Category: Uncategorized

Is it news when police photograph and videotape demonstrations?

Apparently for American editors and reporters, making that news judgement depends on where the demonstration occurs and what nationality the police are.

When a hundred artists gathered outside a Beijing courtroom in mid-November to protest the jailing of artist Wu Yuren, who had earlier been beaten by police and jailed because he had gone to a police station to file a complaint against a landlord, the New York Times ran an article by reporter Andrew Jacobs which pointedly noted that police officers had videotaped the crowd, and then quoted a demonstrator, artist Dou Bu, as saying, “I was scared to come out here today, but you have to face your fears.”

But a week earlier, when several hundred backers of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black journalist on Pennsylvania’s death row for the killing of a police officer, demonstrated in front of a Third Circuit federal court building in Philadelphia, where a three-judge panel was rehearing an argument on his sentence, and local police not only videotaped the officially sanctioned rally, but also aggressively photographed and taped a group of journalists waiting to be allowed into the courtroom early, there was no mention of their action in any media, local or national.

Sergeant Salvatore Giunta will receive a Congressional Medal of Honor this week for bravery under fire in October 2007. At great risk, he assaulted a hill and rescued a gravely wounded comrade being dragged away by an insurgent. He will be the first living soldier to receive the medal since the war in Vietnam.

The man Giunta rescued did not survive, and the US forces eventually abandoned the Korengal Valley where the fighting took place. Giunta, 25, saw his actions this way:

“I ran to the front because that is where he (the wounded comrade) was. I didn’t try to be a hero and save anyone.”

As for the ten-year-old war in Afghanistan, he said, “I have sweat more, cried more, bled more in this country than in my own. These people won’t leave this valley. They have been here far before I could fathom an Afghanistan.”

Giunta’s generous modesty and the strong bond he has with his fellow soldiers is the classic stuff of war legend. He’s an archetypal national war hero from the mold of Gary Cooper playing Sergeant York of WWI fame.

Sergeant Salvatore Giunta

Sergeant Giunta deserves to be honored – as do many young soldiers like him whose heroism under fire may go unknown or unrecognized beyond their unit.

Meanwhile, back “in the world” — as the home front was known to soldiers in Vietnam — politics in America continues along the tragic and absurd course it has been on for too long.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, God must love veterans; He makes so many of them.

We just finished “celebrating” Veteran’s Day earlier this month, complete with the usual parades and the show of flags, but it’s worth remembering that Nov. 11 wasn’t always a day for blindly glorifying the military.

When November 11 was initially established as a US holiday, it was done by an Act of Congress to commemorate the cease-fire established on the Western front between the forces of Germany and those of the French, British and Americans. The name of the holiday–Remembrance Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries, Armistice Day in the US–was only changed in America to Veterans Day after the Korean War, when the US was well on the way to being transformed into a permanent war machine.

World War I dead litter a road

The three-decades-long murder case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has sat in solitary in a cramped cell on Pennsylvania’s death row for 28 years fighting his conviction and a concerted campaign by the national police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, to execute him, was back in court Tuesday, with a three-judge federal Appeals Court panel reconsidering its 2008 decision backing the vacating of his death sentence, on orders of the US Supreme Court.

Many Americans simply assume that the government and politicians lie when they are talking about things like cutting taxes, or eliminating waste. But somehow, we tend to believe official government reports about things like economic “growth” or unemployment rates, or even cost-of-living increases.

The truth, sadly, is that the government is lying about these things too.

Take jobs and unemployment. Right after the election, the Obama administration’s Bureau of Labor Statistics proudly trumpeted that the economy had added 151,000 new jobs in October. President Obama, about to head off to India, a land where American jobs go to die, made it sound like maybe the American economy had finally turned a corner. The news led to a jump in the stock market and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, because finally, we had a number that was greater than the 100,000 new jobs that we have been repeatedly told are needed “just to keep pace with the new workers who join the labor force every month.”

This huge and confusing thing we call the United States of America is in the midst of a major epochal reality check, not your usual, garden-variety recession. The roots of today’s crises go back at least 60 years or more.

Politics in such a crisis state is naturally volatile, swinging this way, then that way, affected by fear and pride and all the usual human emotions. Like the stock market, electoral politics operates with rapid, shifting en-mass movements like a school of little fish into which one throws a rock.

At times like these, it’s interesting to look at what’s not being said – the large elephants in the room going unrecognized. To talk about these things would take courage, self-awareness and humility, like the hard stuff shrinks and counselors try to get troubled patients to look at.

In our current climate of fear, courage is too often translated into military bravery and the capacity to do violence, and humility is virtually against the law, on par with being a “socialist,” a “communist” or a “terrorist.” Or else humility is seen as what the Tea Party has just done to the Democrats, which is humiliation.

Hours after San Francisco Bay Area radio show host J.R. Valrey screened his documentary film about police brutality at a university in Philadelphia daily newspapers in that city carried articles about two separate lawsuits filed against Philly police alleging brutality.

Those lawsuits, filed respectively by a state legislator and a high-profile media commentator (both of whom are black) didn’t surprise Valrey. His travels across America screening his film highlighted for him – again – a reality that governmental officials constantly reject: police brutality is a widespread scourge.

“Police brutality is definitely not ‘isolated incidents’ as officials always say after each new killing or beating by police,” said Valrey, host of the Block Report, a program aired on KPFA-FM, the Pacifica station in the Bay Area.

The Democrats were blown out of the water on Nov. 2.

But it’s not because of the Tea Party, or because of a resurgent Republican majority.

The Democrats deserved to lose because they have long since abandoned whatever principles they had, and more important, they’ve pissed on their most important supporters–the left, real liberals, African Americans, women, unionized workers, and workers in general. So I say hooray, all those groups have struck back!

Barack Obama set this disaster for the party and his presidency in motion before he was even sworn in as president, by choosing Wall Street hacks as his economic advisers in the midst of the worst economic crisis in 75 years, and by choosing as his key political adviser Rahm Emanuel, who famously called progressive critics “fucking retarded,” and who, when warned that the GM bailout plan would hurt the United Autoworkers members who worked there, also famously said “Fuck the UAW!”
Democrats got clobbered for a good reason

Santa Cruz — “Are you planning to vote on Tuesday?” I asked.  The food checker at our local natural food store was cheerful and friendly.  But she was a little befuddled by the question. 

“I don’t know where to vote,” she confessed.
 
“Have you gotten your sample ballot yet?” I asked. 

“No,” she replied.  “I don’t think so.”  She had voted some time back.  Maybe it was for Obama.  She wasn’t sure.  But she couldn’t remember where she had voted, or if it was an absentee ballot.

Election or reefer madness?

Oh, what to do about unemployment?

Try as it might to pump money into the economy and spur hiring, the Fed’s policy ain’t working. Don’t blame Keynes. For the stim to be effective, the cash needs to get to small businesses: the primary source of jobs in our country. Trouble is, the Fed’s counting on banks to circulate the extraordinarily low interest rate money it’s spouting.

The banks are hoarding the dough. In a recent New York Times article, Richard H. Clarida, a Columbia University economist, confirms that “bank lending, much of it to small and medium-size enterprises, has collapsed to an extent unprecedented in previous business cycles and continues to decline more than a year into recovery.”

As a small business owner myself, I can vouch for that.

Rather than take steps to ease the blockage, Fed Chair Ben S. Bernanke’s answer is to shove even more cash into our bloated system, as if making economic foie gras. (It kind of puts a new twist on the pejorative “pig”.) On October 19th, Times reporter Sewell Chan wrote that the Fed is adopting a “radical” move to lower long-term interest rates in a desperate attempt to foster employment. These moves echo Bush era policies that hyped the economy with a potent combo of low interest rates and easy credit. But there’s no easy credit — in fact, far from it.

Ex-Lax for Bankers?