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Blow Out |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Sunday, 11 August 2013 08:12 |
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Pierce writes: "A little over a year ago, at a Chevron refinery in Richmond, California blew up. Nobody died but, in the aftermath, 15,000 people were treated for various respiratory problems caused by the poison that the explosion and fire spewed into the air."
Smoke rises from the scene of an explosion at a Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., 08/06/12. (photo: unknown)
Blow Out
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
11 August 13
 little over a year ago, at a Chevron refinery in Richmond, California blew up. Nobody died but, in the aftermath, 15,000 people were treated for various respiratory problems caused by the poison that the explosion and fire spewed into the air. Now, the city is suing Chevron. Among other things, the city is accusing Chevron of not giving much of a damn who it sickened in and around Richmond.
The lawsuit alleges the explosion and blaze at the Richmond refinery on Aug. 6, 2012, resulted from "years of neglect, lax oversight and corporate indifference to necessary safety inspection and repairs." The fire occurred after a leak in a corroded pipe in the refinery's crude oil unit created a large cloud of hydrocarbon vapor that ignited in a fireball at about 6:30 p.m. that day. The fire burned for several hours before being controlled and sent a huge plume of toxic black smoke over the area. More than 15,000 people were treated at hospitals for respiratory problems and other illnesses. The lawsuit, authorized by the City Council last week, seeks financial compensation for economic damage to the city, including the costs of emergency response, firefighting, environmental cleanup, alleviating harm to public health, and loss of value in city property.
The blog has been following closely those place in the country - West, Texas, Geismar, Louisiana, etc. - that have taken to blowing up recently and it has discovered that, in many cases, the blowing up occurs because the local "business-friendly" climate proposed by state and local governments has had a lot to do with how the Invisible Hand has lit the fuse. After things go boom, however, the Invisible Hand strangely becomes more invisible. The Invisible Hand doesn't leave any fingerprints, either. For example, and for its part, Chevron obviously has decided that little people and their petty attempts to breathe do not concern Chevron very much.
Chevron spokeswoman Melissa Ritchie said on Thursday, "We believe the decision to pursue such a suit is a waste of the city's resources and yet another example of its failed leadership."
Translation from the original weaselspeak: We have lawyered up and we will drag this bad boy out, and the great-grandchildren of your town counsel will be answering motions, and we will break you and your government in court before y'all ever see a dime.
You've got to be a special kind of arrogant to blame your company's corroded pipe that caused an explosion and fire at your company's refinery on the "failed leadership" of the city you poisoned, but that's the kind of arrogance that has arisen as the relationship between American business and American government has shifted so dramatically over the last 40 years. That's the kind of arrogance that gets embedded in the corporate class when it looks around and sees no penalties being exacted by the government for the depredations the corporate class has unleashed on the people for whom the government is the only real protection. This is yet another consequence of looking forward, and not back.
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Frank Rich: "GOP Should Be Happy About CNN's Hillary Film" |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Saturday, 10 August 2013 13:16 |
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Rich writes: "As for the NBC miniseries starring Diane Lane, does anyone really believe that such a project long before the election, broadcast on a network often seen by fewer viewers than Univision, is going to seriously alter public perception of someone as well known at this point as Hillary Clinton?"
New York Magazine columnist Frank Rich. (photo: NY Magazine)
Frank Rich: "GOP Should Be Happy About CNN's Hillary Film"
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
10 August 13
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Reince Priebus throws an ill-considered fit, Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post, and Obama yucks it up with Jay Leno.
 NC chairman Reince Priebus delivered an ultimatum to CNN and NBC earlier this week: Pull the plug on your planned Hillary Clinton film projects, or we won't allow you to air the 2016 GOP primaries. Priebus's stance against the Hillary films (if not his petulant threats) has been backed by some unlikely allies, among them David Brock and Maureen Dowd. Do you think the RNC chair has a point? And, tactically, is this a smart fight for him to pick?
It seems that almost no one debating this has seen the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job directed by Charles Ferguson, who CNN has hired to do its Hillary documentary. It is a scathing (and superb) takedown of the Wall Street financial establishment that looted the country during the bubble and precipitated the crash. My guess is that David Brock has seen Inside Job, and that might explain in part why Media Matters is against Ferguson taking on the assignment for CNN: It's impossible to imagine that Ferguson would do a hagiography of Hillary, whose husband's administration empowered many of the villains in Inside Job. (And it tells you what kind of idiot Priebus is that he is looking a gift horse from CNN in the mouth.) As for the NBC miniseries starring Diane Lane, does anyone really believe that such a project long before the election, broadcast on a network often seen by fewer viewers than Univision, is going to seriously alter public perception of someone as well known at this point as Hillary Clinton? Perhaps most idiotic of all is Priebus's threat to bar GOP presidential primary debates from airing on CNN and NBC in retaliation for those networks' "in-kind donations" to Hillary. Does he really want to go there? Fox News, after all, is a 365-days-a-year in-kind donation by Rupert Murdoch to his political party. But let's say for the sake of argument that Priebus pulls off his boycott and even achieves what is surely his dream scenario - that all Republican debates be held under the auspices of Roger Ailes at Fox. What the GOP will end up with is a presidential field that panders entirely to the party's base - the perfect way to facilitate, say, a Paul-Cruz ticket, provided that Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann doesn't make a comeback. Good luck with that in November 2016.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post on Monday. Some in the media have cheered Bezos's purchase as the potential salvation of newspapers. Others suspect he bought the Post to exert political influence in the capital. What's your reaction to the news?
A brief, vague statement to Post employees aside, Bezos himself has said nothing about what he intends to do with the Post. If you read the reams (and I do mean reams) of media speculation on his plans, you can find every conceivable scenario, ranging from the villainous (he's found a journalistic vehicle to further Amazon's ruthless corporate interests on the Hill) to the utopian (he'll save the news business with creative ideas tantamount to those that remade American retailing). But no one knows, and it's possible (if unlikely) that he will just subsidize the Post from afar as an altruistic public service and really keep the paper's current management in place over the long term, as he says he is doing for now. My own, equally worthless speculation is this: Bezos is a titanic businessman who swings for the fences, and he didn't buy the Post to let it sit there and collect dust as if it were a wealthy guy's image-enhancing art collection. Bezos got into the media business for the same reason such other tech proprietors as Michael Bloomberg and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes (the owner of The New Republic) did: to make a difference and to win. Nobody knows how he could or will do that, because if anybody did know how to save the newspaper business, the Washington Post would not have been slowly (not so slowly, actually) dying under the Graham family's devoted and honorable management. The fact that the Times felt compelled to release a long, after-business-hours statement last night saying it was not for sale shows just how much Bezos has rattled the industry in 48 hours, and by doing nothing but writing what for him is a pocket-change check. Fasten your seat belts.
On Tuesday night, President Obama went on The Tonight Show to talk with Jay Leno about topics ranging from his golf game to domestic surveillance. Obama's approval ratings are down. Of course, he'll never have to deal with another election in his life. How important is his popularity now? And do late-night TV appearances have any effect?
It was fascinating to turn on Andrea Mitchell's show on MSNBC the day after and watch the assembled Washington panelists earnestly chatter about what a "new development" it was that a president would talk about substantive matters to an entertainer on a talk show. To quote SNL: Really? Where have you been for the past decade? Time to stop going to all those parties chronicled in This Town and turn on a television that's not tuned in 24/7 to cable news. In any case, I doubt that Obama's poll numbers, which are mediocre but not dire, will be affected at all by this appearance (graceful as it was); as long as his numbers are roughly four times higher than Congress's (and they are), he's in safe political territory. What I found most interesting about the Tonight outing was the freedom that Jay Leno seemed to be enjoying now that he, like the president, is a lame duck. He had no qualms about asking informed, forthright questions about government contractors - not just Edward Snowden, but Blackwater - and the oppression of gays and lesbians in Russia. This is not the cautious Jay that usually erred on the side of bland.
Speaking of which: The Winter Olympics is six months away, and Russia's new edict outlawing any public support of homosexuality is ramping up into a major controversy. Russia's anti-gay restrictions will apply to athletes (and everyone else) at the Sochi Games. Should the U.S. boycott the Olympics in protest?
This is an untenable situation, and, as Obama indicated in his Leno interview, it's weighing on him along with the other matters, including the granting of asylum to Snowden, that led him to cancel his summit with Putin. A boycott should not be ruled out, and I suspect that gay Olympic athletes will (and should) have a major role in weighing that question. But I also think a smart early strategy would be to pressure NBC, which paid $775 million to broadcast the Games and so far has issued only anodyne statements about the situation it will confront in Russia. Chad Griffin of the Human Rights Campaign has called for NBC News to do serious coverage of how the Russian government treats its gay citizens - surely a must, but only a start. As Jeré Longman wrote in the Times, NBC's journalists on the scene in Sochi could be prosecuted merely "for addressing the issue of homosexuality," which they will surely have to do. Do NBC and its corporate parent, Comcast, think this affront to human rights is just going to go away? They, and all the other American corporate sponsors of the Games, will have to take a strong stand because too many of their customers, straight and gay, will not stand for the Russian government's abuse of human rights.
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FOCUS | US Image-Polishing on Immigration? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 10 August 2013 10:20 |
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Boardman writes: "On August 1, police arrested more than 40 peaceful demonstrators for taking part in an immigration sit-in on Capitol Hill. What if civil disobedience connects with the moral rot of American policy?"
Eliseo Medina, center, of the Service Employees International Union was among those arrested Thursday in Washington as part of an effort to push for an immigration overhaul. (photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick/NYT)
US Image-Polishing on Immigration?
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 August 13
The Dream 9 are out, but 30,000 are still prisoners subject to torture. With 40 protesters arrested in DC, Washington acts to cool the heat.
 he scene in a Tucson, Arizona, parking lot in the late afternoon of August 7 looked something like the aftermath of a local graduation ceremony, with small groups of people clustered around smiling young people in caps and gowns. But these nine "graduates" were smiling in part because they had just left the nearby Eloy Detention Center, where six of them had suffered the torture technique of solitary confinement for the offense of going on a hunger strike to get phone contact with the outside world.
These are the nine young people known as the Dream 9, who have lived much or most of their lives in the United States and threaten to put a human face on the cruel and unjust activities known generally as U.S. immigration policy. On August 1, police arrested more than 40 peaceful demonstrators for taking part in an immigration sit-in on Capitol Hill. What if civil disobedience connects with the moral rot of American policy?
The cynic might suspect that the Dream 9 were released because they'll be less of a problem for the government scattered to their homes around the country than they were inside where they were organizing, protesting, gathering stories of other detainees, and shining some light on one of the darker corners of authoritarian America.
On any given day, the United States holds more than 30,000 people in immigration prisons, with more than 300 of them in solitary confinement. It is a system in which the use of torture techniques is unquestioned, and is outsourced by the government to private contractors like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which runs the Eloy prison, which has a reputation for horrific conditions and a history of detainee deaths, including two suicides in March this year. [CCA has not responded to inquiries.]
HEADLINE: "Dream 9 Released from Custody After 17 Days in Detainment"
That was the early headline on NBC Latino, an online source of Latino news, as the story of the release broke. The tone of that headline and the happy-face story that follows illustrates how compliant media can create the appearance that "the system works" when the evidence is overwhelming that American immigration law is unjust and the Obama administration policy that has deported more that 1.7 million people is cruel and inhuman.
That much is clear from the experience of the Dream 9, whose civil disobedience took the unusual step of committing a legal act for which they assumed they would be arrested and jailed. The legal act? Crossing the border and asking the authorities for asylum. The government obliged by arresting and sending them to a for-profit prison, where they were further mistreated.
As reported August 1 on Colorlines.com, CCA's mistreatment included singling out "ringleaders" for special attention:
Shortly after arriving at Eloy, the Dream 9 say their phone use was unfairly restricted. In protest, they began a hunger strike - but six were placed in solitary confinement for their decision to do so....
At the time of publication, 24-year-old Lulu Martinez and 22-year-old Maria Peniche have spent 104 out of the last 108 hours in complete isolation.... when Martinez and Peniche are brought out of their individual cells and into the yard once a day, they are shackled and interact only with guards....
Thesla Zenaida, who met the Dream 9 at Eloy and is now participating in a hunger strike along with other women detainees, explained in a phone call that a guard's treatment at the detention facility drove a fellow detainee to suicide.
Look, a girl hanged herself. A girl was hanged here. [After] she was hanged, they didn't want to take her body down. And for the same reason - because they treat us poorly. A guard treated her poorly, and that guard is still working here. They us like the worst dogs.
Jesus Magana Is a Citizen and an Air Force Veteran - His Sister Is a Prisoner
On the same day the Dream 9 got out of Eloy, Jesus Magana, 24, posted a short video about his sister, Alejandra Pablos, 29, on the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) channel on YouTube.
Alejandra Pablos has been a prisoner for about two years. Her mother is a citizen, and her brother is a citizen who served four years in the Air Force (part of the time in a combat zone). Alejandre Pablos made her first mistake when she came to the U.S. when she was only two, accompanying her mother.
She never lived in Mexico after that. She went to school in Arizona and graduated from the University of Arizona with high honors and a business degree. She was planning on returning to school for her masters before the U.S. Department of Homeland Security decided it needed to detain her and revoke her permanent residency status over two misdemeanor convictions.
The U.S. is trying to deport Alejandra Pablos. She is resisting deportation because she has no ties to Mexico and is fearful about what would happen to her there. This is essentially the same situation each of the Dream 9 faces, and served as the basis of their argument for asylum in their home country, the U.S.
For whatever reason, Homeland Security has now decided that the Dream 9 have reasonable fear for their wellbeing if they are sent back to Mexico, so they have been released, pending an immigration court hearing on their asylum requests. Why do security officials exercise such inconsistent standards? They don't say, even on those rare occasions when they're asked. Surely it's not only to protect CCA's profit margin.
Why Didn't the President Respond to the Moral Challenge of the Dream 9?
Stonewalling is the bedrock of American immigration enforcement. On July 30, Representative Mike Honda, a Democrat from California, sent a letter to President Obama, also a Democrat, asking him to intervene on behalf of the Dream 9. More than 40 other members of Congress have signed the letter.
Rep. Honda spent four years of his early childhood in a Colorado internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. In 1965, Honda joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in El Salvador, where he became fluent in Spanish. His letter began by reminding the president that:
... last week, three leaders of the undocumented youth movement in the United States crossed the border into Mexico and turned themselves in at the Morley border crossing near Nogales, Arizona, along with [six] other DREAM Act-eligible youth currently living in Mexico. They took this courageous step because they are fighting to reunite families separated by the border and mass deportation policies, including their own. These youths are the victims of our broken immigration policy, and they deserve to come home to the United States, where they can continue to work toward fulfilling their dreams of higher education.
In a July 30 press release announcing the delivery of the Obama letter, Rep. Honda said: "These courageous, undocumented young people shine a light on the painful family separation caused by our broken immigration system. One who took part in this protest is Lizbeth Mateo, a constituent. It had been 15 years since she last saw her family in Mexico, and overcame incredible odds to gain admission this fall to Santa Clara University Law School. While we are working hard to achieve comprehensive reform in Congress, DREAMers like Lizbeth need action now for the opportunity to live, learn, and succeed in our country."
President Obama has not responded to the letter.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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How Did Ayn Rand Become a Hero to Right-Wing Nerds Everywhere? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=17709"><span class="small">Michael Lind, Salon</span></a>
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Saturday, 10 August 2013 08:23 |
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Lind writes: "The mentality of Ayn Rand ... is remarkably similar to the mentality of the Tea Party right that seeks to sabotage government (as Rand's heroes sabotage the economy), no matter the consequences for the nation."
(art: Benjamin Wheelock/Salon/AP/Phil Long)
How Did Ayn Rand Become a Hero to Right-Wing Nerds Everywhere?
By Michael Lind, Salon
10 August 13
he growing influence on the American right of Ayn Rand, the libertarian right's answer to Scientology's novelist-philosopher L. Ron Hubbard, is a wonder to behold. When she died in 1982, Alissa Rosenbaum - the original name of the Russian-born novelist - was the leader of a marginal cult, the Objectivists, who had long been cast out of the mainstream American right. But the rise of Tea Party conservatism, fueled by white racial panic and zero-sum distributional conflicts in the Great Recession, has turned this minor, once-forgotten figure into an icon for a new generation of nerds who imagine themselves Nietzschean Ubermenschen oppressed by the totalitarian tyranny of the post office and the Social Security administration.
Rand-worshipers can be found in, among other places, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. At a 2005 gathering to honor her memory, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan declared, "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand."
The late Gore Vidal would not have been surprised by the former Republican vice-presidential candidate's choice of a patron saint. After all, it was Vidal who observed, in a 1961 article for Esquire:
She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the 'welfare' state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you're dumb or incompetent that's your lookout.
Vidal might be dismissed as a biased leftist. But the late William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of post-1945 conservatism who engaged in a famous televised spat with Vidal during the 1968 Democratic convention, shared Vidal's contempt for Ayn Rand. After her death in 1982, Buckley wrote in the New York Daily News: "She was an eloquent and persuasive anti-statist, and if only she had left it at that, but no. She had to declare that God did not exist, that altruism was despicable, that only self-interest was good and noble." In 2003, Buckley described his encounter with Rand's interminable propaganda novel "Atlas Shrugged": "I had to flog myself to read it."
Ayn Rand and her "Objectivist" cult members never forgave Buckley for reading them out of the mainstream American right, along with the equally crackpot John Birch Society. In 1957 Buckley, then the young editor of the flagship magazine of the conservative movement, National Review, published a review of "Atlas Shrugged" by Whittaker Chambers, the ex-communist intellectual who had played a key role in exposing Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy.
Chambers titled his review " Big Sister Is Watching You." He wrote:
Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, Labor, etc. etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. "This," she is saying in effect, "is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from."
The juvenile plot of "Atlas Shrugged" is a melodramatic war between "Children of Light" and "Children of Darkness":
The Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. In so far as any of them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in Board rooms. Otherwise, the Children of Light are geniuses. One of them is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia.
Today's libertarian rightist radicals distinguish between "makers" and "takers." In the flagship conservative magazine of the 1950s, Whittaker Chambers did not tolerate such crude sloganeering:
In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as "looters." This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the plaguey business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.
Long before the historian Corey Robin made the case for the Nietzschean roots of much modern libertarianism, Chambers detected Nietzsche's influence on the author of "Atlas Shrugged":
Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche's "last men," both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria. And much else comes, consciously or not, from the same source.
Chambers concluded that despite all her talk about individualism and liberty, Rand was driven by a romantic and illiberal vision in which a heroic minority of superhuman geniuses would remake a corrupt society from top to bottom:
One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind).
Chambers did not live to see one of Ayn Rand's early disciples, Alan Greenspan, become chairman of the Federal Reserve, the ultimate technocrat of the financial caste, if not of industrialists and engineers.
Rand's conceited Nietzschean elitism was shared by another libertarian hero, Ludwig von Mises, who wrote to Rand: "You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you." (Hayek later confessed that he was defeated by "Atlas Shrugged": "Although I tried seriously to read the book, I failed, because there was no romance in it. I tried even more diligently to read that fellow John Galt's hundred-page declaration of independence, and I knew I'd be questioned on all that, but I just couldn't get through it.")
The mentality of Ayn Rand, as described by Chambers back in 1957 in the pages of the leading conservative magazine, is remarkably similar to the mentality of the Tea Party right that seeks to sabotage government (as Rand's heroes sabotage the economy), no matter the consequences for the nation:
In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked.
What should we conclude from the fact that Ayn Rand's works are admired by 21st century American rightists like Paul Ryan who have forgotten, if they ever knew about, sophisticated conservative intellectuals like Chambers and Buckley? Gore Vidal's comments in 1961 seem chillingly prescient in 2013:
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead.
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hat has Edward Snowden done for Barack Obama? According to the President, who spoke 
