Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Detroit: An American Crisis

Lawrence Porter and Naomi Spencer. "Social crisis in Detroit: A special report"

Detroit, historically known as the auto capital of the world, has been transformed into the biggest poor city in America, according to the US Census Bureau, with an official poverty rate of 31.4 percent. Detroit has earned this designation several times over the past 30 years as the auto industry destroyed tens of thousands of decent paying jobs.

This once booming city of 2 million has lost more than half of its population, now standing at 900,000, with the exodus accelerating yearly. In some areas only the poorest people remain and the tax and employment bases have collapsed. As a result of the decline, Detroit has the highest high school dropout rate of any big city in the country—over 50 percent. It also has one of the highest unemployment rates in the US and is listed among the top 10 cities in home foreclosures. The city also has recently been determined to have the highest rate of families needing food assistance.

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Jada Browning, an out-of-work waitress and mother of three, told the WSWS, “It’s crazy. You either walk or put money in your car so that you can get a job.” She said that food prices were so high, utility bills just had to wait, and gas was too expensive for her to purchase a full tank for her van. “I haven’t been able to fill it up in so long I couldn’t tell you anymore,” she said. “You know, I’m scrounging for $20-$30, and that is just enough to pick my son up from school and go put in a couple of [job] applications. It is just hard.”

Substantial sections of Detroit’s population do not even have vehicles and must find other means of transportation. In fact, according to the US Census Bureau, 21.9 percent of households—more than one in five—do not possess a car. This places an enormous constraint on quality of life for residents who must travel across the sprawling metro area for work, food, school, and other basic obligations.

Detroit is the most expensive city to own and operate a car, according to Runzheimer International, a management-consulting company based in Wisconsin that specializes in employee reimbursement costs. Detroiters pay an average $5,894 for auto insurance alone each year. In all, operating expenses such as gas, tires, oil, maintenance and ownership costs such as insurance total $11,844 for city residents. Having a car is a major expense that is out of the question for many.

• • •



The decimation of auto industry compensation—the standard-setter for pay scale and benefits in many other sectors of industry, as well as the driver of the economy in the region—combined with cuts to public assistance programs have truly devastated working class living standards.

As the cost of living spirals, thousands of families now face a tremendous financial conundrum.

Poverty is pervasive in Detroit. In 2006, according to the federal Census Bureau, median household income in the city was $29,500. This figure is nearly $20,000 less than the median household income nationwide. Per capita income for the city was only $14,700 in 2006.

Such a low income cannot support a mortgage, a family’s basic food and transportation needs, childcare costs and other expenses. As a result, thousands of families turn to emergency government assistance and charity.

Statewide, more than 1.25 million people now receive federal food assistance through the Food Stamp program—a record number and yet still far from the number of people who qualify for aid.

The Economy of Hunger

Mary Dejevsky, "There's no reason why the world should go hungry"

Overall, the assumption that a richer and more populous world will not be able to feed itself needs more critical examination than it is getting. Take the past: India and famine were once synonymous; that is no longer so. Take the present and the distorting demand for rice in Africa: the development of strains resistant to drought and salinity is well advanced, without resort to controversial genetically modified varieties. But the most effective remedy would be peace. Then take future concerns about farmland: huge acreages in Russia, Ukraine and parts of Central Asia are currently unfarmed, or farmed only inefficiently. As this land is bought up by investors and farmers – as is quietly happening – supply will surely rise to meet demand.

For all these reasons, I wonder whether the world is really running short of food. Or is it rather in thrall to a fevered market in which speculators gamble on stratospheric long-term price rises and so drive up prices today? When I press the button on my next online grocery order, I will think less about whether 1.3 billion Chinese are better nourished and more about whether a futures market in staple food crops belongs in a civilised world.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

So Much For the Ticking Time-Bomb Scenario

Scott Shane, "Inside a 9/11 Mastermind's Interrogation"

The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called "knuckledraggers."

Mr. Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers.

A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious. "They'd have long talks about religion," comparing notes on Islam and Mr. Martinez's Catholicism, one C.I.A. officer recalled. And, the officer added, there was one other detail no one could have predicted: "He wrote poems to Deuce's wife."

Mr. Martinez, who by then had interrogated at least three other high-level prisoners, would bring Mr. Mohammed snacks, usually dates. He would listen to Mr. Mohammed's despair over the likelihood that he would never see his children again and to his catalog of complaints about his accommodations.

"He wanted a view," the C.I.A. officer recalled.

The story of Mr. Martinez's role in the C.I.A.'s interrogation program, including his contribution to the first capture of a major figure in Al Qaeda, provides the closest look to date beneath the blanket of secrecy that hides the program from terrorists and from critics who accuse the agency of torture.

Beyond the interrogator's successes, this account includes new details on the campaign against Al Qaeda, including the text message that led to Mr. Mohammed's capture, the reason the C.I.A. believed his claim that he was the murderer of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the separate teams at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons of those who meted out the agony and those who asked the questions.

In the Hollywood cliché of Fox's "24," a torturer shouts questions at a bound terrorist while inflicting excruciating pain. The C.I.A. program worked differently. A paramilitary team put on the pressure, using cold temperatures, sleeplessness, pain and fear to force a prisoner to talk. When the prisoner signaled assent, the tormenters stepped aside. After a break that could be a day or even longer, Mr. Martinez or another interrogator took up the questioning.

Mr. Martinez's success at building a rapport with the most ruthless of terrorists goes to the heart of the interrogation debate. Did it suggest that traditional methods alone might have obtained the same information or more? Or did Mr. Mohammed talk so expansively because he feared more of the brutal treatment he had already endured?

Irony: A Politician Asks a Paid Liar About a Suspected (Known) Liar

WashingtonPost.com, "McClellan Testifies Before Congress" (June 20, 2008)

REP. ARTUR DAVIS, D-ALA.: Mr. Chairman, thank you. And, Ms. Baldwin, thank you for letting me slip ahead, because I have a plane to catch. So I thank you for that. Mr. McClellan, let me circle around a person whose name has come up a great deal today, and that's Karl Rove. You state in your book and you've reiterated to the committee several times that Mr. Rove encouraged you, allowed you and encouraged you to repeat a lie.

You've said a number of things about Mr. Rove. And you've indicated that you've known him for some period of time. So I want you to kind of give the committee some advice on how to deal with the little situation that we have with Mr. Rove right now. The committee has extended an invitation to Mr. Rove to do what you've done to come and appear under oath to allow anyone who wants to ask you questions to do so. Mr. Rove has, not surprisingly to you, I suspect, declined the invitation.

Mr. Rove has come back and he's said to the committee, well, I'm willing to talk, but only if there is no oath, only if there are no cameras present, only if there are no notes made of what I have to say. And let me just ask you, based on what you know of Mr. Rove, Mr. McClellan, does it, first of all, surprise you that Mr. Rove is seeking limitations on the manner and the circumstances in which he would appear before this committee?

MCCLELLAN: No, it doesn't surprise me. And I think it's probably part of an effort to stonewall the whole process.

DAVIS: I'm going to ask you two pointed questions. Would you trust Mr. Rove, if he were not under oath, to tell the truth?

MCCLELLAN: Well, based on my own experience, I could not say that I would.

DAVIS: And, in fact, if Mr. Rove were under oath, would you have complete confidence that he would tell the truth?

MCCLELLAN: I would hope that he would be willing to do that. And as you point out, it doesn't seem that he is willing to do that. But based on my own experiences, I have some concerns about that.

DAVIS: Mr. Rove did testify under oath before the grand jury investigating the leak a number of times, did he not? You have to answer orally.

MCCLELLAN: Yes. I'm sorry. Yes.

DAVIS: You don't believe he told the complete truth to the grand jury under oath when he did testify?

MCCLELLAN: I don't know. Since I haven't seen his testimony, I do not know.

DAVIS: You state at one point -- there was a very pointed sentence -- you say that Karl was only concerned about protecting himself from possible legal action and preventing his many critics from bringing him down. Do you believe, based on what you know of Mr. Rove, that he is capable of lying to protect himself from legal jeopardy, sir?

MCCLELLAN: Well, he certainly passed on false information -- or he lied to me. That's the only conclusion I can draw. So based on my own experience, you can appreciate where I'm coming from.

DAVIS: Do believe, based on what you know of this gentleman, your experiences with him, that he is capable of lying to protect himself from political embarrassment?

MCCLELLAN: I would have to say that he did in my situation, so the answer is yes.

Friday, June 20, 2008

SciAm Responds to Stein's Expelled

Michael Shermer, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed--Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin"

Anyone who thinks that scientists do not question Darwinism has never been to an evolutionary conference. At the World Summit on Evolution held in the Galapagos Islands during June 2005, for example, I witnessed a scientific theory rich in controversy and disputation. Paleontologist William Schopf of the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, explained that "We know the overall sequence of life's origin, that the origin of life was early, microbial and unicellular, and that an RNA world preceded today's DNA–protein world." He openly admitted, however, "We do not know the precise environments of the early earth in which these events occurred; we do not know the exact chemistry of some of the important chemical reactions that led to life; and we do not have any knowledge of life in a pre-RNA world."

Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden declared that Darwin's theory of sexual selection (a specific type of natural selection) is wrong in its claim that females choose mates who are more attractive and well-armed. Calling neo-Darwinians "bullies," the University of Massachusetts Amherst biologist Lynn Margulis pronounced that "neo-Darwinism is dead" and, echoing Darwin, she said, "It was like confessing a murder when I discovered I was not a neo-Darwinist." Why? Because, Margulis explained, "Random changes in DNA alone do not lead to speciation. Symbiogenesis—the appearance of new behaviors, tissues, organs, organ systems, physiologies or species as a result of symbiont interaction—is the major source of evolutionary novelty in eukaryotes: animals, plants and fungi."

Finally, Cornell University evolutionary theorist William Provine (featured in Expelled) presented 11 problems with evolutionary theory, including: "Natural selection does not shape an adaptation or cause a gene to spread over a population or really do anything at all. It is instead the result of specific causes: hereditary changes, developmental causes, ecological causes and demography. Natural selection is the result of these causes, not a cause that is by itself. It is not a mechanism."

Despite this public questioning of Darwinism (and neo-Darwinism), which I reported on in Scientific American, Schopf, Roughgarden, Margulis and Provine have not been persecuted, shunned, fired or even Expelled. Why? Because they are doing science, not religion. It is perfectly okay to question Darwinism (or any other "-ism" in science), as long as there is a way to test your challenge. Intelligent design creationists, by contrast, have no interest in doing science at all. In the words of mathematician and philosopher William Dembski of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a key witness in Stein's prosecution of evolution, from a 2000 speech at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Anaheim, Calif.: "Intelligent design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God…. And if there's anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ as the free reign of the spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view."


(Much appreciation to Paul Krugman.)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

The End of Accountability

Tim Rutten, "Torture began at the top "

Right-wing -- as opposed to conservative -- commentators already have begun branding the Senate investigation and parallel House inquiries as a witch hunt designed to discredit administration policies that they say have kept the country free from attack for seven years. (It's interesting, however, that even Pentagon spokespeople no longer hint that interrogations involving torture elicited information on planned attacks, let alone imminent ones.)

Part of the hysteria over all this that you see in places like the Wall Street Journal editorial pages stems from an anxiety that congressional inquiries, like that of Levin's committee, will lead to indictments and possibly even war crimes trials for officials who participated in the administration's deliberations over torture and the treatment of prisoners.

It's true that there are a handful of European rights activists and people on the lacy left fringe of American politics who would dearly like to see such trials, but actually pursuing them would be a profound -- even tragic -- mistake. Our political system works as smoothly as it does, in part, because we've never criminalized differences over policy. Since Andrew Jackson's time, our electoral victors celebrate by throwing the losers out of work -- not into jail cells.


(And, humbly presented, a retort.)

The Path to Darkness

Mark Benjamin, "A timeline to Bush government torture"

For years now, the Bush White House has claimed that the United States does not conduct torture. Prisoner abuse at places like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it has asserted, was an aberration -- the work of a few "bad apples" on the night shift. When the CIA used "enhanced" interrogation techniques such as waterboarding (simulated drowning), the abuse, according to Bush officials, did not add up to torture.

But as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture. Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and the CIA began an orchestrated effort to tap expertise from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, for use in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. The U.S. military's SERE training is designed to inoculate elite soldiers, sailors and airmen to torture, in the event of their capture, by an enemy that would violate the Geneva Conventions. Those service members are subjected to forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, slapping, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and, yes, in some cases, waterboarding.

SERE training has nothing to do with effective interrogation, according to military experts. Trained interrogators don't work in the program. Skilled, experienced interrogators, in fact, say that only a fool would think that the training could somehow be reverse-engineered into effective interrogation techniques ....

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

A Critic On Criticism

Charles Mudede, "The New Criticism"

The problem with criticism in all of its forms (art, film, literature) has been its susceptibility to the charge that, ultimately, it is nothing more than the product of someone’s opinion. Criticism is not truth; it is an opinion—or what the Greeks called doxa. We can all agree that opinions are no good.

Kant tried to solve this problem by universalizing subjectivity. He failed miserably. Marxist criticism tried solve this problem by politicizing the function art. The art object, according to this school of thought, was like any other consumer object and so could be analyzed as such. As Marx removed the fetish magic from consumer products in Das Capital, the Marxist critic attempted to remove the aura from the art object. Also, the Marxist critic tried to expose the art object’s idealogical function—to show that the art object was made to reinforce certain beliefs, ideas that supported the reproduction of a given society’s means of production.

But the problem with the Marxist approach is this: it cannot make sense of the fact that some art objects made in societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production are great (Blade Runner) and critical of the system from which they arise; and some art objects made in former socialist societies are very weak (Cement) and support the anti-capitalist system from which they arise ....

How to Earn Big Money

Andre Damon, "CEO pay sets new record as economy tanks"

Average CEO compensation grew by 3.5 percent last year despite slowing economic growth, falling profits and mass layoffs, according to an Associated Press review published Monday. The review found that the S&P 500 CEO received an average yearly compensation of $8.4 million, up $280,000 (an average raise that is the equivalent of six times the US median household income) during 2006.

The data render ridiculous those apologies for social inequality resting on the idea that CEO pay is linked to ‘performance' in some meaningful way. The Associated Press review found that "CEO pay rose or fell regardless of the direction of a company's stock price or profits." The report also notes that half of the 10 best paid CEOs—who collectively hauled in half a billion dollars last year—presided over companies whose profits shrank "dramatically" ....

.... John Thain, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, ranks first on the list. He received $83 million in compensation for the year, despite presiding over a company that posted a $9.8 billion loss in the fourth quarter. He replaced former CEO Stanley O'Neal on December 1, 2007. O'Neal left the bank with a compensation package worth over $161 million, despite his direct oversight of the bank's gambling with mortgage-backed securities that ultimately exploded in 2006-2007 ....

.... Looking at the AP compensation report, one is struck by the apparent correlation between a CEO's pay and the amount of social harm his or her company inflicts. The bankers who triggered a worldwide financial crisis got the biggest bonuses. Then we have the energy executives, whose compensation shot up some 32 percent last year as gas prices breached $4 per gallon, sharply reducing the real incomes of millions of working people.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Let Them Eat ... Uh ... Let Them Buy Arms

Mark Steel, "If the poor of Africa are hungry, send them arms"

It's arguable there isn't a food shortage at all. According to the World Hunger Education Service, there are now 17 per cent more calories produced per person each day than there were 30 years ago. The problem is that, for example, in India, while 48 per cent of children under five are malnourished, in 2004 they exported one-and-a-half-billion dollars' worth of rice to meet trade agreements.

But instead the most common solution offered is that Africa has to attract the free market, and then trade itself out of hunger. Kofi Annan, on Monday's Newsnight agreed with this, in his amiable helpless way. There was no alternative, he said, to attracting Chinese trade, regardless of their human rights records or whether that trade will encourage the dictators they trade with. Because that's what the starving need – people who are prepared to make a few quid out of them.

The only flaw is that these people are already the ones who've wrecked the place. In Nigeria entire villages were uprooted to make room for Shell Oil. In Tanzania the water supply was sold off to a consortium, which spent a huge chunk of Tanzanian public money and was so disastrous even the World Bank kicked them out. In South Africa tens of thousands were left without electricity after privatisation.

But the more chaos these companies cause, the more we're told they're the only answer. Maybe that's how these companies advertise, with little boxes in the Yellow Pages that say "Balfour Beatty – making disaster come faster". Or they send out leaflets that say: "Not long ago no one had heard of the Shanto region of Ethiopia. But since Unimax Ltd. forced the farmers to make cheap coffee for export, many inhabitants now feature regularly on Christmas charity videos! Unimax – we put the star into starvation."

Rowson On the Dumb Son of a Bitch

Martin Rowson, "Drawn to Dubya"

Martin Rowson on Bush, Iraq, and five years of war.In 2004 the re-election of George Bush filled almost every atom of my being with dismay, despair, fear, loathing and disgust, at what this implied about the future of America and the world. I say almost every atom, because deep down in my reptile brain, the cartoonist in me knew that four years of Dubya could never be enough.

This highlights several of the fundamental contradictions contained within satirists. Obviously, if our satire worked and all those creeps we lampoon just stopped, the world would be a perfect place, we'd have nothing left to satirise and I'd be painting kittens in teacups, probably on velvet. But worse than that, quite often cartoonists get caught in a kind of satirical Stockholm syndrome, where we come to love the things we seek to destroy. In other words, Bush was just a joy to draw.

Infuriatingly, Steve Bell established the Bush-as-chimp shtick before any of the rest of us, and it's considered bad form to nick other cartoonist's tricks. Even so, Bush still offered more than any caricaturist could dream possible: there's the eyebrows writhing round his crinkled forehead like demented chinchillas, and beneath them eyes so close together they seem in constant danger of fusing into cyclopism; then there's the mouth, offering either a dumb, Mad magazine shit-eating grin or elongating into a truly simian pant hoot as he tried to articulate human speech. Add to that his pointy ears and flattened, beaky nose, and even if he'd been a Nobel Peace laureate of impeccable liberal credentials, we'd still have loved drawing and stretching every single feature.

Newt Gingrich: Frightened Senseless?

Glenn Greenwald, "Newt Gingrich, supreme fear-monger"

Even when set against all the reckless fear-mongering being spewed in response to last week's Supreme Court ruling -- which merely held that our Government can't abolish the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus and must provide minimum due process to people before locking them in cages for life -- this comment by Newt Gingrich on Face the Nation this weekend is in a class all by itself:

On the other hand, I will say, the recent Supreme Court decision to turn over to a local district judge decisions of national security and life and death that should be made by the president and the Congress is the most extraordinarily arrogant and destructive decision the Supreme Court has made in its history. . . . . Worse than Dred Scott, worse than–because–for this following reason: . . .

This court decision is a disaster which could cost us a city. And the debate ought to be over whether or not you're prepared to risk losing an American city on behalf of five lawyers . . . .

We better not allow people we seek to imprison for life to have access to a court -- or require our Government to show evidence before it encages people for decades -- otherwise . . . we'll "lose a city."


Casually threatening Americans with the loss of a city unless they allow their Government to violate core constitutional guarantees is deranged fear-mongering in its most unadorned form, exactly what every two-bit tyrant tells his country about why they must be deprived of basic liberties. But what makes it all the more notable is how repeatedly Gingrich invokes this same deranged formulation in order to argue for a whole array of policies he supports -- we better accept what Gingrich wants or else we'll "lose a city" ....

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Feed the World

Alex Lantier, "The world food crisis and the capitalist market"

With consumers increasingly unable to pay world market prices for food, national governments are compelled to intervene to avert famine and revolt. These interventions, while offering at best partial resolutions to local problems, only increase difficulties elsewhere. Exporting states are limiting their external sales in an attempt to shield their own populations from the worst of the price rises, while extorting higher prices from importing nations by restricting supply.

The most devastating price increases are those for the basic food grains. These are relatively non-perishable and therefore widely traded, and make up a third or more of daily caloric intake, especially in poorer countries. They are also used extensively in other parts of the food chain—e.g., for livestock feed and sweeteners—thus affecting prices for meat, eggs, dairy products and various processed foods.

• • •



The central problem underlying the current food crisis is not a physical lack of food, but rather its unaffordability for masses of people due to rapidly increasing prices. Among the immediate factors driving the rapid worsening of the food crisis, a major role is played by the explosion of speculative investment in basic commodities such as oil and grain, itself bound up with the difficulties facing US and world financial markets and the decline in the US dollar. Rampant speculation by hedge funds and other big market players has increased costs, encouraging private firms to further bid up prices in a competitive drive to amass as much profit as possible.

Official statistics disprove the assertion that there is not enough food for everyone. According to 2008 US Department of Agriculture figures, the average per capita consumption is 2,618 calories per day in developing countries and 3,348 in developed countries, compared with a recommended minimum of 2,100 calories. However, profound disparities in access to this food, stemming from poverty and social inequality, condemn many millions to hunger.

• • •



The current food crisis reflects not only financial events of recent years, but longer-term policies of world imperialism. Instead of allowing for a planned improvement of infrastructure and farming techniques, globalization on a capitalist basis has resulted in a restriction in many parts of the world of farm production. This has been carried out in order to lessen competition and prevent market gluts from harming the profit interests of the major powers.

One major aspect of imperialist policy was to limit farm production in the so-called "First World" to prevent sudden falls in world prices. In the US, this policy took the form of the federal government's Conservation Reserve Program, first passed as part of the 1985 Food Security Act.

The American Transition

Paul Krugman, "It's a Different Country"

Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.

Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.

And the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.