Dan Aalbers, one of members of the 2008 American Psychological Association referendum opposing psychologist participation in illegal detention sites has written the APA Council of Representatives protesting the association’s lack of action to implement the policy that was adopted by 59% of the APA members who voted:
Dear Member of the Council of Representatives,
It has been more than a year since the first referendum in our history
passed by a margin of 59 to 41. It has been nearly a year since the
council received a report on the implementation of the referendum, yet
very little has been to implement the referendum. Psychologists
remain at Guantanamo Bay — a camp whose name is synonymous with
torture. The membership voted to walk away from this torture center
but the will of the majority is not being enacted.
At a bare minimum, a letter should be sent to GITMO’s camp commander
that lays out the following instructions in no uncertain terms:
“Please inform all psychologists who are engaged in any activity other
than offering psychotherapy to fellow soldiers that they are in
violation of APA policy. These psychologists will remain in violation
of said policy unless they immediately seek to deploy elsewhere.”
If you believe that voting matters, if you believe that
representatives need to follow the clear instructions of their
constituents please contact me so we can work together to enact the
will of the membership.
Paul Krugman says the spending freeze is “appalling on every level.”
It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)
It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.
And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
Every year at this time I post a version of Christmas in the Trenches, that great song by John McCutcheon that suggests the possibility of peace in the midst of war. This year I post a brand new version by Gabriel Donohue:
I also post each year the following article I originally wrote in 2005 on the Christmas truce:
The 1914 Christmas Truce and the Possibility of Peace
A new French film, Joyeux Noel , brings the 1914 Christmas truce, that moment when a world of peace could be imagined, to a wider audience.
An article on the truce and the film from the Telegraph has this nugget:
Some viewers might find a certain sentimental excess in the scene in which a Scottish bagpiper spontaneously joins in when German soldiers began singing Stille Nacht (Silent Night). There are records of such an event. “All the acts of fraternisation had one thing in common: music and song,” says Carion. “I loved the idea that these could stop a war for a few hours.”
Perhaps we should learn something from this experience about the importance of music to peace. After all, the 60’s peace movements were infused with song, whereas today’s movements are silent. Music and song can unite, they can inspire, but they also can soothe. Movements for peace need all three.
The Telegraph article continues to point out that the reality of peace is beyond what audiences can believe:
The film also features a foraging ginger cat adopted as a mascot by both the French and the Germans. The cat existed, and, in real life, it was arrested by the French, convicted of espionage and shot in accordance with military regulations. “It was an era of madmen,” says Carion, who filmed this scene – to the great distress of his extras – but decided not to include it in case his audience didn’t believe it.
A Scottish bishop’s sermon, which includes references to a “crusade” and a “holy war”, seems like a thumpingly obvious effort to find parallels with more recent discourses about Iraq. In fact, these words were, Carion says, taken directly from a sermon preached by an Anglican bishop at Westminster Abbey. Here, too, the truth was toned down: Carion excised the real bishop’s references to German soldiers “crucifying babies on Christmas Day” in order to make it credible.
Perhaps the propensity toward war is aided by our unwillingness to imagine the depths to which people can sink when captured by the lure of war, the fantasy of perfect union with the state, that idealized perfect mother, and the ability to extrude all evil onto the enemy, that poisonous cannibalistic bad mother. As Christopher Hedges points out in War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, in more normal times we disown this desire for union and extrusion and cannot remember or imagine how destructive it can be.
Perhaps this dynamic also helps explain people’s passivity toward the threats to democracy facing us in the United States today. For those identified with their country, to truly accept the danger puts the evil, the bad, inside the union, where it is especially terrifying.
A resolution for many is the demonization solution, to view George W. Bush and his administration as absolute evil, destroying the country and the world. While tempting, and certainly not without evidence, the problem with this outlook is that it is the mirror image of that attitude which leads us into the nightmare. To those adopting this view, evil resides in Bush, in Cheney, in the Republicans. If only they could be removed, impeached, tried, the world would be saved. The problem with this notion is that it encourages only destruction of the enemy, not construction of something better. History has repeatedly demonstrated that movements guided by hatred do not end up producing a better world.
The Christmas truce, in its magnificence, gives us a tiny glimpse of a true alternative, a world in which we are all simply human, in which that which we have in common is greater than that which divides us. For the brief moment of that truce, lasting days or weeks, the soldiers on all sides embodied the wisdom of peace through union, a union without an all-bad enemy (though the officer class trying so hard to restore their respective killing machines surely could have qualified). A union of fun, of games, and of song. A world dominated by eros.
The challenge, so far unsolved, is how to take such a moment and make it last, or at least not turn into its opposite, a renewed carnage of destruction. This challenge, as pacifists and nonviolent activists have repeatedly discovered, requires us to find a way to accept and tame the capacity for destructiveness in each of us, so as not to need to attribute it to an enemy. At the same time, we need to find a way to continue peace and unity in more normal, less extraordinary times, beyond the moment of fusion. For eventually the excitement fades and we remember all our irritations, our gripes and our fears. To bring peace into daily life is the need upon which the future of the human race may well depend.
Large sectors of our country are inhumane. Today brings word of young Texans getting years in jail for graffiti. Yet torturers get protected by the Justice Department and the Supreme Court., What a country!
Irate judge won’t get to tag graffiti vandal with eight years
By Daniel Tencer
A Texas teenager who was sentenced to eight years in prison for graffiti and marijuana possession has had his sentence reduced under new state legal guidelines.
Corpus Christi Judge Marisela Saldana sentenced 18-year-old Sebastian Perez to eight years in prison last week for three counts of graffiti and one count of marijuana possession, giving Perez the maximum two-year sentence for each charge. Both crimes are felonies under Texas law.
But a new law that took effect in the state this fall means judges can no longer “stack” consecutive sentences in cases like Perez’s, and on Friday Perez had his sentence reduced to two years, according to KIII-TV in Corpus Christi.
Perez broke down in sobs last week when a visibly irate Judge Saldana scolded him for his six-month graffiti spree and handed down the eight-year sentence.
“My question to you, Sebastian Perez, [is] why do you pick on these other fine citizens of Corpus Christi, why don’t you knock yourself out spraying, tagging, marking on your girlfriend’s house, her mother’s house, your friend’s house, your mother’s house,” Saldana said at the original sentencing. “Knock yourself out.”
Deanna McQueen, the Corpus Christi police force’s graffiti enforcer, said the eight-year sentence was an appropriate deterrent to other taggers, and declared, “It was a good day … for the citizens of Corpus Christi.”
The Corpus Christi Caller-Timesreported that the damage to private property from Perez’s tagging amounted to $7,300. Blogger Will Sherman at Animal New York calculates that the cost to taxpayers of incarcerating Perez for eight years in Texas would have amounted to $140,000.
This is not the first case of taggers receiving lengthy sentences in Corpus Christi. Last summer, 19-year-old Ralph Mirabal was sentenced to three concurrent sentences of eight years for graffiti damage to some 30 properties. Mirabal had reneged on a plea deal to join the Army, and was given a lengthy sentence as a result.
A UN official claims that money from the illegal drug trade saved the banking system during the height of the economic crisis:
Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor
Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions
By Rajeev Syal
Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.
Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.
“Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.” Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.
“That was the moment [last year] when the system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another. The progressive liquidisation to the system and the progressive improvement by some banks of their share values [has meant that] the problem [of illegal money] has become much less serious than it was,” he said.
The IMF estimated that large US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009 and more than 200 mortgage lenders went bankrupt. Many major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover.
Gangs are now believed to make most of their profits from the drugs trade and are estimated to be worth £352bn, the UN says. They have traditionally kept proceeds in cash or moved it offshore to hide it from the authorities. It is understood that evidence that drug money has flowed into banks came from officials in Britain, Switzerland, Italy and the US.
British bankers would want to see any evidence that Costa has to back his claims. A British Bankers’ Association spokesman said: “We have not been party to any regulatory dialogue that would support a theory of this kind. There was clearly a lack of liquidity in the system and to a large degree this was filled by the intervention of central banks.”
Conservative blogger Charles Johnson, at Little Green Footballs has had it with right-wing hatred and xenophobia. It is nice to see an intelligent and skeptical conservative. While I’m sure I disagree with him on many issues, I suspect I could have an intelligent and interesting conversation with him. What more could one ask for? It will be interesting to watch his future development.
1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)
2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)
3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)
4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)
5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)
6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)
7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)
8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)
9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)
10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)
And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.
An oped in the Tennessean laws out one of the arguments against Taser use, they’ve kill hundreds of people. These supposed “non-lethal” weapons are inherently brutal and traumatic and should, therefore, as Feuer argues, be used only as a last resort. they brutalize society; their supposed non-lethality encourages their use against 10-year-old children who refuse showers, against mothers stopped for traffic violations, and against students not showing ID in the campus library, and against students asking uncomfortable questions of politicians.
I wonder what the long-term effects are of being suddenly subjkected to 50,000 volts. I suspect that, in many instances, being the target of Taser use is traumatizing. Perhaps we need a follow-up consequences of the psychological sequlae of being Tasered.
Looking for reason not to use Tasers? Here are 400 of them
By Jared Feuer
Undoubtedly, it is in society’s interest to provide law enforcement with the necessary tools to protect the public safety. International standards encourage nonlethal or “less lethal” measures to decrease the risk of death or injury from firearms and other impact weapons. Taser devices, once widely touted as a valuable innovation in this regard, are today at the center of much debate.
Since 2001, about 400 people have died — 39 this year — after being Tasered by law enforcement personnel in the U.S. Amnesty International believes it is time to reconsider the use of Tasers. We believe this is even more essential as Taser International has issued new recommendations calling on law enforcement to avoid shocking people in the chest. This is the first time Taser has admitted a potentially serious health risk with the devices, and we believe it underscores our call for a full evaluation of their use.
Stun gun used too often
The reasons for these deaths are an open question; what we do know is that a Taser gun exposes the victim to a 50,000-volt shock that continues until the officer releases his or her finger or the battery depletes. Such a shock overrides the body’s central nervous system, causing uncontrollable contraction of muscles and instant collapse. In a manufacturer’s study, it was found that additional shocks are required one-third of the time.
Because law enforcement officers do not know the medical history or condition of those being Tasered, they are not trained, required or able to determine the potential impact of the shock. The result appears to have been fatal for hundreds of people. It is for this reason that Amnesty International has urged that Taser use be limited to situations in which officers are faced with an immediate threat of death or serious injury that cannot be contained through less extreme options, if not suspended altogether pending an independent study to determine why people have died after being Tasered.
It is important to note that because Tasers are perceived as non-lethal, it is likely that they are being used more frequently, often against the most vulnerable of individuals, including those who are in poor health or under the influence of stimulant drugs. Tasers are being used where batons are not justified and appear to be becoming the weapon of first resort. Force should always be proportional to the threat; however, a study by Amnesty International found that 90 percent of Taser-related deaths 2001-08 involved individuals who were unarmed. We have also found that Tasers were used against the most vulnerable parts of the population, including a 6-year-old boy, an elderly man suffering from dementia and a pregnant woman who later miscarried.
It has become apparent that Tasers have become an alternative to negotiation. The priority for law enforcement officers must always be safe resolution of a situation, even if such actions are not the most expedient.
Clearly, technology has outpaced policy. It is in the public’s best interest to inform lawmakers of the dangers of Taser use. Officials must stop sending police into the field with misguided information regarding Taser use in order to prevent unnecessary deaths.
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Jared Feuer, based in Atlanta, is Southern regional director for Amnesty International USA. For more information: www.amnestyusa.org.