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Dear Friends,
Many of you heard about the horrible fire that happened in Pilsen last week – it was at the Whale, home of our friends Kenneth Morrison, Nat Ward, and Michelle Faust, plus their pet chickens, Osso the Cat, and Macky the Dog.
You guys might know these people as the folks behind the Ever So-Secret Order of the Lamprey or Punk Band or the Hideout Panto or a million other things: they’re family.
All people and pets are safe, but – as you can see in the photo above – their home is devastated. If you can help us restore it then that would be really awesome.
There are two ways to help: the first is donating money. You can do that by going to the Paypal account here (http://tiny.cc/whale547) and typing in natmichellehideout@gmail.com. We know money’s tight right now. Everything helps! Think about it like buying them a drink or a bone, then donate more if you can.
The second is by donating things or services – to find out what the Whale needs and when people are gutting, drywalling, and salvaging, join the Facebook group here (http://www.tiny.cc/whale785) or email Mairead Case at mairead.case@gmail.com.
You can also forward this email to people you think might want to help!
Thank you very, very much.
– Jerry Boyle, Mairead Case, Ed & Rachael Marszewski, and the Whale
Artists take over a subway station to display a group exhibition.
more pics here.
Totally exciting reclamation of public space.
Early this morning the Senate passed a version of its health care overhall. Democrats say the changes are seismic and the reform package will most likely be delivered by Christmas.
We have to say we are utterly confused as to what exactly this health care reform bill means. All we know is that there is no public option and that the lack of resistance from some quarters of the health care industry made us believe the bill would probably not be in our common interest. When Big Pharma’s stocks go up when the Senate signs a health care reform bill we know that is a bad sign.
Some reading:
How Health Reform was Killed by Triangulation
We are intrigued by Alexander Cockburns analysis of the Copenhagen climate change summit where a number of leaked emails have tainted the Global warming activists’ claims.
Turning Tricks, Cashing In on Fear
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
In the early 1970s the UN spearheaded the progressive notion of a new world economic order, one that would try to level the playing field between the First World and the Third. The neoliberal onslaughts gathering strength from the mid-1970s on destroyed that project. Eventually the UN, desperate to reassert some semblance of moral leadership, regrouped behind the supposed crisis of climate change as concocted by the AGW lobby, behind which lurk huge corporate interests such as the nuclear power companies. Radicals from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, putting forward proposals for upping the Third World’s income from its primary commodities, were displaced by climate shills in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC. The end consequence, as represented by Copenhagen’s money-grubbing power plays over “carbon mitigation” funding, has been a hideous travesty of that earlier vision of a global redistribution of resources.
When the entertainers of the right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call “the Chicago way.” As imagined by the right, the men in the West Wing are like a demonic cross between the antiwar demonstrators who gathered in Grant Park in 1968 and the Chicago cops who cracked their hippie skulls. Tremble, men of commerce, before this infernal combination.
Myths like this are fun to invent. The problem, as ever, is reality.
Consider one of the actual news stories to emerge from Chicago of late: The city’s decision to privatize its parking meters. Thanks to a deal finalized in 2008, Chicago’s parking meters will be operated for the next 75 years by a group of investors put together by Morgan Stanley, including the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi.
As it happens, Chicago is the nation’s leader in municipal privatization efforts. That’s right: The city that conservatives portray as the citadel of the power-grabbing, government-growing left has been selling itself off in pieces for years. It signed a 99-year lease for the Chicago Skyway, a toll road in the city’s South Side, back in 2005. It did the same for its big downtown parking garages in 2006. Last year, it approved a deal to privatize Midway Airport; fortunately, the arrangements fell through.
The city’s longtime mayor, Richard M. Daley, is such a keen enthusiast of privatization that he has promoted it as the budget solution for every government in the land. “If they start leasing public assets — every city, every county, every state and the federal government — you would not have to raise any taxes whatsoever,” Mr. Daley told the Chicago Sun-Times in January. “You would have more infrastructure money that way than any other way in the nation.”
Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had Mr. Obama not been elected president, the nation’s business journals would be falling over one another to praise his city for its daring, market-friendly innovations.
And if they chose, they would also find just as much to criticize in Mayor Daley’s real-life privatization spree as they do in the brutality that they imagine President Obama shows his opponents.
The details of the parking meter deal, for example, were negotiated by the Daley administration with almost no public scrutiny. When it came time to approve the billion-dollar arrangement, the city council got exactly two days. It was a farce. According to a report issued by Chicago’s inspector general, “No financial analysis was provided of the value of the parking-meter system to the City if it retained the system, since no such analysis had been done. … There was no public comment; no testimony from critics or experts; no presentation of recent studies” on privatization elsewhere.
It was not until months later that Chicagoans discovered what a lousy deal it was. The inspector general’s report estimates that the private investors paid a little more than half the amount that the system would have generated had the city held onto the meters itself.
One alderman, described at length in the Chicago Reader last May, figures that the parking system might be worth four times what the investors paid. “The taxpayers had been hosed,” the Reader concluded.
Meanwhile, the cost of parking increased dramatically, as the new parking-meter proprietor sought to maximize its return. Meters broke down from the unaccustomed load of quarters. Tickets were handed out with abandon. Chicagoans were furious.
What they eventually learned is that they had handed over a component of self-governance to a private company that is, by definition, unconcerned with the public interest. Chicago police will still hand out parking tickets; the state of Illinois will still suspend drivers’ licenses; but for the next 75 years all of it will be done to ensure that citizens render proper tribute to Wall Street.
And now comes the inevitable denouement. Last week, the Chicago City Council voted to plug a hole in its 2010 budget using funds remaining from the billion-dollar parking-meter haul, despite earlier plans to invest the money for the long term. Almost all of it will be gone by the end of next year.
It may not fit the myth, but that’s the real Chicago way. Sell off public property without public scrutiny. Prohibit public input on an essential public service. Rationalize the whole thing, as Mr. Daley’s administration has done, by insisting that government can’t run such things as well as the private sector can.
And then, when the money runs out, privatize something else: The water supply, maybe. The sewer system. An airport or two.
Why not privatize a U.S. Senate seat, too? Just imagine what Abu Dhabi would pay for that.
War Cries From a Defeated Man
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN via Counterpunch
Ritual trumphalism about America’s righteous mission in the closing sentences of his speech did not dispel the distinct impression during President Obama’s 33-minute address to cadets at West Point Tuesday night that we were listening to a man defeated by the challenge of justifying the dispatch of 3o,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Contrary to the hackneyed references to his “soaring rhetoric”, the speech was earth-bound and mechanically delivered.
Obama didn’t make the case and he pleased few. The liberals seethed as they heard him say that it is “in our vital national interest” to send 30,000 more troops to a mission they regard as doomed from the getgo. The cheers of the right at the news of the deployment died in their throats as they heard his next line, “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”
No mature American, seasoned in the ineradicable graft flourishing down the decades in every major American city, believes a pledge that corruption will be banished from Afghanistan in a year and a half, or that Karzai has any credibility as the wielder of the cleansing broom.
Each proposition of Obama’s rationale collapses at the first prod, starting with the comparison with the conclusion of America’s mission in Iraq. It’s taken as axiomatic in Washington that the “surge” in Iraq worked – that the extra troops demanded of President Bush by General Petraeus turned the tide.
But what truly turned the tide in Iraq was the victory of the Shi’a in Baghdad and other major cities in their bloody civil war with the Sunni, the majority of whose fighters then saw they had alternative but to forge an alliance with the hated occupiers and garland the tanks they had been trying to blow up only weeks earlier.
Prime Minister Maliki has at his disposal a large and seemingly loyal army and extensive trained militia and police force to sustain and guard the Iraqi state. The Afghan army is rag-tag, barely trained, mostly illiterate and rife with desertion – disproportionately manned and commanded by Tajiks whom the Pashtuns despise. The police depend for their living on bribes. As Professor Juan Cole points out, “the entire province of Qunduz north of the capital only has 800 police for a population of nearly a million. In contrast, the similarly-sized San Francisco has over 2,000 police officers and rather fewer armed militants.”
Core to Obama’s argument for intervention is the claim he made at West Point that the fundamental objective of destroying Al Qaida can only be achieved by destroying their hosts, the Taliban and that this enterprise requires more troops. But there is evidence that across the recent months of infighting over America’s options, Obama and his White House national security advisers themselves had no confidence in this proposition.
In the struggle between the White House and General McChrystal, the Pentagon and its Defense Secretary Robert Gates (a holdover from the Bush years) Obama’s security adviser Gen. James Jones mooted to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post the question of why al Qaeda would want to move out of its present sanctuary in Pakistan to the uncertainties of Afghanistan.
McChrystal promptly struck back in his London speech to the Institute of Strategic Studies: “When the Taliban has success, “that provides sanctuary from which al Qaeda can operate transnationally.”
Days later the New York Times reported that “senior administration officials” were saying privately that Obama’s national security team was now “arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States.”
Detailing this semi-covert struggle, the Washington-based national security analyst argued here on the CounterPunch site last Wednesday that Obama was boxed in by an alliance of Gates and Secretary of State Clinton plus McChrystal and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in “a textbook demonstration of how the national security apparatus ensures that its policy preference on issues of military force prevail in the White House.”
Though Porter makes a decent case, this is giving too much comfort to those disconsolate but ever hopeful liberals arguing that there really is a “good Obama” battling away against the darker forces. In a larger time-frame, if anyone boxed himself in on Afghanistan it was Obama who spent a lot of the campaign last year seeking to deflect McCain’s charges that he was a quitter on Iraq, by proclaiming that America’s true battlefield lay in Afghanistan.
There were other unusual down-key notes in the speech. Obama is probably the first president of the United States to declare flatly that “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars…That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open- ended: because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”
Contrast that to the budgetary bravado of President Kennedy proclaiming in his inaugural address in 1961 that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden … in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
In the wake of the speech – particularly after polls showing that it had failed to increase prowar sentiment – the Democrats were glum, well aware that they will be saddled with an unpopular war through the 2010 midterm elections and that Obama will unhesitatingly turn to Republicans in Congress to get the necessary vote for the money to finance the widening war. From the left came pledges to revive the antiwar movement, dormant these past two years.
There are hurt cries from prominent pwogs such as Tom Hayden who now vows he will strip the Obama sticker off his car. Maybe so. Our sense here at CounterPunch is that Lady Macbeth would get those damned spots off her hands far quicker that American progressives will purge themselves of Obamaphilia.
At least the American political landscape is offering some pleasing spectacles. On Wednesday came tidings of a right-left alliance in Congress, challenging the reappointment of Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a slap in the face not only for Bernanke but for Obama.
In demanding a hold on Bernanke’s reappointment, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said, “The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities to put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few. What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.”
The president could scarcely exult publicly at one piece of good news, since it comes at the expense of the lives of four police officers, in Tacoma, Washington, shot dead by Maurice Clemmons, an apparent madman who had a very lengthy prison sentence commuted nine years ago by Mike Huckabee when the latter was governor of Arkansas.
Huckabee’s pardons were estimable and prompted praise from CounterPunch’s editors last year as unique exhibitions of courage in the grotesque penal climate in America today. To his credit Huckabee is standing by his reason for pardoning Clemmons– that a ninety-plus year sentence had been a grotesque sentence to give a teenager. But the prospects of him winning the Republican nomination in 2012 have now shriveled, sparing Obama a witty and resourceful opponent.
Obama is no doubt more comfortable with the thought that his opponent might conceivably be Sarah Palin, the woman who is the progressives’ alibi for not having to focus on their pathetic illusions about Obama. He didn’t deceive them on the campaign trail, if they’d been ready to listen closely. He pledged a war in Afghanistan and now he’s cashing that promise. He didn’t fool them. They fooled themselves, a far more culpable offense.
We knew it was probable but its incredibly lame that our President has to continue the debacle and charade thrust upon him by his corporate masters. Talks about withdrawl in three years and an “Afgan Surge” are fantasies. No one will ever be able to occupy Afganistan. Are American soldiers any different than the Taliban in the eyes of the Afganistaniis? Do we really need 100,000 troops to find 100 supposed Al Queada terrorists? Instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on the this Bankers War lets spend the money in the US and wage a war on poverty here at home.
Obama Sets Faster Troop Deployment to Afghanistan
Human Terrain Systems, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan
A “Necessary War” — for a Gas Pipeline: It’s Obama’s War Now
Finishing the Job at Home: How About a War on Poverty Instead?
