current musical obsession: chimes of freedom to benefit amnesty international

If you've ever seen Bob Dylan in concert, or if you are a fan of his live recordings, you know he seldom sings a song the same way twice. Subtle lyrical changes shift emphasis and perspective. New arrangements funnel songs you thought you knew through unlikely channels. Dylan is not only one of the great poets and songwriters of our time, he is a timeless troubadour, creating and re-creating his music in front of your eyes. (Just don't try to sing along.)

It seems fitting then, that a hugely disparate collection of musicians have covered and interpreted Dylan's work. You can hear eighty of these artists' interpretations by downloading "Chimes of Freedom," for a mere $19.99, with all profits going to Amnesty International. Or, you can buy a four-CD set for only $24.99. The CDs only ship to US addresses, but the downloads can accessed five times. You can also purchase individual songs.

This extremely eclectic collection almost certainly includes artists you've never heard of and, even for huge Dylan fans like me, songs you've never heard of, too. The covers range from the mundane to the irresistible, but which is which will be up to you.

Hey, it's $20 and it benefits Amnesty! What have you got to lose?

help me get rid of zip

When we lived in NYC, I was hugely into Netflix. The selection and convenience were terrific, and for frequent movie watching, the flat monthly fee was a great value.

After moving to Canada, we joined Zip... and thus began the saga.

Zip (now owned by media giant Rogers) has a good (not great) selection, their ship-times are good, and the price is decent if you watch a lot of movies. But. Two big buts.

Their system doesn't work if you have less than 20 titles on your ZipList (the equivalent of the Netflix queue). This would not be a problem if they shipped titles in your order of preference. You could simply add junk titles that you didn't really want to see to the end of your list.

That's where the second but comes in. Zip does not ship titles in any order even resembling your preference. You're as likely to get a movie from the bottom of your list as you are from the top.

Now, as you all know and are undoubtedly sick of reading by now, I watch movies for half the year, and watch baseball during the other half. Movie Season begins in November or (grumble, grumble) October, and ends at the end of March. By January, I have a short list of movies that I really want to see before April, but my ZipList is running low, so service slows down.

I then have two choices. I either add a bunch of "filler" titles to my list, and hope they don't ship, or I get movies much less frequently - which sucks, plus what I do receive is still unlikely to be any of my top choices.

When we first joined, we really struggled with this, compounded by truly terrible customer service. At that time, Zip's idea of customer service was to tell me that my problem was not really happening, and if it is, it was my own fault, and I should lower my expectations. (I wrote about it here, here, and here.)

To keep my business, a customer service manager gave me some special service: she did something to my list so that movies would continue to ship, even though the number of titles on the list was dwindling.

The following year, I contacted her again... and she again obliged. This special service - which I know some of you will not approve of - kept me a reasonably happy Zip subscriber.

It worked for four years, but now she has left the company. Zip seems to have fixed their customer service problem - they're not arguing anymore, they're polite, and sympathetic - but no one is interested in helping me with this issue. I understand that I can't expect special service forever, but I don't understand why they can't figure out how to run their business better.

Now I really want to get rid of Zip, but I don't know how to replace it. Here are the options that I know of.

- Netflix. I know many Canadians are excited that Netflix is now available in Canada, through a streaming service. However, we don't have a gaming system, so it would mean watching movies on a computer, which both Allan and I find very unappealing. In addition, I've heard from many people that the quality is very bad - sputtering, buffering, skipping. We would hate that. Unless the quality improved and there was some easy way to watch on our TV, this is not an option.

- Downloading from iTunes. Even if we can somehow work around our Rogers download cap (which is an inconvenience for Allan), we're talking $13.00 per movie. That's all right sometimes, but during Movie Season, I see two or three movies each week. Through a Netflix or Zip type of service, I can do that for about $30 a month. Thirteen dollars a pop is not affordable. Plus, the selection will be minimal.

- Pay-per-view on cable. No downloading issues, but other than that, same as above.

- Movie rental stores. Do these even exist anymore? Inconvenient, crap selection. Return to the 1990s. No thanks.

- The library. Good when movies are available, but right now, for example, there are 12 copies of Moneyball and 115 people waiting for them ahead of me. Also, selection will be spotty.

- Other services like Zip? I found something called Canflix, formerly in Calgary, now out of business, and CineMail.ca, in Winnipeg. I haven't found any user reviews yet. Their website looks so rinky-dink, I'm already skeptical, but I'll continue to investigate.

Anything else? What can I do???

pollitt: komen foundation pinkwashes anti-choicers, punks planned parenthood

The one and only Katha Pollitt:

The anti-choice movement can be so clumsy, and so weird, we forget that it is also smart and strategic and busy busy busy. Because while you were shaking your head over pink Bibles and stem-cell futurology, Komen was hiring Karen Handel as senior vice president for public policy. Handel is not your typical philanthropy administrator. She is a Republican pol, a former Georgia secretary of state, who ran in the 2010 gubernatorial primary, with endorsements from Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and anti-immigrant finger-pointing Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. At that time she described herself as “staunchly and unequivocally pro-life,” opposed to stem cell research and a fan of crisis pregnancy centers—places that have repeatedly been shown to use scare tactics and misinformation to dissuade women from seeking abortions. She vowed to eliminate from the state budget pass-through grants to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screenings. Interestingly, she had previously supported these grants, using the exact arguments defenders of Komen’s PP grants are making now: PP is the only organization capable of doing the work—reaching low-income women, for whom the PP clinic is often the only medical care the get—and the grant money does not fund abortions. Handel’s turnaround shows you how quickly the anti-choicers have claimed formerly neutral turf: in only a few years a relationship deemed normal and good — in Georgia! — and the only existing way of providing needed services was branded with the mark of the beast.

Read it here.

who is behind the susan g. komen foundation's decision to cut ties with planned parenthood?

When a leading breast-cancer charity severs its relationship with the largest provider of reproductive health services in the US, we have to ask, who is behind this terrible decision? The Atlantic:

The nation's leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which has spent nearly $2 billion over the past 30 years for breast cancer education, health services, research, and advocacy, has announced that it will end its longtime partnership with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The announcement has sparked bitter debate among representatives from all concerned parties, highlighting the ongoing debate over abortion.

Planned Parenthood, currently the largest provider of reproductive health services in the United States, is widely known for helping women to obtain abortions and contraceptives. But those services, despite their high profile, account for only 38 percent (PDF) of the organization's work. And though Republicans often portray Planned Parenthood as strictly an abortion provider, using the phrase to incite anger among pro-life constituents and gain support for cuts to federal funding -- it comes largely through the Title X and Medicaid programs -- the fact is that the organization devotes most of its money and manpower to screening for breast, cervical, and testicular cancers; treating menopause; testing for sexually transmitted diseases; and more.

The money provided by Susan G. Komen for the Cure went to just a fraction -- about 19 according to one report -- of Planned Parenthood's more than 85 affiliates. And it was all -- roughly $680,000 last year and $580,000 the year before that -- used for breast-cancer screening and other breast-health services for low-income, uninsured, and under-insured women.

Koman has been criticized in the past for donating to Planned Parenthood and the official response has always been that, despite the controversy surrounding some of its programs, the organization was the only one working to provide breast-health services to women in need in dozens of communities around the United States.

So why the sudden change?

Cutting funds to Planned Parenthood is the result of a newly adopted policy to block grants to organizations currently under investigation by any local, state, or federal authorities, Koman spokeswoman Leslie Aun told the Associated Press. A statement released Tuesday evening added: "While it is regrettable when changes in priorities and policies affect any of our grantees, such as a long-standing partner like Planned Parenthood, we must continue to evolve to best meet the needs of the women we serve and most fully advance our mission."

The key factor behind Komen's decision, Aun told the Associated Press, is not ongoing protests of Planned Parenthood -- the Alliance Defense Fund was quick to praise Komen "for seeing the contradiction between its lifesaving work and its relationship with an abortionist that has ended millions of lives" -- but an audit launched by Rep. Cliff Stearns, chairman of the Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, to determine whether public money had been spent on abortions over the last decade.

When launched way back in late September, Stearns' review was described as the first-ever oversight on taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. But his motivations have been questioned repeatedly. Rep. Henry Waxman called out (PDF) Stearns: "Your fervent ideological opposition to Planned Parenthood does not justify launching this intrusive investigation." And Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), has said that investigation was politically motivated; Stearns must bow to the demands of Florida's 6th congressional district, a largely Republican area of North Central Florida that includes parts of Ocala and Gainesville.

Perhaps best known for his position overseeing the investigation into the Solyndra loan guarantee, Stearns has spent more than 20 years in Congress. Over such a long period, his political opponents inevitably called him a number of negative things. Among them, "bully" might be the easiest to print.

"It's hard to understand how an organization with whom we share a mission of saving women's lives could have bowed to this kind of bullying. It's really hurtful," Richards told the Associated Press. More than confused, Richard was shocked to learn about decision in a phone call this past December. She called it "incredibly surprising" that Komen's president, Elizabeth Thompson, was unwilling to have a discussion about the quick shift.

Read more here.

And sign a petition: Tell the board of Susan G. Komen for a Cure: Don't throw Planned Parenthood under the bus!

national day of student action

Today, February 1, Canadian post-secondary students all over the country are mobilizing in a Day of Action to demand increased education funding and a reduction in tuition fees.

In Ontario, post-secondary students from all over the province will converge in Toronto for a rally and march to Queen's Park, demanding that the McGuinty government keep its promise to slash college and university fees by one-third.

During the 2011 Ontario election, the government was elected, in part, based on a promise to reduce tuition fees by 30 percent. Right now, however, the tuition rebates the Liberal government is offering are not available to about two-thirds of Ontario students.

Students are excited to see the government taking concrete steps to address the mounting cost of post-secondary education and to ensure that low-and middle-income students are able to attend. Students have long called for a tuition fee reduction and are pleased that the government has committed $430 million dollars to provide a grant for some students.

However, students hope to work with the Ontario government to improve the policy. We are concerned that the tuition fee grant will exclude students who need it the most, is inadequate at assessing need, will be expensive to administer, will be difficult to implement at an institutional level and will fail to bring more access to the sector in the way that the government intends.

We want to ensure that government policy has the goal of addressing inequality in access to post-secondary education. To this end, we have created this document to begin a process of collaboration to improve the policy together. We hope that such collaboration will result in the implementation of a policy that both students and policy-makers can be pleased with for September 2012.

Post-secondary education is not optional anymore. Degree requirements are piled one after the next for basic entry into almost any field. But affordable education is not available to all. Students are graduating with the debt equivalents of mortgages that take 15 or 20 years to pay off - if they're well employed. It doesn't have to be that way. A provincial and federal government committed to education could change it.

Today, tuition fees are increasing at a faster rate than any other cost faced by students. According to Statistics Canada’s Youth in Transition Survey, 70 per cent of high school graduates who do not go on to post-secondary education cite financial reasons as the main factor. One in four of those cite debt aversion as their principal deterrent. Moreover, research has consistently found that high up-front costs are a significant barrier to attending college or university for many students.

The result of skyrocketing tuition fees is a system that is increasing the gap between rich and poor. Domestic students are not the only ones who face challenges accessing post-secondary education. International students have faced some of the largest fee increases. Tuition fees for international students now average over $15,000 per year, approximately three times the amount charged to most Canadian students. Some provinces have gone so far as to completely deregulate international tuition fees, allowing universities and colleges to generate revenue from international students well above cost-recovery levels.

While the up-front costs of post-secondary education have risen dramatically, in the last decade every province has at some point either frozen or reduced tuition fees, and public opinion polling consistently finds that an overwhelming majority of Canadians oppose tuition fee increases.

Students are asking for:
- the progressive reduction of tuition and ancillary fees at public post-secondary institutions across the country, including reduced post-residency fees for graduate students;
- the elimination of differential fees for all students (professional, out of province, and international students);
- the development of a dedicated cash-transfer payment guided by principles set out in a federal Post-Secondary Education Act for the purpose of reducing tuition fees and improving quality of teaching, learning, and research infrastructure at colleges and universities.

For more facts, visit EducationIsARight.ca.

hedges: what happened to canada? (corporations have no borders)

Chris Hedges:

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”

The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

Read it here.

wmtc now without threaded comments!

No go on the threaded comments.

First of all, it only indents once. That's a good space-saver, but kind of defeats the purpose of using the threaded format.

Second, as Allan points out, threading makes it more difficult to scan through a comment thread to read only the newest comments.

And finally, the new comment style added justified text and a narrow line height, which look bad. Hopefully reverting back to the original style of commenting will change that, too.

On we go.

wmtc now has threaded comments

Blogger now supports threading commenting, which (mostly) alleviates the need to quote the person you're responding to or use @soandso. It also helps distinguish between comments responding to other comments and those responding to the post itself.

I've also upgraded to the new Blogger interface, which is similar to the new Gmail interface. It's taking some getting used to, but there are lots of nice features.

So let's try threaded comments! What should we talk about?

dear mr harper: stop the threats and intimidation. we will speak out against the enbridge pipeline.

I've been holding on to this email from Leadnow.ca, hoping to write a scathing post... but this is too important to wait until I have time. In case you haven't seen it, I'll re-run the email in its entirety.

No one who has been following Canadian politics for the last few years could be surprised by the tactics of the Harper Government^TM, but we mustn't grow so jaded that we simply let this pass without comment or protest. Please read, click through to send a letter to the Prime Minister, and spread the word.

This week, we learned that the Harper Government is using closed-door intimidation tactics against Canadian charities. They’re trying to silence groups that question our government’s plans to push the Enbridge western pipeline and supertankers project through overwhelming local opposition, and recklessly expand the tar sands at all costs.

A whistleblower just revealed that the Prime Minister’s Office threatened to revoke the charitable status of Tides Canada if they continue their support for ForestEthics, an environmental group that has engaged thousands of Canadians in the public hearings about the Enbridge project.[1]

According to the whistleblower, a former senior communications manager for ForestEthics named Andrew Frank, the Prime Minister’s Office told Tides Canada they consider ForestEthics to be an “enemy of the Government of Canada” because of the group’s opposition to the Enbridge pipeline and tar sands expansion.[1]

This is about more than our jobs and environment. It’s about our rights and our democracy, and we need to speak out now. Together, we can stop these closed-door intimidation tactics by shining a bright light of public attention on our government’s actions.

Click here to tell Prime Minister Harper to stop the threats and ensure fair hearings for Canadians, then please forward this important message far and wide.

While we don’t know exactly what was said behind closed doors, the Globe and Mail reports that the Harper Government has called ForestEthics a group “acting against the government of Canada and people of Canada” in private meetings designed to intimidate charitable funders.[2] And Peter Robinson, the Chief Executive Officer of the David Suzuki Foundation, says that environmental groups are “right to worry” that the government will threaten the charitable status of groups they disagree with in order to shut down debate.[3]

The latest threats are part of a much larger pattern. Internal documents from March 2011 outline the Harper Government’s strategy to spend Canadian tax dollars on a PR and lobbying campaign to derail Europe’s climate and environmental policy. The foreign lobbying strategy lists First Nations and environmental groups as the government’s “adversaries,” while oil companies, industry associations, and the National Energy Board are listed as the government’s “allies.”[4]

Our government’s job is to provide a free and open forum for Canadians to hear the arguments and evidence for and against the Enbridge western pipeline and oil supertanker project, so that together we can decide whether or not the project is in Canada’s best interests.
Instead, Prime Minister Harper is abusing the power of government to silence Canadians who are concerned about a project that will kill jobs, destabilize the climate and threaten our salmon and coast.

Click here to tell Prime Minister Harper to stop the threats and ensure fair hearings.

The public hearings about the Enbridge western pipeline and supetanker project are now severely compromised in three ways:

1. The Harper Government has directly biased the hearings with a massive PR campaign to discredit environmental organizations as “foreign special interests” and “radical groups” while privately threatening Canadian charities.[5]

2. The National Energy Board has stacked the deck for the Enbridge western pipeline and supertanker hearings by issuing a directive that muzzles any discussion about the environmental impacts of the tar sands. In this way, they've ensured the hearings will overstate the benefits of the pipeline by ignoring the major costs of expanding the tar sands.[6]

3. The National Energy Board has committed to "consult" with First Nations, but it has not committed to respect the rights of First Nations to “free, prior and informed consent” over any project that affects their territory. Over 70 First Nations groups, covering the entire proposed path of the pipeline and much of the BC coast, have already stood together to oppose the project.[7,8]

We are seeing a radical shift in our national conversation, an aggressive attempt to poison the well of debate with public smears and private threats against organizations that Canadians have built to help us all have a voice on the issues that matter.

We need your help to speak out and tell Prime Minister Harper that Canadians will not be silenced. Click here to take action.

P.S. - Emma Pullman, Leadnow's research director, has found very close ties between industry front-group EthicalOil.org, the Sun Media network and the Prime Minister’s Office that suggest they have a coordinated strategy to create an echo chamber for pro-oil industry and anti-environmental group talking points. You can learn more here.

The letter to Harper reads as follows:

Dear Prime Minister Harper,

I am deeply concerned by reports that members of your office have been threatening charities that support Canadians who have serious concerns about the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and the expansion of the oilsands.

All Canadians, no matter what our political affiliation, have an interest in free and open debate. We have a right to decide what we think is in Canada’s best interests.

Between these private threats to charitable organizations, and the public campaign to discredit thousands of concerned Canadians and First Nations as “foreign special interests” and “radical groups”, I believe that the integrity of these hearings has been badly compromised.

I am writing today to call on you to stop the threats against Canadian charities and ensure that Canadians get a fair hearing so that we can decide whether or not the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline is in Canada’s best interests.

Specifically, I call on you to:

1. Immediately stop your government’s public and private campaign to silence environmental groups.

2. Instruct the National Energy Board to rescind its directive that the hearings be prohibited from considering the costs of expanding the tar sands.

3. Instruct the National Energy Board to respect the rights of First Nations to free, prior and informed consent on any project that affects their territory.

Sources from Leadnow.ca:

1. Affidavit accuses Prime Minister’s Office of threatening environmental charity

2. Environmentalist’s departure sheds light on tension felt by green groups

3. Attack on “radicals” sign of tougher federal strategy

4. Feds list First Nations, green groups as oilsands “adversaries”

5. ”Scary time” for Canada

6. Canadian pipeline needs aboriginal consent: chief

7. Save the Fraser Declaration

8. Whistleblower’s Open Letter to Canadians

9. PMO branded environmental group an ‘enemy’ of Canada, affidavit says

10. Affidavit accuses Prime Minister's Office of threatening environmental charity

11. Affidavit accuses PMO of threatening environmental group

occupy the u.s. election, part 2: it doesn't matter who wins if they don't count the votes

There are two principal reasons why the U.S. presidential election doesn't matter. Corporate money's death grip on both parties is one. Election fraud is the other.

Long-time readers of wmtc may recall a time when I was fairly obsessed with U.S. elections - not with the results, but with the veracity and validity of the elections themselves. A quick scroll through the wmtc category "election fraud" will give you an idea. The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were both fraudulent. This has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. There were tremendous "irregularities" (lovely euphemism there) in the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections. In 2008, there was rampant vote suppression and obstruction, voter-list purging, and outright vote theft, but apparently Obama's election watchdogs over-rode enough of it so that the person who got the most votes actually won the election. At least we think so; there's no way to be certain. (For an interesting discussion of 2008 presidential election fraud, see this thread, especially the discussion in comments: "obama can't win if they don't count the votes".)

None of this has gone away. None of it has even gotten better. But there might be some hope on the horizon. From election fraud central, otherwise known as Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman:

Has America’s Stolen Election Process Finally Hit Prime Time?

It took two stolen US Presidential elections and the prospect of another one coming up in 2012.

For years the Democratic Party and even much of the left press has reacted with scorn for those who’ve reported on it.

But the imperial fraud that has utterly corrupted our electoral process seems finally to be dawning on a broadening core of the American electorate---if it can still be called that.

The shift is highlighted by three major developments...

Fitrakis and Wasserman outline three factors that could add up to progress: the NAACP has petitioned the United Nations, the Justice Department has moved against the state of South Carolina, and the Election Assistance Commission has ruled that voting machines are programmed to be partisan. It's worth reading. They conclude:

But a flood of articles about these realities---including coverage in the New York Times---seems to indicate the theft of our elections has finally taken a leap into the mainstream of the American mind. Whether that leads to concrete reforms before another presidential election is stolen remains to be seen. But after more than a decade of ignorance and contempt, it’s about time something gets done to restore a semblance of democracy to the nation that claims to be the world’s oldest.

occupy the u.s. election, part 1: "we can vote for romney or obama, but goldman sachs and exxonmobil and bank of america and the defense contractors always win."

Occasionally a bit of slime seeps from the sewer of the Republican primaries into my oxygen, and I feel the need to share the smell.

When a public figure says that a pregnancy from rape is a silver lining sent from god, as Rick Santorum did, and that person is a bona fide presidential candidate... well, it's disgusting, and it's dangerous, and it has to be mentioned.

I enjoyed reading this exposé of Newt Gingrich's hypocrisy - or at least some of his hypocrisy, as an exhaustive exposé would fill a book.

Generally, though, I'm paying as much attention to the 2012 circus as I did to the 2008 circus. That would be none.

Chris Hedges explains why this is, and what USians should be doing instead.

Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick-Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters. You won’t hear it on the corporate-owned airwaves and cable networks, including MSNBC, which has become to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. You won’t hear it on NPR or PBS. You won’t read about it in our major newspapers. The issues that matter are being debated, however, on “Democracy Now!,” Link TV, The Real News, Occupy websites and Revolution Truth. They are being raised by journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. You can find genuine ideas in corners of the Internet or in books by political philosophers such as Sheldon Wolin. But you have to go looking for them.

Voting will not alter the corporate systems of power. Voting is an act of political theater. Voting in the United States is as futile and sterile as in the elections I covered as a reporter in dictatorships like Syria, Iran and Iraq. There were always opposition candidates offered up by these dictatorships. Give the people the illusion of choice. Throw up the pretense of debate. Let the power elite hold public celebrations to exalt the triumph of popular will. We can vote for Romney or Obama, but Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil and Bank of America and the defense contractors always win. There is little difference between our electoral charade and the ones endured by the Syrians and Iranians. Do we really believe that Obama has, or ever had, any intention to change the culture in Washington?

In this year’s presidential election I will vote for a third-party candidate, either the Green Party candidate or Rocky Anderson, assuming one of them makes it onto the ballot in New Jersey, but voting is nothing more than a brief chance to register our disgust with the corporate state. It will not alter the configurations of power. The campaign is not worth our emotional, physical or intellectual energy.

Our efforts must be directed toward acts of civil disobedience, to chipping away, through nonviolent protest, at the pillars of established, corporate power. The corporate state is so unfair, so corrupt and so rotten that the institutions tasked with holding it up—the police, the press, the banking system, the civil service and the judiciary—have become vulnerable. It is becoming harder and harder for the corporations to convince its foot soldiers to hold the system in place.

There's much more: read it here.

"capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us"

Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us.

When a high priest of Davos says this, I can't help but wonder. Has the idea reached a tipping point?

Harper may have "unveiled his grand plans to reshape Canada" - come on, Globe and Mail, he's been unveiling that for five years - but he hasn't been elected Prime Minister for Life.

Klaus Schwab, the Chairman of the Davos World Economic Forum, Capitalism Central, publicly voices doubts about the future of global capitalism. Stephen Harper may have plans, but the future is always unknown.

More Schwab:

How sustainable is it and at what cost to the environment? How are the gains distributed? What has become of the family and community fabric, as well as of our culture and heritage? The time has come to embrace a much more holistic, inclusive and qualitative approach to economic development.

Are 'sustainable' and 'inclusive' merely buzzwords? But why bother? He's not running for office, doesn't need our approval. Could it be that even the enablers of the 1% are coming to understand that the centre cannot hold?

A global transformation is urgently needed and it must start with reinstating a global sense of social responsibility.

A global transformation? Transformation is another word for revolution.
Maybe Schwab is one of those "foreign radicals" Harper is on about. You know, ordinary people, who want there to be a future for all.

shit native new yorkers say

Ah, here's the real New York. This one's much closer to the mark.

To be honest, these are not limited to native New Yorkers (except "I grew up in..."), but to anyone who lived in the City during the 1970s or 1980s. I would replace yoga studios with nail salons, but "that used to be..." is a staple of that town. "I remember when this place was a...." earns you a merit badge towards your Real New Yorker ID.

And muggings and dead people on the subway, but no masturbators? What's up with that?

Many thanks to johngoldfine!

ode to a hero: attorney for the damned (with thanks to jill lepore)

Clarence Darrow was one of my earliest heroes. I first encountered Darrow in the guise of Spencer Tracy, who portrayed the lawyer in the 1960 movie "Inherit the Wind". Darrow famously defended John Scopes, who tried to teach evolution in a Tennessee public school. His courtroom opponent was William Jennings Bryan, portrayed in the same movie by Frederic March. (In "Inherit the Wind," as was typical in those days, names were fictionalized. Darrow was called Henry Drummond and Bryan was called Matthew Harrison Brady. "Inherit the Wind" was originally a play, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, who also wrote the screenplay. It has been adapted for film several times.)

Some years later, as a young teenager exploring ideas of atheism and agnosticism, I came upon this.

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose. - Clarence Darrow

A simple statement, maybe even simplistic, but it spurred a lot of thought for me. I wanted to know about the man who said this.

I discovered Darrow's life work was defending the poor from the rich, defending labour from oppression, and especially saving people from being murdered by the state under the guise of justice. Naturally, I loved this, and for a long while dreamed of becoming a defense attorney to do the exact same thing.

During those same years I stumbled on another fictionalized version of Darrow, in a novel called Compulsion, by Meyer Levin, about the Leopold and Loeb murder case, one of the most sensationalist trials of its time. The fictionalized account interested me enough to look into the actual case, and I discovered Darrow had defended two boys who had abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered a child. The public was clamoring for the electric chair (it didn't help that the murderers were rich and Jewish) and Darrow saved their lives.

Of course, with my interest in labour history, I started running into Darrow on a regular basis. In Big Trouble, a towering work of history by the late J. Anthony Lukas - one of my favourite nonfiction books, ever - there's a mini-biography of Darrow. He seemed to be one of those figures that would pop up wherever I looked.

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Many years later, I had a rare experience. I learned about the tarnish on my hero's shine, and it only made me admire him more.

Clarence Darrow, "Attorney for the Damned," would do anything to win a case. He would bend any rule to within an inch of its life, subject the legal system to interpretations wider than his bull-like broad shoulders. He was not above jury-tampering, lies, bribery, suborning perjury, or any other trick. Whatever it took, he would do. For Darrow, the ends justified the means, because the goal was saving a person's life.

It's a radical approach to defense, and I admire it deeply. It recognizes that the legal and judicial systems are tremendously biased, designed to protect the interests of the state, and often, the interests of property, of capital, of industry and corporations. The poor defendant is at an incalcuable disadvantage. "Playing by the rules" doesn't mean playing fairly.

In the cases Darrow agreed to represent, the state was often trying to set an example to deter further disobedience. Prosecutors were trying to score political points with the people who would get them elected, the captains of industry whose interests they maintained. But the defendant was fighting for her or his life. If the state lost, nothing much changed. If the defendant lost, he died.

As my politics and worldview grew and formed, my imagined kinship with Darrow deepened. After reading Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking, my opposition to capital punishment moved from conditional to absolute. And at some point I realized that I actually don't believe in nonviolence as an absolute dogma in liberation movements - that nonviolent resistance is important and often a good strategy, but there are times when it's not necessarily the best path. Darrow, too, believed that certain ends are to be achieved - or at least fought for - by any means necessary.

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Along with Frederic Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., Darrow was one of the US's greatest orators. His closing summations to juries read like manifestos or declarations. Closing statements would go on for hours. He spoke, always, without notes. He was also one of the country's most famous skeptics, who believed "doubt was the beginning of wisdom."

I recently read "Objection," a long magazine piece by writer and historian Jill Lepore. Lepore is (among other things) a staff writer at The New Yorker, and she writes about many subjects that interest me. Two books about Darrow were published last year, and Lepore wrote a nominal book review that is really an ode to my enduring hero.

The excellent piece is only available online by subscription. Ms. Lepore gave me permission to reprint a couple of paragraphs, so I'm trying to limit myself to that. If you're interested in Darrow, try to get your hands on this issue of The New Yorker (or ask me for the text).

"Objection" recounts the story of Darrow's defense of a labour organizer Thomas Kidd on charges of conspiracy. The charges were an attempt to criminalize union organizing.

In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, also known as "Sawdust City", workers turned out 400,000 doors a year for the Paine Lumber Company. After the men reported to work in the morning, the factory doors were locked, and remained locked, except for a lunch break, until the guards opened the door at dusk. For a 12-hour day, a grown man could expect to earn 45 cents. But lately many workers were earning much less, because they were children, often hired to replace their fathers, working with the same giant saws. Kidd and the workers sent a letter to the owner, George Paine, demanding "better wages, a weekly payday, the end of woman and child labour, and recognition of their union". Paine trashed the letter.

The workers of the Paine Lumber Company went on strike, and the governor of Wisconsin called in the National Guard. On June 24, 1898, "four companies of infantry, a battery of artillery, and a squadron of cavalry armed with rifles and Gatling guns" faced the workers outside the factory gates. The National Guard, mind you, had been formed specifically to deal with labour unrest. Their salaries were paid partly by industry. But guess what? In Oshkosh the guardsmen were sympathetic with the strikers. They were sent back to Milwaukee and the mills remained closed. The workers struck for 14 weeks.

Now the state of Wisconsin thought it had found a way to rid itself forever of worker unrest. Kidd was charged with conspiracy to destroy the Paine Lumber Company. The trial became a test case for labour versus capital.

Lepore walks the reader through Darrow's closing statement, which would have constituted a famous speech for any other man. Darrow recounts the facts of the case - did the accused make a speech, did he incite fellow workers to strike, did he write a letter calling on the company to change its ways - and dismisses each one as trivial.

No, Darrow didn't care about the facts; nor, for that matter, did he care about the case. He cared only about one question: "Whether when a body of men desiring to benefit their condition, and the condition of their fellow men, shall strike, whether those men can be sent to jail."

And then Darrow said to the jury, "I know that you will render a verdict in this case which will be a milestone in the history of the world, and an inspiration and hope to the dumb, despairing millions whose fate is in your hands." He had spoken for eight hours.

The Kidd trial may not have been a milestone in the history of the world, but it was a landmark in the Gilded Age debate about prosperity and equality. There were two ways of looking at what Darrow called "the great questions that are agitating the world today." Either wealthy businessmen like Paine and Pullman were ushering in prosperity for all or else the interests of the Paines and the Pullmans of the world were at odds with everyone else's interests. In Oshkosh, Darrow won that argument. The jury was out for fifty minutes. All three defendants were acquitted.

. . . .

After [his own trial and indictment, in 1910], Darrow left the labor movement. He went on to do his best work, speaking and writing against fundamentalism, eugenics, the death penalty, and Jim Crow. "America seems to have an epidemic of intolerance," he wrote. That's still true. And the Gilded Age debate about the right to strike did not end in Sawdust City, a century later, it's still going on. Just this past March, Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, signed a law making public-sector collective bargaining a crime.

"Gentlemen, the world is dark," Darrow told that jury in Oshkosh, "but it is not hopeless." After all, no attorney for the damned ever lacks for work.

fightback works: peel parents win, for now

Community meetings, rallies, emergency mobilizations, and a five-hour Council meeting ended with the Peel Regional Council voting not to close 12 publicly-funded daycare centres - yet. The Council voted unanimously to stop the rush to closure and instead set up a task force to explore the options.

According to this story in the Star, the current daycare arrangement serves 800 children. Fewer than half of those are subsidized, and 4,000 children on the waiting list to get in.

The answer is simple. Don't cut public services: expand them.

Roll back the corporate tax cuts, require everyone to pay their fair share. It's not that difficult to figure out. Daycare > prisons. Education > military.

we don't care about facts, tarsands edition

Why you always have to ask, who is sponsoring this exhibit/ad/study/media. And why tax dollars should support the arts, humanities and sciences: because if we don't, they will. (Emphasis added.)

The Canada Science and Technology Museum faced pressure from a corporate sponsor to change its portrayal of the oilsands in a new energy exhibit, the museum’s former vice-president confirms.

Randall Brooks said both Imperial Oil and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers felt the exhibit was too critical of the oilsands. Brooks was still vice-president at the time but retired last year.

“They certainly were pushing for a positive portrayal of the oilsands,” he said Tuesday.

The Imperial Oil Foundation gave $600,000 over six years for the show called “Energy: Power to Choose.”

Brooks said industry representatives made up a large part of an advisory committee of about 25 people overseeing the exhibit’s preparation. It reported directly to the museum’s CEO, Denise Amyot.

“One of the things that they wanted point out, obviously, was that Canada is an energy-rich country and we need to exploit it,” he said.

“They were as far as possible trying to downplay the negative side of energy exploitation.”

Meanwhile correspondence between the museum and industry reps, obtained by Radio-Canada in an access to information request, show the industry pushing for changes in the exhibit’s content.

A letter last May from Susan Swan, the president of the Imperial Oil Foundation, says: “I find the language not balanced overall. I have tried to point out the most significant issues I have seen, but the overall tone is of concern to me.”

Imperial Oil calls a section of text about oil dependence “pejorative and unbalanced” and insists: “This has to be removed and rewritten.”

The company also says it’s uncomfortable with links in the exhibit between wars and oil.

Another objection is that the exhibit shows changes in the landscape caused by oilsands mining. Since the land must be reclaimed later under Canadian law, the exhibit is “telling only half the story,” the company says.

The museum’s current vice-president, Yves St-Onge, said energy is a “very complex” subject and his staff did a solid job of balancing many competing messages.

“From all the comments we received, we took some and left others behind,” he said.

“We tried to create a balanced content ... Our team of curators feel very strongly about the content of what we put out.

“It’s not something that has been dictated by any of the sponsors.”

A museum studies professor in Toronto says the same issue crops up again and again, as museums try to find a balance between the need for private money and the donors’ wishes to influence an exhibit.

Government funding cuts cause a “corporatization of museums,” said Lynne Teather of the University of Toronto’s faculty of information.

“Anybody running a museum today knows they have to deal with what we call stakeholders,” she said. As well, there’s the view of inside experts — the curators — and the museum’s own corporate mission. And the board of trustees may add its own influence toward a particular point of view.

Tensions can spring up over the interpretation of history, culture, or anything involving industry, she said.

“We would advise (the organizers) to be talking about that up front. Somehow those negotiations and balancing points get worked through toward an end point. We certainly teach students to be aware of these things.” She says there’s less private sponsorship money available than governments believe. And corporate donors may see their money as a marketing tool, not a simple donation.

we don't care about facts, crime edition

If only the Harper Government^TM weren't determined to waste our tax dollars on prison-building and useless mandatory sentencing, while telling us we can't afford to maintain decent spending levels for universal health insurance. If only they cared about facts.

New poll results show the public is abandoning a stubborn belief that crime is on the rise, bringing public opinion into alignment with a 20-year trend of declining crime rates.

The long-standing disconnect between public fears and reality has confounded criminologists and fuelled federal get-tough policies.

However, the Environics Focus Canada poll - obtained by The Globe and Mail and scheduled for release Thursday - shakes conventional wisdom even more by finding growing support for the use of crime prevention rather than punishment.

"This doesn't mean that people want to lay off criminals," said Keith Neuman, executive director of the Environics Institute. "But what people would like to see is more crime prevention. They feel that this is the right thing to do."

Has this persistent disconnect really "confounded" criminologists? Perhaps criminologists also know that if the mainstream media didn't run blaring headlines every time a crime is committed against a white, middle-class Canadian, people wouldn't be so afraid.

And what is really fuelling the federal crime policies? Citizens' fear, or prison profits?

save peel region public day care

Tomorrow, Peel Region Councillors will vote on whether to end publicly financed, union-staffed daycare services in Mississauga and Brampton.

A report from an audit by KPMG - released only days ago - recommended closing five daycare centres in Brampton and seven in Mississauga. In less than a week, Councillors are putting this to a vote. What's the rush? Why are the Councillors avoiding input from the people whose lives would be affected by the closures?

Closing these 12 daycare centres would eliminate around 800 child care spaces and almost 300 jobs. The goal is supposedly saving the Region money, but as we've seen time and again, these supposed savings rarely, if ever, materialize.

Since hearing about this report, parents in the area have been understandably worried, even panicked. The don't know how or where they'll be able to arrange dependable care for their children during working hours.

If Region contracts are awarded to private day-care companies, daycare costs are sure to rise, at a time when so many families are already struggling.

Inevitably, closing public daycare centres will lead to an increase in unlicensed, informal daycare arrangements, which have no oversight or accountability. Those situations may put children at risk and will create anxiety for working parents.

Hundreds of trained child-care professionals also stand to lose their jobs.

So who wins? That is, besides ideologues opposed to public services on principle, and shareholders who profit from corporate childcare?

From the Brampton Guardian:

It’s unfortunate that an information meeting held Friday in Mississauga that might have helped allay some concerns and fill in some of the blanks for parents actually barred the media from attending. The reason given, apparently, was that the region didn’t want to panic parents or bring them any extra anxiety. What a telling statement. The region’s approach to calming parents who are already clearly agitated and anxious is to prevent them from finding out more information through media reports?

Certainly, some of those parents who attended the meeting said afterward that their concerns had not been addressed and one parent concluded the region has “no plan” for how it would implement such closures. We wouldn’t know because we weren’t invited.

Region of Peel, wake up and do the right thing. You are supposed to represent the people of Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon, not KPMG, and not corporate daycare companies.

Mississauga News: Parents outraged

is m.p. lizon a bigot or just plain ignorant? you make the call

A few weeks ago, I learned that my new Conservative MP, Wladyslaw Lizon, brought to the attention of Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney the shock and horror of a woman wearing a veil during a citizenship ceremony.

Mr. Kenney, equally horrified (and similarly Islamophobic), issued a directive that forces women to choose between their personal comfort and becoming Canadian citizens. (My response is here; scroll down.)

Now the Member of Parliament for Mississauga-East Cooksville again displays how much he understands and respects the people in his culturally diverse riding. He sent out a survey asking, among other things, about the languages spoken in constituents' households. Choices included English, Polish, Arabic, Mandarin, Italian, Greek - and Indian. Indian? What language would that be?

This letter to the Mississauga News pinpoints the problem.

I’m keenly interested to know who in Mississauga East-Cooksville MP Wladyslaw Lizon’s office is responsible for the questionnaire regarding which primary language is used within a household.

I’m puzzled, confused, bewildered and seriously concerned about some major mistakes.

The questionnaire asks if people in some households speak Indian as their primary language? What does that mean?

India is a country, a recognized geographical state with 18 official languages. Hindu, Punjabi, Gujarati and Urdu represent the most commonly spoken languages among city residents who came from India.

Perhaps this question was not directed to people from India at all, but rather, referred to Native Indians? Here again, the most common languages spoken among members of this community would be Cree, Ojibwe, Cherokee or Tsalagi, which is an Iroquoian language.

Maybe Lizon’s office was referring to languages spoken by people of the West Indies?

Citizens expect and deserve greater respect and more knowledgeable representatives in government.

Oleh Michael Romaniuk, Mississauga

Mr Romaniuk: good job! Mr Lizon: you don't deserve to represent this beautiful riding. And by the way, I'm still waiting for a response to my last letter.

belafonte on obama: "a dagger in our sense of justice"

On a recommendation from a friend, I watched Harry Belafonte interviewed by Charlie Rose in New York City. Belafonte - musician, actor, social-justice activist, radical - is a joy to hear, and his life story is a march through history.

Here's one terrific thing I learned. Belafonte was still searching for his musical niche, finding the place where his music would match his heart. He went to the Village Vanguard to see Woody Guthrie, and that set him on his true life path. A few weeks later, he saw Leadbelly, and the whole thing was confirmed. Belafonte went to the Library of Congress and to hear and absorb everything he could about folk music and the activist music tradition. I wasn't aware of a connection between Belafonte and Woody (except in the metaphorical sense, the connection every activist musician has to Woody Guthrie). That was very cool.

If you're interested in Belafonte (or, for that matter, in US history, African-American history, theatre history, civil rights...), the whole interview is well worth your time. But at about the 45-minute mark, Rose asks Belafonte about Barack Obama. It's at the end of a long session (the full, unedited interview ran close to two hours), and I think the 84-year-old Belafonte is a bit tired and flagging, so he is not at the top of his game. But it's still worth hearing, when Obama asks, "When are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?", to which Belafonte responds, "What makes you think we haven't already?"

Listen here; Rose asks about Obama shortly after the 45-minute mark.

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I've also been watching portions of Cornel West and Tavis Smiley's Poverty Tour, including this segment that features Iraq War veteran and peace activist Geoff Millard, speaking about how war and poverty work together. I've always been a huge fan of Cornel West. I'm happy to know he's still a public teacher.

The Poverty Tour:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Remaking America, a panel discussion on solutions, featuring Michael Moore, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Suze Orman, Majora Carter, Vicki B. Escarra, moderated by Smiley.

Lots of great stuff here. Some people want to throw out the present economic system, some people have ideas on how to make the present system more liveable and equitable, but everyone wants to face the reality of a country imploding into a third-world nation.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3.

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Bonus: 37 seconds of humour. The description from YouTube: "Bill O'Reilly claims that banks haven't broken any laws; Tavis Smiley and Cornel West react appropriately."