America’s Selective Grief
Remember the 20 children who died in Newton Connecticut.
Remember the 35 children who died in Gaza this month from Israeli bombardments.
Remember the 168 children who have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2006.
Remember the 231 children killed in Afghanistan in the first 6 months of this year.
Remember the 400 other children in the US under the age of 15 who die from gunshot wounds each year.
Remember the 921 children killed by US air strikes against insurgents in Iraq.
Remember the 1,770 US children who die each year from child abuse and maltreatment.
Remember the 16,000 children who die each day around the world from hunger.
These tragedies must end.
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can reach Bill at quigley77@gmail.com
December 18, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Afghanistan, BILL QUIGLEY, Drone attacks in Pakistan, Gaza |
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The Plutocrats and the Placeholder President
By Rob Urie | December 7, 2012
In Quentin Tarantino’s movie ‘Jackie Brown’ the illegal arms dealer played by Samuel L. Jackson laughs as he recounts the sales slogan used by the manufacturer of the ‘Tech Nine’ semi-automatic weapon—“the most popular gun in American crime, like they proud of that shit.” Mere weeks after Barack Obama was re-elected farce is added to tragedy with his supporters complaining that while the Republican proposal to cut Federal government spending and social insurance programs is all bluster and misdirection, their guy (Mr. Obama) has a real plan to do so—like they’re proud of that shit. Thanks just the same folks, but I’ll take the fake plan.
The moment when the New Deal as we knew it became history by bi-partisan consensus was a long time coming. A trans-generational core of inherited wealth and right-wing cranks has been trying to undo the New Deal since Social Security became fact in 1935. Ronald Reagan echoed anti-New Deal cries of ‘socialism,’ first as a paid spokesperson of the AMA (American Medical Association) against the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid, and later through his racist caricature of the ‘welfare queen’ living fat on public largesse. Despite the fact that Social Security is an insurance program paid for by its participants, much the same as private insurance but without the executive looting, the charge has always been of an undeserving public sucking on “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”
Democrats first joined the effort in earnest with Bill Clinton’s plan to partially privatize Social Security. The idea was to let our good friends on Wall Street manage a bit of the money for us, for a fee of course. That proposal faltered when Mr. Clinton was impeached. As was the fashion in European Central Bank circles in 2009, Mr. Obama took up the torch of fiscal austerity of his own initiative by creating his very own deficit commission. This should have come as no surprise to anyone paying attention—Mr. Obama publicly stated his intention to ‘fix’ Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid when he allied himself with the Wall Street friendly ‘Hamilton Project’ in 2006.
(In Between Democrats Clinton and Obama came Republican George W. Bush who also tried to partially privatize Social Security. Mr. Bush quickly retreated when he saw the depth of political opposition to the effort. As the saying goes, it takes a Democrat to gut the New Deal).
For the uninitiated, the Hamilton Project is the demon spawn of the Clintonite contingent of the Democratic Party led by former Treasury Secretary and disgraced Citicorp Board member Robert Rubin. The kindest take on the Wall Street lootocracy populating the organization is that they don’t know how money is created (the U.S. has a fiat currency), making them morons. The less kind take is that their greed has no limits. Whichever is more applicable (neither is mutually exclusive), if one group of Wall Street politicos bears responsibility for the economic catastrophe that an unregulated Wall Street has visited upon the world in recent years, the Hamilton Project is it.
Never one to let the wish list of the entrenched plutocracy go unfulfilled, Barack Obama chose Democrat, inheritance baby and Wall Street ‘welfare queen’ Erskine Bowles, to co-head his (Mr. Obama’s) very own ‘deficit commission.’ Of course Mr. Obama knew nothing of Mr. Bowles experience leading the earlier effort to (partially) privatize Social Security when he appointed him to the position. In his speech welcoming the Hamilton Project into existence (link above), Mr. Obama additionally described himself as an enthusiastic ‘free trader’ committed to globalization. And of current relevance, he ascribed fiscal ‘discipline’ as the proximate cause of the Clinton economic ‘boom,’ deftly ignoring the greatest stock market bubble (as measured by price / earnings ratio—twice that of 1929) in human history.
One could be forgiven for believing that Mr. Obama, or any other placeholder Democrat for that matter, has something of a point regarding ‘entitlement’ spending if his words are the only that are listened to. People in the U.S. are living longer and a strapped citizenry simply cannot afford the lavish promises made in an earlier age of plenty goes the toxic bullshit. By leaving out class divisions this formulation simply furthers the shift in social resources upward from poor to rich. As economist Paul Krugman has effectively argued, the rich are living longer and the working class and poor are not. Additionally, unless those in the ‘gap’ years between the old and new eligibility ages for Medicare simply forgo health care, the change will force them to purchase private health insurance under whatever terms the ‘market’ will bear. But of course, private insurance companies always act in the public interest when people’s backs are to the wall.
At the end of the day this charade is a struggle over social resources. The ‘too-big-to-fail’ guarantee of the banks, which is the only reason why insolvent, predatory Wall Street remains in business, is an entitlement program for connected bankers—for which they pay nothing. The bloated, murderous, military industry that lobbies the U.S. into unnecessary wars for their own benefit and that of corporate welfare receiving multi-national corporations is an entitlement program. And the aforementioned corporate welfare that perpetuates the puffy, gray corporate executives behind the ‘Fix the Debt’ campaign for whom official Washington now apparently works is an entitlement program. So if we want to have a public ‘discussion’ of entitlement spending, by all means let’s do so.
And as far as entitlement programs go, government guarantees and redistribution schemes are only a starting point. As economist Dean Baker has argued, America’s professional class retains monopoly pricing power for their labor through trade restrictions while the working class has been thrown to the wolves. The Federal Reserve has spent upwards of four trillion dollars to entitle the fortunes of the investor class since 2008, returning the already rich to their former wealth. And corporate executives have entitled themselves to robber-baron sized paychecks through the combination of trade policies that have so reduced the fortunes of the working class, tax abatements that have bled the public weal for some forty years, and through the financialization of the economy that has favored, along with Federal Reserve policies, the financial wealth that executives pay themselves with. All of these and more are entitlement programs that have redistributed ever more social wealth from the working class and poor up to the Washington establishment’s beloved plutocrats.
But the trillions of dollars in health care expenditures that we deadbeats intend to sponge off of the blessedly deserving rich is the really big money, right? When Erskine Bowles wakes with night terrors, it is my herniated disk and your gall bladder operation that will sink the country, right? The U.S. pays 30% – 50% more per person than other first world nations for health care that is of substantially lower quality because we have a largely private health care system. Were the system totally public—Medicare for all, we would realize some material proportion of these savings and most likely vastly improve the health of the citizenry. Were the monopoly entitlements of doctors and pharmaceutical companies reduced or eliminated, further cost reductions would be realized. So quickly, who are the main beneficiaries of America’s ‘bloated’ entitlement programs?
As Mr. Obama will offer, his proposals include reducing payments to health care providers and negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. However, the private health care system in America is the global leader in shifting costs to those with the least social power. Cuts in public payments to private providers have a long history of popping up elsewhere, as health insurer profits will attest. For instance, Mr. Obama’s health care ‘reform’ program, the ACA (Affordable Care Act), requires insurance companies to spend fixed percentages of their revenues providing health care or to rebate the difference to their customers. As corporations constitute the majority of their ‘customers,’ corporations apparently now have an incentive to shop around for health insurers that provide the lowest proportion of health care to their employees to maximize the rebates. (The central business of insurers was already to provide the appearance of coverage without providing actual coverage). And health insurance providers can gain market share, if at lower margins, by doing exactly this. Welcome to America.
Last, any honest discussion of ‘entitlements’ would be to the benefit of America’s poor and working classes. The globetrotting plutocrats behind current ‘discussions’ see working class product as their due. This is the very definition of entitlement. We can either disabuse them of this notion or roll over and play dead. Or better yet, roll over and vote Democrat.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.
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December 8, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Erskine Bowles, New Deal, Obama, Social Security, United States, Wall Street |
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It all started out simply enough. The nonprofit Council for the National Interest, of which I am president, recently tried to buy an advertisement in American History magazine.
The ad was to promote a new book by CNI’s founder, former Congressman Paul Findley, offering discounted copies through the CNI website.
The book, Speaking Out: A Congressman’s Lifelong Fight Against Bigotry, Famine, and War, is a fascinating memoir of Findley’s nine decades of life. It describes his depression-era childhood, World War II service in the South Pacific, experiences as an editor of a small town corn-belt newspaper, and 22 years as a Congressman grappling with everything from farm issues, to Vietnam, to Israel-Palestine.
The ad featured the cover of Findley’s book and four strong endorsements, including the following by Bill Moyers:
“There is a place in America called Findley Country. Inspired by its founding father, the people who live there cherish principled politics, political courage, and speaking truth to power (even when it hurts). Paul has given us a lively recollection of a robust and honorable life in public service, grounded in a patriot’s devotion to the country he loves.”
American History magazine refused to run our advertisement.
In fact, Advertising Director Julie Kershenbaum gratuitously informed us that they would not publish it in any of the 10 other U.S. history magazines owned by the same company. She said that the chain’s CEO and publisher, Eric Weider, had personally made the decision.
The reason? CNI is allegedly “anti-Israel.”
In reality, CNI is a nonpartisan organization founded 20 years ago by highly principled former U.S. Congressmen and diplomats. Our board members include several ambassadors.
CNI provides in-depth, transparently sourced information on the history and current situation in Israel-Palestine, on U.S. Middle East policies, and on their impact on American citizens, in line with our mission to work for U.S. Middle East policies that serve the national interest; that represent the highest values of our founders and our citizens; and that work to sustain a nation of honor, decency, security, and prosperity.
We oppose failed national policies that prolong the tragic violence in the Middle East, that place perceived Israeli interests over American ones, and that drain billions of dollars from the American economy.
Although many Americans are unaware of this, Americans are closely connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We give well over $8 million per day to Israel, a state smaller than New Jersey. On average, Israelis receive 10,000 times more U.S. foreign aid per capita than other people throughout the world. And this costs us significantly more – some analysts have placed the total cost at approximately $15 million per day.
We feel that it is essential that Americans become thoroughly informed about this conflict, which has cost multitudes of lives and created potentially catastrophic instability in the Middle East for over 60 years.
Yet, because the owners of what may be the world’s largest publisher of history magazines are partial to Israel, readers of 11 key American history magazines will neither be permitted to read about Findley’s autobiography nor even see the CNI name.
Troubled by this censorship, I phoned Publisher Eric Weider to discuss his decision. When he failed to return my calls, I began to research his company. Who were the people deciding what information could or could not reach American history fans?
While many people might picture the publishers of these magazines as scholars dedicated to the disinterested study of history, I discovered a very different situation.
Instead, I found out that the magazines are part of a massive and lucrative empire based on bodybuilding and related products: an empire that has been investigated and convicted for using false claims to sell potentially dangerous “nutritional supplements” and for publishing “obscene” magazines, run by powerful people with powerful friends in high places who’ve opposed the regulation of such supplements.
Not the profile readers might expect, though Publisher Weider is now interviewed in the media as an expert on American history – one whose commentary supports the alleged necessity of American wars in the Middle East.
The Weider History Group’s Eleven Magazines
The entity known as the Weider History Group publishes several history-related websites and eleven magazines: America’s Civil War, American History, Aviation History, Armchair General, British Heritage, Civil War Times, Military History, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Vietnam, Wild West, and World War II.
All but one of these publications were originally independent magazines. Some of them are decades old. Civil War Times has been around for half a century; American History since the 1960s.
In 2006 the Weider History Group took over them all, acquiring them from another magazine chain.
Not everyone was pleased with the change. Civil War Times Editor Chris Lewis eventually resigned over the new direction the magazines were taking. He circulated an email explaining why he had decided to leave:
“I am a lifelong reader and care a great deal about this publication—which is why I cannot be a part of the ‘new direction’ that the magazines in this group are either already going in, or will be going in soon. There is no respect here anymore for history, historians or the core audience.”
The Empire that Owns American History
The Weider History Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of Weider Health and Fitness, Inc., which in turn is part of a larger Weider empire valued at a billion dollars. The Weiders were initially Canadian promoters who are known for largely creating the business of modern bodybuilding and its multitude of spin-off products. Brothers Ben and Joe Weider founded the empire 70 years ago. Ben later said that his original dream had been to be an architect but that anti-Semitism had prevented this. Today, the principals are Joe Weider and Ben Weider’s son, Eric.
By the 1990s the Weider empire consisted of numerous brands and over a thousand products. These include bodybuilding extravaganzas and competitions; a wide range of exercise equipment and purported body enhancing devices; diverse publications; and a dazzling collection of “fitness products” and “nutritional supplements”– pills, powders, potions, and programs.
The latter are a large part of the Weider empire’s moneymaking machine. They include weight gain products, weight loss products, muscle health products, etc. An example is Weider BodyShaper Diet & Energy tablets “for Mental Energy and Thermogenesis.”
While many people purchase Weider products and some may deliver fully on their extravagant promises, federal investigations have found that a number of them do not.
Weider merchandise has been the subject of a number of federal investigations, and Weider companies have been found guilty of fraud on several occasions. The Weiders have worked to prevent legislation that would have further restricted the kinds of supplements sold by their companies.
In the 1970s U.S. postal officials found the Weider company had engaged in false claims involving a number of its products: “Slimmer Shake,” also known as “Weider’s Weight Loss Formula, XR-7;” “Slim Guard;” “Joe Weider’s Crash Weight Gain Formula #7;” “5 Minute Waist Slimmer Plan;” “5 Minute Body Shaper Plan;” and “Beauti-Breast of Paris,” a device which promised to enlarge breasts.
In 1981 the FTC found the company had made fraudulent claims regarding its “Slim-Quick formula.” The FTC also concluded that under some circumstances the weight-loss concoction could be significantly dangerous to health and required the company to add warning labels.
In 1986 the FTC forced Weider Health & Fitness Inc. to refund the purchase price paid by those who bought its “Anabolic Mega-Pak” or “Dynamic Life Essence” pills.
In 2000 Weider Nutritional International settled an FTC complaint involving false claims for PhenCal and was required to pay $400,000, a sum unlikely to have caused much pain to a billion dollar operation.
An Empire Built on Bodybuilding
The foundation of the Weider empire was originally the business of bodybuilding, and this still remains a significant part of its focus. According to anthropologist Alan Klein, the Weiders own “the largest conglomerate of bodybuilding products in the world.”
The Weiders founded the International Federation of Body Builders (IFBB) in 1946 and Joe Weider has been called the “czar” of bodybuilding.
In a 1998 book, former Mr. Universe Bob Paris stated that the Weiders “control bodybuilding.” (To learn more about bodybuilding see the montage at the IFBBpro website. As of this writing, the Weider history magazines have a banner ad on the site.)
Paris writes that the Weiders would pressure the most promising young bodybuilders into signing contracts with them. Anyone who publicly criticized or questioned any of the policies of the IFBB or its officers, Paris wrote, could be suspended. The officers seem to have mostly been the Weiders themselves or their friends.
Paris states:
“[T]he Weider brothers claim that the IFBB and the Weider companies are separate and completely unrelated. Only the most naive fool would believe that. They should simply say that, yes, they are completely linked… but of course if they did that, then nasty words like monopoly or conflict of interest would start getting thrown around….”
Another writer reported that a connection to the Weiders spelled success for an aspiring bodybuilder, but for a price: “…from that point on, the bodybuilder’s career is owned by the Weider corporation.”
The Arnold Schwarzenegger Connection
It was the Weiders who discovered future movie star/California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and brought him to America. They got the aspiring bodybuilder an apartment, bought him a car, and crafted him into a celebrity, tutoring him on everything from his exercise regimen and real estate investments to how to wear his hair. Joe Weider told the New York Times, “We created Arnold.”
The Weiders supported Schwarzenegger for California governor and remain close to him. Schwarzenegger declared July 9, 2007 “Joe Weider Day.” As we will see, there is a further connection. But first, we need to examine another aspect of the Weider business machine.
The Weider empire has also long included an array of magazines, mostly focused on bodybuilding and fitness. A few in past years seem to have crossed the line into lewdness and Joe Weider was twice indicted for producing and distributing obscene literature. In 1957 he was placed on a five-year probation.
In 2003 the Weiders sold this line of publications (the more obscene ones had been abandoned) to American Media, which also publishes the National Enquirer and Star tabloids, for $350 million.
This was less than a clean break, however, as the businesses seem to have arranged a mutually beneficial association, some of it apparently touching on Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Joe Weider remained in charge of the magazines under American Media, while American Media director David Pecker signed a contract to co-sponsor major bodybuilding contests with the Weiders.
With this new Weider-Pecker alliance came a change in how American Media’s tabloids covered Schwarzenegger, who was then running for California governor, and whose previous steroid use, sexual affairs (one allegedly with a minor), bullying groping incidents, etc. were the kind of fodder that often fuels tabloids.
According to an article in the San Jose Mercury News, “Tabloids Starry-Eyed for Schwarzenegger,” by Dion Nissenbaum, Pecker promised Weider that his tabloids would “lay off’’ Schwarzenegger and “not dig up any dirt” on the gubernatorial candidate. In fact, following its deal with Weider, American Media now seemed to be promoting Schwarzenegger.
The Mercury News reported that American Media produced a 120-page glossy magazine called Arnold, the American Dream, “crammed with flattering photographs” that auspiciously hit the streets just as Schwarzenegger headed into the final lap of his campaign for governor.
The next year, after Schwarzenegger became governor, Pecker made him executive editor of Flex and Muscle & Fitness, promising him an estimated $8 million over the next five years for helping to “further the business objectives” of the company, according to the LA Times.
If anyone wondered how a sitting governor of one of the nation’s largest states would have time for such a position, Advertising Age reported that this was “a largely honorary position” and according to a Schwarzenegger aide “would only take up a ‘nominal amount’ of the governor’s time.”
The following year Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation that would have cracked down on the use of supplements by student athletes.
A number of these supplements have been tied to serious health consequences. The medical community has warned that potential health effects include liver cancer, heart disease, impaired testicular function, and neurodegenerative effects.
Following Schwarzenegger’s veto, critics accused him of a conflict of interest, since supplements constituted a large portion of the advertising in the magazines that were paying him so generously for his work.
Advertising Age also made a point of noting that Schwarzenegger’s veto of legislation that would have regulated supplements “highlighted Mr. Schwarzenegger’s decades-long relationship with Joe Weider, the godfather of the supplement business.”
While Schwarzenneger was governor, and since, he has also worked to promote Israel. In a speech at an event at the Israeli Consulate Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “I love Israel. When I became governor, Israel was the first country that I visited.”
“I’ve had the pleasure of being there many times,” Schwarzenegger said, “and have seen it from a bodybuilding point of view, from a tourist’s point of view, from an entertainer’s point of view, from the governor’s point of view, forming trade relationships with Israel in order. I have been a long-time friend of Israel.”
The Orrin Hatch Connection
The Weiders have a history of working against public health regulation of supplements, despite evidence that some supplements can be dangerous to health – sometimes fatally so.
In 1994, according to a report on Weider Nutrition International in the International Directory of Company Histories, Vol.29, the Weiders worked with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch to successfully counter the FDA’s attempts to regulate supplements. Many Weider companies are headquartered in Utah.
The company history reports that a bill sponsored by Hatch entitled “the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act” was passed “to prevent the Food and Drug Administration from over-regulating the health products industry.”
“Later that year,” the report states, “Weider Nutrition honored Senator Hatch for his work on the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to Salt Lake City to present Hatch with Weider’s first annual award for major health contributions.”
A 2001 article in the Washington Monthly, “Scorin’ with Orrin: How the gentleman from Utah made it easier for kids to buy steroids, speed, and Spanish fly,” gives the details.
Washington Monthly reports that the FDA had not bothered to participate in debates over Hatch’s bill, because it believed the law was so obviously bad it would never pass. However, Hatch sneaked the bill through in a late-night session, the magazine reports. Afterward, a pharmacist and public health expert appalled at the bill remarked: “I do not understand how a single member of Congress voted for it.”
Washington Monthly concludes, “Thanks to Hatch, the U.S. now has standards as low as those in many Third World countries for the sale of many products with serious, pharmacological effects. The results have been deadly. Between 1993 and 1998, the FDA linked at least 184 deaths to dietary supplements, which are now suspected of contributing to the sudden deaths of three football players in August.”
Six years later, a number of athletes who had taken American supplements were devastated when they failed drug tests at the 2000 Olympics. Unbeknownst to these athletes, the supplements contained substances banned internationally because of the dangers they posed to health.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) warned athletes to avoid American supplements, particularly those manufactured in Utah, which had become known as the “Cellulose Valley of the U.S. supplement industry.”
When Olympic officials and others specifically blamed Hatch for the problem, Weider and other manufacturers met with him to encourage him to keep the supplements as unregulated as possible. Washington Monthly reports that Hatch’s office “apparently reassured them that the senator would continue to defend their interests.”
While Hatch is reportedly a true believer in alternative medicine, the article pointed out: “There’s big money in dietary supplements, and Hatch has taken his fair share in campaign contributions.”
Loren Israelson, executive director of the Utah Natural Products Alliance, which represents the Utah supplement industry, lauded Hatch’s commitment: “He is by far our greatest advocate. No one rises to the issue the way Sen. Hatch does. He’s a true believer in natural health.”
Weider Foundations
The Weider empire is not limited to the U.S. The Weiders have promoted bodybuilding (and Weider products) worldwide. There are now IFBB groups in 182 countries, and there are photos of Weider with diverse government officials, including Ronald Reagan, Yasser Arafat, and Menachem Begin.
Multimillionaires often set up tax-deductible foundations and the Weiders have created several.
The Ben Weider foundation has donated gyms around the world as part of their bodybuilding outreach, including in Israel and Palestine. Ben endowed what is now known as the “Ben Weider Jewish Community Center in Montreal” and also supported two Lubavitch institutions, a charismatic and sometimes controversial branch of Orthodox Judaism. He was an admirer of Lubavitch head Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, a religious leader who was a major force in Israel; Israeli leaders – including Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Benjamin Netanyahu – would often visit him when they were in the U.S. and seek his advice. A widely revered but controversial leader, Schneerson was held by some followers to be the Messiah. Less widely known is the fact that he made statements that Jews are a different and superior species to non-Jews.
There is also a Joe Weider Foundation; Joe Weider is CEO and Eric Weider has been CFO and is currently President. This entity has given several large grants to a Los Angeles-based organization called American Friends Of Aish HaTorah. Aish HaTorah is an Israeli organization that opposes Jewish assimilation and promotes Israel in the United States. It has been connected to the production of pseudo-documentaries promoting Islamophobia that were distributed in the U.S.
Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, a strong Israel proponent himself, calls Aish “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today. Its operatives flourish in the radical belt of Jewish settlements just south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, and their outposts across the world propagandize on behalf of a particularly sterile, sexist and revanchist brand of Judaism.”
Among its multitude of activities, Aish has a program to create and equip advocates for Israel on American campuses. These “Hasbara Fellows” as they’re termed, operate on over 120 campuses.
Joe Weider is one of six North American chairmen of The Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah. This focuses on bringing political leaders, corporate executives, investors, and entertainment personages on private trips to Israel to increase their support for Israel.
Weider Empire Acquires History Magazines
The same year the Weiders sold their muscle and fitness magazines they began their foray into history magazines. Working out of the same San Fernando offices, they published the first in their new chain, Armchair General, the following year. A Reuters story on the launch announced:
“The Los Angeles publisher that made its fortune on the dreams of armchair musclemen everywhere now wants to get Americans pumped up on a new avocation — becoming armchair generals.
“Eric Weider, whose family firm sold mainstream America on bodybuilding and Arnold Schwarzenegger, on Tuesday launched Armchair General, an ‘interactive’ war magazine aimed at selling military history to the masses.”
The Weiders’ market analysis showed a potential readership of “more than 35 million lifelong devotees.” Eric Weider, who had moved to California from Canada many years before, became an American citizen around this time.
While Eric Weider appears to be a genuine history buff, he apparently has no training or degree in history. He has a Master’s degree in business administration and has spent most of his life working in his family’s business empire, mostly in its bodybuilding and “nutritional supplements” divisions.
A Business Week c.v. lists the following positions: President and Chief Executive Officer of Weider Health and Fitness Inc., President of the Joe Weider Foundation, Chairman of Schiff Nutrition International Inc., Director of a number of public and private companies in the United States and Canada, including Nutripeak, Inc., Hillside Investment Management, Inc., Organ Recovery Systems and Life Science Holdings, and Weider Health and Fitness, a subsidiary of Schiff Nutrition International Inc.
Nevertheless, TV and radio shows hosted by such people as Tucker Carlson and Al Rantel feature Eric Weider as “an historian” to provide what is promoted as expert commentary on current events and today’s wars.
Weider is an engaging speaker, but the history he cites is highly selective and is used to support military action in the Middle East. On the Rantel show he suggested that American presidents should ignore polls indicating what Americans want and instead “instill the will” to fight.
The Weider History Group and Israel-Palestine
A survey of the publications’ website, HistoryNet, shows most articles and commentaries regarding Israel-Palestine to be Israel-centric. They often extol the Israeli military.
The publications’ articles during and following Israel’s 2008-9 massive attack on Gaza largely consisted of cheering Israel’s victory. The articles failed to mention that this allegedly proud conquest (fueled by massive American money and weaponry) was over one of the world’s poorest populations (largely thanks to Israeli policies). They also failed to mention that Palestinians have no navy, no air force, and no real army, and that their resistance groups are minimally armed.
When Israel finally ended its three-week long invasion of the densely populated enclave (during which Israeli forces had killed 1,400 Palestinians, 470 of them women and children; many others elderly men), a Weider HistoryNet article bemoaned Israel’s decision “to break off its punitive expedition into Gaza prematurely—despite the superb performance of the Israel Defense Force….”
The HistoryNet articles emphasized Israel’s need “to defend itself” against Palestinian rockets, but they failed to report that these are largely small, homemade projectiles and that Palestinian resistance forces began firing them only after Israel had already invaded Gaza numerous times and killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians of all ages.
They also neglected to mention that, before the invasion, these rockets had killed a total of approximately 19 Israelis – ever. (The total fatalities from Gaza rockets through November 2012 are 29. During the same time, according to the Israeli organization B’Tselem, Israeli forces killed over 4,000 Gazans.)
The articles erroneously claimed that Israel invaded Gaza because the Palestinian Hamas group had violated a ceasefire agreement with Israel. In reality, it was Israel that had violated the ceasefire three times – killing seven Palestinians – before some Palestinian groups then resumed rocket fire.
Finally, the Weider articles failed to inform readers that Israel had been planning the invasion for six months ahead of time, as revealed by a Jewish Chronicle article applauding Israel’s effective “hasbara” (propaganda) campaign during the operation.
Eric Weider himself has occasionally posted pro-Israel comments on the site’s forums. In one he responds to a member’s posting about Israeli fighters flying over Gaza several times a day to create sonic booms in order to frighten the people below, who would dive for shelter. Weider comments: “Next thing you know the Israelis will start talking excessively loudly! Their cruely [sic] knows no bounds!” In another thread, Weider states, “It is important to recognize that there is a lot of anti-semetic [sic] inspired Anti-Israel sentiment in the world.”
Eric Weider and George Washington
Eric Weider expresses great admiration for George Washington and has begun a petition to restore his birthday as a federal holiday. He has written: “If I have a historical role model I would say that I most admire George Washington and I do my best to conduct myself in a way that he (and my father) would approve of.”
Yet, Weider seems to be violating one of Washington’s major recommendations:
In his Farewell Address, Washington warned against a “passionate attachment” to any foreign nation, saying that such attachments were “particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot.”
If Eric Weider looked at the CNI website when he decided to censor it from his 11 magazines, he saw prominently displayed on the homepage a picture of the American forefather who he has called “first in his heart.”
Under this he saw an excerpt from his role model’s famous speech in which Washington warned: “Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”
On our homepage Weider would have also seen a history article on the U.S.-Israel relationship that contains considerable new, somewhat explosive information. Much of this would quite likely be of interest to readers of American history magazines, if they were allowed to learn of it.
Determining the future through controlling the past
It is disturbing to find that a chain targeting American history enthusiasts is exploiting its considerable power in furtherance of a political agenda of such monumental significance.
Multitudes of lives have been lost and destroyed in Middle East wars – many thousands of them American. Israel is the core issue in the Middle East and key cause of hostility to the U.S., is a factor in the American economic crisis, is embedded in U.S. electoral politics, and plays a significant role in many aspects of American policy formation. It is essential that Americans become well informed on Israel and on our relationship to it.
Author George Orwell’s words capture the profound significance of the Weider censorship within its history magazines: “Who controls the past controls the future.” Or, in the words of someone who posted to an online bodybuilding forum about the Weiders’ ownership of history publications: “Of course, if you control the writing of history… you gain power.”
The way to avoid a dangerously darkening future, I feel, is to free the past to full, open, and unfiltered inquiry. Our forefathers created freedom of the press because they rightly understood the necessity of a fully informed populace for the survival of our democratic republic.
The only way to counter the manipulation of powerful media owners is to expose their actions widely and to demand better. I hope all those who love knowledge, who care about the United States, and who value the lives of others on the other side of the world will help disseminate this information. It is time to stop allowing those who own the press to abuse their massive power.
Alison Weir is president of the Council for the National Interest and executive director of If Americans Knew. She can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org.
December 6, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | History of the United States, Israel, Israel-Palestine, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Weider History Group, Zionism |
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Mondoweiss:
“. . . a significant part of the community wants to talk about Israeli policy in the context of Jewish history and Jewish identity, and do so in a highly critical manner. Clearly a lot of people, including many in our community, want to have these conversations and regard them as necessary to resolving the Middle East conflict. We don’t. We are tired of serving as a platform for this discussion, including in the comment section, and don’t see the conversation as a productive one. From here on out, the Mondoweiss comment section will no longer serve as a forum to pillory Jewish culture and religion as the driving factors in Israeli and US policy.
We are making this change because this discussion makes for a toxic, often racist, discourse, and scares off others who would otherwise be drawn to the issues this site concerns itself with.”
Xymphora responds:
I look forward to the ‘Roots of Slavery in the Old South’ forum, which consists entirely of a discussion of the sufferings of the slaveholders, and how their actions derived entirely from the racism experienced by their Scots-Irish forefathers.
Of course, the deeper issue is that Zionism is based, not in Jewish suffering or the mythology of a universal irrational hatred of Jews, but in Jewish violent group supremacism. This is easy to see in that Zionism waxes in times of Jewish group dominance (like now), and wanes in the relatively rare times of Jewish group oppression. The lite Zionists are always more skittish about hiding Jewish supremacism than the hard-core Zionists.
~~~
Aletho News adds the following list containing the names of those who have publicly disavowed Gilad Atzmon due to his recognizing a connection between Jewish cultural identity and Zionist ideology:
As’ad AbuKhalil, The Angry Arab News Service, Turlock, CA
Suha Afyouni, solidarity activist, Beirut, LEBANON
Max Ajl, essayist, rabble-rouser, proprietor of Jewbonics blog site, Ithaca, NY
Haifaa Al-Moammar, activist, stay-at-home mom, and marathon walker, Los Angeles, CA
Electa Arenal, professor emerita, CUNY Graduate Center/Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Women’s Studies, New York, NY
Gabriel Ash, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Geneva, SWITZERLAND
Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Dan Berger, Wild Poppies Collective, Philadelphia, PA
Chip Berlet, Boston, MA
Nazila Bettache, activist, Montréal, CANADA
Sam Bick, Tadamon!, Immigrant Workers Center, Montréal, Québec
Max Blumenthal, author; writing fellow, The Nation, New York, NY
Lenni Brenner, author, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, New York, NY
Café Intifada
Paola Canarutto, Rete-ECO (Italian Network of Jews against the Occupation), Torino, ITALY
Paulette d’Auteuil, National Jericho Movement, Albuquerque, NM
Susie Day, Monthly Review, New York, NY
Ali Hocine Dimerdji, PhD student at The University of Nottingham, in Nottingham, UK
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, professor emerita, California State University
Todd Eaton, Park Slope Food Coop Members for Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions, Brooklyn, NY
Mark Elf, Jews sans frontieres
S. EtShalom, registered nurse, Philadelphia, PA
Benjamin Evans, solidarity activist, Chicago, IL
First of May Anarchist Alliance
Sherna Berger Gluck, professor emerita, California State University/Israel Divestment Campaign, CA
Neta Golan, International Solidarity Movement
Tony Greenstein, Secretary Brighton Unemployed Centre/UNISON, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, Brighton, UK
Andrew Griggs, Café Intifada, Los Angeles, CA
Jenny Grossbard, artist, designer, writer and fighter, New York, NY
Freda Guttman, activist, Montréal, CANADA
Adam Hanieh, lecturer, Department of Development Studies/SOAS, University of London, UK
Swaneagle Harijan, anti-racism, social justice activism, Seattle, WA
Sarah Hawas, researcher and solidarity activist, Cairo, EGYPT
Stanley Heller, “The Struggle” Video News, moderator “Jews Who Speak Out”
Mostafa Henaway, Tadamon!, Immigrant Workers Center, Montréal, CANADA
Elise Hendrick, Meldungen aus dem Exil/Noticias de una multipátrida, Cincinnati, OH
Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer, New York, NY
Ken Hiebert, activist, Ladysmith, CANADA
Elizabeth Horowitz, solidarity activist, New York, NY
Adam Hudson, writer/blogger, San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Dhruv Jain, Researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academie and PhD student at York University, Paris, FRANCE
Tom Keefer, an editor of the journal Upping the Anti, Toronto, CANADA
Karl Kersplebedeb, Left Wing Books, Montréal, CANADA
Anne Key, Penrith, Cumbria, UK
Mark Klein, activist, Toronto, CANADA
Bill Koehnlein, Brecht Forum, New York, NY
L.A. Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee, Los Angeles, CA
Mark Lance, Georgetown University/Institute for Anarchist Studies, Washington, DC
David Landy, author, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel, Dublin, IRELAND
Bob Lederer, Pacifica/WBAI producer, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, New York, NY
Matthew Lyons, Three Way Fight, Philadelphia, PA
Karen MacRae, solidarity activist, Toronto, CANADA
Heba Farouk Mahfouz, student activist, blogger, Cairo, EGYPT
Marvin Mandell and Betty Reid Mandell, co-editors, New Politics, West Roxbury, MA
Ruth Sarah Berman McConnell, retired teacher, DeLand, FL
Kathleen McLeod, poet, Brisbane, Australia
Karrie Melendres, Los Angeles, CA
Matt Meyer, Resistance in Brooklyn, New York, NY
Amirah Mizrahi, poet and educator, New York, NY
mesha Monge-Irizarry, co-director of Education Not Incarceration; SF MOOC City commissioner, San Francisco, CA
Matthew Morgan-Brown, solidarity activist, Ottawa, CANADA
Michael Novick, People Against Racist Terror/Anti-Racist Action, Los Angeles, CA
Saffo Papantonopoulou, New School Students for Justice in Palestine, New York, NY
Susan Pashkoff, Jews Against Zionism, London, UK
Tom Pessah, UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine, Berkeley, CA
Marie-Claire Picher, Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB), New York, NY
Sylvia Posadas (Jinjirrie), Kadaitcha, Noosa, AUSTRALIA
Roland Rance, Jews Against Zionism, London, UK
Danielle Ratcliff, San Francisco, CA
Liz Roberts, War Resisters League, New York, NY
Emma Rosenthal, contributor, Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation, Los Angeles, CA
Penny Rosenwasser, PhD, Oakland, CA
Suzanne Ross, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, The Riverside Church Prison Ministry, New York, NY
Gabriel San Roman, Orange County Weekly, Orange County, CA
Ian Saville, performer and lecturer, London, UK
Joel Schwartz, CSEA retiree/AFSCME, New York, NY
Tali Shapiro, Anarchists Against the Wall, Boycott From Within, Tel Aviv, OCCUPIED PALESTINE
Simona Sharoni, SUNY, author, Gender & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Plattsburgh, NY
Jaggi Singh, No One Is Illegal-Montreal/Solidarity Across Borders, Montréal, CANADA
Michael S. Smith, board member, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, NY
Pierre Stambul, Union juive française pour la paix (French Jewish Union for Peace), Paris, FRANCE
Muffy Sunde, Los Angeles, CA
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin, Bronx, NY
Tadamon! (http://www.tadamon.ca/), Montréal, CANADA
Ian Trujillo, atheist, Los Angeles, CA
Gabriella Turek, PhD, Auckland, NEW ZEALAND
Henry Walton, SEIU, retired, Los Angeles, CA
Bill Weinberg, New Jewish Resistance, New York, NY
Abraham Weizfeld, author, The End of Zionism and the liberation of the Jewish People, Montreal, CANADA
Ben White, author, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Cambridge, UK
Laura Whitehorn, former political prisoner, NYS Task Force on Political Prisoners, New York, NY
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, founding member, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG)
Asa Winstanley, journalist for Electronic Intifada, Al-Akhbar and others, London, UK
Ziyaad Yousef, solidarity activist
and also:
- Ali Abunimah
- Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
- Omar Barghouti, human rights activist
- Hatem Bazian, Chair, American Muslims for Palestine
- Andrew Dalack, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
- Haidar Eid, Gaza
- Nada Elia, US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
- Toufic Haddad
- Kathryn Hamoudah
- Adam Hanieh, Lecturer, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London
- Mostafa Henaway, Tadamon! Canada
- Monadel Herzallah, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
- Nadia Hijab, author and human rights advocate
- Andrew Kadi
- Abir Kobty, Palestinian blogger and activist
- Joseph Massad, Professor, Columbia University, NY
- Danya Mustafa, Israeli Apartheid Week US National Co-Coordinator & Students for Justice in Palestine- University of New Mexico
- Dina Omar, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine
- Haitham Salawdeh, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
- Sobhi Samour, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London
- Khaled Ziada, SOAS Palestine Society, London
- Rafeef Ziadah, poet and human rights advocate
October 24, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Israel, Jewish, Jewish identity, Mondoweiss, Zionism |
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In 1994, the African National Congress of South Africa made a deal with the devil. There would be one-person, one-vote, majority rule of electoral politics. But corporate power over the South African economy would not be tampered with, and white civil servants would be guaranteed they could keep their well-paying jobs, for life. The ANC also set itself another goal: to create a class of Black millionaires.
Much earlier, the ANC had made a solemn commitment to the broad masses of people. It’s called the Freedom Charter, adopted in 1955, which served as the unifying document of the struggle against apartheid that culminated in the elections that brought the ANC to power. The Freedom Charter promised that “the national wealth of [the] country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people;” that “the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;” that “all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people; all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger;” and that “all shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose.”
Yet, none of this has come to pass. The Freedom Charter is absolutely incompatible with the deal the ANC made for a peaceful transition to Black majority rule. If corporate privileges are untouched, there can be no collective ownership of the mineral wealth, the soil, the banks and industries. And social systems that breed new Black millionaires – or millionaires of any kind – cannot possibly give priority to the well-being of the masses of people.
South Africa was one of the most unequal places in the world in 1994, and it is at least as unequal, today – because of the deal cut by the ANC. The covenant with white privilege and corporate power was also entered into by the ANC’s partners: the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU. Thus, the three pillars of the liberation movement agreed that they would not upset the existing corporate framework, and they would not implement the clearly socialist aims of the Freedom Charter. Instead, they nurtured a tiny, Black capitalist class made up largely of ANC insiders. Union leaders became rich men, while conditions for the poor and working classes deteriorated.
These chickens have now come home to roost, especially following the massacre of 34 miners at Marikana. The mining industry is in turmoil, with 41 percent of South Africa’s gold output shut down. Hundreds of thousands of municipal workers will go on strike this week to protest poor pay and corruption. Yet the official voice of labor, COSATU, cannot credibly claim to represent the interests of working people when it is a partner of the ruling party whose police kill, beat and imprison workers.
This fundamentally corrupt arrangement has run its course. There will be nothing but mass bloodshed at the end of this journey unless the African National Congress breaks the pact that it made with corporate power, in 1994. The ANC stands at a crossroads, and must make a turn.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
October 17, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | African National Congress, ANC, Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU, Freedom Charter, South Africa, South African Communist Party |
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ABC World News’ David Muir (9/30/12) took note of the 2,000th U.S. military death in Afghanistan this way:
Overseas now to Afghanistan, and a stark reminder tonight of the human cost of war. An attack at a checkpoint left two Americans dead, one of them a serviceman, the 2,000th U.S. military death since the war began.
That kind of language is revealing in that it presents American deaths as evidence of the “human cost of war.” But, of course, that is a human cost almost every day most wars. What they’re saying is this is primarily something we should think about when the humans in question are U.S. troops.
We don’t need to search very far to find a counter-example. On the very same show, two weeks earlier (9/16/12) , viewers were told about a NATO airstrike that killed eight Afghan women. They had been out collecting firewood.
How did ABC report these deaths? In all of one sentence, stuffed at the end of a report by correspondent Muhammad Lila about U.S. troop deaths:
And late this evening, another incident that’s causing tension here. NATO is confirming that an air strike has led to civilian casualties, reportedly including Afghan women and children.
Last year, in a very similar incident, a NATO airstrike killed nine boys. And ABC’s brief report (3/6/11) focused on Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s “harsh words for the U.S.”
October 2, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | ABC World News, Afghanistan, NATO, Peter Hart, United States, United States Armed Forces |
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United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya called on Argentina to cease the eviction of indigenous communities from their lands, during the presentation of the annual report of his office before the UN Human Rights council in Geneva.
The usurpation of indigenous lands is common practice argues Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya The usurpation of indigenous lands is common practice argues Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya
The report requests “the suspension of all process and administrative actions to evict indigenous communities from their lands until a full technical-juridical procedural survey of lands occupied by the indigenous peoples is completed”.
“The grave legal insecurity in indigenous lands has been reflected in the high number of indigenous communities’ evictions” points out the report elaborated on data collected by Anaya during a mission to Argentina in 2011. Anaya and his staff besides Buenos Aires City visited ten of the 23 provinces and completed 170 testimonies.
The Argentine delegation replied that under the current Emergency Law, (26.160) evictions from these lands has been suspended until 23 November 2013, but admitted that “after verifying the absence of the requirements demanded, there have been evictions”.
Argentina’s ombudsman office supported the report saying he “continues to receive” claims from members of the “Mapuche community Lof Paichil Antriao in the province of Neuquén, the Qom people of Formosa, the Omaguaca people of Jujuy and the Wichi from Salta”. They all claim that the Emergency Law is not being complied.
The head of the Argentine NGO Human Rights Standing Assembly, Rodrigo Gomez Tortosa has been quoted saying that the emergency law has “a very low degree of compliance” and accused the authorities from the northern province of Formosa for “the threats and aggressions suffered by the indigenous leader from the Qom community, Felix Diaz, who is in litigation “over the usurpation of land by provincial officials.
According to official data the indigenous population totals 600.329, which is equivalent to 1.7% of the 42 million Argentines, although other sources mentioned by Anaya estimate the number closer to 2 million made up of 30 autochthonous peoples, settled mainly to the north and south of the country.
The problems of Argentina’s indigenous stems from the “historic de-possession of vast tracks of their lands by ranchers and the big farming, oil and mining corporations which operate in the lands claimed by these communities” which lack “a legal acknowledgement of their lands according to their forms of use and occupation” concludes the report presented by Anaya.
September 19, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Anaya, Argentina, Indigenous People, James Anaya, United Nations Human Rights Council, United Nations Special Rapporteur |
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The water crisis in Palestine is 100% human-made, not a climate change catastrophe, not an issue of deforestation or drought. Don’t let the location fool you; as Ziyad Lunat from the Thirsting For Justice campaign pointed out, “Palestine and Israel get the same amount of rainfall as England.”
We say Palestine, mind you, not the West Bank and/or Gaza and/or the Occupied Territories. When we say Palestine, we mean all of it. The Palestine that is Gaza, the West Bank, the 64+ year flood of refugees in Jordan and Syria and Turkey and Chicago, the largest flood of refugees in modern history that span across the globe.
This water catastrophe — this other type of nakba — is definitively the result of Israel’s apartheid policies that are being conducted continuously, evident in the waterborne disease spreading throughout Palestinian refugee camps that are perhaps not an accident, an inconvenient oversight. Perhaps they are part of the continuing collateral damage of a so-called unsolvable crisis that in person, feels much more like the combination of a big lie and a large land grab. And as in other places, behind every land grab is a water grab.
Israeli policies and practices limit Palestinians’ access to the water they are entitled to under international law. Israel controls all sources of freshwater in the West Bank. In Gaza, 90 to 95 percent of the coastal aquifer, on which Gaza inhabitants are dependent for water, is contaminated due to over extraction and sewage contamination, making it unfit for human consumption. For most Palestinians, this ongoing and catastrophic water crisis is what they face daily, when they wash clothing, need a glass of water or try to water their crops.
Thirsting for Justice
During my most recent trip to Palestine while traveling with Barbara Lubin, Executive Director of the Middle East Children’s Alliance ( MECA), I was directly asked by one of MECA’s partners to take part in the Thirsting for Justice Summer Challenge and only consume 6.3 gallons of water for one 24-hour period in solidarity with Palestinians. In the moment, I promised to participate and now I ask you to consider joining this campaign as well.
In Palestine, MECA was working to further our partnership with UNRWA to sustain and support MECA’s ongoing Maia project, which provides clean drinking water for children throughout kindergartens and UN schools in Gaza. As a natural extension of MECA’s humanitarian efforts, they are a member of the Emergency Water Sanitation and Hygiene group (EWASH), a coalition of 30 leading humanitarian organizations that launched this Thirsting for Justice Campaign. These groups have realized that demand for clean water will only increase unless there is some component where they do not just respond to the overwhelming need for clean water, but they advocate for a change in Israel’s water policy, which in my view amounts to liquid apartheid.
Taking the Challenge
I am not going to lie to you for a moment. This challenge is an impossible and completely symbolic task. How does one in the places in which we live respond to such a challenge? I, for one, procrastinated and delayed, as such is my privilege, since this is a symbolic nothingness, a gesture, a shoulder shrug. Solidarity? Perhaps. But solidarity means nothing when the 6.3 gallons I consumed during my allotted and chosen 24 hours were highly purified, compared to the water in Gaza, where I know from experience that if you take a hot shower the salt in the water burns your skin, that friends invite you to brush your teeth with their own bottled water so that your teeth won’t begin to erode for use of tap water. Water in Palestine is often so heavily salinated or in short supply that blue baby syndrome, liver afflictions, and kidney problems are all too commonly spoken on the lips of mothers when talking about their children.
Yet still I delayed. A 6.3 gallon challenge? Are you kidding me? I flush the toilet twice in the same day and I fail. If I do a load of laundry, or turn on the dishwasher, I fail. One shower, failure. I am American, therefore entitled to unlimited resources, am I not? Isn’t the American way of life not up for negotiation?
I finally acquiesced and undertook the Thirsting For Justice Challenge. Yesterday, instead of showering, I swam in the ocean. I pissed outdoors — I never flushed. I did not use dishes, except for one glass. I attempted the challenge and in the process spent countless gallons of oil and even more kilowatts of electricity, especially if you are reading this, all to communicate to you the importance of the Thirsting for Justice campaign, all to attempt to wash off the guilt and the default complicity we share in this occupation, all to complete a promise.
Taking part in the Thirsting for Justice Summer Challenge did make me think more about what it means to consume. Consume. Consume. The American mantra. We consume and destroy, and we do not question policies like the ongoing occupation and division of Palestine that we fund every day with US tax dollars. All of this, of course, is completely absent from debates, from dialogue, from the ongoing election cycle that makes one nauseous enough it makes it difficult to swallow. Even this symbolic feeling of being deprived of water, if just for one day, gives one pause to think about things such as this.
This symbolic challenge is a challenge nonetheless, one I invite you to consider, to embrace, to make you pause, despite all the noise, and join in the walk with the peoples of Palestine. Those who join the walk will be haunted as am I by Martin Luther King’s words: “ In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
What now?
When I left Palestine weeks ago and returned home, (as is my privilege, I have freedom to travel, I am not Palestinian) sometimes things seemed more silent than ever. Sometimes I thought about how much harder it is to speak when you are thirsty. Sometimes I wished there was an easy way to be be heard by you, Israel. Because you are choking Palestine. There literally is no Jordan River anymore. You dam(n) the waters from the underground aquifers that provide water to Palestinians, you poison their wells, you have built walls to encompass the high ground, you redirect the streams to fill swimming pools of settlers born of other lands with other privileges, many of whom are surprisingly well armed. With US weapons no less.
6.3 gallons. Per person. Per diem. I grab at the easy words in easy reach, carpe diem, to louden the call to join this Thirsting for Justice campaign today, but I cringe now at this phrase. Being in Palestine makes you realize seizure means something different when you are on the receiving end of being seized.
Lessons learned?
What is 6.3 gallons? It is Israeli water torture. It is part of the occupation. It is part of maintaining the stalemate, the status quo, the divide and conquer, the non-solution is a solution. In the meantime, in the never ending interim, if you are Palestinian, just keep your water consumption under 6.3 gallons a day or there will be hell to pay.
I now know more deeply that expecting one to live on 6.3 gallons of water in a day is an insult. It’s collective punishment. It’s fucking horrible. An allotment of 6.3 gallons of water a day makes you want to flee.
This is not about me or you joining the Thirsting for Justice Summer campaign. This is about Israel using allotment of water resources as one of the many weapons in their arsenal to maintain their ongoing occupation. This is about making Palestine unlivable. This is about creating a different kind of Exodus. This is about a new Trail of Tears. But this is a controlled amount of tears, and it is controlled at the water spigots, controlled at the borders, controlled in the halls in Washington and the Knesset and in the lack of news you hear about the unwillingness of many Palestinians to be truly part of their two paltry puppets, the PA and Hamas.
This other Trail of Tears is drier and longer and older than you think. Listen. Do you hear the footsteps? More feet down the trail every day, with our silence. More tears. All happening in real time, all with the blind allegiance and support of the USA.
By no means, do I know what it is to walk any Trail of Tears. All I can think is to try to strive to accompany in some small way those who have been forced on this path by no choice of their own. That many of those walking are children. That there are choices before all of us, that we can, in fact, ourselves thirst for justice in our own way and shrink the gap between those on the receiving end, those whose lives know only war and occupation and those of us who, by default, by waking up in America, are the ones who are partly responsible.
Danny Muller has worked with the Middle East Children’s Alliance since they were jointly breaking the economic sanctions against Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness in the 1990’s. He is raising money to build a water treatment unit at the UNRWA Rehabilitation Centre for Visually Impaired (RCVI) where almost 500 students come for training and treatment but have no access to clean water, and asks that you consider making a donation and support Palestine.
September 3, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Gaza, Israel, MECA, Palestine, West Bank |
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The national leader of one of America’s feistiest unions is aiming to expand the economic fairness debate. He’s proposing a cap on incomes at the top that rises only if incomes at the bottom rise first.
With Labor Day fast approaching, what better time to reflect about those Americans who earn the least for their labor? These Americans — workers paid the federal minimum wage — are now taking home just $7.25 an hour.
On paper, minimum wage workers are making exactly what they made in July 2009, the last time the minimum wage bumped up. In reality, minimum wage workers are making less today than they made last year — and the year before that — since inflation has eaten away at their incomes.
And if we go back a few decades, today’s raw deal on the minimum wage gets even rawer. Back in 1968, minimum wage workers took home $1.60 an hour. To make that much today, adjusting for inflation, a minimum wage worker would have to be earning $10.55 an hour.
In effect, minimum wage workers today are taking home almost $7,000 less over the course of a year than minimum wage workers took home in 1968.
Figures like these don’t particularly discomfort our nation’s most powerful. We live in tough times, their argument goes. The small businesses that drive our economy, we’re informed, can’t possibly afford to pay their help any more than they already do.
But the vast majority of our nation’s minimum wage workers don’t labor for Main Street mom-and-pops. They labor for businesses that no average American would ever call small. Two-thirds of America’s low-wage workers, the National Employment Law Project documented last month, work for companies with over 100 employees on their payrolls.
The 50 largest of these low-wage employers are doing just fine, even with the Great Recession. Over the last five years, these 50 corporations — outfits that range from Wal-Mart to Office Depot — have together returned $175 billion to shareholders in dividends or share buybacks.
And the CEOs at these companies last year averaged $9.4 million in personal compensation. A minimum wage worker would have to labor 623 years bring in that kind of pay.
So what can we do to bring some semblance of fairness back into our workplaces? For starters, we obviously need to raise the minimum wage. But some close observers of America’s economic landscape believe we need to do more. A great deal more.
Count Larry Hanley among these more ambitious change agents. Hanley, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, sits on the AFL-CIO executive council, the American labor movement’s top decision-making body. Earlier this month, Hanley called for a “maximum wage,” a cap on the compensation that goes to the corporate execs who profit so hugely off low-wage labor.
This maximum, if Hanley had his way, would be defined as a multiple of the pay that goes to a company’s lowest-paid worker. If we had a “maximum wage” set at 100 times that lowest wage, the CEO at a company that paid workers as little as $15,080 — the annual take-home for a minimum wage worker — could waltz off with annual pay no higher than just over $1.5 million.
During World War II, Amalgamated Transit Union president Hanley points out, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for what amounted to a maximum wage. FDR urged Congress to place a 100 percent tax on income over $25,000 a year, a sum now equal, after inflation, to just over $350,000.
Congress didn’t go along. But FDR did end up winning a 94 percent top tax rate on income over $200,000, a move that would help usher in the greatest years of middle-class prosperity the United States has ever known.
Throughout World War II, FDR enjoyed broad support from within the labor movement — and the general public — for his pay cap notion. Now’s the time, Hanley believes, to put that notion back on the political table. We need, he says, “to start a national discussion about creating a maximum wage law.”
Hanley may just have started that discussion, just in time for Labor Day.
August 27, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Amalgamated Transit Union, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Minimum wage, United States |
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Charles H. Ferguson, the director of the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country.
He exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators’ path to conquest.
Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.
·Finance has become America’s dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.
· The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.
· Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.
· Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world’s most unequal and unfair societies.
Ferguson shows how from the Reagan administration forward, both major political parties have become captives of the moneyed elite.
It was the Clinton administration that dismantled the regulatory controls that protected the average citizen from avaricious financiers. It was the Bush team that destroyed the federal revenue base with its grotesquely skewed tax cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama White House that has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed “reforms” installed after the collapse of 2008.
Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
Excerpt:
It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the American (and global) financial sector has become criminalized, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behavior that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.
It is important to understand that this behavior really is seriously criminal. We are not talking about neglecting some bureaucratic formality. We are talking about deliberate concealment of financial transactions that aided terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation, and large-scale tax evasion; assisting in concealment of criminal assets and activities by others; and directly committing frauds that substantially worsened the worst financial bubbles and crises since the Depression.
None of this conduct was punished in any significant way. On November 7, 2011, the New York Times published an article (Wall Street’s Repeat Violations, Despite Repeated Promises) based on its own review of major banks’ settlements of SEC lawsuits since 1996. The Times’ analysis found fifty-one cases in which major banks had settled cases involving securities fraud, after having previously been caught violating the same law, and then promising the SEC not to do so again. The Times’ list, furthermore, covered only SEC securities fraud cases; it did not include any criminal cases, private lawsuits by victims, cases filed by state attorneys general, or any cases of bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, or illegal asset concealment — all areas in which the banks have numerous and major violations. In Predator Nation, I provide detailed, well-documented accounts of behavior ranging from assisting Enron’s frauds (Citigroup, Merrill Lynch), to fraudulently exploiting the Internet bubble (most of the major investment banks), to using for-profit colleges to exploit government student loan programs (Goldman Sachs), to assisting in money laundering and tax evasion on a large scale (at least eleven banks including UBS, Barclay’s, and Lloyds), to using bribery and artificially complex derivatives to destroy the finances of a county government (JP Morgan Chase), to profiting from Bernard Madoff even while strongly suspecting him to be a fraud (JP Morgan Chase, UBS).
Total fines for all these cases combined appear to be far less than 1 percent of financial sector profits and bonuses during the same period. There have been very few prosecutions and no criminal convictions of large U.S. financial institutions or their senior executives. Where individuals not linked to major banks have committed similar offenses, they have been treated far more harshly.
Given this background, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the mortgage bubble and financial crisis were facilitated not only by deregulation but also by the prior twenty years’ tolerance of large scale financial crime. First, the absence of prosecution gradually led to a deeply embedded cultural acceptance of unethical and criminal behavior in finance. And second, it generated a sense of personal impunity; bankers contemplating criminal actions were no longer deterred by threat of prosecution.
And just as the last twenty years of unpunished financial crime constituted a green light for the bubble, so, too, America’s non-response to the bubble and crisis is setting the tone for financial conduct in the future.
The Obama administration has rationalized its failure to prosecute any senior financial executives (literally, not a single one) for bubble-related crimes by saying that while much of Wall Street’s behavior was unwise or unethical, it wasn’t illegal. Here is President Obama at a White House press conference on October 6, 2011:
Well, first on the issue of prosecutions on Wall Street, one of the biggest problems about the collapse of Lehmans [sic] and the subsequent financial crisis and the whole subprime lending fiasco is that a lot of that stuff wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless….I think part of people’s frustrations, part of my frustration, was a lot of practices that should not have been allowed weren’t necessarily against the law.
The president and senior administration officials (such as Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division) have portrayed themselves as frustrated and hamstrung — desirous of punishing those responsible for the crisis, but unable to do so because their conduct wasn’t illegal, and/or the federal government lacks sufficient power to sanction them. With apologies for my vulgarity, this is complete horseshit.
When the federal government is really serious about something — preventing another 9/11, or pursuing major organized crime figures — it has many tools at its disposal and often uses them. There are wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping. There are special prosecutors, task forces, and grand juries. When Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, the FBI assigned hundreds of agents to the case.
In organized crime investigations, the FBI and federal prosecutors often start at the bottom in order to get to the top. They use the well established technique of nailing lower-level people and then offering them a deal if they inform on and/or testify about their superiors — whereupon the FBI nails their superiors, and does the same thing to them, until climbing to the top of the tree. There is also the technique of nailing people for what can be proven against them, even if it’s not the main offense. Al Capone was never convicted of bootlegging, large scale corruption, or murder; he was convicted of tax evasion.
In this spirit, here are a few observations about the ethics, legalities, and practicalities of prosecution related to the bubble:
First, much of the bubble was directly, massively criminal.
Second, if you really wanted to get these people, you could. Maybe not all of them, but certainly many. Some bubble-related violations are very clear, with strong written evidence, as my book Predator Nation demonstrates. And if you flipped enough people, some of them would undoubtedly have interesting things to say about what their senior management knew. In fact, there are many techniques, venues, organizations, regulations, and statutes, both civil and criminal, available to investigate these people, punish them, and recover the money they took — if you really wanted to. The federal government has used almost none of them.
Third, the moral argument for punishment is very strong, providing ample justification for erring on the side of aggressive legal pursuit. Whatever portion of banking conduct during the bubble was criminal, it was certainly substantial, and there is no doubt whatsoever that it was utterly, pervasively unethical, designed to defraud in reality if not in law. Since the crisis, the people who caused it have been anything but honest or contrite. They have been evasive, dishonest, and self-justifying, returning as quickly as possible to their unerringly selfish behavior. Their behavior caused enormous damage, both human and economic; the consequences of their wrongdoing are so large as to justify almost any action that could help to prevent another such crisis by creating real deterrence. There would also be intangible but large benefits to raising the general ethical standard of a vital industry, and one whose executives often become high-level government officials.
Given this background, let’s now consider the question of criminal liability, as well as the feasibility of prosecution.
J’Accuse
The list of prosecutable crimes committed during the bubble, the crisis, and aftermath period by financial services firms and senior executives includes: securities fraud (many forms); accounting fraud (many forms); honest services violations (mail fraud statute); bribery; perjury and making false statements to federal investigators; Sarbanes-Oxley violations (certifying accounting statements and financial controls); RICO offenses and criminal antitrust violations; Federal aid disclosure regulations (related to Federal Reserve loans); Personal conduct offenses (many forms: drugs, tax evasion, etc.).
In Predator Nation I consider each of these categories in detail, naming many names and providing many specific examples. But in considering only one category, securities fraud, we already face an embarrassment of riches.
Almost all the prospectuses and sales material on mortgage-backed securities sold from 2005 through 2007 were a compound of falsehoods. But it starts even earlier in the food chain. We also know that mortgage originators committed securities fraud when they misrepresented the characteristics of loan pools, and the nature and extent of their due diligence with regard to them, when they sold pools to securitizers (and accepted financing from them). Most or all of the securitizers (meaning nearly all the investment banks and major banking conglomerates) then committed securities fraud when they misrepresented the characteristics of the loans backing their CDOs, the characteristics of the resulting mortgage-backed securities, and the nature and results of their due diligence in the process of creating those securities. The securitizers also committed securities fraud when they made similar misrepresentations to the insurers of, and sellers of credit default swap (CDS) protection on, those securities.
The executives of both originators and securitizers then committed a separate form of securities fraud in their statements to investors and the public about their companies’ financial condition. They knew that they were engaging in a Ponzi-like fraud that would eventually need to end, and as the bubble peaked and started to collapse, they repeatedly lied about their companies’ financial condition. In some cases they also concealed other material information, such as the extent to which they, themselves, and/or other executives of their firms, were selling or hedging their own stock holdings because they knew that their firms were about to collapse.
Next, several investment banks committed securities fraud when they failed to disclose that they were selling securities that were designed to fail so that the investment banks, and/or their hedge fund clients, could profit by betting on their failure. The Hudson and Timberwolf synthetic CDOs sold by Goldman Sachs, and which were the focus of the Levin Senate subcommittee hearings, provide a very strong basis for prosecution. Goldman’s trading arm had been dragooned into finding and dumping their most dangerous assets to naive institutional investors. Important representations in the Hudson sales material–that assets were not sourced from Goldman’s own inventory — were lies, and they were material lies, since investors had learned to be wary of banks clearing out their own bad inventory. E-mail trails show that top executives closely tracked the garbage disposals and were gleeful at the unloading of the Timberwolf assets — as they should have been, for the assets were nearly worthless within months. There have been no prosecutions.
In some cases, we already have clear evidence of senior executive knowledge of and involvement in these frauds. For example, quarterly presentations to investors are nearly always made by the CEO or CFO of the firm; if lies were told in those presentations, or if material facts were omitted, the responsibility lies with senior management. In some other cases, such as Bear Stearns, we already have evidence from civil lawsuits that very senior executives were directly involved in constructing and selling securities whose prospectuses contained lies and omissions.
The list is long. In chapters three through six of Predator Nation, I survey the financial sector’s behavior during the bubble, and provide dozens of examples of major criminal behavior. Again, there have been no prosecutions.
August 27, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Bernard Madoff, Charles H. Ferguson, Finance, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, UBS, United States |
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The rich are getting richer, and the poor really are getting poorer. According to a new report, Americans are earning less today on average than they were when the Great Recession, which began in December 2007, ended in June 2009. Using Census Bureau data, economists Gordon Green and John Coder determined that real median household income has actually fallen by 4.8% since the recession’s end. Even more surprisingly, they found that the decline since June 2009 was larger than the 2.6 percent decline that occurred during the recession. Adding them together, Green and Coder conclude that average household income has fallen 7.2% since December 2007.
According to Green, “almost every group is worse off now than it was three years ago, with the exception of households with householders 65 years old and over. For some groups of households—Blacks, men living alone, younger and upper-middle age brackets, those with some college but no degree, the unemployed, the self-employed, and those living in the West—the declines tended to be larger than average.” Racial inequality is reflected in the fact that income for white households declined by 5.2% while income for black households dropped by 11.1%, or more than twice the rate.
Not everyone has experienced a drop in income, however. As AllGov reported in July, a study from Northeastern University found that “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of growth since the recovery began in 2009. Corporations are posting record profits, while investors, who are disproportionately wealthy already, are earning large capital gains that are taxed at special low rates, leading to greater inequality and even slower economic growth.
August 27, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Household income in the United States, United States |
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It is the “under 1 percent” who come to the vaunted Hamptons by helicopter from Manhattan—and in the process blanket Long Islanders below with raucous noise.
The racket of helicopters heading to and returning from what has become the main aerial gateway of the Hamptons and Long Island’s biggest noisemaker—East Hampton Airport—has been intense this summer.
Involved, said planner and author Peter M. Wolf at a recent East Hampton Informational Forum on Aircraft Noise, is a “small minority…under 1 percent” imposing severe noise pollution on the population of Long Island.
The well-heeled pay a high price to use choppers to come to and return from the Hamptons, some 100 miles from Manhattan. A full-page newspaper ad for Talon Air that is currently running declares: “Work To Weekend In 30 Minutes. Fly NYC to the Hamptons in our Sikorsky Helicopter…” A Talon Air reservations agent said the round-trip charge for the trip is $5,800 but, it was explained, the chopper would be flying right back to the city from East Hampton, so the return flight a day or more later would cost another $5,800, bringing the total to near $12,000. Thus, for six people, the helicopter ride from Manhattan to East Hampton and for the return would be almost $2,000 for each passenger.
It’s a highly expensive way for the “under 1 percent” to avoid the often traffic-clogged Long Island Expressway to get to and from the Hamptons and it comes at an even a bigger cost for Long Islanders below—deprivation of their peace and quiet.
“It’s constant,” said Richard Ficara of Noyac, a hamlet west of Sag Harbor, of the noise from the East Hampton Airport chopper traffic. He was speaking at an “Emergency Planning Meeting” this week. “Save Our Neighborhoods From Loud Noise & Pollutants from Helicopters & Airplanes,” the flier for the meeting, sponsored by the Noyac Civil Council “and Concerned Citizens,” was headed. Ficara and others at the gathering told of choppers flying low and loud every several minutes over their homes.
An overflow crowd of Noyac residents—and people from elsewhere on Long Island impacted by the East Hampton helicopter din—were at the meeting Wednesday evening.
Although Noyac has been especially hard-hit, the East Hampton helicopter racket has become widespread on Long Island, said Janice LoRusso at the meeting. She spoke of a helicopter last weekend flying over her home in Jamesport on the North Fork of Long Island that was “so low you could reach out and tickle its belly.” She said that also being affected is “my boyfriend in Rocky Point,” and people through the Towns of Riverhead and Southold.
Discussed at the gathering was taking legal and political action and mounting protest demonstrations at East Hampton Airport. It followed the August 9th meeting in East Hampton meeting on aircraft noise sponsored by the Village Preservation Society of East Hampton.
Wolf, a member of the panel there, said the noise of aircraft going to and leaving from East Hampton Airport “keeps getting talked about but nothing is done.” Wolf, a consultant to the Village of East Hampton, said there’s “a problem of courage in government.”
Wolf said the noise from the aircraft going to and from East Hampton Airport is a “nuisance” in the “same way leaf blowers…and wild parties” are nuisances. The aircraft noise “just affects many more people.” He said “this is not so hard” to confront—it must be “limited like any other nuisance.” There should be “hours in which flights can occur” and “strict enforcement” of this and other regulations.
East Hampton Town Councilwoman Theresa Quigley at this meeting acknowledged that “people come here for the peace and tranquility” and aircraft noise “interferes with that tranquility.” But, she added, so do “cars and busses.” Wolf criticized the comparison because the aircraft traffic to and from town-owned East Hampton Airport involves a tiny minority making use of a transportation mode unaffordable by most and victimizing the Long Island populace with noise in the process.
A “terribly small percentage” of people use the airport to commute between Manhattan and the Hamptons but, meanwhile, a “terribly large percentage” of people on the ground are being impacted. He said the situation was ripe for a class action lawsuit.
And Barry Holden, who organized the subsequent Noyac meeting, opened it by suggesting “a class action suit against the airport and helicopter owners” be brought. “We have to do something!” declared Holden.
LoRusso said the least bothersome route for choppers flying between Manhattan and the East Hampton Airport, would be over the ocean off the south shore of Long Island which would only require a short hop overland to the airport over a strip which includes Georgica Pond. However, said LoRusso, the choppers aren’t routed that way because of the wealth of the people who live in this, among the toniest of East Hampton areas. “They contribute to politicians’ campaigns. We’re fighting against rich people!”
Larry Tullio agreed: “The simple solution is going over the ocean,” he said. But the “people who have the most money” live in Georgica “and they evidently know somebody on the East Hampton Town Board.”
Ed Jablonsky of Noyac added that “most of the people who use the helicopters are down there…We have been sort of dumped on here.”
John LaSala, a leader on Shelter Island in battling East Hampton Airport chopper noise, told the meeting that in efforts to press for this southern route “we were told it would upset the people in Georgica.” He said it was important that “everybody get together” for this route.
Indeed, a “Master Plan Report” for the East Hampton Airport done for the town in 2008 by the consulting firm of Savik & Murray of Ronkonkoma pointed to the route as the best way to diminish chopper noise—but raised concern about the wealth of those then affected.
In a section in the report devoted to “Noise Abatement,” the report acknowledged that helicopters “are a disproportionate source of annoyance.” And it stated: “One approach and departure corridor was found to be substantially better than the existing routes” in terms of noise abatement. This “approach/departure path” would “branch off” from over the ocean and “on approach helicopters would over-fly Georgica Pond and thence over the currently undeveloped land adjacent to the Runway 34 threshold and then land in the terminal area. This is the minimum sound track, avoids overflight areas in Southampton, and adds little if any flying distance and flight time.”
But, the report went on: “It would, however, expose residents in this area of high value real estate to much greater noise levels than currently exist.”
At the meeting in Noyac, Chip Duyck said “we have to put fire under” public officials and send them the message that “you won’t be elected if you don’t solve the problem.” People should make it clear: “I’m angry and I vote.” Of East Hampton town officials, Duyck, of Noyac, said that “people who are pro-airport basically got elected.”
John Kirrane, also of Noyac, called for protest demonstrations to be held regularly at East Hampton Airport. He spoke of protesters carrying placards declaring “Stop the Helicopter Noise” and “embarrassing the hell out of the 300 who use” helicopter service to and from the Hamptons.
At the Noyac meeting, too, Councilwoman Quigley said the East Hampton Town Board was “trying to figure out things to do to stop the noise complaints.” Only recently, she said, the board learned that “we have the ability to control helicopters” through curfews and other restrictions.
A leading group fighting the noise connected with East Hampton Airport is the Quiet Skies Coalition. It declares on its website—http://quietskiescoalition.org —“We are committed to regaining control of what was once a small, rural airport supporting local recreational pilots. The increased number of flights to East Hampton Airport, particularly those of helicopters, sea planes and jets, disrupts and disturbs the peaceful enjoyment of our homes, properties and recreational areas and damages our protected natural habitats.”
But it has been an uphill fight considering the clout of the “under 1 percent.”
August 17, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | East Hampton, East Hampton Airport, Georgica Pond, Hamptons, Long Island, Manhattan, Noyac |
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