"From the outside, anarchy might look threatening and scary and exciting. From the inside, anarchy can seem quite boring. But it is a profoundly hopeful type of boring." This more nuanced account of what anarchism is and what anarchists do is a refreshing change from the usual shrill MSM version. A must-read. "

Sorry 'bout that, Chief!

The Guardian has two good peices that need to be read together today. First, Mehdi Hasan points out that Barack Obama, like Mitt Romney, is an apologist for the 1%. Then Gary Younge writes that while the white working class is often said to 'vote against its own interests' by rejecting Democrats, we could equally ask why poor black and latino folk consistently vote against their interests by turning out for Dems.

Those who are struggling and believe Romney will improve their economic lot are wrong, regardless of their race. Eight years of George W Bush proved that. But it does not follow automatically from that that their home should be supporting Democrats under whom things have gotten less bad less quickly. True, those are the only two choices on offer. But if you're poor they are not great choices. What they need is a party that represents their interests. In a country where corporate money chooses the candidates and therefore shapes the debate that will demand a change in politics, not just politicians.

Or as one of my friends crudely put it: "the difference is that the Dems at least offer to buy you dinner before they date-rape you. But you still don't get that dinner."

Washington Post, By Jeremy Borden, May 25

Woodbridge, VA - Before she was 2, her mother recalls, Lori Anne Madison was reading her first book — Dr. Seuss’s “Hop on Pop.” At age 3, she competed in her first spelling bee.

Now 6, Lori Anne is the youngest contestant on record to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Her ticket to the competition that begins Tuesday was the word “vaquero,” meaning cowboy, which she spelled correctly to win the Prince William County bee.

It will get tougher onstage at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center when the home-schooled girl from Woodbridge faces 277 opponents, most of whom are at least twice her age. Last year, the winning word was “cymotrichous,” which means having wavy hair. The previous winner spelled “stromuhr,” which is a medical instrument.

But Speller 269, who will compete for $30,000, among other prizes, reports that she isn’t particularly nervous and isn’t cramming.

What a shockingly bad lede from A.P. this is:

The U.N. nuclear has found traces of uranium enriched at an Iranian site to a level that is slightly closer to the threshold needed to arm nuclear missiles.

The International Atomic Energy Agency says in a report that its experts have found particles enriched up to 27 percent. That is higher than the 20 percent declared by Iran and closer to the weapons-grade material used in the fissile core of such missiles.

Argh, Iran has stepped over the line! Panic! Start the bombing right now!

Oh wait:

The restricted report says Iran explains the find as a technical glitch. The agency says it is assessing that explanation and has asked for more details, while analysts and diplomats say Iran’s version sounds plausible.

Even David Albright, no stranger to concocting scary Iran stories himself, admits that the trace amounts found are almost certainly a quality control issue and are "embarrassing but not nefarious". Cancel the bombers!

George Jahn, who leads reporting on Iran for the A.P. and wrote this piece, has a long history of banging war drums at every opportunity and a track record of revealing spanner-in-the-works scoops sourced to "an official of a country tracking Iran's nuclear program" which is a "member of the International Atomic Energy Agency" - that is, Israel. Others like the team of man-Judys at the NYT, Broad and Sanger, or Reueters' Deihl, are hardly any better. They usually force themselves to get the truth in there somewhere, but they'll spin it as negatively as possible.

When reading Western media on Iran, it's best to remember the Spanish-American War and that Pullitzer was one of the pioneers of yellow journalism.

But...we should definitely fear Iran's Oompa-Loompa engineers.

The French Tom Friedman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, is calling for war again. Infamous as the man who convinced his pal Sarkozy that a short, victorious war in Libya would help his election chances - leading Sarko to drag in the Brits and Cameron to drag in the US - he's now looking to the UK's Cameron to lead the charge against Syria. The platform is his new nacissistic movie about how he started the Libya intervention.

According to Lévy the film shows why intervention worked in Libya and not Iraq and how the conditions are present in Syria. “In Iraq we had no international mandate, there was no demand on the ground of the people, there was no representative leader for the forces against Saddam Hussein, in Iraq it was Western versus Arab country in Libya there was a real coalition with Arab countries involved in coalition with Emirati and Qatar forces. Intervention is justified if you have these conditions.”

Luckily - since Syria is a very different and far harder proposition than Libya both militarily and socially and in any case the whole notion of "humanitarian intervention" is on a shaky footing - I doubt Cameron will be so easy to fool.

The EU's Ashton says the next round of talks will be in Moscow on June 18-19. Forget all the did-they-didn't-they-make-progress media reports - those are just reporters looking for an easy and headlineable narrative (and in some cases, working the agenda of those who'd rather see talks fail). The truth is captured perfectly by Ashton's spokes: "If there wasn’t progress, we wouldn’t still be holding the talks," Mann told reporters in the Iraqi capital. "Progress has been made." The process is the progress. That's a whole 'nother month there won't be war.

Racist attacks on black Africans - they're not just for Libyans.

Demonstrators have attacked African migrants in Tel Aviv in a protest against refugees and asylum-seekers that indicates an increasingly volatile mood in Israel over what it terms as "infiltrators".

Miri Regev, a member of the Israeli parliament, told the crowd "the Sudanese are a cancer in our body". The vast majority of asylum-seekers in Israel are from Sudan and Eritrea.

Around 1,000 demonstrators took part in the demonstration on Wednesday night, waving signs saying: "Infiltrators, get out of our homes" and "Our streets are no longer safe for our children." A car containing Africans was attacked and shops serving the refugee community were looted. Seventeen people were arrested.

A reporter for the Israeli daily Maariv described it as an "unbridled rampage" and explosion of "pent-up rage".

Seems to me everyone in the North has it in for sub-Saharans. But I do wonder whether the Israeli bigots have a heirarchy of racism which ranks Arabs and black Africans on a scale of hateability. The bigots would doubtless complain that their hate is also about "infiltrators" taking jobs and causing crime. As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes today though, "Complicating racism with other factors doesn't make it any better. It just makes it racism. Again." That's as true in Israel as it is anywhere else.

From OilPrice.com:

Song Xiaojun, a former senior officer of the People's Liberation Army, warned that Australia cannot juggle its relationships with the United States and China indefinitely and Australia has to find a godfather sooner or later. Australia always has to depend on somebody else, whether it is to be the 'son' of the US or 'son' of China.

What is also notable about Song's remarks is that they coincided with Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr's first official visit to China, where Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi urged Australia to dismiss its alliance with the United States, a decades-old bipartisan and central pillar of the nation's foreign policy, as "the time for Cold War alliances has passed."

The Guardian's Nick Hopkins reports that British defense chiefs are dusting off and updating contingency plans after being told by M.I.6 that there's still a "25-50% chance" that Israel will decide to attack Iran before the US elections in November, inevitably drawing in the US and UK.

Israel must weigh up whether President Obama is likely to take a harder line on pre-emptive action against Iran next year if he has won a second term.

"The Americans might hang out the Israelis to dry after the election, but not before," said a senior Whitehall source. "Obama would have to support Israel if there was an attack before November."

British contingency measures are mostly defensive: making sure British troops in Helmand, Afghanistan are properly prepared for the prospect of Iranian-sponsored attacks as well as by Talibanesque groups and moving UK minesweeping vessels to the Persian Gulf to help keep shipping lanes open if Iran mines the Strait. Hopkins reports that some cabinet ministers would strongly resist UK involvement in any missile or air strikes on Iran by the US if Israel does drag the allies into war. That resistance seems to extend into the British civil service and military establishments.

The Guardian has spoken to a number of Foreign Office and military officials in recent months, and all of them have expressed dread at the thought of a conflict with Iran.

One spoke of fear every time Obama and Cameron are left to discuss the issue and what may have been agreed. "We have our hearts in our mouth," said the source.

I wonder if US officials feel the same way? Probably.

From IPS:

The results from 19 different state-of-the-art climate models project extreme and persistent drought conditions (colored dark red-brown on the maps) for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America.

If climate change pushes the global average temperature to 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels, as many experts now expect, these regions will be under severe and permanent drought conditions.

Future conditions are projected to be worse than Mexico's current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate.

These are some of the conclusions of the study "Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico", which was published in the December 2011 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Hydrometeorology and has gone largely unnoticed.

"Drought conditions will prevail no matter what precipitation rates are in the future," said co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. government research centre in California.

...The 19 models used in the study show that the increased heat will dry soils more than any additional rain can replenish soil moisture levels. Ever warmer air temperatures will cause greater evaporation, drying out soils.

I know I've written about this before, but I'm going to keep repeating the message because this is the biggest danger of climate change to Americans, who need to realise this is coming. American-produced apathy and denialism is one of the biggest drags on world-wide climate change opinion, and thus on action. Maybe this, a disaster for the bulk of America's heartland, will convince Americans to get their collective heads out of their asses.

Over at AmericaBlog, Gaius Publius cogently argues that "if Occupy leaders (organizers) don't take on and reject violence, they will do lasting damage both to Occupy and to the broader movement of which Occupy is just one part." The heart of his argument is that:

You don't stop police violence with non-violence; but you justify it by violent acts of your own. Your violence guarantees escalation of violence on both sides, and guarantees that their violence (police beatings; pepper-swabbed eyeballs and throats; multiple strip searches; extended stays in urine-soaked solitary cells) will be sold as "necessary" by the entire troop of millionaire news-blond(e)s.

But if non-violent protest won't halt police violence, in a time when it is increasingly normalized, what will? And if it cannot be halted, where do we end up?

Matt Stoller explains a stark reality of U.S. (and, increasingly, British) politics:

Most activists and political operatives are under a delusion about American politics, which goes as follows. Politicians will do *anything* to get reelected, and they will pander, beg, borrow, lie, cheat and steal, just to stay in office. It’s all about their job.

This is 100% wrong. The dirty secret of American politics is that, for most politicians, getting elected is just not that important. What matters is post-election employment. It’s all about staying in the elite political class, which means being respected in a dense network of corporate-funded think tanks, high-powered law firms, banks, defense contractors, prestigious universities, and corporations. If you run a campaign based on populist themes, that’s a threat to your post-election employment prospects. This is why rising Democratic star and Newark Mayor Corey Booker reacted so strongly against criticism of private equity – he’s looking out for a potential client after his political career is over, or perhaps, during interludes between offices. Running as a vague populist is manageable, as long as you’re lying to voters. If you actually go after powerful interests while in office, then you better win, because if you don’t, you’ll have basically nowhere to go. And if you lose, but you were a team player, then you’ll have plenty of money and opportunity. The most lucrative scenario is to win and be a team player, which is what Bill and Hillary Clinton did. The Clinton’s are the best at the political game – it’s not a coincidence that deregulation accelerated in the late 1990s, as Clinton and his whole team began thinking about their post-Presidential prospects.

Bill Clinton is nowadays worth around $80 million and admits "I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I’ve done reasonably well since then." Stoller notes in a tweet that you can substitute "general" for "politician" and understand what makes the Pentagon tick too.

A report from a couple of weeks ago that German police fired only 85 bullets in action during the whole of 2011 is still drawing amazed comment from American friends on Twitter.

Officers fired 36 times at people, killing six and injuring 15. This is a slight decline from 2010, when seven people were killed and 17 injured. Ninety-six shots were fired in 2010.

Meanwhile, in the United States, The Atlantic reported that in April, 84 shots were fired at one murder suspect in Harlem, and another 90 at an unarmed man in Los Angeles.

"Our police officers are no thugs in uniform," Lorenz Caffier, interior minister of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, said at a press conference Tuesday.

People shouldn't be so amazed at the German figure, rather they should be outraged at American statistics. American gun culture is run amuck.

So far, yes - but it's dumbing down at a precipitous rate.

There's only two days to go until the next round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 kick off in Baghdad. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano has been in Tehran ahead of that summit but despite what were described by the IAEA head as "expanded and intensive negotiations in a good atmosphere" there's still no concrete sign of any grand bargain which might permamnently put off the West's threat of war.

I always find it both amusing and frustrating when American national security analysts decide they're going to pontificate on NATO and Europe. Try as they might, it seems impossible for them to see the issue in any other than a highly polarized, American exceptionalist, way. Take my friend Michael Cohen at the national Security Network, writing today:

the biggest problem with NATO funding (and this has been true for quite some time) is not that President Obama is undermining the alliance with defense cuts here at home, but rather that America's NATO allies refuse to fully pony up their share of NATO's defense budget. And why they should they? Indeed, as long as NATO funding is used as a political football then the United States will continue to be played for a sucker by the Europeans who know that for all our complaining about their lack of financial support for the military alliance . . . we're never going to pull the plug.

At some point, it's worth asking whether this makes any sense at all. Why should the US be responsible for underwriting European security (and in turn the European welfare state), especially when European countries face not a single legitimate military threat to their well-being? Moreover, it Europeans don't think it's important enough to spend their own money on their own security why should America? Now granted, the Europeans are a little short on cash these days, but then so is the United States. But of course as the House of Representatives reminded us recently - as they eviscerated key social safety net programs to restore cuts made to the defense budget -- you can't put a price tag on a huge American military that does little to keep America safe and underwrites the security of other countries.

In Romney's statement he noted "NATO is a testament to the fact that the price of weakness is always far greater than the price of strength." If anything it's increasingly becoming a testament to how divorced from reality our own national security debate has become. The new American weakness is apparently when you don't let key European allies take enough advantage of you.

Now there are exactly two unarguable facts in all that: that Europe refuses to pony up its share of the NATO budget and that European countries face not a single legitimate military threat to their well-being. Do you think the two might be connected?

Look, from a European point of view - and I don't mean the poodlish yes-men in London - the NATO budget may be agreed to by all parties but it is set to an American agenda and only agreed to after a lot of American arm-bending. It funds an organization which has outlived its original purpose, surviving now only to give a modicum of cover to American military adventurism - which is why the US will "never pull the plug". NATO only survives because the costs that would be imposed by America on any European nation who withdrew would be greater than the status quo.

It is ridiculous to suggest that European allies are "taking advantage" of the US or that the US is "underwriting European security" while admitting that there's no threat to Europe needing all that money spent on it. But Michael isn't the only smart American making the same logical mistake this week, to say nothing of what gets said by the not-so-smart hawks over on the Right.

P.S.: Is America sure it wants a well armed Europe? Remember the last time it was true? The US spent the next thirty years guaranteeing Europe's security partly so that Europe (Germany) wouldn't have to stand up seriously continental-sized armed forces itself. And if it does, why does it keep trying to put its own spanner in the works of a European Defense Force and other intra-European defense pacts?

Chicago spent $1 million on riot control equipment in anticipation of the NATO summit, and funded, at unknown cost, a secret police control center where "officials from more than 40 different agencies sit side by side with a giant central screen before them". Bernard Harcourt, Julius Kreeger professor of law at the University of Chicago and chair of the political science department there, writes for the Guardian that "The Nato summit will come and go, but Mayor Emanuel has authorised a 'new normal' of militarised social control in Chicago."

First, it is astounding – but sadly, not surprising – that the City of Chicago would deny protest permits or make protest so difficult in Chicago because of alleged inconveniences to traffic and ordinary business. Our new Chicago lockdown belies any suggestion that the city cares about such inconveniences. While Mayor Emanuel has bent backwards for Nato, first amendment free speech receives dramatically less accommodation.

Second, this police state serves, in reality, as our new welfare state. The security mania represents our truly unique way of stimulating the economy, of employing piece labor, of creating government jobs and subsidized contracts. Just think of the amount of overtime pay that we are disbursing with all this policing. Instead of investing in schools and education, in job training, or in re-entry programs, this is how we invest in our future. And we never think of it as government welfare because it falls in that sacred space of security – because, essentially, of the American paradox of laissez-faire and mass punishment.

Third, and finally, all of this is, sadly, here to stay. Nato will come and go, but the new anti-protest laws, the new riot-gear, the two LRAD sound cannons, and all the normalization of this police state … that will be with us for a long time.

This is, I'd contend, in perfect tune with the Obama administration's continuation of the notion of the Imperial Presidency, which holds simply that if the President's doing it then it's not illegal and that the "elected monarch" has veto powers over the Constitution. Such a mindset stems from 1%-er dislocation from the people and is absolutely to be expected from members of the elite like Emmanuel too. If only we'd asked the damn question.

The written transcript is available at this link for those who would rather read the piece..., and you should read or see it. Here are a couple of snips. As for my opinion on the matter..., it's way more than a "canary in a coal mine"..., it's a deep dark rumbling with dust and smoke rising from down below. Ignore it at your own peril.

The Uptake:

Tracey Pollock, a credentialed photographer for The UpTake, is attacked by police in Chicago during an anti-NATO protest on Saturday. Before the attack, police were using their bicycles as weapons to force back the crowd which was staging a march without a permit.
Police had formed a barricade; as you can see from the video, there was some sort of incident along the barricade. Pollock tried to get closer to see what was happening when a police officer reached up, grabbed her lens and tried to rip her camera away. The officer then pushed her over some bicycles.

Pollock was wearing a large press badge and as you can hear from the audio, even bystanders could tell she was part of the press. Protesters behind the bicycles pulled her to safety.

Pollock was bruised in the incident but not seriously injured. She says she never crossed the police barricade.

The Guardian's Helena Smith talks to Greek leftist leader Alex Tsipras:

Tsipras, who turns 38 in July, wants me to know that the war is not personal. The enemy is not Berlin, until now the biggest provider of the monumental rescue funds keeping the debt-stricken economy afloat. "It is not between nations and peoples," he says. "On the one side there are workers and a majority of people and on the other are global capitalists, bankers, profiteers on stock exchanges, the big funds. It's a war between peoples and capitalism … and as in each war what happens on the frontline defines the battle. It will be decisive for the war elsewhere."

Greece, he says, has become a model for the rest of Europe because it was the first country to fall victim to the enforcement of hard-hitting "growth through austerity" policies pursued in the name of resolving the crisis.

"It was chosen as the experiment for the enforcement of neo-liberal shock [policies] and Greek people were the guinea pigs," he insists.

"If the experiment continues, it will be considered successful and the policies will be applied in other countries. That's why it is so important to stop the experiment. It will not just be a victory for Greece but for all of Europe."

Even the old capitalist robber-barons understood that the way to get wealthy was to create wealth for all while making sure you kept the lion's share. Neoliberal austerity policies are just asset stripping under a false banner.

Buzzfeed - An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
..
The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”

words fail

Here are a few snippets of eye-opening information about the fastest-growing intertainment sector.

Since its November release, Skyrim has won award after award and led reviewers to call it the "greatest role-playing video game ever made." In its first month, it made $650 million, almost double the entire year's gross in the United States for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2," the bestselling movie of 2011.

...In 2011, the American video game industry says it:

•Recorded $25 billion in sales.

•Accounted for about 120,000 American jobs directly or indirectly.

•Paid workers an average of $90,000 a year, mostly in five states: California, Texas, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts.

Since 2005, the industry has grown eight times faster than the US economy.

CS Monitor's journey through the world of video games is well worth a read, full of things you might not have known or might find yourself looking at from a new angle.

Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money" was actually blasting from my ITunes player when I clicked over to Memeorandum and saw this headline -- "Donna Summer Dead At 63."

This is a terrible loss. I know what a cliche that is, but I don't know what else to say, and it's true. Donna Summer was a "disco legend" for good reason.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has given an ominous warning to the West about military adventurism against Syria and Iran.

"Hasty military operations in foreign states usually bring radicals to power," Medvedev, president for four years until Vladimir Putin's inauguration on May 7, told a conference in St. Petersburg in remarks posted on the government's website.

"At some point such actions which undermine state sovereignty may lead to a full-scale regional war, even, although I do not want to frighten anyone, with the use of nuclear weapons," Medvedev said. "Everyone should bear this in mind."

I suspect he may be talking about Israel's nuclear arsenal there. If Israel became embroilled in an attack on Iran, missiles tipped with chemical weapons might well be a retaliation to which Israel's obvious recourse would be nukes. Or maybe he's talking about some hypothetical way down the road where an arc of failed states comprising US-conquered Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan leads to so much non-state trouble boiling up that it sparks an India-Pakistan war. Maybe he's setting out Russia's stall. Reuter's Gleb Bryanski writes:

Medvedev gave no further explanation. Nuclear-armed Russia has said publicly that it is under no obligation to protect Syria if it is attacked, and analysts and diplomats say Russia would not get involved in military action if Iran were attacked.

Russia has adamantly urged Western nations not to attack Iran to neutralize its nuclear program or intervene against the Syrian government over bloodshed in which the United Nations says its forces have killed more than 9,000 people.

"No obligation" isn't the same as "won't, never-ever" and maybe the conventional wisdom of all those analysts about Russian intentions in the region is plain wrong. It wouldn't be the first time the experts have been flatfooted. One things for sure, the PM of Russia wasn't just flapping his gums.