At a recent campaign stop at a coffee house in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney spotted a man wearing a veteran’s cap. Since candidates love to pander to veterans, Romney glommed on to him but it was not quite what he expected. Listen to what the Vietnam veteran says after Romney leaves.
For fifty years, Loudon County courthouse in Leesburg, VA had just a crèche and a Christmas tree on the grounds.
[I]n 2009, a courthouse-grounds committee, concerned about a growing number of requests to use the public space, decided that Loudoun should ban all unattended displays on the property.
Public outcry was fierce and emotional. Residents poured into the county boardroom wearing Santa hats and religious pins, pleading with county leaders to respect their freedoms of speech and religion. The board ultimately decided to allow up to 10 holiday displays on a first-come, first-served basis. Applicants got in line.
You can imagine what happened. Similar to what happened in Santa Monica when public spaces were allotted by lottery, many people got into the spirit of the season.
Then came the atheists. And the Jedis. And the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — each with its own decorations. A skeleton Santa Claus was mounted on a cross, intended by its creator to portray society’s obsession with consumerism. Nearby, a pine tree stood adorned with atheist testimonials.
Flying Spaghetti Monster devotees are scheduled to put up their contribution this weekend. It’s a banner portraying a Nativity-style scene, but Jesus is nowhere to be found. Instead, the Virgin Mary cradles a stalk-eyed noodle-and-meatball creature, its manger surrounded by an army of pirates, a solemn gnome and barnyard animals. The message proclaims: “Touched by an Angelhair.”
Will Christians fight back next year to regain exclusive rights to put up displays on public property? Stay tuned.
Bradley Manning, alleged Wikileaks leaker, is finally getting his day in court, even if it is just a military court that does not allow for the full exercise of rights that civilian courts have.
One overlooked aspect of the WikiLeaks releases is what it says about US subservience to Israel’s interests. For example, recall the failure of the talks last year between Israel and the Palestinian leadership. M. J. Rosenberg describes how the US government, both the White House and the Congress, is controlled by the Israel lobby led by AIPAC, and says that “here is only one reason that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations collapsed. It is the power of the “pro-Israel lobby” (led by AIPAC) which prevents the United States from saying publicly what it says privately: that resolution of a conflict which is so damaging to US interests is consistently being blocked by the intransigence of the Netanyahu government and its determination to maintain the occupation.”
Israel has shown that it can extort what it wants from the US. Last year, the US requested that there be a moratorium on settlement building in the occupied territories. Israel refused, even rejecting the US offer of a bribe of three billion dollars in return for which Israel would simply have a moratorium on settlement for just 90 days. And despite being publicly humiliated time and again, the US government continues to be servile to Israel.
Apart from being one of the major enablers for these Israeli policies and lavishing the country with huge amounts of aid that enable Israelis to have a high standard of living, the US also provides it with diplomatic cover in the international arena. The US even vetoes UN resolutions on the settlements even when the resolutions are exactly in line with publicly stated US policy. WikiLeaks revealed that the US had secret deal with Israel to expand settlements even as they publicly decry it.
Is there any more glaring indication of the fecklessness of US political leaders and their subservience to Israel? But one notable feature is how few of the leaked WikiLeaks cables deal with Israel. Israel Shamir suggests that this is part of the western government-media subservience to the Israel lobby, which we also saw demonstrated with how they downplayed reports that the US, French, and German leaders view the Israeli prime minister as an incorrigible liar.
The Guardian and the New York Times, Le Monde and Spiegel are quite unable to publish a story unacceptable to Israel. They may pen a moderately embarrassing piece of fluff, or a slightly critical technical analysis in order to convince discerning readers of their objectivity. They may even let an opponent air his or her views every once in a blue moon. But they could never publish a story really damaging to Israel. This is true for all mainstream media.
Furthermore, no American ambassador would ever send a cable really unacceptable to Israel – unless he intended to retire the next month. Yet even supposing this kamikaze ambassador would send the cable, the newspapers would overlook it.
Even with thousands of secret cables about Israel in their hands, the mainstream media delays and prevaricates. They don’t want anyone to yell at them. That is why they have postponed publishing the articles. Once forced by circumstance or competition to publish the contents of the cables, you can bet they’ll twist the revelations into toady headlines and bury the truth in the final paragraph.
Robert Fisk comments on one aspect of Middle East politics gleaned from the few WikiLeaks releases:
It’s not that US diplomats don’t understand the Middle East; it’s just that they’ve lost all sight of injustice. Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove that the mainstay of Washington’s Middle East policy is alignment with Israel, that its principal aim is to encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli alliance against Iran, that the compass point of US policy over years and years is the need to tame/bully/crush/oppress/ ultimately destroy the power of Iran.
There is virtually no talk (so far, at least) of illegal Jewish colonial settlements on the West Bank, of Israeli “outposts”, of extremist Israeli “settlers” whose homes now smallpox the occupied Palestinian West Bank – of the vast illegal system of land theft which lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian war. And incredibly, all kinds of worthy US diplomats grovel and kneel before Israel’s demands – many of them apparently fervent supporters of Israel – as Mossad bosses and Israel military intelligence agents read their wish-list to their benefactors.
As long as the US continues to be subservient to Israeli interests and impervious to justice, there will be no resolution of the Middle East conflict.
He became part of our family six years ago today and is resting up before the partying in his honor begins.
Christopher Hitchens undoubtedly died well, by which I mean that he faced his terminal illness with dignity, not falling into either one of the common twin traps that snare people who are told they have a serious terminal illness, that of maudlin sentimentality of the ‘why me?’ variety or fake bravado that he would defeat the cancer somehow when all before him had failed. He was above all, a writer, for whom the compulsion to pour words out was unstoppable. Not for him the idea that his last days should be spent in doing those things he had had no time for before. He was apparently working on an essay until the end, even when he was so weak that he could barely drag his IV drip with to the chair and would nod off periodically and could barely hit the keys. One has to admire that.
The only book I read of his was God is Not Great and my review was decidedly mixed. But there was no doubt that his debating skills in favor of the atheist cause were definitely something I welcomed. He had a quick wit, an easy facility with words, was widely read, and seemed to have a prodigious memory, all of which come in handy when engaged in the kinds of polemical battles he seemed to relish.
It must be said, however, that his other politics in the latter part of his life were atrocious. He seemed to have bought the entire neoconservative package, demonstrating an enthusiasm for wars against Muslim countries that was appalling. Critics claimed that he was a social climber, eager to move in elite American political and social circles and that his entry ticket to that world was to join in the jingoistic hysteria that followed the events of September 11, 2001. Recall that in those days, to decry the reaction to lash out at perceived enemies was seen as irrelevant and not serious at best and borderline treasonous at worst.
Since I am not of that world, I am in no position to judge if that charge is accurate, but I thought that this remembrance of him by Alexander Cockburn was worth linking to.
I just saw Hot Coffee, an excellent and disturbing award-winning documentary about the concerted effort by big corporations that, under the banner of ‘tort reform’, seek to deprive people of their right to sue them for the damage they inflict. See the film’s website for more information and for the interview that director Susan Saladoff had with Stephen Colbert, that I also linked to earlier.
Here’s the trailer for the film.
The film takes its title from the famous case in which Stella Liebeck, an elderly woman, sued McDonalds because of the injuries she suffered when she spilled their hot coffee over her legs. A jury awarded her $160,000 in damages and $2.7 million in punitive damages. McDonalds and other big corporations exploited this case to create a vast mythology about ‘jackpot justice’ in which they alleged that people filed frivolous lawsuits against big corporations and doctors in the hope that they would strike it rich, and that the cost of defending against these charges and paying the judgments was passed on to the rest of us. The corporations successfully appealed to the crocodile mentality in people that resents what seems like undeserved good fortune to people who are just like them but in which they do not share, and the case became the punch line for comedians.
The corporations have used that case to steadily encroach on the rights of people by instituting caps on damages, forcing binding arbitration on people so that they cannot sue in court but must have their case decided by an arbitrator who is picked by the very corporation that harmed them, and pouring money into judicial races so that any convictions that people obtain are overturned by higher courts and the laws depriving people of their day in court are ruled constitutional. The film shows how the oligarchy works, creating a pseudo-legal system that is friendly to business and government and conspires against ordinary people.
The documentary starts by exposing the central myths of the hot coffee case, which was that it involved a doddering old woman who spilled coffee on herself while stupidly drinking while driving. In actual fact, Liebeck was an active and robust woman who had just retired a couple of months earlier and was the passenger in the car that was parked in the lot when the event occurred. But what was shocking to me was the scale of the burns suffered by the woman. They were horrendous and required major skin grafts. The photos of the injury were horrifying and I had to turn away. What was worse, McDonalds had received many previous complaints about their hot coffee but had done nothing.
The idea of having some caps on damages seems reasonable to most people because of the perception that juries are emotional idiots who pick some number out of a hat out of excessive sympathy for the victim. The film examines a case in which a child (one of a pair of twins) was born with brain damage because of medical malpractice by a doctor who had had previous problems. The jury award carefully took into account the amount of money the family would need to provide a lifetime of care to their child but this amount was arbitrarily reduced because of the caps laws passed by the state legislature, which means that Medicaid (i.e., taxpayers) will have to foot part of the bill while the doctors and hospitals escape the full consequences.
In the case of the damage caused by binding arbitration, the film looked at the case of a young woman who was gang raped by her fellow Halliburton employees in Iraq and then when she complained was locked in a storage trailer and was released only because her father in the US got their congressman involved. But she could not sue Halliburton for damages because her employment contract had a binding arbitration clause that she was unaware of and she had to fight hard just to get her case heard in court.
The film says that many of the contracts we now enter into, such as with our credit card companies, include such clauses in the fine print, when we originally sign up or in the modifications to our agreements that we get in the mail and which hardly anyone reads. Arbitrators overwhelmingly rule in favor of the companies. It is not hard to see why. The arbitrators are picked and paid by the company and make their living by deciding these cases and those who rule against the companies find that they rarely get asked again. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The film also examines the case of how business interests pour money into electing judges who will be sympathetic to them, in particular waging a relentless campaign to defeat a Mississippi Supreme Court judge who was deemed to be not subservient enough.
The filmmakers interviewed some of the jurors in the hot coffee case and they explained how they weighed the evidence and arrived at their verdict and the size of the judgment. Rather than being stupid people who picked a large number at random, they carefully weighed how much blame should be borne by the woman and how much by McDonalds and what punitive damages would be appropriate to send McDonalds the message that they had acted irresponsibly by cavalierly ignoring the warnings about its product. They settled on two days worth of coffee sales revenue.
I have been called for jury duty several times and although I have never been picked for an actual case, I have spent a lot of time in the jury poolroom talking with my fellow potential jurors. These are just ordinary people from all walks of life and for some of whom it was a real hardship to serve on a jury because they lost wages. But I was impressed at how seriously they took their task and they confirmed my belief that I would much rather put my fate in the hands of a jury of my peers than in those of an arbitrator or judge, however well-educated or experienced they are.
Strange as it may seem to some people, gay couples react to the news of becoming grandparents pretty much the same way as heterosexual couples do.
Explain to me again why we should not let gay people adopt children?
The corrupting influence of money on politics in the US is pervasive and entrenched. I had never found any proposed solution that satisfied me. The catch with federally funded campaigns, which is favored by many reformists, is that while it might reduce the influence of lobbyists and big campaign donors, it also tends to favor the two established parties. Until those two parties face a revolt or otherwise genuine threat to their entrenched dominance, there is little incentive for them to not be corrupt.
So I was pleasantly surprised to hear Lawrence Lessig on The Daily Show suggest a reform that might actually work. I have not read his book Republic, Lost: How money corrupts Congress – and a plan to stop it but his idea is that the government would refund the first $50 of people’s taxes to them in the form of a voucher that they could donate to any political campaign. In addition, each person would be allowed to donate up to $100 of their own money.
The catch is that this would require a constitutional amendment since the Supreme Court has ruled that money is a form of speech and steadily removed restrictions on campaign contributions.
The interview is well worth watching. In the first part, Lessig describes how the current system corrupts politics and in the second, he discusses his solution, as well as some other options that modern technology allows.
Part 1:
Part 2:
(This clip appeared on December 13, 2011. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
The Daily Show on the All-American Muslim silliness.
