands of remaining units. With this proviso: That African Americans had to get 50% of the action—white developers had to have black partners; there had to be black contractors. And Daley chose African Americans—as his top administrators and planners for the clearances, demolition and re-settlement. African Americans were prominent in developing and rehabbing the new housing for the refugees from the demolished projects—who were re-settled in communities to the south like Englewood, Roseland and Harvey. Altogether the Plan for Transformation involved the largest demolition of public housing in American history, affecting about 45,000 people— in neighborhoods where eight of the 20 poorest census tracts in the U.S. were located.[2]

But what does this all have to do with Obama? Just this: the area demolished included the communities that Obama represented as a state senator; and the top black administrators, developers and planners were people like Valerie Jarrett—who served as a member of the Chicago Planning Commission. And Martin Nesbitt who became head of the CHA. Nesbitt serves as Obama campaign finance treasurer; Jarrett as co-chair of the Transition Team. The other co-chair is William Daley, the Mayor’s brother and the Midwest chair of JP Morgan Chase—an institution deeply involved in the transformation of inner-city neighborhoods thorough its support for—what financial institutions call “neighborhood revitalization” and neighborhood activists call gentrification.

If we examine more carefully the interests that Obama represents; if we look at his core financial supporters; as well as his inmost circle of advisors, we’ll see that they represent the primary activists in the demolition movement and the primary real estate beneficiaries of this transformation of public housing projects into condos and townhouses: the profitable creep of the Central Business District and elite residential neighborhoods southward; and the shifting of the pile of human misery about three miles further into the South Side and the south suburbs.

Obama’s political base comes primarily from Chicago FIRE—the finance, insurance and real estate industry. And the wealthiest families—the Pritzkers, the Crowns and the Levins. But it’s more than just Chicago FIRE. Also within Obama’s inner core of support are allies from the non-profit sector: the liberal foundations, the elite universities, the nonprofit community developers and the real estate reverends who produce market rate housing with tax breaks from the city and who have been known to shout from the pulpit “give us this day our Daley, Richard Daley bread.”[3]

Aggregate them and what emerges is a constellation of interests around Obama that I call “Friendly FIRE.” Fire power disguised by the camouflage of community uplift; augmented by the authority of academia; greased by billions in foundation grants; and wired to conventional FIRE by the terms of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1995.

And yet friendly FIRE is just as deadly as the conventional FIRE that comes from bankers and developers that we’re used to ducking from. It’s the whole condominium of interests whose advancement depends on the elimination of poor blacks from the community and their replacement by white people and—at least temporarily—by the black middle class—who’ve gotten subprime mortgages—in a kind of redlining in reverse.

This “friendly FIRE” analysis stands in opposition to the two main themes of the McCain attack ads. Either they try to frighten people into believing that Obama is a dangerous leftist who hangs with Bill Ayers the former Weatherperson; or they assert he’s a creature of the corrupt Chicago machine.

There are a few slivers of meat floating in this beggar’s broth of charges. Yes, Obama worked with Ayers, but not the Ayers who blew up buildings; but the Ayers who was able to bring down $50 million from the Walter Annenberg foundation, leveraging it to create a $120 million a non-profit organization with Obama as its head. Annenberg was a billionaire friend of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Why would he give mega- millions to a terrorist? Perhaps because he liked Ayers’ new politics. Ayer’s initiative grew out of the backlash against the 1985 Chicago teachers’ strike; his plan promoted “the community” as a third force in education politics between the union and the city administration. Friendly FIRE wants the same kind of education reform as FIRE: the forces that brought about welfare reform have now moved onto education reform and for the same reason: crippling the power of the union will reduce teachers’ salaries, which will cut real estate taxes which will raise land values.

Is Obama a minion of Richie Daley? It’s true that Obama has never denounced Daley. He actually endorsed him for Mayor in 2007. Even after federal convictions of Daley’s top aides. After the minority hiring scandals. And after the Hired Truck scandal which showed that the Daley machine shared its favors with The Outfit.

But the Daley dynasty has expanded far beyond wiseguy industries. The Mayor’s brother, William Daley, who served on Obama’s transition team, also serves now as a top executive of J.P. Morgan Chase. He heads the Midwest region. And chairs J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation, the core of friendly FIRE. Here’s an excerpt from a recent report:

…[we] achieved significant progress toward our 10-year pledge to invest $800 billion in low- and moderate income communities in the U.S.—the largest commitment by any bank focused on mortgages, small-business lending and community development. In 2006, we committed $87 billion, with total investment to date of $241 billion in the third year of the program.

Played a leadership role in the creation of The New York Acquisition Fund, along with 15 lenders and in conjunction with six foundations and the City of New York. The Fund is a $230 million initiative to finance the acquisition of land and buildings to be developed and/or preserved for affordable housing.”[4]

It’s also true that key Black members of the Obama inner circle are Daley Administration alumnae—but they’ve moved up—now they’re part of Chicago FIRE. Like Martin Nesbitt. Obama is Nesbitt’s son’s godfather. He’s the African American chairman of the CHA. But his principal occupation is the vice presidency of the Pritzker Realty group. Although they’re not well known outside of Chicago, the Pritzkers rank among the richest families in the U.S. There are ten Pritzkers among the Forbes 400: Thomas is the richest at 2.3 billion. Anthony and J.B. are next at $2.2 billion; Penny in fourth, at $2.1 billion— Daniel, James, Gigi, John, Karen, and Linda weigh in with $1.9 billion. Penny is finance chair of the Obama campaign. Martin is the treasurer.

Penny Pritzker herself has had a rocky career as a commercial banker. In 1991, she founded something called the Superior Bank of Chicago which pioneered in sub-prime lending to minorities. Superior was an early casualty of the sub-prime meltdown, though, crashing in 2001 when it was seized by the FDIC. Depositors filed a civil suit against Penny charging that Superior was a racketeering organization. The government charged that Superior paid out hundreds of millions of dividends to the Pritzkers and another family while the bank was essentially broke. There was a complex settlement in which the Pritzkers were forced to pay hundreds of millions in penalties; but the agreement contained provisions that may enable the Pritzkers to earn hundreds of millions. Notwithstanding the Superior bank disaster, Penny is being touted as Obama’s next Secretary of Commerce.

Valerie Jarrett is another black real estate executive. Described as “the other side of Barack’s brain,”[5] she also served as finance chair during his successful 2004 U.S. Senate campaign. Jarrett was Daley’s deputy chief of staff – that was her job when she hired Michelle Obama. Eventually Daley made her the head of city planning. But Jarrett doesn’t work for Daley anymore. She’s CEO of David Levin’s Habitat—one of the largest property managers in Chicago—and the court-appointed overseer of CHA projects.[6] Habitat also managed Grove Parc, the scandal-ridden project in Englewood that left Section 8 tenants, mostly refugees from demolished public housing projects, without heat in the winter but inundated with rats. Grove Parc was developed by Tony Rezko, who’s white. And his longtime partner Allison Davis, who’s black.

Let’s look at Rezko and then Davis. It was Rezko’s ability to exploit relationships with influential blacks—including Muhammad Ali—that enabled him to become one of Chicago’s preeminent cockroach capitalists. Altogether, Rezko wound up developing over 1,000 apartments with state and city money. There was more to the Obama-Rezko relationship than the empty lot in Kenwood. Rezko raised over $250,000 for Obama’s state senate campaign. While Obama was a state senator he wrote letters in support of Rezko’s applications for development funds. But Obama ignored the plight of Rezko’s tenants who complained to Obama’s office.[7]

Rezko’s Grove Parc partner, Allison Davis, was a witness in the Rezko trial, he’s pretty radioactive too. But you could see why Rezko wanted to hook up with him. Davis was the senior partner in Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, a small, black law firm, where Obama worked for nearly a decade. As the editor of the Harvard Law Review, Obama could have worked anywhere. Why did he choose the Davis firm?

Davis had been a noted civil rights attorney and a progressive critic of the first Daley machine. But in 1980 Davis got a call from the Ford Foundation’s poorly known, but immensely influential, affiliate LISC—the Local Initiatives Support Corporation—that had just been founded. LISC, whose present chair is Citigroup’s Robert Rubin, connects small, mainly minority community non-profits with big foundation grants and especially with bank loans and tax credit-driven equity. LISC wanted to co-opt Davis in their ghetto redevelopment program. He agreed and the Davis firm came to specialize in handling legal work for non-profit community development firms. Eventually Davis left the firm to go into partnership with Tony Rezko.

Meanwhile, Obama did legal work for the Rezko-Davis partnership. And for Community Development Organizations like Woodlawn Organization. In 1994, the LA Times reports, Obama appeared in Cook County court on behalf of Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corp., defending it against a suit by the city, which alleged that the company failed to provide heat for low-income tenants on the South Side during the winter.[8] There were several cases of this type, but as the Times observes, Obama doesn’t mention them in Dreams from My Father.[9]

In the 1960s, under the leadership of Arthur M. Brazier, Bishop of the Apostolic Church of God, Woodlawn gained a reputation as Chicago’s outstanding Saul Alinsky-style community organization. Mainly, TWO [The Woodlawn Organization] battled the University of Chicago’s urban renewal program. But gradually, Brazier’s political direction changed. Now TWO is partnering with UC in efforts to gentrify Woodlawn. When Barack Obama left Jeremiah Wright’s church, he switched to Brazier’s Apostolic Church of God.

Brazier is typical of a much larger group—real estate reverends—who play the Community Development game and in the process have acquired huge real estate portfolios. But it’s really a national phenomenon. Here in New York we have Rev. Calvin Butts whose church has a subsidiary, the Abyssinian Development Corp. In partnership with LISC, the ADC now boasts a portfolio of $500 million in Harlem property alone. Rev. Floyd Flake of the Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jamaica, Queens has a sizeable portfolio of commercial property too.

Chicago’s disciples of development include Wilbur Daniel. He’s the Pastor of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Englewood who really did exclaim “Give us this day our Daley bread,” meaning free land and free capital for real estate development. Daniel’s prayers were answered in 2001, when with Daley’s help, Antioch was chosen to be the lead church in Fannie Mae’s $55 billion House Chicago plan for the redevelopment of the South Side.

How has Obama earned the support and allegiance of friendly FIRE? Where does he stand on the Plan for Transformation? Generally speaking, he’s been careful not to leave too many footprints. If you google Obama and public housing, nothing comes up. But in 1995, a year before he ran successfully for state senate seat from South Side, in Dreams from My Father he wrote about his encounters with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama says he was impressed by Wright’s emphasis on the unity of the black community. But he’s a little skeptical of too broad a unity; of achieving unity without conflict. He says, “Would the interest in maintaining such unity allow Reverend Wright to take a forceful stand on the latest proposals to reform public housing?” (Here he’s referring to Clinton’s Hope VI—that provided matching federal money for the demolition of public housing. And the corresponding local initiatives, which culminated in the Plan for Transformation. “And if men like Reverend Wright failed to take a stand, if churches like Trinity refused to engage with real power and risk genuine conflict, then what chance would there be in holding the larger community intact?”[10]

I have to stop now and put Karnak’s envelope to my forehead. What we see is that the Chicago core of the Obama coalition is made up of blacks who’ve moved up by moving poor blacks out of the community. And very wealthy whites who’ve advanced their community development agenda by hiring blacks. Will this be the pattern for the future in an Obama administration? I can’t read the envelope. But I do believe that if we want to disrupt the pattern of the past we have to make some distinctions: between the change they believe in and the change we believe in; between our interests and theirs; between a notion of community that scapegoats the poor and one that respects their human rights—one of which is not to be the object of ethnic cleaning. Between Hope VI and genuine human hope.

Footnotes:

1. Perry Bacon Jr.,”Obama Reaches Out with Tough Love,” Washington Post, May 3, 2007, p. A01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202813_pf.html

2. Pam Belluck, “End of a Ghetto, A special report: Razing the Slums to Rescue the Residents.” New York Times, September 6, 1998. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/06/us/end-of-a-ghetto-a-special-report-razing-the-slums-to-rescue-the-residents.html

3. John Kass, “The New Mayor Daley,” Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. August 25, 1996.

4. http://www.jpmorganchase.com/cm/cs?pagename=Chase/Href&urlname=jpmc/community

5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynn-sweet/valerie-jarrett-steps-up-_b_65350.html

6. Jarrett’s father was Robert Taylor, head of CHA, after whom a dozen of the now demolished projects were named.

7. http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/425305,CST-NWS-obama13.article

8. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/06/nation/na-obamalegal6

9. Ibid.

10. Dreams, p.286.

Even if viewed as a content-based prosecution, [Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project] makes clear that even exclusively speech-related activities, when done for the purpose of supporting a FTO can be prosecuted. [...] There is abundant evidence that the conspirators were not acting to independently advocate for the interests of Al Qa’ida — rather, they specifically agreed to provide support which they believed was needed and would benefit Al Qa’ida. HLP, 130 S. Ct. at 2722 (“The use of the word “to” indicates a connection between the service and the foreign group. We think a person of ordinary intelligence would understand that independently advocating for a cause is different from providing a service to a group that is advocating for that cause.”).

With this, the government is arguably going further than the Supreme Court in the Humanitarian Law Project ruling. Remember that the court held that “independently advocating” for a designated terrorist organization was protected free speech but that any coordination with the terrorist group in question would make advocacy a criminal offense. In the Mehanna case, the prosecution asserted that direct contact and coordination with an illegal terrorist group is not even required to make advocacy criminal. While looking at the bolded text, one can’t help but wonder how an individual could “independently advocate” for al-Qaeda without believing such advocacy would benefit al-Qaeda. It is clear to me, at least, that the government is now splitting hairs in a way that is eroding the First Amendment.

Working in the meatpacking or poultry processing industry is notoriously dangerous. Almost every worker interviewed by Human Rights Watch for this report began with the story of a serious injury he or she suffered in a meat or poultry plant, injuries reflected in their scars, swellings, rashes, amputations, blindness, or other afflictions. At least they survived.

On October 9, 2003, thirty-one-year-old Jason Kelly was repairing leaks in “hydrolizer” equipment used to process chicken feathers to make a pet-food additive at Tyson Foods’ RiverValley animal feed plant in Texarkana, Texas. The hydrolizer was leaking hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas created by decaying organic matter. According to an OSHA investigator’s report, Tyson did not give Kelly respiratory gear to guard against inhalation of the poison, failed to label hazardous chemicals, and failed to train workers how to detect those chemicals in case of a leak.

Kelly died of asphyxiation, according to a coroner’s report, due to “acute hydrogen sulfide intoxication.” Tyson is contesting an OSHA citation and fine in connection with Kelly’s death, arguing that the cause of death has not been conclusively determined. [66]

Five weeks after Kelly’s death, on the morning of November 20, 2003, twenty-five-year-old Glen Birdsong was working alone cleaning a holding tank near the loading dock at the Smithfield Foods hog processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. The tank held Mucosa mixed with sodium bisulfite intended for use as a clotting medicine ingredient. [67] The hose Birdsong was using got caught in the tank. Birdsong climbed down a ladder to free the hose. Coworkers later found him at the bottom of the ladder unconscious and not breathing. Attempts to resuscitate him failed. He died overcome by fumes inside the tank. [68] “They didn’t tell him about the dangers, and they didn’t give him a safety belt to get pulled out of there in case he fell in,” coworkers told Human Rights Watch. [69]
[...]
Anecdotal evidence of the dangers in meat and poultry plants is backed up by hard numbers. The industry has the highest rate of injury and illness in the manufacturing sector. As one Nebraska expert explains:

Despite the hardhats, goggles, earplugs, stainless-steel mesh gloves, plastic forearm guards, chain-mail aprons and chaps, leather weightlifting belts, even baseball catcher’s shin guards and hockey masks . . . the reported injury and illness rate for meatpacking was a staggering 20 per hundred full-time workers in 2001. This is two-and-a-half times greater than the average manufacturing rate of 8.1 and almost four times more than the overall rate for private industry of 7.4.

A special investigative report in 2003 by the Omaha World-Herald documented death, lost limbs, and other serious injuries in Nebraska meatpacking industry plants since 1999. [73] Much of the evidence involved night shift cleaners, most of them undocumented workers. OSHA documents dryly recorded what happened:

• “Cleaner killed when hog-splitting saw is activated.”
• “Cleaner dies when he is pulled into a conveyer and crushed.”
• “Cleaner loses legs when a worker activates the grinder in which he is standing.”
• “Cleaner loses hand when he reaches under a boning table to hose meat from chain.”
• “Hand crushed in rollers when worker tries to catch a scrubbing pad that he dropped.”
• In all, the report concluded, nearly one hundred night shift cleaning workers in the state meatpacking industry suffered amputations and crushings of body parts in the period (1999-2003) reviewed by the investigative team. These severe injuries are just the tip of an iceberg of thousands of lacerations, contusions, burns, fractures, punctures and other forms of what the medical profession calls traumatic injuries, distinct from the endemic phenomenon in the industry of repetitive stress or musculoskeletal injury.

Eric Schlosser documented a similarly gruesome string of deaths in the mid-1990s:

At the Monfort plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, Richard Skala was beheaded by a dehiding machine. Carlos Vincente . . . was pulled into the cogs of a conveyer belt at an Excel plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and torn apart. Lorenzo Marin, Sr. fell from the top of a skinning machine . . . struck his head on the concrete floor of an IBP plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, and died. . . . Salvador Hernandez-Gonzalez had his head crushed by a pork-loin processing machine at an IBP plant in Madison, Nebraska. At a National Beef plant in Liberal, Kansas, Homer Stull climbed into a blood collection tank to clean it, a filthy tank thirty feet high. Stull was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes. Two coworkers climbed into the tank and tried to rescue him. All three men died.

Jeff Tietz, “Boss Hog – Pork’s Dirty Secret: The nation’s top hog producer is also one of America’s worst polluters,” Rolling Stone, 16 December 2006:

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

Michael Moss, “The Burger That Shattered Her Life,” New York Times, 3 October 2009:

Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, thought she had a stomach virus. The aches and cramping were tolerable that first day, and she finished her classes.

Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed.

Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.

“I ask myself every day, ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why from a hamburger?’ ”Ms. Smith said. In the simplest terms, she ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance whose rules and risks are not widely known.

Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.
[...]
“Ground beef is not a completely safe product,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bender, a food safety expert at the University of Minnesota who helped develop systems for tracing E. coli contamination. He said that while outbreaks had been on the decline, “unfortunately it looks like we are going a bit in the opposite direction.”

Food scientists have registered increasing concern about the virulence of this pathogen since only a few stray cells can make someone sick, and they warn that federal guidance to cook meat thoroughly and to wash up afterward is not sufficient. A test by The Times found that the safe handling instructions are not enough to prevent the bacteria from spreading in the kitchen.

Cargill, whose $116.6 billion in revenues last year made it the country’s largest private company, declined requests to interview company officials or visit its facilities.
[...]
The meat industry treats much of its practices and the ingredients in ground beef as trade secrets. While the Department of Agriculture has inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also guards those secrets. Federal records released by the department through the Freedom of Information Act blacked out details of Cargill’s grinding operation that could be learned only through copies of the documents obtained from other sources. Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets.

Within weeks of the Cargill outbreak in 2007, U.S.D.A. officials swept across the country, conducting spot checks at 224 meat plants to assess their efforts to combat E. coli. Although inspectors had been monitoring these plants all along, officials found serious problems at 55 that were failing to follow their own safety plans.

“Every time we look, we find out that things are not what we hoped they would be,” said Loren D. Lange, an executive associate in the Agriculture Department’s food safety division.

In the weeks before Ms. Smith’s patty was made, federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture.”

In the end, though, the agency accepted Cargill’s proposal to increase its scrutiny of suppliers. That agreement came early last year after contentious negotiations, records show. When Cargill defended its safety system and initially resisted making some changes, an agency official wrote back: “How is food safety not the ultimate issue?”

Southern Poverty Law Center, Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry, November 2011:

Farmworkers

• There are an estimated 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers employed in the United States. The federal government estimates that 60 percent of farmworkers are undocumented immigrants; farmworker advocates say the percentage is far higher.
• The National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) published by the Department of Labor reports that about 22% of the farmworker population is female. Thus, there are an estimated 630,000 women engaged in farm work in the United States.
• The average personal income of female crop workers is $11,250, compared to $16,250 for male crop workers.
• A mere 8 percent of farmworkers report being covered by employer-provided health insurance, a rate that dropped to 5 percent for farmworkers who are employed seasonally and not year-round.
• According to the U.S. Department of Labor, farmworkers suffer from higher rates of toxic chemical injuries and skin disorders than any other workers in the country. The children of migrant farmworkers, also, have higher rates of pesticide exposure than the general public.
• Each year, there are an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 cases of physician-diagnosed pesticide poisoning among U.S. farmworkers, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
• Farmworkers are not covered by workers’ compensation laws in many states. They are not entitled to overtime pay under federal law. On smaller farms and in short harvest seasons, they are not entitled to the federal minimum wage. They are excluded from many state health and safety laws.
• Because of special exemptions for agriculture, children as young as 10 may work in the fields. Also, many states exempt farmworker children from compulsory education laws.

[...]
Sexual Abuse On the Job

• In a recent study of 150 women of Mexican descent working in the fields in California’s Central Valley, 80% said they had experienced sexual harassment. That compares to roughly half of all women in the U.S. workforce who say they have experienced at least one incident.
• While investigating the sexual harassment of California farmworker women in the mid-1990s, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that “hundreds, if not thousands, of women had to have sex with supervisors to get or keep jobs and/or put up with a constant barrage of grabbing and touching and propositions for sex by supervisors.”
• A 1989 article in Florida indicates that sexual harassment against farmworker women was so pervasive that women referred to the fields as the “green motel.” Similarly, the EEOC reports that women in California refer to the fields as “fil de calzon,” or the fields of panties, because sexual harassment is so widespread.
• Due to the many obstacles that confront farmworker women — including fear, shame, lack of information about their rights, lack of available resources to help them, poverty, cultural and/or social pressures, language access and, for some, their status as undocumented immigrants — few farmworker women ever come forward to seek justice for the sexual harassment and assault that they have suffered.
• In interviews for this report, virtually all women reported that sexual violence in the workplace is a serious problem.

Center for Disease Control:

Each year, 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick from and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.

Personally, I think pink slime is among the least of our problems right now. Relatively speaking, of course.

• According to the Commonwealth Fund, Florida ranks 47th in the US for children’s health care.
• Just recently, a budget passed by the state Senate seeks to cut $146 million from Medicaid pediatrics funding. As noted by the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida, two out of three children in Florida are insured by the program.
• Florida public schools are still allowed to paddle children as a disciplinary measure. In the year 2010 alone some 3,661 students students were paddled as punishment in Florida, although the number is declining.
• Last year, the GOP-controlled state legislature rejected $52 million in federal funds to combat child abuse and neglect because the funds were made available under the Affordable Care Act.
• Also last year, the Florida legislature passed SB 2112, allowing “sheriffs to house young people in adult jails without the protections developed over the years for children in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice.”
• Until a 2010 Supreme Court ruling ended the practice, Florida allowed persons convicted as minors for offenses other than murder to be locked up for life without parole. Of the 129 juvenile offenders who were given such sentences, 77 were in Florida while the rest were in only 10 other states.

“The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone.”

–Norman Podhoretz, Jewish neoconservative racist and father of John Podhoretz, writing in Commentary

The latest plot was exposed when the Government received a tip from the U.S. non-governmental organization (NGO) Invisible Children regarding the location of Patrick Komekech. He was wanted by the security services for impersonating LRA leaders to extort money from government officials, NGOs, and Acholi leaders. Komekech is purportedly a former child soldier abducted by the LRA. Invisible Children had featured him in its documentaries. Invisible Children reported that Komekech had been in Nairobi and had recently reappeared in Gulu, where he was staying with the NGO. Security organizations jumped on the tip and immediately arrested Komekech on March 5. He had a satellite telephone and other gadgets, which were confiscated when security forces picked him up.
[...]
Bigombe, who has known Komekech for the past ten years, said Komekech had confessed to being part of a new anti-government movement in the north. Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) officers confirmed Komekech’s confession and said that the new group, which was previously called the Uganda’ Peoples Front (UPF), is now the PPF. Its objective is to overthrow the Ugandan Government. Komekech reportedly gave the locations of several arms caches in Pader District with a total of 600 weapons. The group had begun recruiting throughout the north, from West Nile to Pader. Komekech named several former LRA combatants that had been integrated into the Ugandan Peoples Defense Forces (UPDF) as members of the new group as well as other civilian participants. The security services have been slowly arresting these individuals and interrogating them. The detainees have been kept separately, but all are reporting similar information about the group, its intentions, and its financiers, according to Bigombe.
[...]
A Gulu-based “journalist”, Patrick Otim, also was picked up, according to press reports. Gulu Resident District Commissioner Walter Ochora told P/E Chief that Otim is not a journalist, but an administrative officer at a local radio station.
[...]
P/E Chief asked a Chieftancy of Military Intelligence (CMI) officer on June 9 if the Government was planning to charge Komekech and the others in court. The officer replied that Komekech and the other low-level operatives will be released. They allegedly have been cooperative and agreed to reveal publicly the names of their supporters in the diaspora. The officer said that CMI was waiting for President Museveni to approve the plan to publicly “shame” the diaspora.

New Vision, 6 March 2012:

ONE of the 13 people accused of plotting to overthrow the government of President Yoweri Museveni yesterday ‘disowned’ his confession statement, claiming torture, intimidation, and threats to his life.

John Otim was giving his testimony at the High Court in Kampala when court opted for a trial within a trial after the defence lawyers objected to the testimony of prosecution witness number 16 Joel Loum.

The defence lawyers argued that Otim could not own the Charge and Caution statement, claiming it was pre-recorded at Gulu Military barracks in 2009 between June 2, and 8.They stated that it was later taken to Gulu Police station, from where Otim was forced to sign it on June 9.

The other accused are Alex Okot Langwen,the son of former chief of the Uganda National Liberation Army Lt Gen Bazilio Olara-Okello, journalist Patrick Otim, Patrick Komakech(peasant), and Patrick Otim(student).
[...]
Otim, 35, claimed that he was arrested on June 2, 2009, when on his way to school at Comboni Vocational School in Gulu. He asserted that plain-clothed armed men bundled him onto a double cabin truck, blindfolded him, and sped off. He said he later realised that he was at the military barracks.

Otim identified his purported tormenters only as Capt. Okello, and Lt Adupango, saying he was threatened with death and told to reveal the location of the guns hidden in Oyuku hills in Latanya village.

“Captain Okello removed his pistol, forced it inside my mouth and one of my canine teeth broke. He told me that he would kill me like he did to Opon Acak, and that no one would claim for me” Otim asserted.

He dismissed as untrue allegations that on June 7, 2009, he led investigators to the scene where the guns were hidden.Otim said an army man, whom he identified only as Omony, located the area using an arms detecting device. He said he was later ordered to hold two guns, and then photographed.

Accordingly, the judge is expected to give his ruling today in light of the allegations raised by Otim.

[Some context on Invisible Children here and here.]

¶ 447.      The Commission notes that the Misratan thuwar [i.e. anti-Qaddafi forces] have been open about their treatment of the Tawerghans. In one interview with the Commission, a thuwar said he thought that Tawerghans deserved “to be wiped off the face of the planet”.

¶ 448.      Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph, an officer in charge of thuwar in Tawergha said, “we gave them thirty days to leave…We said if they didn’t go, they would be conquered and imprisoned. Every single one of them has left, and we will never allow them to come back”. The same officer continued, “[t]he military council will decide what will happen to the buildings, But over our dead bodies will the Tawerghas return:”, with another commander stating to the reporter, “Tawergha no longer exists.”

¶ 449.      Mamoud Jibril, then the NTC Prime Minister, in a speech at a public meeting in the Misrata town hall, was quoted as saying “Regarding Tawergha, my own viewpoint is that nobody has the right to interfere in this matter except the people of Misrata.”

¶ 450.      In meetings with the First Deputy to the Prime Minister and the Adviser to the Prime Minister in January 2012, it was indicated to the Commission that the Libyan government was trying to resolve the “Tawergha problem” but had not yet been successful. The impasse was attributed, by those interviewed, to the crimes of rape they believed had solely been committed by Tawerghan men. Those interviewed appeared not to be aware that, according to the Commission’s investigations, confessions of rape from detained Tawerghan men had been elicited through use of torture.

¶ 451.      In its meeting with the Libyan Minister of the Interior, the Commission was informed the issue of Tawergha had “historical, cultural and political dimensions” and that most Tawerghans participated in the Qadhafi forces attack on Misrata. The Minister stated that the Tawergha forces committed rapes and killings in Misrata and indicated that while Libyans would forgive “blood crimes” they will never forgive “honour crimes”. The Minister indicated that “no force on earth can return people of Tawergha to their town under the current circumstances”, and suggested that the Libyan state resettle them elsewhere in Libya with proper educational, health care and other facilities.

The document, titled “General License No. 15″ comes amidst concerns that the Obama administration intends to beef up the prosecution of intellectual copyright infringement. It has recently indicted the large filesharing website Megaupload and intends to expand the Justice Department unit dedicated to such prosecutions. According to Reuters (17 February 2012):

The Justice Department asked Congress for $5 million to hire 14 new employees, including nine attorneys, to focus on intellectual property crimes. [...] “We’ve had an increase in the number of cases that we’re dealing with in IP (intellectual property),” Deputy Attorney General James Cole told reporters. “We think this is an area that really needs some focus and some efforts and increases in the future.” [...] If the budget request is approved by Congress, the team would grow to 34. The entertainment industry has been pushing the administration to do more, and efforts to pass new legislation to crack down further on such crimes has stalled.

It’s anyone’s best guess why the Obama administration chose the embargo against Syria–of all things–to apply an IP enforcement loophole. According to the US State Department’s 2011 Investment Climate Statement for the country:

Violations of intellectual property rights (IPR) are rampant in Syria. Patent, trademark, and copyright laws are all inadequate. As a result, Syria provides minimal protection for local producers and almost no protection for foreign producers.

Jewish Press, 19 Jan. 2012:

MK Yaakov “Katzeleh” Katz (National Union) [...] has submitted to the Knesset a new piece of legislation that would allow Israel to annex the portion of Judea and Samaria [sic] known as Area C from the Oslo 2 agreement, signed in 1995.

Approximately 350,000 Israeli citizens live in Area C, a portion of Judea and Samaria [sic] which is currently under Israeli military control. The Israeli citizens who live in Area C currently do not enjoy the same legal status and rights that they would receive if the area was annexed. There are also between 56,000 and 150,000 Arabs living in Area C. Knesset Diaspora Affairs Committee Chairman MK Danny Danon (Likud) and Knesset House Committee Chairman Yariv Levin (Likud) have signed on as co-sponsors of Katzeleh’s bill.

Outside of the Knesset, Pinchas Polonsky is leading a new peace initiative involving the annexation of Area C which will target American politicians. The plan calls for promoting the strategy to Republican congressman and presidential candidates and would lead to a speech at the Republican National Convention in August. There are now more than a dozen Congressmen who have signed on to the objective.

This, of course, comes on the heels of multiple GOP presidential contenders asserting that Palestinian people do not exist, a bill proposed by a Republican representative in the House that supports “Israel’s right to annex Judea and Samaria in the event that the Palestinian Authority continues to press for unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations,” and an RNC resolution that appeared to endorse a one-state solution to the conflict. This news comes about six months after it was revealed that the World Likud organization had hired a prominent PR firm led by a member of the prominent Rubenstein PR dynasty that also does work for well known American figures such as Donald Trump and Alex Rodriguez. All signs point to a cynical alliance between the right-wings of both Israel and America to undermine the Obama’s administration’s (already watered down) position on Israeli colonization of the West Bank in addition to increased PR work in the US on the part of Israeli-based operatives.

Make no mistake about it: the Republican position on Palestine is outright ghoulish these days and the terrible specter of a Zionist pander-fest at the RNC that calls for the legalized theft of 62% of the West Bank is increasingly likely.

Apparently Newt Gingrich has been fear-mongering about UN Agenda 21 these days:

It’s a United Nations proposal to create a series of centralized planning provisions, where all of a sudden your local city government can’t do something because of some agreement they signed with some private group who are all committed basically to taking control of your private property and turning it into a publically controlled property. Everywhere I go in the country today, people, particularly the tea parties, are very worried about Agenda 21. It’s part of a general problem of United Nations and other international bureaucracies that are seeking to maintain an extra-constitutional control over us, and I reject that model totally. The United State is a sovereign country. The United Nations does not authorize anything for the United States, and the United Nations does not have any control of the United States, and we want to make sure that remains our core value as we go forward.

However, years ago, Gingrich apparently thought that a new “international bureaucracy” being created for environmental matters was a fine idea.

US Embassy in Paris, 14 Jun 2005, “French discuss UN reform issues with Newt Gingrich”:

[French diplomat Jean-Maurice] Ripert said that France also favored a universal UN environmental organization to address issues currently dealt with by 500 conventions and autonomous secretariats all over the world. He envisioned an environmental body similar to WIPO [World Intellectual Property Organization], having a small secretariat. Gingrich said that this was a good idea and that he would be interested in hearing more on France’s thoughts in this regard.

QUESTION: The Israeli Government has announced plans to actually encourage settlers to move into the West Bank and to begin – and also to begin a process that would – that could end up in legalizing what are now illegal outposts. I’m assuming that your position on both of these things hasn’t changed, so I’m wondering –

MR. TONER: You assume correctly.

QUESTION: Yeah.

MR. TONER: You know we’ve said multiple times –

QUESTION: What is it – can you maybe make it a little bit more clear, because it seems to be apparent that the Israelis, or at least Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government, don’t understand exactly what it is that you, as their prime benefactor and large – huge ally, want from them.

MR. TONER: Well, Matt, we’ve said this many times from this podium and from elsewhere that we view any move that would jeopardize getting these two parties back to the negotiating table, and indeed, we’ve obviously seen them back – face-to-face negotiations over the past couple of weeks – that we find those unconstructive and unhelpful.

QUESTION: And that would include what they have announced today?

MR. TONER: Yes, that would include that.

QUESTION: All right. So what is the consequence, then, for Israel for them continuing to defy – not only defy but really to do – not just to say no, we don’t agree with that, but then to actually actively –

MR. TONER: Well, again –

QUESTION: — oppose or actively take active steps that fly in the face of what you say is helpful?

MR. TONER: Well, again, we’re seeking clarity on what is actually being proposed here. We did have an initial round of direct talks in Jordan. Those talks have ended, but they did show signs of progress and we certainly want to see them continue. And these kinds of actions don’t help create the kind of atmosphere that are conducive to these talks continuing.

Now, David Hale is in the region. He’s going to have meetings in Amman as well as Jerusalem and Ramallah, and he’ll be back in Washington later this week. But – obviously, he’s there in his capacity, but also I think he’ll make some of these concerns – convey them to the Israeli Government.

QUESTION: Well, these concerns have been conveyed over and over and over to the Israelis. What is the consequence for them continuing to do this?

MR. TONER: Well, again, this is about getting them back to the negotiating table. And what we make clear is that whenever these kinds of actions take place, that they hamper that process.

QUESTION: So there is no consequence at all?

MR. TONER: Well, again, it’s not about carrots and sticks. What it’s about is trying to encourage these parties to get back to the negotiating table.

QUESTION: Why not? It’s about carrots and sticks everywhere else in the world. Why isn’t it about carrots and sticks here?

MR. TONER: In this case, it’s in both their –

QUESTION: What are you doing –

MR. TONER: — it’s in both parties’ best interests to continue negotiations towards a comprehensive settlement.

QUESTION: But the actions of at least – one could argue the actions of both parties, but in this series of questions, which is about the announcements by the Israeli Government –

MR. TONER: Right.

QUESTION: — they are not acting in the best interests of that, according to you.

MR. TONER: Again –

QUESTION: Correct? So what is the consequence of that? The consequence is they don’t get back to talks that they apparently don’t seem to want?

MR. TONER: Well, again, you’ll have to ask the Israeli Government what their intent is here. But you’re absolutely right that this has to be something that both sides want to pursue and to do so in a meaningful and committed fashion. And again, we are very outspoken when we see actions by either side that we believe hampers the chance for these parties to get back into direct negotiations. It’s certainly – as we’ve said many times, it’s in both of their interests to be in direct negotiations.

QUESTION: All right. Two more very quick ones –

MR. TONER: Yeah. Sure.

QUESTION: — and then I’m done. You talk about meaningful and committed fashion. Are the actions of the Israeli Government something that you would consider meaningful and committed to be – is what they’re doing, is that something that you consider to be acting in a meaningful and [...] committed fashion?

MR. TONER: Thanks, Andy. Again, I think I’ve been very clear that actions by either side that we view as unconstructive to the process –

QUESTION: So they are not acting in a meaningful and committed fashion?

MR. TONER: Well, again, we have had talks in Jordan over the past few weeks that we believe offered a good start. We want to see those talks continue. David Hale is in the region. He’s consulting with all sides as well as the Jordanians.

QUESTION: Mark, that’s a great answer to a question, but it’s not the question I asked. Is Israel asking in a meaningful – acting in a meaningful and committed fashion toward getting a peace – towards encouraging these talks?

MR. TONER: Again, we’ve said that these kinds of actions are not constructive.

QUESTION: I think it’s a yes-or-no question.

MR. TONER: And I’m going to answer you the way I’m answering you, which is that it’s not constructive.

QUESTION: It’s not constructive, all right.

[...]

QUESTION: — quick follow-up on this. Now, you keep saying that the path to statehood is through direct negotiations. Seeing how the settlement processing increased by 20 percent in 2011 and with today’s announcement, and in fact, since the beginning of this month we are likely to see an increase if they continue at this pace – like a 40 percent increase in settlement activities. So what incentive is there for the Palestinians to go into these negotiations to sort of get a state that is viable – as you keep saying – that is viable and contiguous and independent and sovereign?

MR. TONER: Well, the motivation should be clear, and that is the sooner they sit down with Israel and work through these issues in a comprehensive fashion so that we can get a clear way forward in terms of borders, then the sooner they have that comprehensive settlement and that statehood that they so desire.

QUESTION: But isn’t there a pattern that every time there is some sort of a negotiation and, in fact, a visit by a high-level U.S. official and so on to Israel, that the Israelis always counter by announcing a new settlement and increase the settlements and so on?

MR. TONER: Again, you’re asking me to speak to the motivations behind this decision. I don’t know.

QUESTION: Okay. So you talk about incentives for the Palestinians, but do you have any kind of disincentive for the increased Israeli settlement activities?

MR. TONER: Well, we’ve always been clear that – and Israelis themselves have commented that the status quo is unsustainable. So that’s –

QUESTION: So then the expression of anger and perhaps a little pouting, there is nothing that you can do?

MR. TONER: I disagree. David Hale is right now in the region. He is consulting with our partners as well as the parties. And we’re committed to getting them back into direct negotiations.

QUESTION: Can you tell us the last time that your position that was made very clearly to the Israelis did have an impact on stemming the settlement activities?

MR. TONER: Again, we are very outspoken when we see these kinds of actions by either side. We convey those to the Israelis, but you’re asking me to –

QUESTION: But you expressed a little recollection on that –

MR. TONER: — elaborate on some kind of actions that I can’t.

QUESTION: In the last 12 months, you have not been able to sort of dissuade the Israelis from settlement activities. Are you aware of any time that you were able to persuade them?

MR. TONER: Again, Said, it is a question better directed to the Israeli Government. What we’re trying to do without preconditions, we’re trying to get the parties back to the negotiating table, and we’ve had a good start.

To summarize: Israel spits in the face of the US State Department and the Palestinian Authority with the clear intent of sabotaging any future Palestinian state and all the US does is wag its finger in mild disapproval and fetishize the “negotiating table” as the end-all-be-all solution. There is–of course–no suggestion that the US could even threaten a reduction in the massive amounts of aid shoveled into Israel’s coffers. It’s not clear how simply getting the parties back to the negotiating table is going to solve anything when Israel is hellbent on colonizing the West Bank. If anything, it puts the onus on the Palestinians to make even more concessions and passively allow the IDF to enclose them into smaller and smaller ghettos with the collaboration of PA security forces.

In the 1970s, guided by Kamal Adham, Saudi Arabia’s chief of intelligence, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. The United States, accustomed to working with Saudi Arabia, was untroubled by the rise of Islamism in Egypt. In fact, Washington was so eager to bring Egypt over the US side in the Cold War that policy makers, diplomats, and intelligence officers viewed Sadat’s restoration of the Islamic right benignly or tacitly encouraged it.
[...]
Concurrent with the growth of the Islamic right in Egypt, Sadat helped engineer a dramatic expansion of America’s power in the Middle East. Under Nasser, Egypt was a nation at odds with the United States. Twenty thousand Soviet troops, technicians, and advisers backed Egypt’s armed force; a war of attrition was under way along the Egypt-Israel border; and Egypt and the United States lacked even normal diplomatic ties. But Sadat established a covert relationship with Adham, the CIA, and Henry Kissinger, the US national security adviser. In 1971, within a year of assuming control, Sadat ousted the Egyptian left from the government, and in 1972 he stunned Moscow by expelling Soviet forces. After the 1973 Ramadan War–waged in concert with Saudi Arabia and organized around Islamic themes rather than Arab nationalism–Egypt and the United States reestablished ties. [...] By 1980, Egypt was America’s leading Arab ally, engaged in supporting the US jihad in Afghanistan and providing a base for US influence in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. For even the most cynical US Middle East specialists, the change in Egypt, from foe to ally, was dizzying.
[...]
Sadat consolidated his shaky rule by unleashing the power of the Islamic right as a hammer against the left, with the generous financial assistance of Saudi Arabia. Though Nasser had suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood and fought to reduce the power of right-wing Islamism in Egypt, Sadat welcomes the exiled Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt, reinvigorated the organization, and built its institutional presence within the universities, professional associations, and the media. Before Sadat, the Islamists were for the most part fringe-dwelling, marginalized radicals; after Sadat, the Muslim Brotherhood and its even more radical youth wing were part of mainstream discourse in Egypt.

The massive growth in immigration pressures from Mexico in the 1990s was not a failure of NAFTA, but an inevitable consequence. The way we’ll know that CAFTA is promoting economic development in Central America and the Dominican Republic (the scope of the treaty) will be when we see the same increase in immigration pressures. Counterintuitive as it might seem, economic development, especially agricultural modernization, always sets people on the move, by consolidating small farms into larger, more productive operations. These excess farmers then move to cities, where they get manufacturing or service-sector jobs.

But the fact that development cuts peasants loose from the land and compels them to move to cities doesn’t tell us whose cities they’re moving to. Immigration pressure, after all, is not the same as actual immigration. The problem with NAFTA was not that it promoted trade between the United States and Mexico but that neither country did anything meaningful to make sure that the excess Mexican peasantry moved to Mexico’s cities instead of ours. And CAFTA might actually create proportionately greater immigration pressures, because most of the agreement’s impact will be to make our exports more competitive there, with some 80 percent of imports from the CAFTA countries already entering our country duty-free.
[...]
If there is one lesson to be learned from NAFTA it is that free-trade agreements must be accompanied by muscular immigration controls, especially if they are reached with countries that are nearby or already send a lot of immigrants here. If the experience of NAFTA is repeated, and the immigration pressures unleashed by CAFTA are allowed to flood into the United States, the case for future free-trade agreements will be undermined.
[...]
The equivalency between trade and immigration is false. Immigrants are people, after all, not just labor inputs. As Henry Simons, a free-market pioneer at the University of Chicago, wrote in 1948: “To insist that a free-trade program is logically or practically incomplete without free migration is either disingenuous or stupid. Free trade may and should raise living standards everywhere . . . Free immigration would level standards, perhaps without raising them anywhere.”

The way forward, then, is clear: More trade, less immigration.

The brilliance of conservative thinking in its glory can be seen right here.

Of course, there is no mention of the role played by US-subsidized agriculture in flooding Mexican markets and pushing farmers off their land. Or of the widespread use of hazardous and expensive chemicals on the “larger, more productive operations” Mexico was left with. Or of the massive food insecurity reduced domestic food production has led to.

You also have to love the perverse restrictionist conclusion reached from the (correct) assertion that immigrants are people and not mere inputs. Does Mr. Krikorian really think that goods, services and capital should be given full freedom of movement but that human beings shouldn’t? Does he even realize that he is reaching the opposite conclusion any decent person would reach? The granting of rights and protections to multinational investments and traded goods that impoverished peasants can only dream of is one of the cruel ironies of the current global order.

And don’t even get me started on the callous description of hard-working and dispossessed farm workers as “excess Mexican peasantry.”

Perhaps the sociopathic sentiments expressed in this editorial are an honest look at the mind of the privileged First Worlder. Just as the slaveholder had to rationalize the chaining of human beings to their plantations, the First World must collectively rationalize its decision to deny sanctuary to those who have been disenfranchised by global capitalism. Keeping Third Worlders in the Third World increases the pool of desperate shanty towners and slum dwellers who have no choice but to work in industrial sweatshops or cash crop plantations to meet their daily needs.

These views, that the pauperization of Mexicans was a necessary development for efficient production, that the unrestrained international flow of capital–despite being an inherently disruptive and destabilizing force–is a net good for society, and that only the flow of newly destitute human beings must be restrained, are essentially motivated by social sadism and craven self-interest. These two motives also reside at the very foundations of the global neoliberal order.

More on Mark Krikorian can be read here and here.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the advocacy group, said CAIR recently called on the FBI to investigate threats targeting mosques posted on an anti-Islam blog called “Bare Naked Islam.”

One comment on the site read: “Throw 10 Molotov cocktails into these mosques and burn them down,” according to Hooper. By Monday, the comment appeared to have been taken down by blog operator WordPress.com.

An example of a particularly vile thread on this site from May 2011 can be found in the Google Cache. The thread is started with a post containing links to news articles describing indiscriminate mob violence against Muslim immigrants in Greece with the author voicing approval. Many of the comments openly call for such tactics against Muslims to be exported to other countries such as the US. An example:

I think we should applaud Greece and use them as an example and start throwing bombs in Mosques. I really don’t CAIR what they think they shouldn’t be here so their rights don’t matter. Treat me as you want to be treated.

This thread is notable because the webmaster behind the website openly calls for riots against Muslims around the world.

A poster named “Shawn” commented that:

It’s about time! Maybe this is the start of an ‘Anti-Islam Summer’. Now that’s something to celebrate and get behind.

The webmaster “barenakedislam” then responded:

Shawn I like that, a worldwide anti-Islam summer. Riots in the streets in every country in which Muslims have invaded.

So, in case this site tries to defend itself by claiming that it’s only a “few rogue commenters” who are inciting violence, it should be noted that commenters supporting violence are in the majority and that they include the owner of the site.