« April 30, 2006 - May 6, 2006 | Main | May 14, 2006 - May 20, 2006 »

May 12, 2006

Uppity Cleveland woman carted to psych hospital by police and ordered to a psych unit by judge

For as long as we have had some kind of mental health system, women who "behave incorrectly" have been ordered to undergo its treatments. At one time or another, feminists, suffragists, menopausal women, and women who question authority in any way have been sent to institutions so that they could recieve "help." The latest woman to get such help is Carol Fisher of Cleveland. Fisher is on the staff of Revolution Books, and on January 28, while she was putting Bush Step Down posters on telephone polls in Cleveland Heights, she was ordered by a police officer to take them down or face a fine. When she complied, she was asked for her ID, which she did not have on her. He then grabbed her by the arm, pushed her against a store window, and knocked her face down onto the sidewalk. He was joined by another officer, and they both pressed their feet against her back until she could not breathe. Her chin was pressed down into the concrete; Fisher has osteoradionecrosis in her jaw from radiation treatments for cancer.

Fisher was handcuffed and shackled. During this time, Fisher yelled out to everyone who passed what the posters were about. One of the police officers then told her, Fisher says, to "Shut up or I will kill you! I am sick of this anti-Bush shit! You are definitely going to the psyche ward."

She was then threatened some more and taken away in an EMS truck. At the hospital, Fisher was asked to undress in front of the police officers, which she refused to do. The officers refused to leave, so a nurse attempted to shield her while she undressed. Fisher says she was then cuffed to the bed, given an IV of some sort, and made to wait hours for a psychiatrist to interview her. By this time, members of her World Can't Wait group were in the emergency room having a confrontation with the police, who refused to let them see Fisher. Someone called the news media, who never made an appearance.

Fisher was eventually released and sent home. On May 2, she went to court and was found guilty of two counts of felonious assault of two police officers. The prosecution's "witnesses" had not seen the alleged assault; rather, they claimed that Fisher lacked respect for authority. It took a jury more than eight hours to find her guilty. According to a letter to the editor of The Free Press, the prosecution misquoted Fisher's testimony and gave the jury incorrect information about the city's arrestable offenses. When asked to clarify the law, the judge refused.

As part of the pre-sentencing procedure, the judge, Timothy McGinty, had Fisher undergo a state psychological exam. He had already surmised publicly that Fisher must be mentally unstable to resist arrest. McGinty then declared her "delusional," and on May 9, ordered her to be incarcerated in a psychiatric unit of the Cuyahoga County Jail in downtown Cleveland, where she now sits and waits; she could face a three-year prison sentence. According to Mark Crispin Miller, who has spoken with Fisher by telephone, Fisher has also been placed on suicide watch, has had her eyeglasses taken from her, and--if she refuses to take the psych exam--she will be sent to North Coast Mental Institute for a 20-day evaluation.

May 11, 2006

Pro sports and the religious right--a symbiotic relationship

Salon has an interesting feature on the relationship between pro football and the religious right. More and more pro athletes thank God for their victories these days, and Salon writer Tom Krattenmaker says that is because the players are "coached" by members of the evangelical wing of the Christian right. Krattenmaker claims that these religious coaches are embedded inside each of the teams in the Big Three--baseball, football, and basketball. That, he says, is why so many players make speeches with religious content and make "seemingly nonstop religious gestures on and off the field."

The players are coached in Christian evangelism by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes' Athletes in Action, a group that is closely related to James Dobson's Focus on the Familiy and to Campus Crusade for Christ. Focus on the Family is virulently anti-gay and anti-feminist, and Dobson has bragged about beating both his children and his dog for "disobeying." Campus Crusade for Christ is based on Christian fundamentalism.

The chaplains offer prayer services and religious counseling to athletes who are unable to attend church; between 20 and 40% (not a very accurate statistic) of athletes attend prayer services and Bible studies. Former Minnesota Vikings running back Robert Smith, an atheist, says he does not object at all to religious services and counseling being made available to players, but he does object to certain religious groups selling their religion "with high-profile athletes."

Shirl Hoffman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, says that the sports leagues do not interfere with these evangelical goings-on because the teams have a symbiotic relationship with the religious sects: The ministries capitalize on the popularity of pro sports, and the teams, which are increasingly embroiled in scandal, like to be identified with religion.

FCA employs 650 people and is active in team summer camps, as well as in 800 "huddles" that meet regularly in high schools and colleges. In 2003, FCA gave its Tom Landry Award to James Dobson. Many members of the sports ministries and their athlete followers are politically active for very conservative causes.

One of the things Krattenmaker brings up in his article is that stadiums are often wholly or partially financed by tax dollars, yet only the religious right is represented at the prayer groups, Bible studies and huddles. Former NFL player Anthony Prior characterizes the evangelical movement in pro sports as Christianity "packaged in a way to basically make players submissive." Prior also says--no surprise--that there is a wedge between the pro athlete Christian evangelicals and other members of the teams.

Peace in Darfur? Not Likely.

Eric Reeves has a new article today on the recently-signed Abuja agreement in Sudan. Basically, it's very, very unlikely that it will halt the ongoing genocide in Darfur. There's no reason, after all, to trust the Khartoum government, which has never abided by any of the previous agreements, and has never paid a price for any of its previous violations.

More to the point, the genocidaires in Sudan have, for the past year, followed a strategy of "genocide by attrition"—making sure that badly-needed food and medical assistance can't make its way to the displaced Darfuris—and on that front, already the government has refused to give humanitarian workers the access they need, despite the fact that this was ostensibly part of the agreement.

More NSA Surveillance...

About a month ago, Wired interviewed a former AT&T technician who claimed that his company was letting the NSA tap its circuits, something that sounded ominous but was kind of vague. (Link thanks to Kevin Drum.) Today USA Today has more on phone companies collaborating with the NSA:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

Last year the president insisted that the NSA was only focusing on international calls. According to USA Today, that's not entirely true, and the administration is looking at "the communications habits of millions of Americans" making domestic calls. Of course. The man lies. Now granted, gathering info about phone records is different from actually listening into those domestic calls without a warrant, but here's what the paper has to say about the legal issues:

Q: Is this legal?

A: That will be a matter of debate. In the past, law enforcement officials had to obtain a court warrant before getting calling records. Telecommunications law assesses hefty fines on phone companies that violate customer privacy by divulging such records without warrants. But in discussing the eavesdropping program last December, Bush said he has the authority to order the NSA to get information without court warrants.

In other words, it's probably against the law, but the president feels like his "wartime powers" take precedence over the law. (Orin Kerr has a more detailed look at the legal issues—he says collecting phone records probably isn't unconstitutional, but could create "statutory problems under… FISA.")

But frankly, at this point, figuring out whether this program is "technically" legal or not seems beside the point. The administration has done this sort of thing way too many times—the government, recall, now claims that it can listen in on phone calls without a warrant, detain citizens indefinitely without trial, and have them tortured if it so desires—to earn the benefit of the doubt for even the smallest of steps. And as Atrios says, once you start entering legal gray areas, even with something as apparently "harmless" as looking at phone records, it's very hard to stop. If the government picks up a "suspect" thanks to information from an illegal wiretapping program, then it can't use that evidence in court, so it can't ever bring the suspect to trial, which means it has to keep the person in an extralegal detention center somewhere, presumably forever. And so on. "It's all one thing. You can't separate them." No kidding.

May 10, 2006

Congress set to form sunset commission to review federal programs

From time to time, we hear about plans to get rid certain federal agencies, such as OSHA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Last month, however, these conversations became more than just ideas floated about; House majority leader John Boehner made a deal with the Republican Study Committee in which the RSC would vote for Bush's budget resolution, and the House would form a sunset commission to review federal agencies. The purpose of the review is to overhaul, consolidate, or eliminate a number of federal agencies. The commission will consist of eight members, to be appointed by George W. Bush or his allies in Congress. They will review federal programs every ten years.

On its face, the commission appears to be a useful entity for cutting waste in government, but given the Bush administration's history, it is reasonable to expect it to function as a tool for the removal of government regulation. There is nothing in the deal, for example, that would prohibit lobbyists from being appointed to the commission.

Bush's long-time friend, Clay Johnson, is the architect of the sunset commission. When Bush was governor of Texas, Johnson got rid of the state environmental protection agency and replaced its members with industry representatives. Critics of the plan are justifiably calling the commission a dream come true for the planners of the Reagan government. Once the commission is formed, officials of various government programs will have to "plead their case" in order to remain operative.

There are currently two bills that would advance the formation of the sunset commission. One, the Brady Bill, exempts the commission from various sunshine laws, and the Tiehrt gives the commission subpoena power.

Genocide Or Not?

Er, I don't quite get Matt Yglesias' argument about Darfur in the American Prospect. He argues that what's going on in Sudan isn't an "unambiguous" genocide—which would mean, according to him, an "ethnic genocide." Instead, what's going on is "counter-guerilla mass slaughter," which supposedly makes intervention more difficult:

[I]t remains the case that the leaders in Khartoum didn't wake up one morning and just decide to exterminate Darfur's inhabitants. The mass killing was adopted as a strategy in the midst of a war, and at the intersection of counter-guerilla mass killing and ethnic warfare lies the ambiguous genocide.

Does it matter? On one level, no. War crimes are war crimes, brutality is brutality, slaughter is slaughter, and we all have a duty to reduce its incidence. But once ambiguity re-enters the picture, so should common sense. Faced with counter-guerilla mass slaughter, you can't just stop the killing, any intervention necessarily entails taking a side on the basic question of the war. Advocates of intervening have a duty to explain what it is they intend to do -- create an independent Darfur? Controlled by whom? They also have a duty to answer, rather than simply dismiss, questions about the big picture of American foreign policy. How would attacking another Arab country affect America's larger security concerns? Would circumventing the UN merely provoke protests from China and like-minded human rights averse dictators, or will developing world democracies like India, South Africa, and Brazil see it as imperialism run amok?

Okay, all fair questions, but we'd have to think about all of this regardless of what "type" of mass killing was going on. Even if Darfur was facing an "unambiguous" genocide, whatever that means, it's not like stopping that would somehow be a simpler matter than stopping "counter-guerilla mass slaughter."

In both cases, we'd have to think about what comes after intervention, what sort of settlement would resolve the conflict, how to enforce the peace, and what the effects of intervening would be. Now perhaps the answers would be different, depending on what was motivating the conflict—mass slaughter fuelled by "pure" ethnic hatred, for instance, might even be harder to resolve than, say, mass slaughter fuelled by a political conflict—but you still ask the same questions. Both situations require "common sense." So unless we're suggesting that the wholesale killing of Darfuris is somehow semi-justifiable because it's part of a counterinsurgency campaign—and no one seems to be saying that—then this seems like a lot of meaningless hair-splitting.

Newsflash: Tax Cuts Benefit Rich

Naturally, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has everything you need to know about the latest capital gains tax cut passed by the House and Senate. Republicans apparently had to use every trick in the book to try to hide the cost of the bill. And CBPP's graph in the middle is especially striking: Households with incomes of over $1 million will reap an average of $41,977 from the cut, while the bottom 40 percent of taxpayers will receive an average of $10. Hot damn; now I can finally pay off those library fines...

What Can $1 Trillion Buy?

In the Washington Post today, Cass Sunstein says that complying with the Kyoto Protocol would have cost the U.S. a mere $300 billion—far less than the price we're paying to watch an entirely useless bout of mass slaughter and chaos in Iraq. Indeed, there are a lot of things we could've done for a fraction of the price of war. We could've made sure that some of those 4 million infants dying each year—for want of knit caps and clean scalpels—don't actually die. Or done more to halt the genocide in Darfur. That's why the cost of war has to factor in all those useful things we could have done with those hundreds of billions of dollars but didn't.

May 9, 2006

McCain's planned speeches at universities met with protest

Senator John McCain of Arizona is about to show up at a couple of places one wouldn't think to find him: He is the speaker at Columbia College's Class Day on May 16, and he is scheduled to give the commencement address at the New School on May 19. McCain was invited to the New School by New School president Bob Kerrey, who is standing by his decision, despite a lot of protest.

Columbia's class of 2006 has constructed a website, John McCain Does Not Speak For Us, which includes a petition to withdraw the school's invitation to McCain to be its Class Day speaker. At the New School, Gregory Tewksbury, a leader of the anti-McCain protests, is suggesting that McCain would be an appropriate guest if New School faculty and students could debate him, but that he is not an appropriate commencement speaker. Others at the school do not think McCain should be a guest there under any circumstances.

The protests against McCain, as expected, are about the senator's strong voting record against gay rights and women's right to choose, and his support of the war in Iraq. But there is something else that has made the protests perhaps even stronger than they might have been: This Saturday, McCain is delivering the commencement address at Liberty University, the school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Mr. Falwell is also opposed to gay rights and women's right to choose, and drew attention to himself after the September 11 attacks for saying that the attacks were caused by the ACLU, feminists, gays, abortionists, and the federal courts.

McCain says he considers it "an honor" to address the students and faculty at Liberty Univeristy.

Genetic Screening To Expand in UK?

The Guardian reports that the British government may allow women with a family history of breast cancer to use in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in order "to have children free of the disease." Currently, 10 British clinics are allowed to prescreen embryos, but only for genetic diseases with an early onset, such as cystic fibrosis.

Proponents of the measure argue that parents should be able to prevent their children from suffering later in life. "If families would wish to eliminate the threat of serious cancer from their family they should be at liberty to do so," said Simon Fishel, managing director of CARE, a group of fertility clinics. Angela McNab, chief executive of the UK's fertility watchdog, said: "what we are asking people is whether it is appropriate to use embryo screening technology to stop children being born with faulty genes when there is a chance they may never go on to suffer the cancer." The HFEA is slated to review the proposal tomorrow.

Army Recruits Autistic Man

Jared Guinther, 18, was diagnosed at three with moderate to severe autism. He doesn’t speak unless spoken to and has been enrolled in special education his entire life. Yet he was recently permitted to enlist in the U.S. Army as a cavalry scout—widely considered the army’s most dangerous job because of its frequent engagement with the enemy using "anti-armor weapons and scout vehicles." And despite the fact that he was completely unaware of the war in Iraq until last fall, he enlisted when approached by a military recruiter and offered a "$4,000 signing bonus, $67,000 for college and more buddies than he could count."

His story draws attention to the surge in recruiting improprieties over the last several years. Its possible that recruiters concealed Guinther's disability in hopes of meeting their enlistment targets. According to The Oregonian, Maj. Curt Steinagel, commander of the Military Entrance Processing Station in Portland, said the papers filled out by Jared's recruiters contained no indication of his disability. "I can't speak for Army," he said, "but it's no secret that recruiters stretch and bend the rules because of all the pressure they're under. The problem exists, and we all know it exists."

Bolivia vs. the Corporations

I've started reading Daniel Cohen's new book, Globalization and its Enemies, which argues that poor countries are poor not because they've been exploited by rich countries and multinational corporations and the IMF and the like, but because they've been unable to enter the global economy, even when they want to.

That may sound like familiar territory, but Cohen actually makes a number of surprising and novel points, and while I'd say that he understates the amount of exploitation going on, there's surely something to his argument that many developing countries suffer not from too much globalization but too little. (I'll try to write more on the book once I'm done; Cohen does put forward a more nuanced account than the usual Economist line that poor countries just need more free trade and everything will be "fine.") So that brings us to Bolivia.

Since the 1980s or so, the vast majority of foreign direct investment from the First World has gone not to poor countries but to other wealthy countries (and China). I have some ideas as to how and why this all came about, but they're probably wrong, so I'll set those aside. What's better-known is that many developing countries have signed various Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) over the years in order to try and attract some of those investment flows. These BITs are basically laws that offer a great deal of legal protection to companies that invest in a given country.

Bolivia's former leaders had previously signed a BIT with the United States, under which foreign companies could sue if future Bolivian governments passed laws that undermined their investments. In 2000, when activists in Cochabamba drove Bechtel out of the country, after the company had contracted with the government to privatize the countries water supplies and then raised local water rates, Bechtel sued the Bolivian government under the BIT for $50 million. The company only backed down after a worldwide campaign by activists; it was only the second time a company had ever backed down from such a claim.

Now it's not clear whether the major oil companies—including ExxonMobil, Repsol, Total, British Gas—will sue after Evo Morales' latest move to partially "nationalize" the gas industry (which really just amounts to renegotiating outlandish concessions given to foreign companies by former corrupt leaders, so as to make sure more of the wealth goes to ordinary Bolivians). The firms certainly have the power to do so: When former president Carlos Mesa proposed to raise taxes on natural gas production, he backed down under litigation threats. And the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank all have ways of hurting Bolivia if it doesn't pay up.

But that's still up in the air. What I'm interested in now is whether these BITs—which, among other things, cede democratic decision-making to foreign corporations—actually do encourage foreign investment flows. Are they worth it? Interestingly, a 2004 report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development noted that they probably aren't much good. Countries such as Brazil and Nigeria receive plenty of foreign investment "despite shying away from such treaties," while many smaller countries in Central Africa and Central America have "entered into a raft of BITs" and still attract very little foreign investment. Signing away your sovereignty isn't always the key to success, apparently. (One could also debate the merits of foreign investment itself, but that's another story.)

Contraception and Infant Mortality

Putting the first and last paragraphs of this New York Times story next to each other is rather illuminating:

More than four million newborns worldwide die each year in their first month of life, comparable to the number of babies born in the United States annually, Save the Children reported Monday. …

Another way to reduce deaths is to give women access to modern contraceptives, the group said. Birth control, it said, allows enough time between births to preserve the mother's health and reduce the likelihood that their babies are born with low birth weights.

Yet another reason to oppose the right's ongoing war on contraceptives (as if people needed another). The article also notes that many of those 4 million infants die because of a lack of inexpensive medical items—sterile blades, or antibiotics and knit caps to treat pneumonia. Now lots of critics are fond of saying that foreign aid "doesn't work," but it's fairly obvious here that there are extraordinarily simple things that can save a lot of lives very cheaply. Knit caps. Sterile blades. Of course it would work.

But wealthy countries remain stingy. The Bush administration cut USAID's maternal and health programs from $356 million last year to $323 million this year. That's 0.0001 of all federal spending, and it still gets cut. On the other hand, the White House has somehow found hundreds of millions of dollars for abstinence-only programs overseas, which don't work, and, as the quote above shows, are exactly the wrong way to alleviate infant mortality.

The Coming Water Wars

Jon Margolis has a very interesting piece in the American Prospect today on Canada's water wars. The country has 20 percent of the world's freshwater and only 0.5 percent of the population. Water's becoming scarce in many places around the world. Why shouldn't Canada ship its surplus out? Well, for one, NAFTA would make it difficult for Canada to pass new environmental laws for its lakes once companies start engaging in the water trade:

According to an August 2004, report by the International Joint Commission, one of the bi-national bodies established to govern and protect the Great Lakes, most climate change models predict lower lake levels as the earth warms. And the same report appears to acknowledge that once a body of water has become "a commercial good or saleable commodity," any effort to protect it could fall afoul of NAFTA. The message seems to be that if you want to protect any of the lakes, or perhaps any bays or inlets thereof, pass the law before some company starts selling the water.

Although I'm sure he's aware of it, Margolis doesn't detail the various—and often serious—environmental problems with bringing in the tankers to haul water out of Canada: fluctuations in water level can accelerate erosion and destroy the surrounding soil, and any transport of water risks introducing new species to new environments, with all the disasters that can bring. And once Canada starts selling its water, NAFTA sharply limits what the government can do to address these problems.

Now in the context of this particular article, the case for conservation seems strong. A bunch of American developers want the Southwest to continue its totally unsustainable population explosion, so they're trying to pillage Canadian water supplies. One could suggest that Americans start choosing to live where there are natural water supplies—although that, as Margolis points out, would probably mean depopulating California. Or, as an interim measure, we simply could learn to conserve water; the United States is terrible in that regard, especially our practice of "irrigating fields that produce crops already in surplus."

But neither suggestion really addresses the underlying issue. About 1.5 billion people around the globe lack freshwater. In about 20 years demand for freshwater will exceed supply by 56 percent. As Margolis notes, "in 1997 the United Nations concluded that the best—perhaps the only—way to get water to them was through a system of international markets and trade." I don't know how true that is, exactly; most countries could stand to manage their own resources more carefully before thinking about water from elsewhere, but it sure looks like we'll have to start talking about a global water trade eventually, which, I think, will get rather dicey.

May 8, 2006

Border Enforcement Is Still Failing...

Sunday's New York Times reported that arresting lots of would-be immigrants on the Mexican border still doesn't deter people from trying to sneak in. So Congress, naturally, thinks the answer is more enforcement:

What is certain is the United States keeps building up its border defenses, with more planned this year, including adding 1,500 agents and spending some $35 million in Arizona alone on surveillance equipment.

The U.S. plans to up the number of agents by 10,000 over the next five years, which will make Border Patrol the largest enforcement agency in the country—bigger than the FBI and four times as big as the DEA. This report from the TRAC Immigration Project has some useful numbers on whether more immigration enforcement is effective or not. It doesn't seem so. Between 1995 and 2005 the U.S. doubled its Border Patrol, yet apprehensions went down by 10 percent. But people continue to think that if we just add a few more agents, then this time we'll finally start to crack down on immigration...

Iranian Women Banned from World Cup

Just a month before the World Cup is slated to begin, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei has overruled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's previous decision to allow women at men’s soccer games—provided they were seated in a separate section. Despite the fact Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared in April that allowing women would "improve soccer-watching manners and promote a healthy atmosphere," the president withdrew his request

Conservative Shiite Muslim clerics, who showed strong support for the president’s election last year and who have maintained a strong control over Iranian society for the last several decades, lobbied heavily for a reversal of the decision, arguing that it was a clear violation of Islamic law. According to the BBC, one cleric said that had the decision to welcome women remained, "there would have been suicide bombers protesting on the streets of Teheran."

Ahmadinejad Writes a Letter

Interesting. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposes direct talks with the Bush administration about "international problems"—presumably meaning Iran's nuclear program and the like. Maybe he's serious; maybe not. It would be nice if the White House could at least try to sit down for talks and find out.

Except that, as Kevin Drum has noted, officials in the Bush administration showed no interest in taking up similar overtures from Iran three years ago, and there's no reason to think they'd start now. Especially if Republicans could really use an international crisis to help themselves out in the midterms later this year. Maybe that's cynical. This bunch has certainly earned it.

Also, Chuck Hagel, one of those much-feted "moderate" Republicans, has an absurdly reasonable op-ed in the Financial Times arguing that Iran's nuclear program isn't an immediate crisis, that under no circumstances should we ever go to war with Iran (well, he doesn't quite say that, but he makes the case), and that the U.S. should try diplomacy. That's all quite right, but Hagel has been saying a lot of quite right things about foreign policy for the past two years, and no one at the top ever seems to listen.

May 7, 2006

Iraqi citizen deaths mounting

According to the Los Angeles Times, more Iraqis were killed in the first three months of 2006 than at any time since the fall of Saddam Husein's regime. At least 3,800 have died, and many of them were killed execution-style; they were shot, strangled, electrocuted, stabbed, garroted, and hanged. Many, of course, died in bombings. The killings now appear to be more systematic, and there are obvious signs of tortune on the bodies. The majority of those killed have been Sunnis; Shiite death squads have been targeting Sunni citizens.

A series of car bomb blasts killed 30 people and wounded 70 today. Also, a minister in Iraq's interior department, along with 17 others, has been arrested under suspicion of his ivolvement in kidnappings and death squads. Meanwhile, a group in the 16th brigade has been apprehended on for carrying out the murders of citizens. Iraqi citizens have begun forming vigilante squads to counter-attack the death squads.