It is way too pretty on the porch this morning to be mad at anything or anyone. No matter who happens to occupy the White House or the governor’s mansion, or what morons serve in Congress or the state legislature, I have a roof over my head and food to eat, a little gas in the van, and I’m not in the path of Hurricane Irene making a fool out of myself on TeeVee.
On the other hand, I refuse to allow a few moments of quiet solitude to distract me from the mission at hand. The county I live in is in big financial trouble, and the state is not much better off. This country is reeling from one human catastrophe to another. And even though the U.S. is no longer rated triple A, the world still depends upon leadership from us.
But like a lot of commentators, I wonder if we are any longer up to the task. We seem to be a mixed up people now, so oblivious to the cause and effect of our problems as to defy our ability to craft solutions.
A couple of nights ago, I got a friend request on Facebook from someone in Brazil, who sent me a nice note and asked how things were going in the U.S. I jokingly told him all my friends were searching the world over on the Internet for somewhere to move when the shit goes down.
The polls show a majority of Americans favor the rich and corporations paying more taxes. The Republicans say that’s “off the table?” If the tea party Republicans would go along with letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, that could accomplish their goal of reducing the deficit. Will they do it? Of course not. It would not serve their selfish, political agenda.
The Supreme Court put the brakes on a massive job discrimination lawsuit against mega-retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc., saying the plaintiffs had not shown justification for sweeping class-action status that could have potentially involved hundreds of thousands of current and former female workers, according to CNN.
This comes as no real surprise considering the makeup of the court is dominated by Republican Bush appointees sympathetic to corporate interests and not sympathetic to workers. This case shows why voting matters, people. If you want corporations to get away with murder and every other crime in the book, vote Republican. If not, well, you know what to do…
Bob Simon interviews the Iraqi defector code-named “Curve Ball,” whose false tale of a mobile, biological weapons program was the chief justification the Bush administration used to invade Iraq.
“Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”
– William Faulkner, from Light in August (1932)
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It seems almost inevitable that about this time every year, while joining the rest of the press in searching the world over for a good man or woman to highlight as the person of the year, I sort of feel like Diogenes the Cynic, who you may recall from the story, supposedly walked around naked and homeless in ancient Athens, Greece — holding up a lantern looking for an honest man.
While none of Diogenes’ writings actually survive from his time of about 400 years before Jesus trod the earth, the tale has been passed down through history in many forms over the generations. The story of Diogenes is remembered as a lesson in ethics. He mocked the idea of finding true human virtue and even the idea that we could ever really know the truth about human nature.
The most famous such search in the modern media, of course, is Time magazine’s cover story on the person of the year. For 2010, the magazine named Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives.”
As a recent convert to Facebook myself, I can see why the editors made that choice, although it clearly remains to be seen whether Zuckerberg’s creation will ultimately be used for good or evil. It allows for some amazing connections to be made and helps citizens bypass traditional barriers to knowledge, but it also has a couple of serious down sides. The loss of individual privacy for one.
Then, it is another tool that continues to allow the hyper concentration of wealth into the hands of too few people, a problem that will plague this country until enough people face the facts and fight to turn the tide. Perhaps we can use Facebook to do just that — unless they screw it up and corporatize it, which seems to be the direction the Internet is going like every technology that came before.
You will be glad to find out today that perhaps your favorite brand of toilet paper may no longer come from wood harvested out of some of the South’s more important hardwood forests. But the deal that led to that agreement raises some interesting economic and political questions that are not being explored either by the non-profit groups which forged the deal — or the mainstream media covering it. Let’s connect some dots and raise some healthy, democratic skepticism.
Three non-profit environmental organizations are basking in the glow of victory this week and heaping massive praise on the Georgia-Pacific paper company, for establishing a policy not to purchase trees from so-called “Endangered Forests” or from new pine plantations established where natural hardwood forests once stood. The policy statement was developed in consultation with the Dogwood Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rainforest Action Network.
The NRDC press release hails the agreement as a “bold commitment to forests,” and the Dogwood Alliance praises the “iconic Southern paper giant” for “announcing bold new steps … to prevent the conversion of (more than) 90 million acres of natural hardwood forests to pine plantations and protect endangered forests in the Southern U.S. –- the largest wood and paper producing region of the world. History is in the making. Times are changing. A major economic force affecting forests has shifted.”
While the new forest policy applies to all of its operations, according to the agreement, it is just a “first step” in implementing the company’s commitment to working with environmental groups and scientists “to identify 11 Endangered Forests and Special Areas totaling 600,000 acres in the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Eco-Region, as well as 90 million acres of natural hardwood forests in the Southern region.”
“No other U.S. company has demonstrated this level of initiative in mapping unique forests across such a broad region,” said Debbie Hammel, the senior resource specialist with NRDC. “Through this process, GP has proven that — by harnessing scientific advances and seeking conservation guidance — corporations can help protect unique places without sacrificing profitability.”
It is high time George W. Bush faced a real investigation into his war crimes during his disastrous two terms as president of the United States.
In light of Bush’s admission of authorizing waterboarding in an interview on NBC this week, the American Civil Liberties Union urged Attorney General Eric Holder to ask Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate whether former President Bush violated the federal statute prohibiting torture.
The request, made in a letter sent to Holder, comes on the heels of the release of Bush’s plagiarized memoir in which he admits directly authorized the use of waterboarding. The U.S. Department of Justice policy is that waterboarding is torture and, as such, it is a crime under the federal anti-torture statute.
“In light of the admission by the former president, and the legally correct determination by the Department of Justice that waterboarding is a crime, you should ensure that Mr. Durham’s current investigation into detainee interrogations encompasses the conduct and decisions of former President Bush,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero says in the letter. “The former president’s acknowledgement that he authorized torture is absolutely without parallel in American history. The admission cannot be ignored. In our system, no one is above the law or beyond its reach, not even a former president.”
The letter also points out that failure to investigate President Bush’s role in violating the torture statute would severely compromise America’s ability to advocate for human rights in other countries.
“A nation committed to the rule of law … cannot simply ignore evidence that its most senior leaders authorized torture,” the letter concludes.
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
- Paul Newman as Luke, in Cool Hand Luke
“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
- John Muir
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
LITTLE RIVER CANYON – Sitting as quietly and patently as could be expected on such a quick, short trip to the mountain waterfalls around Mentone, Alabama over the weekend, I gazed until I knew the sun would soon disappear from view behind the treetops at one of the Littler River Falls overlooks.
In this preserved idyllic setting, I thought about my Cherokee ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years before the United States of America was a gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye. I thought of the men who killed the Cherokee too, and connected the dots in my mind to understand the modern descendants of those killers.
Is it possible that a grudge could linger from a human gene, and not just pass down from one generation to another through the culture?
I thought about the social and political problems in the world today, chiefly focusing on this country — and my native state.
There in that muted fall beauty, as muddled as the world has become today, my thoughts also turned to the Scotsman John Muir, an early American botanist, one of the first American naturalists and nature writers to roam from the hills of Scotland to New England, through Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately California by way of South America.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
