Chris Floyd

• Saturday Night Special: "Historic" Vote Kills Health Care Reform for Another ...

  2009 Nov 08

  What did you do last Saturday night? Head out for dinner and a movie? Take in a show? Hit the clubs? Get cozy on the couch with your main squeeze? Well, here's what the U.S. House of Representatives did: they passed an "historic" health care bill which will put the kibosh on any genuine, equitable, sensible health care reform for many and many a year.
  
  Couldn't they have just had a cookout -- or a key party -- instead? We would've all been better off.
  
  Of course, the House bill, bad as it is, will be mangled beyond all recognition in that elitist abattoir known as the Senate, where no doubt even the few milder-than-milquetoast ameliorations that survived the corporate bludgeoning in the House will be cast aside. But for now, this is how, in the words of Barack Obama, our Democratic solons "answered the call of history": with a bill that places an onerous financial burden and threat of punishment on those least able to bear it, while stripping millions of the most vulnerable women in society from access to completely legal medical procedures easily available to the middle-class and the rich, and delivering to the corrupt, cruel and price-gouging insurance companies "50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers," in the gushing words of Nancy Pelosi, who shepherded the bill through the House -- and who was responsible for stripping abortion coverage from poor women by greenlighting the single allowed amendment to the bill.
  
  (So, we get the first woman Speaker of the House, and what happens? The House kicks poor women in the guts -- literally. What next? Our first African-American president repealing the Civil Rights Act?)
  
  But let's turn to Arthur Silber, who has a few choice words about these world-historical developments:
  
  

  The lies begin with the name itself. The bill is titled: Affordable Health Care for America Act.
  
  In fact, the bill's primary purpose has absolutely nothing to do with providing "affordable health care." The purpose is to extract as much money as possible from "ordinary" Americans -- and to do so at the point of a gun (what do you think those financial penalties and even possible prison time are, if not a gun pointing directly at your head?) -- and shovel it directly to already-engorged insurance companies. Americans will be forced to buy insurance, which as we all know, many of us through deeply painful personal experience, has nothing whatsoever to do with health care. And Americans will be forced to spend money for largely useless insurance -- which insurance will often be entirely useless just when they need it most critically -- in amounts that may devastate them and their families.
  

  
  But Silber, for one, is not surprised by any of this. As he notes:
  
  

  In the NY Times story about the House passage of this detestable bill, we read this utterance from the awful Steny Hoyer:
  
  

  “We did what we promised the American people we would do,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader...
  

  
  On this occasion, Hoyer is entirely correct.
  
  If you listened carefully to what almost every politician said during the last election campaign -- and I emphatically include what Obama and all leading Democrats said -- and if you understood what they were saying, they told you over and over again that they would fuck you in an endless variety of ways, until almost every last drop of your blood and almost every dollar you possess were gone. In their infinite kindness, they won't kill you, for they hope to extract still more from you, as your life and hope slowly ebb away.
  
  They've kept their promise. They've fucked you yet again, just as they said they would.
  
  And they are very far from done.
  

  
  Too strong? Too true. Look at this prophecy from David Swanson, written just a few days ago (also cited by Silber in this other, excellent piece):
  
  

  At first the "public option" was to be a massive but less-than-universal healthcare plan that would prove so efficient and effective that over several years the public would all opt into it. It was a backdoor to a civilized system of Medicare for all. Now what's left of it? Now it's a public option for 2 percent of Americans, and in some states 0 percent, to be run by private corporations, with prices set to avoid any efficiency or competition for the wasteful health insurance companies.
  
  Is that better than nothing? No, it's worse, because this pathetic scam of a healthcare plan is plastered like lipstick on a pig to a bailout for the health insurance corporations. (Sure, the bill contains some reforms to the insurance corporations' practices, but that's like trying to reform piranhas.) And when the healthcare crisis continues to worsen in the coming years, the blame will be placed on the nearly nonexistent public option, thus justifying making things even worse, if possible....
  
  Now, enough House Democrats have publicly committed to voting No on any bill this bad, that it could not pass. On July 30th, 57 of them signed a letter saying that any bill without a public option based on Medicare rates would be unacceptable. And therefore, this bill would be dead, and we could go into round 2 with a stronger demand for a bill that might actually save a significant number of lives .... Sadly, these people's word is as trustworthy as the promises of a health insurance company. (And when they prove that yet again, you can forget about progressive legislation or action on any issue in the months and years to come.)
  

  
  And thus it came to pass on Saturday night, exactly as Swanson foretold. The 57 public-option stalwarts folded like a concertina; almost all of the few Democrats who ended up opposing the bill were so-called Blue Dogs, who resolutely oppose any public option at all. But as Swanson noted, by this time, the only thing that mattered to most "progressives" -- certainly the "serious ones," the ones who want to be "inside the tent," with liaisons with White House staffers, etc. -- was passing passing any bill at all:
  
  

  So-called citizens' groups, now actually taking their directives from the very people they pretend to lobby, are so obsessed with passing any sort of bill, that the content of the bill is virtually irrelevant. I say virtually, because the collective decision is that it must contain something or other that can be mislabeled a "public option." Other than that, it could sentence millions of Americans to death, and it would still be fine and dandy. And that is exactly what it does.
  
  And why is a bill better than no bill? Why is a bill that funds absolutely useless parasites like health insurance companies at the expense of our grandchildren's unearned pay better than nothing? Why -- when blocking a bill would almost guarantee a better debate in round 2 -- is it more important to pass the bill and close off the opportunity for valuable reform?
  

  
  Why is this bad bill better than no bill, to those who pushed it and passed it? Because, as Silber points out, a bad bill is the intended result of the whole exercise:
  
  

  Given the nature of the corporatist system that now throttles every aspect of life in the U.S., that is how the system works. That's how it's set up, and that's its purpose. The fact that insurance companies will reap huge rewards on the backs of "ordinary" taxpaying Americans is not a regrettable byproduct of an allegedly good but imperfect effort at reform, or a flaw that will be fixed at some unspecified future date. And as already powerful and wealthy interests become more powerful and wealthy, the State will also increase its already massive power over all our lives still more. None of that is incidental: it's the point.
  

  
  Well, the lipsticked pig has been set loose now. He'll be skittering and squealing around the Senate floor next, under the whiphand of master swineherd (and corporate bagman extraordinaire) Harry Reid, who makes Nancy Pelosi look like Robert LaFollette.  Lord have mercy, we ain't seen half of how ugly this thing is gonna get.
  
  II.
  But what should we do? Sit down on the ground and weep salt tears of despair? Silber thinks otherwise. In yet another new post (the man is cooking with gas these days) -- Tribalism and the Destructive Politics of Demonization (I): The Largely Unrecognized Possibility for a New Coalition--  he sets out the beginnings of a powerful, practical approach that holds out a wide promise of -- dare one say it? -- hope and change, in the genuine sense of those much-degraded words. I'm not going to excerpt it here, because it should be read in full. I will only urge you to repair thither forthwith, read, and consider.

  
  

  

• Dark Glass: Hateful Echoes and Hidden Costs

  2009 Nov 06

  (UPDATED BELOW)
  

  I.
  Seventy-one years ago, almost to the very day, a member of a religious minority fatally shot a government official – an act by a troubled individual that was seized upon by hateful minds to set off an orgy of blood and destruction against his co-religionists.
  
  While the Ft. Hood shootings will not spark a rerun of Kristallnacht – the anti-semitic pogrom launched by the Nazis after 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst Vom Rath in Paris on Nov. 7, 1938, in retaliation for Nazi depradations against the Jews – the upswelling of racial, ethnic and religious hatred against Muslims and Arabs we will now see in many quarters will ring with ugly echoes.
  

  The entire lexicon of Islamophobia is already filled to bursting with Nazi tropes – "the enemy within," the dark, monolithic mass of "prodigious breeders" threatening to overwhelm Western Civilization, the "maniacal extremists" who will not rest until they destroy the sacred Homeland, the sinister, secret worldwide conspiracy which bribes and suborns Western leaders into doing its bidding, etc. etc. This sinister discourse is accepted, and used, among the highest circles of power – senators, representatives, "serious" commentators, academics, think-tank apparatchiks. And all of this is being constantly regurgitated even while the armed forces and covert operators of the United States are in the midst of an apparently endless campaign of death and violence that has killed, so far, well in excess of a million innocent people – the vast majority of them Muslims, or of Muslim heritage – while planting great, bristling fortresses of domination and excess in the midst of wretchedly poor lands.

  In this too, our modern Islamophobes mimic their German forbears. It was the Nazis who held – and exercised – violent, overwhelming sway over the Jews within their reach, even as they bleated constantly about the "Jewish threat" to "destroy the German people."  Perhaps many of them, at some level, believed this fantastical projection of their own murderous desires and unquenchable anxieties; certainly, we know that top Nazis like Hitler and Himmler "justified" their extermination programs as "pre-emptive defense" against an existential threat from the "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy. (For in this disordered mindset, every Jew was considered a Bolshevik -- and even rich, capitalist Jews were seen as part of the same overarching conspiracy -- just as our Islamophobes consider every Muslim a terrorist or an extremist.) In a similar manner, all of our Terror Warriors – not just the strident Islamophobes, but the entire bipartisan political establishment, including the "progressive" president – paint the "Long War" as a strictly defensive measure against dark forces who irrationally "hate us for our freedoms" and seek to "destroy our way of life."
  

  Comparisons are not equivalencies, and history does not repeat itself -- but it often rings with disturbing assonances.
  

  II.

  At this stage, with so much about the Ft. Hood case still unknown, there is little point in commenting on the substance of the case. But all kinds of rumors and conjectures and second-hand reports about the alleged shooter are richoceting around the media echo chamber.
  
  For example, the New York Times, the nation's most "serious" newspaper, filled some of its early reports with pro-terrorist comments culled from the internet, left there by people who have the same or similar names as the accused. (This just days after the media had been burned by numerous "false positives" in the White House guest list.)  The fact that it is unlikely that an Army officer on active duty would post such comments in his own name was obviously no bar to getting the most the most inflammatory factoids into circulation as soon as possible.

  This might be considered irresponsible, if it didn't come from a paper that has been instrumental in selling the Terror War, with its ever-mounting toll of civilians deaths (three more children, and other civilians working in a field, were killed by a NATO missile on the same day of the Ft. Hood shooting), and all the despair and suffering and hatred it is engendering.  In any case, at this point, I think the only relevant thing one can say about this particular case appeared on the website of the Iraq Veterans Against the War on Thursday: "The shootings that happened today are a tragic reminder of the hidden costs of war."

  ***
  

  UPDATE: Playwright Wajahat Ali has some pertinent observations in the Guardian:

  ...Sadly, although yesterday's violent outburst against fellow soldiers was the most deadly in US history, it was not the first of its kind. In May this year, five soldiers were shot dead at Camp Liberty in Baghdad by Sergeant John Russell. In February 2008, an Air Force sergeant diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) upon returning from Iraq fatally shot his son and daughter after a domestic argument with his ex-wife. Religion was not the common link between these soldiers; it was mental instability. Even if such individuals purported to be religious, their wanton acts of barbarism reflect rather their tenuous grasp on sanity.
  
  A cousin of Hasan, interviewed by reporters, has suggested an alternative motivation, not necessarily influenced by religious conviction. "He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy," said Nader Hasan. "He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there [in Iraq and Afghanistan]."... Hasan's aunt told the Washington Post that her nephew had consulted an attorney to see if he could leave the army before his contract expired due to harassment he had received from colleagues because he was Muslim.
  
  Whatever the FBI investigation and any subsequent prosecution following the terrible shootings at Fort Hood may finally reveal, incidents such as these warrant a re-examination of how to treat and discharge or excuse those soldiers who are troubled or conflicted psychologically, politically or religiously over our foreign policy and, in particular, the current war in Afghanistan and occupation of Iraq.
  
  No mere factual, evidential explanation could ever justify or excuse in any way Hasan's alleged actions. But it ought to broaden the horizon of those in the media who seem infatuated with the need to pin the blame for this perverse tragedy solely on a man's religious faith and Arabic last name, rather than exploring the possibility of a more complicated truth involving some combination of mental state, divided loyalty or conscientious objection.
  

  
  

  

• Stone Walls and Steel Bars: America's War on its Own Keeps Raging

  2009 Nov 05

  The cruel and unusual punitiveness of American society is a frequent topic on these page. (The most recent piece is here.) No nation on earth puts as many of its people in jail -- both in real numbers and as a percentage of the population. And few if any have "justice" systems so savagely targeted at racial minorities. For the past 30 years -- concurrent with the organized effort by the monied, militarized elite to destroy any and all restraints on their predatory appetites -- the United States has waged an unrelenting war on its black population, and on other minority and marginalized groups as well.
  
  Punitive incarceration has been turned into a lucrative resource for private profit (and public corruption), and a political tool by which ambitious poltroons in both major parties establish their "toughness," their fitness for power in an aggressive empire. The size and the harshness of the America's domestic gulag have very little to do with the actual level of dangerous crime; they are instead tied far more closely to the agenda of money and power than any reality.
  
  David Cole lays out the details at the New York Review of Books, looking at three new books on the subject:
  
  

  With approximately 2.3 million people in prison or jail, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world—by far. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada's, eight times greater than France's, and twelve times greater than Japan's. Here, at least, we are an undisputed world leader; we have a 40 percent lead on our closest competitors—Russia and Belarus.
  
  ...For one group in particular, however, these figures have concrete and deep-rooted implications—African-Americans, especially young black men, and especially poor young black men. African-Americans are 13 percent of the general population, but over 50 percent of the prison population. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than that of whites—a disparity that dwarfs other racial disparities. (Black–white disparities in unemployment, for example, are 2–1; in nonmarital childbirth, 3–1; in infant mortality, 2–1; and in net worth, 1–5).
  
  In the 1950s, when segregation was still legal, African-Americans comprised 30 percent of the prison population. Sixty years later, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population, and that population has skyrocketed. The disparities are greatest where race and class intersect—nearly 60 percent of all young black men born between 1965 and 1969 who dropped out of high school went to prison at least once on a felony conviction before they turned thirty-five. And the incarceration rate for this group—black male high school dropouts—is nearly fifty times the national average.
  
  These disparities in turn have extraordinary ripple effects. For an entire cohort of young black men in America's inner cities, incarceration has become the more-likely-than-not norm, not the unthinkable exception. And in part because prisons today offer inmates little or nothing in the way of job training, education, or counseling regarding their return to society, ex-offenders' prospects for employment, housing, and marriage upon release drop precipitously from their already low levels before incarceration.
  
  That in turn makes it far more likely that these ex-offenders will return to criminal behavior—and then to prison. Meanwhile, the incarceration of so many young men means more single-parent households, and more children whose fathers are in prison. Children with parents in prison are in turn seven times more likely to be imprisoned at some point in their lives than other children. As Brown professor Glenn Loury puts it in Race, Incarceration, and American Values, we are "creating a racially defined pariah class in the middle of our great cities."
  
  ...Until 1975, the United States' criminal justice system was roughly in line with much of Europe's. For fifty years preceding 1975, the US incarceration rate consistently hovered around 100 inmates per 100,000; criminologists made careers out of theorizing that the incarceration rate would never change. Around 1975, however, they were proved wrong, as the United States became radically more punitive. In thirty-five years, the incarceration rate ballooned to over 700 per 100,000, far outstripping all other countries.
  
  This growth is not attributable to increased offending rates, but to increased punitiveness. Being "tough on crime" became a political mandate. State and federal legislatures imposed mandatory minimum sentences; abolished or radically restricted parole; and adopted "three strikes" laws that exact life imprisonment for a third offense, even when the offense is as minor as stealing a slice of pizza. Comparing the ratio of convictions to "index crimes" such as murder, rape, and burglary between 1975 and 1999 reveals that, holding crime constant, the United States became five times more punitive. Harvard sociologist Bruce Western estimates that the increase in incarceration rates since 1975 can take credit for only about 10 percent of the drop in crime over the same period.
  
  Much of the extraordinary growth in the prison and jail population is attributable to a dramatic increase in prosecution and imprisonment for drug offenses. President Reagan declared a "war on drugs" in 1982, and the states eagerly followed suit. From 1980 to 1997, Loury tells us, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by 1,100 percent. Drug convictions alone account for more than 80 percent of the total increase in the federal prison population from 1985 to 1995. In 2008, four of five drug arrests were for possession, and only one in five was for distribution; fully half of all drug arrests were for marijuana offenses.
  
  African-Americans have borne the brunt of this war. From 1985 to 1991, the number of white drug offenders in state prisons increased by 110 percent; the number of black drug offenders grew by 465 percent. The average time served by African-Americans for drug crimes grew by 62 percent between 1994 and 2003, while white drug offenders served 17 percent more time. Though 14 percent of monthly drug users are black, roughly equal to their proportion of the general population, they are arrested and imprisoned at vastly disproportionate rates: 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses are black as well as 56 percent of those in state prisons for drug offenses. Blacks serve almost as much time in prison for drug offenses (average of 58.7 months) as whites do for violent crimes (average of 61.7 months)
  
  ...If white male babies faced anything like such prospects, the politics of crime would look very different. We would almost certainly see this as an urgent national calamity, and demand a collective investment of public resources to forestall so many going to prison. Politicians would insist that we reduce criminal penalties, decriminalize nonviolent drug offenses, and promote alternatives to incarceration.
  
  ...The war on drugs has by most accounts been a failure, and we are all paying the bill. In 2008, 1.7 million people were arrested for drug crimes.[12] Since 1989, more people have been incarcerated for drug offenses than for all violent crimes combined. Yet much like Prohibition, the war on drugs has not ended or even significantly diminished drug use. It has made drugs more expensive, and fostered a multibillion-dollar criminal industry in drug delivery and sales. Drugs have become more concentrated and deadly; twice as many people die from drugs today than before the war on drugs was declared. If anything, the war on drugs has probably increased the incidence of crime; about half of property crime, robberies, and burglaries are attributable to the inflated cost of drugs caused by criminalizing them.
  

  
  Cole also outlines some of the fitful steps being taken at reforming this monstrous system -- most of them being driven by the financial crisis, as states find they can no longer maintain vast hordes of their own citizens behind bars. And a few officials are dimly beginning to ponder the broader social (and economic -- always economic!) consequences of consigning generation after generation of American citizens to lives of incarceration, poverty, hopelessness and injustice. But as Cole concludes:
  
  

  Our addiction to punishment should be troubling not only because it is costly and often counterproductive, but because its race and class disparities are morally unacceptable. The most promising arguments for reform, therefore, must appeal simultaneously to considerations of pragmatism and principle. The very fact that the US record is so much worse than that of the rest of the world should tell us that we are doing something wrong, and the sheer waste of public dollars and human lives should impel us toward reform. But as the authors of these three books make clear, we will not understand the problem fully until we candidly confront the fact that our criminal justice system would not be tolerable to the majority if its impact were felt more broadly by the general population, and not concentrated on the most deprived among us.
  

  
  

  

• The Inhuman Stain: Saying Yes to State Terror

  2009 Nov 03

  I've been writing about the case of Maher Arar since December 2003. He is the innocent Canadian man who was seized by U.S officials on his way back to Canada and then, at the order of the Justice Department, "renditioned" to Syria, where it was known that the authorities would torture the alleged "terrorist." They did, brutally. He was finally released, and his innocence was confirmed by the Canadian government, which paid him some $9 million for its part in his ordeal. – The United States, on the other hand, made no apologies, no restitution; instead, the government has resolutely blocked any attempt by Arar to seek justice in American courts.
  
  Now the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed his case, ruling instead that the Executive Branch can capture and torture innocent people as they please, with no legal remedy for the victim, as long as they evoke, however spuriously, the sacred doctrine of "national security." Indeed, it is entirely accurate to say that "national security," as determined solely by the president and his designated minions, is now the actual constituion of the United States, the principle by which the state is shaped and governed. Scott Horton at Harper's has the details.
  
  Below is the first piece I wrote on the Arar case. It should be noted that all the draconian authoritarian powers discussed in this article – almost six years and two presidential elections later – are still in force, and still being rigorously defended by the Obama Administration.
  
  

  There is a horrible scandal eating away the heart of the American body politic. Among the many corrupted currents loosed upon the nation by the Bush Regime, this scandal is perhaps the worst, for it abets all the others and breeds new pestilence, new perversions at every turn.
  
  Last month, Maher Arar of Canada detailed his ordeal at the hands of Attorney General John Ashcroft's shadowy security "organs." On his way back home from a family holiday in Tunis, the Syrian-born Arar -- 16 years a Canadian citizen -- was seized at a New York airport. Jailed and interrogated without charges, on unspecified allegations of unspecified connections to unspecified terrorist groups, he was then summarily deported, without a hearing, to Syria. When he told the Homeland Chekists he would be tortured there -- his family was marked down as dissidents by Syria's Baathist regime -- the Chekists replied that their organ "was not the body that deals with the Geneva Conventions regarding torture." They shackled him and flew him to the American-friendly regime in Jordan; from there he was bundled across the border to Damascus.
  
  But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
  
  For 10 months and 10 days, Arar was held in a dank cell in Syria: a "grave," he called it, a three-by-six unlighted hole filled with cat and rat piss falling down from the grating overhead. He was beaten over and over, often with electrical cable, for weeks on end, kept awake for days, made to witness and hear even more exquisite tortures applied to other prisoners. He was forced to sign false confessions. Ashcroft's Baathist comrades had a pre-set storyline they wanted filled in: that Arar had gone to Afghanistan, attended terrorist training camps, was plotting mayhem -- the usual template. Arar, who had spent years working as a computer consultant for a Boston-based high-tech firm, had done none of those things. Yet he was whipped, broken and tortured into submission.
  
  But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
  
  Arar's case is not extraordinary. In the past two years, the Bushist organs have "rendered" thousands of detainees, without charges, hearings or the need to produce any evidence whatsoever, into the hands of regimes which the U.S. government itself denounces for the widespread use of torture. Apparatchiks of the organs make no secret of the practice -- or of their knowledge that the "rendered" will indeed be beaten, burned, drugged, raped, even killed. "I do it with my eyes open," one renderer told the Washington Post. Detainees -- including lifelong American residents -- have been snatched from the homes, businesses, schools, from streets and airports, and sent to torture pits like Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan -- even the stateless chaos of Somalia, where Ashcroft simply dumped more than 30 Somali-Americans last year, without charges, without evidence, without counsel, and with no visible means of support, as the London Times reports.
  
  But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
  
  Of course, the American organs needn't rely exclusively on foreigners for torture anymore. Under the enlightened leadership of Ashcroft, Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other upstanding Christian statesmen, America has now established its own centers for what the organs call "operational flexibility." These include bases in Bagram, Afghanistan and Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean island that was forcibly depopulated in the 1960s to make way for a U.S. military installation. Here, the CIA runs secret interrogation units that are even more restricted than the American concentration camp on Guantanamo Bay. Detainees -- again, held without charges or evidentiary requirements -- are "softened up" by beatings at the hands of military police and Special Forces troops before being subjected to "stress and duress" techniques: sleep deprivation (officially condemned as a torture method by the U.S. government), physical and psychological disorientation, withholding of medical treatment, etc. When beatings and "duress" don't work, detainees are then "packaged" -- hooded, gagged, bound to stretchers with duct tape -- and "rendered" into less dainty hands elsewhere.
  
  But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
  
  Not content with capture and torture, the organs have been given presidential authority to carry out raids and kill "suspected terrorists" (including Americans) on their own volition -- without oversight, without charges, without evidence -- anywhere in the world, including on American soil. In addition to this general license to kill, Bush has claimed the power to designate anyone he pleases "an enemy combatant" and have them "rendered" into the hands of the organs or simply killed at his express order -- without charges, without evidence, with no judicial or legislative oversight whatsoever. The life of every American citizen -- indeed, every person on earth -- is now at the disposal of his arbitrary whim. Never in history has an individual claimed such universal power -- and had the force to back it up.
  
  But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
  
  All of the above facts -- each of them manifest violations of international law and/or the U.S. Constitution  --  have been cheerfully attested to, for years now, by the organs' own appartchiks, in the Post, the NY Times, Newsweek, the Guardian, the Economist and other high-profile, mainstream publications. The stories appear -- then they disappear. There is no reaction. No outcry in Congress or the courts -- the supposed guardians of the people's rights -- beyond a few wan calls for more formality in the concentration camp processing or judicial "warrants" for torture. And among the great mass of "the people" itself, there is -- nothing. Silence. Inattention. Acquiescence. State terrorism -- lawless seizure, filthy torture, official murder -- is simply accepted, a part of "normal life," as in Nazi Germany or Stalin's empire, where "decent people" with "nothing to hide" approved and applauded the work of the "organs" in "defending national security."
  
  This is the scandal, this is the nation's festering shame.This acquiescence to state terror will breed -- and attract -- a thousand evils for every one it supposedly prevents. 
  

  
  

  

• The Violent Bear it Away

  2009 Nov 01

  Arthur Silber writes of the gang-rape case in Richmond, California. You are unlikely to find such passion, eloquence and meaning in any other story about this case, and its implications. I won't excerpt Silber's essay here, because I think you should read the entire piece. I will only print his conclusion:
  
  

  But, many people will say, this is monstrous. We must teach these children that such behavior is deeply wrong, and that they must change. To all such people, I reply: Then change yourselves. Change your values, and change the way you think and act. Children will see those changes, and their own behavior will alter accordingly in time.
  
  Change yourselves. Start today. Start right now.
  

  
  Again, I urge you to read the entire piece, and see the careful, powerful arguments that lead to this conclusion.