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Mathematician Donald Saari last week criticized ranked choice voting (also known as instant runoff voting), which will be used this November in Minneapolis municipal elections.

He prefers a method known as the Borda Count, in which voters also rank candidates in order of choice, but their first choice receives a certain number of points, their second choice a smaller number of points, and so on.

Professor Saari is not alone in favoring a particular voting method. Princeton's Eric Maskin zealously advocates Condorcet voting. NYU's Steven Brams promotes approval voting, and so on. That scholars fail to agree on the meaning of the same facts reflects the truth that there is no "perfect" voting system.

There is no objective means to weigh competing values in areas such as rewarding breadth of support or core support, or the balance between upholding majority rule and achieving consensus.

Most politically engaged reformers focus on instant runoff voting (IRV) instead of other alternatives, because it improves the status quo in ways that are easy to see and is more reflective of voters' expectations of fairness.

Political and civic leaders like President Obama, Sen. John McCain, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and the League of Women Voters of Minnesota agree on the value of IRV. Compared to plurality voting, IRV diminishes the "spoiler" impact of third party and independent candidates. Compared to traditional two-round runoffs, IRV saves taxpayer dollars, reduces the influence of money in politics and maximizes turnout.

IRV also nicely balances the value of first choice support with the value of broad support. Plurality voting rewards only core support.

In contrast, the Borda Count tilts toward rewarding broad support by allowing votes to count for more than one candidate at a time. As a result, Borda can elect candidates who might come in dead last in our current system, but be many voters' second or third choice.

Borda also could defeat a candidate who under today's rules would earn an absolute majority of 51 percent of the vote. Many voters would react skeptically to such results.

Worse, Borda makes it easy for voters to game elections. Nicolaus Tideman, author of "Collective Decisions and Voting," includes Borda in his list of voting methods that "have defects that are so serious as to disqualify them from consideration." The system's inventor, Jean-Charles de Borda himself, stated that the system should be used only for situations where voters are disinterested judges.

Consider Borda and a famous example of the "spoiler dynamic," the 2000 presidential election in which Republican George W. Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore by 537 votes in the halted Florida recount, even as more than 97,488 people voted for Green Party nominee Ralph Nader. Given that more Nader backers supported Gore than Bush, it's clear that under instant runoff voting, Gore would have won Florida and the presidency.

But there's no way to know what would have happened with Borda. With Borda, ranking a second choice counts directly against the chances of your first choice. Some Bush voters might tactically have ranked Nader and other independent candidates ahead of Gore. If more Gore voters honestly chose to rank Bush as one of their top choices, then Bush would have won simply due to his voters engaging in better tactical voting.

Instant runoff voting avoids this problem because your ballot never counts for more than one candidate at a time. Unlike Borda and most other alternative voting methods, ranking additional choices never hurts your first choice. As with every voting method, there are cases where candidates might benefit from insincere voting, but with IRV such situations are too convoluted to be an effective tactic.

That IRV has fair results and isn't prone to gaming explains its successful track record in thousands of hotly contested elections -- from nearly a century of elections for Australia's House of Representatives to decades of elections in Irish presidential races. Professor Saari's examples of its theoretical flaws may interest fellow mathematicians, but they are irrelevant for those wanting to improve American democracy.

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Rob Richie is executive director of FairVote, a national nonprofit organization that says it works "to transform our elections to achieve universal access to participation, a full spectrum of meaningful ballot choices and majority rule with fair representation for all."

// posted by Alice @ Tuesday, September 29, 2009 0 Comments

From: http://planetgreen.discovery.com

1. Henry David Thoreau: "What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" Thoreau's eco-cred is well established but this line sums things up as succinctly as any HDT ever uttered. The average size of an American home three decades ago was 1,000 square feet. Today: 2,400 square feet. So, not only do our oversized abodes need an extreme makeover, so do our eco-systems if we want what Thoreau calls a "tolerable planet."

2. Carl Sagan: "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." As they say in South Florida: bingo. Whether we like it or not, humans are merely part of a larger eco-system. If we sought harmony instead of control, we'd be shaping a far more inspiring planetary legacy. What greater goal could anyone ever have than to leave the planet better off than how we found it?

3. Rachel Carson: "It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself." Every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. Sinister enough for ya?

Nancy R. Cohen/Getty Images

4. William Shakespeare: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." While the Bard was not talking green here, another way to read this quote is to line it up alongside these lyrics from Sting: "We share the biology regardless of ideology."

5. Vandana Shiva: "Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates." A healthy eco-system cannot exist within the current economic culture. Growth, in this sense, is inherently anti-nature.

6. Edward Abbey: "Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris." Every time we flick on a light switch, we play a role in valley fills, strip mining, coal ash, and more. The good news is we can do something about it.

7. David Suzuki: "We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit." Sort of a variation on the Titanic/deck chair line, Suzuki is merely trying to return our gaze to the big picture.

iStockphoto.com/David Gunn

8. Bob Marley: "The bad people trying to make the world worse never take a day off, so why should I?" The green life is both a full-time commitment and a labor of love. Stick with it.

// posted by Alice @ Tuesday, September 29, 2009 0 Comments

Posted on Sep 28, 2009

By Chris Hedges

There is a scene in “Othello” when the Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, “Goats and monkeys!” Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked rage, and his words became captive to hollow clichés. The debasement of language, which Shakespeare understood was a prelude to violence, is the curse of modernity. We have stopped communicating, even with ourselves. And the consequences will be as extreme as in the Shakespearean tragedy.

Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic. This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry and philosophy. It is an argot of clichés, distorted Quranic verses and slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is comprehensible to our literate classes. The reduction of popular discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite’s retreat into obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent virtue, progress and justice, as our clichés constantly assure us, then the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a binary world and renders us children with weapons.

How do you respond to “Islam is the solution” or “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior”? How do you converse with someone who justifies the war in Iraq—as Christopher Hitchens does—with the tautology that we have to “kill them over there so they do not kill us over here”? Those who speak in these thought-terminating clichés banish rational discussion. Their minds are shut. They sputter and rant like a demented Othello. The paucity of public discourse in our culture, even among those deemed to be public intellectuals, is matched by the paucity of public discourse in the Arab world.

This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Manufactured phrases inflame passions and distort reality. The collective chants, jargon and epithets permit people to surrender their moral autonomy to the heady excitement of the crowd. “The crowd doesn’t have to know,” Mussolini often said. “It must believe. ... If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.” Always, he said, be “electric and explosive.” Belief can triumph over knowledge. Emotion can vanquish thought. Our demagogues distort the Bible and the Constitution, while their demagogues distort the Quran, or any other foundational document deemed to be sacred, fueling self-exaltation and hatred at the expense of understanding. The more illiterate a society becomes, the more power those who speak in this corrupted form of speech amass, the more music and images replace words and thought. We are cursed not by a cultural divide but by mutual cultural self-destruction.

The educated elites in the Arab world are now as alienated as the educated elites in the United States. To speak with a vocabulary that the illiterate or semiliterate do not immediately grasp is to be ostracized, distrusted and often ridiculed. It is to impart knowledge, which fosters doubt. And doubt in calcified societies, which prefer to speak in the absolute metaphors of war and science, is a form of heresy. It was not accidental that the founding biblical myth saw the deliverer of knowledge as evil and the loss of innocence as a catastrophe. “This probably had less to do with religion than with the standard desire of those in authority to control those who are not,” John Ralston Saul wrote. “And control of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language.”

The infantile slogans that are used to make sense of the world express, whether in tea party rallies or in Gaza street demonstrations, a very real alienation, yearning and rage. These clichés, hollow to the literate, are electric with power to those for whom these words are the only currency in which they can express anguish and despair. And as the economy worsens, as war in the Middle East and elsewhere continues, as our corporate state strips us of power and reduces us to serfs, expect this rage, and the demented language used to give it voice, to grow.

The Arabic of the Quran is as poetic as the intricate theology of Islam. It is nuanced and difficult to master. But the language of the Quran has been debased in the slums and poor villages across the Middle East by the words and phrases of political Islam. This process is no different from what has taken place with Christianity in the United States. Our mainstream churches have been as complacent in fighting heretics as have the mainstream mosques and religious scholars in the Middle East. Demented forms of Christianity and Islam have largely supplanted genuine and more open forms of religious expression. And they have done so because liberal elites were cowed into silence.

Corruptions of Islamic terms and passages are as numerous in the militants’ ideology as in the ideology of the Christian right. The word jihad for the militants means the impunity to kill, kidnap, hijack and bomb anyone they see as an infidel, including children and other Muslims. Jihad, however, does not always mean holy war, or even war, in the Quran. According to Islamic tradition, the “great jihad” is the battle within one’s self to live in accord with God’s will. A jihad, for the prophet Muhammad, is often the struggle to achieve inner-worldly asceticism, in accord with his call “to command the good and forbid evil with the heart, the tongue and the hand.” And the Quran condemns the use of violence to propagate the faith. “There is no compulsion in religion,” it states. The Quran also denounces forced piety and conversion as insincere. Calls to martyrdom, presented by militants as a direct path toward eternal life, conveniently eschew the Quran’s rigid ban on suicide. But theological nuance is beside the point for zealots. The fantasies peddled by the Christian right, from the Rapture, which is not in the Bible, to the belief that Jesus, who was a pacifist, would bless wars in the Middle East, injects our own version of sanctified slogans into the vernacular.

Our crisis is a crisis of language. Victor Klemperer in his book “Lingua Tertii Imperii” noted that the distortion of language by the Nazis was vital in creating fascist culture. He was repeatedly perplexed by how the masses, even those who opposed the Nazis, willingly ingested the linguistic poison the Nazis used to perpetuate collective self-delusion. “Words may be little doses of arsenic,” he wrote. “They are consumed without being noticed; they seem at first to have no effect, but after a while, indeed, the effect is there.”

Chris Hedges is the author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”

AP / Mohammed Ballas

A Palestinian boy aims a toy gun as he stands next to a mural of militants in the West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp. The Arabic graffiti reads: “Many people held weapons but few used them against their enemies.”

// posted by Alice @ Tuesday, September 29, 2009 0 Comments

The G20 in Pittsburgh showed us how pitifully fearful our leaders have become. What no terrorist could do to us, our own leaders did.

Out of fear of the possibility of a terrorist attack, authorities militarize our towns, scare our people away, stop daily life and quash our constitutional rights.

For days, downtown Pittsburgh, home to the G20, was a turned into a militarized people-free ghost town. Sirens screamed day and night. Helicopters crisscrossed the skies. Gunboats sat in the rivers. The skies were defended by Air Force jets. Streets were barricaded by huge cement blocks and fencing. Bridges were closed with National Guard across the entrances. Public transportation was stopped downtown. Amtrak train service was suspended for days.

In many areas, there were armed police every 100 feet. Businesses closed. Schools closed. Tens of thousands were unable to work.

Four thousand police were on duty plus 2500 National Guard plus Coast Guard and Air Force and dozens of other security agencies. A thousand volunteers from other police forces were sworn in to help out.

Police were dressed in battle gear, bulky black ninja turtle outfits: helmets with clear visors, strapped on body armor, shin guards, big boots, batons, and long guns.

In addition to helicopters, the police had hundreds of cars and motorcycles , armored vehicles, monster trucks, small electric go-karts. There were even passenger vans screaming through town so stuffed with heavily armed ninja turtles that the side and rear doors remained open.

No terrorists showed up at the G20.

Since no terrorists showed up, those in charge of the heavily armed security forces chose to deploy their forces around those who were protesting.

Not everyone is delighted that 20 countries control 80% of the world’s resources. Several thousand of them chose to express their displeasure by protesting.

Unfortunately, the officials in charge thought that it was more important to create a militarized people-free zone around the G20 people than to allow freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or the freedom to protest.

It took a lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU to get any major protest permitted anywhere near downtown Pittsburgh. Even then, the police “forgot” what was permitted and turned people away from areas of town. Hundreds of police also harassed a bus of people who were giving away free food — repeatedly detaining the bus and searching it and its passengers without warrants.

Then a group of young people decided that they did not need a permit to express their human and constitutional rights to freedom. They announced they were going to hold their own gathering at a city park and go down the deserted city streets to protest the G20. Maybe 200 of these young people were self-described anarchists, dressed in black, many with bandanas across their faces. The police warned everyone these people were very scary. My cab driver said the anarchist spokesperson looked like Harry Potter in a black hoodie. The anarchists were joined in the park by hundreds of other activists of all ages, ultimately one thousand strong, all insisting on exercising their right to protest.

This drove the authorities crazy.

Battle dressed ninja turtles showed up at the park and formed a line across one entrance. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Armored vehicles gathered.

The crowd surged out of the park and up a side street yelling, chanting, drumming, and holding signs. As they exited the park, everyone passed an ice cream truck that was playing “It’s a small world after all.” Indeed.

Any remaining doubts about the militarization of the police were dispelled shortly after the crowd left the park. A few blocks away the police unveiled their latest high tech anti-protestor toy. It was mounted on the back of a huge black truck. The Pittsburgh-Gazette described it as Long Range Acoustic Device designed to break up crowds with piercing noise. Similar devices have been used in Fallujah, Mosul and Basra Iraq. The police backed the truck up, told people not to go any further down the street and then blasted them with piercing noise.

The crowd then moved to other streets. Now they were being tracked by helicopters. The police repeatedly tried to block them from re-grouping ultimately firing tear gas into the crowd injuring hundreds including people in the residential neighborhood where the police decided to confront the marchers. I was treated to some of the tear gas myself and I found the Pittsburgh brand to be spiced with a hint of kelbasa. Fortunately, I was handed some paper towels soaked in apple cider vinegar which helped fight the tears and cough a bit. Who would have thought?

After the large group broke and ran from the tear gas, smaller groups went into commercial neighborhoods and broke glass at a bank and a couple of other businesses. The police chased and the glass breakers ran. And the police chased and the people ran. For a few hours.

By day the police were menacing, but at night they lost their cool. Around a park by the University of Pittsburgh the ninja turtles pushed and shoved and beat and arrested not just protestors but people passing by. One young woman reported she and her friend watched Grey’s Anatomy and were on their way back to their dorm when they were cornered by police. One was bruised by police baton and her friend was arrested. Police shot tear gas, pepper spray, smoke canisters, and rubber bullets. They pushed with big plastic shields and struck with batons.

The biggest march was Friday. Thousands of people from Pittsburgh and other places protested the G20. Since the court had ruled on this march, the police did not confront the marchers. Ninja turtled police showed up in formation sometimes and the helicopters hovered but no confrontations occurred.

Again Friday night, riot clad police fought with students outside of the University of Pittsburgh. To what end was just as unclear as the night before.

Ultimately about 200 were arrested, mostly in clashes with the police around the University.

The G20 leaders left by helicopter and limousine.

Pittsburgh now belongs again to the people of Pittsburgh. The cement barricades were removed, the fences were taken down, the bridges and roads were opened. The gunboats packed up and left. The police packed away their ninja turtle outfits and tear gas and rubber bullets. They don’t look like military commandos anymore. No more gunboats on the river. No more sirens all the time. No more armored vehicles and ear splitting machines used in Iraq. On Monday the businesses will open and kids will have to go back to school. Civil society has returned.

It is now probably even safe to exercise constitutional rights in Pittsburgh once again.

The USA really showed those terrorists didn’t we?

// posted by Alice @ Sunday, September 27, 2009 0 Comments

From: RawStory A Colombian hitman recently disclosed to the Venezuelan government that over 2,500 paramilitary fighters are in the country, each chasing a $25 million bounty on the life of Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, according to Arab news network Al Jazeera.

The man, who is reportedly in the custody of Venezuelan officials, said the bounty was offered by Manuel Rosales, Chavez’s most prominent political foe, during a secret meeting 10 years ago.

Rosales allegedly said “that he would give $25 million to kill [Chavez], but that he himself would not give the money directly,” the man said, as translated by Al Jazeera.

Rosales fled into Peru in April after a warrant was issued for his arrest. He protested in the media, calling the corruption charges a political lynching.

“Right now, there are two thousand, five hundred paramilitaries from Colombia inside Venezuela with one objective: with the objective of taking down Chavez, with the objective of destabilizing him” a translator says on the video.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, speaking to a South American newspaper recently, claimed the United States may have been involved in an attempted overthrow of Chavez’s regime.

“I think there is no doubt that in 2002, the United States had at the very least full knowledge about the coup, and could even have been directly involved,” he told El Tiempo last week.

Carter told El Tiempo that he believed Chavez was elected in a “fair” vote in 1999, had carried out necessary reforms for Venezuela and ensured that “those who are traditionally excluded are able to get a larger share of the national wealth.”

But he also said he was worried by the Venezuelan leader’s drift towards “authoritarianism.”

In August, Colombian officials announced a deal with the United States that will allow U.S. troops to be stationed at Colombian military bases, which will serve as a hub for remote surveillance in the region. Their mission will allegedly use advanced Predator drone technology to aid in fighting the drug trade and to combat terrorism, according to published reports in August.

In Venezuela, officials bristled at the news. Chavez warned: “The winds of war [are] beginning to blow.”

Chavez has already accused Colombian troops of making an incursion over the border and regional tensions are running high.

This video is from Al Jazeera English, broadcast Sept. 26, 2009.

With AFP.

// posted by Alice @ Sunday, September 27, 2009 0 Comments

http://positivefeeling.org

With the greatest understanding and compassion, let me mention that Western medicine is in its way one of the most uncivilized hypnotic devices. The most educated Western doctors will look with utter dismay and horror at the thought of a chicken being sacrificed in a primitive witch doctor’s hut, and yet will consider it quite scientific and inevitable that a woman sacrifice two breasts to cancer. The doctors will simply see no other way out, and unfortunately neither will the patient.

A modern Western physician – granted with the greatest discomfiture – will inform his patient that he is about to die, impressing upon him that his situation is hopeless, and yet will react with scorn and loathing when he reads that a voodoo practitioner has put a curse upon some innocent victim.

In your time, medical men, again with great superiority, look at primitive cultures and harshly judge the villagers they think are held in the sway of witch doctors or voodooism; and yet through advertisement and organization, YOUR doctors impress upon each individual in your culture that you must have a physical examination every six months or you will get cancer; that you must have medical insurance because you WILL become ill.

In many instances, therefore, modern physicians are inadequate witch doctors who have forgotten their craft – hypnotists who no longer believe in the power of healing, and whose suggestions bring about other diseases which are diagnosed in advance.

You are told what to look for; you are as cursed – far more – as any native in a tiny village, only you lose breasts, appendixes, and other portions of your anatomy. The doctors follow their own ideas, of course, and in that system they see themselves as completely justified – as humane.

In the medical field, as in no other, you are faced directly with the full impact of your beliefs, for doctors are not the healthiest, but the least healthy. They fall prey to the beliefs to which they so heartily subscribe. Their concentration is upon disease, not health.

This is an excerpt from the Nature of Personal Reality, channelled by Jane Roberts

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 24, 2009 0 Comments

Costa Rica renamed its justice ministry the Ministry of Justice and Peace on September 14, 2009, an act in a long line of peaceful government initiatives that includes abolishing the army in 1948 and peace education in schools. Here, children from two public schools in Costa Rica dressed up, sketched and wrote down their wishes and thoughts about peace in conjunction with a CISV International program in 2006.

Photo courtesy of Peace One Day.

On Monday, September 14, the Costa Rican legislature passed a law changing the name of the country’s justice ministry to the Ministry of Justice and Peace, making the department the first of its kind in Latin America and only the third in the world.

Costa Rica’s justice ministry was created to oversee the country’s penitentiary systems and supervise research on criminal behavior, but had no responsibility for crime prevention. A 1998 executive decree addressed this lapse by creating the National Directorate for the Prevention of Crime. The recent legislation takes crime prevention in a new direction, replacing the old directorate with the newly formed Directorate for the Promotion of Peace and the Peaceful Coexistence of Citizens.

“While we talk about prevention of violence, we are experiencing its effects every day. Changing the language and speaking about ‘promotion of peace’ lead[s] us to the roots of the problem,” states the legislation.

The ministry will take on new responsibilities, including peace promotion, violence prevention (for example, by targeting a recent increase of juvenile offenders), and an emphasis on conflict resolution.

Days after the official creation of its Ministry of Justice and Peace, Costa Rica hosted an international summit for others working to create similar ministries. The Dalai Lama wrote a letter endorsing the summit: “Peace is not something which exists independently of us, any more than war does. Those who are responsible for creating and keeping the peace are members of our own human family, the society that we as individuals participate in and help to create. Peace in the world thus depends on there being peace in the hearts of individuals. Peace based merely on political considerations or prompted by other compulsions will only be temporary and superficial.”

“With this change in name, the focus on prevention of violence has been shifted to promotion of peace,” says Kelly Isola of the Rasur Foundation, the Costa Rican nongovernmental organization that proposed the law in 2005. Having a department of peace, she said, will enable Costa Rica “to benefit from international experiences, which demonstrate that a culture of peace has positive effects in the reduction of violence and crime.”

Although campaigns for peace-oriented government departments are underway in 32 countries, including the United States, only Nepal and the Solomon Islands have similar ministries.

“This Ministry was not born out of war and conflict, but rather through the commitment to a culture of peace,” Isola says. “Costa Rica has a long history of being aligned with peace.”

The country’s tradition of peace-oriented firsts dates back to 1877, when President Tomás Guardia abolished the death penalty. In 1948, Costa Rica became the first country to formally abolish its armed forces; the Constitution still forbids a standing military. President Oscar Arias won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership on the Esquipulas II Peace Accords, which promoted regional reconciliation, democratization, free elections, and arms control in Central America. In 1997, Costa Rica passed a law requiring that peace education be offered in every school and created a place for peaceful conflict resolution in the legal system, which endorses mediation.

Costa Rican children celebrate peace.

Photo courtesy of Peace One Day.

In 2004, the National Directorate of Alternative Conflict Resolution was created, and two years later the National Commission for the Prevention of Violence and Promotion of Social Peace was established. The newly overhauled Ministry of Justice and Peace will work with both.

Legislation for the new law was passed just in time for the fourth annual Global Alliance Summit for Ministries and Departments of Peace, held in Costa Rica September 17-21. The Global Alliance comprises organizations, citizens, and government officials from 35 countries, who work together to establish governmental structures that support a culture of peace.

// posted by Alice @ Wednesday, September 23, 2009 0 Comments

By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - The Guantanamo war crimes court has become "a headless chicken" that still operates under the old rules even as the Obama administration issues new ones, the lawyer for an accused Saudi boat-bomb plotter said on Wednesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama has pledged to shut down the Guantanamo detention camp for terrorism suspects by January 22, and his administration has said it will decide by November 16 whether to move the 10 pending prosecutions into the regular U.S. courts or try them in revised tribunals.

The Obama administration also is pushing legislation in Congress that would stop the military tribunals from using evidence obtained through brutality.

But a military judge in Guantanamo refused on Wednesday to drop the charges against Saudi prisoner Ahmed al Darbi, a case that defense lawyer Ramzi Kassem said was built on confessions obtained through torture.

"Either the Obama administration is duplicitously saying one thing to the public and the media and doing another here or, you know, Guantanamo and the military commissions are like a headless chicken that just keeps on moving after it's been decapitated," Kassem told journalists after the hearing.

The chief prosecutor, Navy Captain John Murphy, called the comparison unfair and said, "Our mission is to operate under the current law."

Torture-derived evidence is banned but the current law permits the use of coerced statements in some cases. The judge, Army Colonel Jim Pohl, scheduled a January hearing to decide whether 119 statements al Darbi gave interrogators can be used at his trial -- if his trial goes forward.

Obama first asked the military to freeze the Guantanamo trials in January, then his administration sought further delays through mid-November to decide whether and how to continue with the prosecutions.

Despite the freeze, military judges have convened three tribunal sessions to try to resolve pretrial motions, and more are planned in October. They say that does not violate Obama's order since they are not holding trials or filing new charges.

DEFENSE ALLEGES TORTURE

Al Darbi, 34, is charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, and he faces life in prison if convicted.

The charges allege he bought a boat and global positioning devices and shopped for crewmen as part of an unrealized plot to ram an explosives-laden boat into an unidentified ship in the Strait of Hormuz. He is also accused of teaching at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and meeting Osama bin Laden there.

Al Darbi has said his boat was used only to ferry sheep across the strait. The defense says the case rests on confessions al Darbi gave after U.S. troops strung him up by his arms, beat him, blasted loud music at him, deprived him of sleep and threatened to rape him while he was held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Prosecutor Frank Rangoussis said there is ample evidence beyond al Darbi's own words, including corroborating witnesses, but he did not elaborate.

Al Darbi was captured in Azerbaijan in 2002 and has been held at Guantanamo since 2003.

"They've had seven years to assess the evidence against Mr. al Darbi," said Kassem, the defense lawyer. "They should either fish or cut bait."

The judge refused his request to drop the charges, and granted a prosecution request to freeze the case until after the November 16 decision by the administration.

(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Cynthia Osterman)

// posted by Alice @ Wednesday, September 23, 2009 0 Comments

From: www.democracynow.org SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has made a dramatic return to his country nearly three months after the military coup that forced him into exile. On Monday, Zelaya reappeared in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, taking refuge in the Brazilian embassy. Speaking from the embassy’s roof, Zelaya said he had arrived after a lengthy trip, traveling sometimes by foot to avoid detection.

PRESIDENT MANUEL ZELAYA: [translated] I had to travel for fifteen hours, sometimes walking, other times marching in different areas in the middle of the night, because I wanted to celebrate the country’s independence day with the Honduran people. Those who believe that governing was something easy have made a mistake. To govern is something serious. Governing requires talent, dedication and love for the people.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Zelaya wouldn’t provide specifics, but it’s unlikely he could have returned without help from elements of the Honduran military or intelligence services. That prospect could signify a further setback for the Honduran coup regime, which has relied on military support to defy internal unrest and global isolation.

The head of the coup regime, Roberto Micheletti, initially dismissed reports of Zelaya’s return as, quote, “media terrorism.” But as thousands of Zelaya supporters descended on the Brazilian embassy, Micheletti imposed a national curfew and took to the airwaves. Flanked by his cabinet and top military leaders, Micheletti called on Brazil to hand over Zelaya for arrest.

ROBERTO MICHELETTI: [translated] It is not clear why Mr. Zelaya has returned to Honduras at this time. Only he knows this. But I cannot reach another conclusion other than he is here to continue hampering the celebrations of our elections next November 29th, as he has done so far, as well as his followers, for a few weeks now.

I made a call to the government of Brazil so that they respect the judicial order against Mr. Zelaya and hand him over to the authorities of Honduras. The state of Honduras is committed to respecting the rights of Mr. Zelaya to the mentioned process. The eyes of the world are placed on Brazil and also on Honduras. Let’s not allow passions of a few stain the reputation and image of our people.

AMY GOODMAN: Zelaya’s supporters are reportedly planning to march on the palace later today. Here in the US, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged both sides to engage in dialogue.

HILLARY CLINTON: It’s imperative that dialogue begin, that there be a channel of communication between President Zelaya and the de facto regime in Honduras. And it’s also imperative that the return of President Zelaya does not lead to any conflict or violence, but instead that everyone act in a peaceful way to try to find some common ground. Once again, the Costa Ricans will be using their good offices to try to encourage that to occur.

AMY GOODMAN: Clinton was speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where she met with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. After the meeting, Arias said he’d be willing to travel to Honduras to resume his efforts at brokering a negotiated solution.

PRESIDENT OSCAR ARIAS: I think this is the best—the best opportunity, the best time, now that Zelaya is back in his country, for the two parties to sign the San José accord. It’s all we have on the table. There is no B plan. And when we wrote this San José accord, it was after listening to everybody. We took suggestions from each of the parties.

I would be willing to go, but if both sides—if both parties ask me to—to go to Tegucigalpa, I certainly would be more than pleased to go and see what I can do.

AMY GOODMAN: The Nobel Peace laureate, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias.

We now go directly to the Brazilian embassy, inside, in Tegucigalpa to Andres Conteris, who works with us at Democracy Now! and on the Program on the Americas director for Nonviolence International.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Andres. What’s happening right now?

ANDRES CONTERIS: Amy, good to talk with you.

About forty minutes ago, there was a very violent removal by the military and police of over 500 protesters who were outside the embassy dancing and rejoicing and celebrating all night. I was able to see them in their incredible, incredible spirit of jubilation as they expressed that since the news arrived that President Zelaya was returning to the country. Then, about forty minutes ago, there was a massive, massive tear gas attack and a violent removal of all of the over 500 people in front of the embassy.

I’m inside the embassy with about 150 people who are inside. There was no direct attack against the embassy itself, but the tear gas did enter, and it affected every single one of us inside the embassy. I’m now in the room where the President slept, and I’m with the First Lady nearby. Everyone, everyone was affected by this tear gas attack. But fortunately, there are no permanent injuries. We’re not aware of any injuries, but I’m sure there were many of those who were protesting and celebrating outside the embassy.

AMY GOODMAN: Andres, can you tell us how did President Zelaya return to Honduras?

ANDRES CONTERIS: Reports are, Amy—and he was asked directly, and he answered in a very general way, but the reports are that he flew from Nicaragua to El Salvador and then reached the border there at a place called El Amatillo and there entered into the trunk of a car and crossed about fifty—I’m sorry, about twenty police barricades and was never detected. He drove straight to—his driver took him straight to the Brazilian embassy.

Initial reports were that the President was in Honduras and that he was at the United Nations headquarters. So the initial rally of celebration went there to the United Nations. There were thousands and thousands of people there rejoicing. And then the word came that he was at the Brazilian embassy. And then we transferred that celebration here.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Andres, why did the Brazilians take him in, have him have refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa?

ANDRES CONTERIS: It’s very clear that Brazil has been a very strong advocate of President Zelaya during this entire crisis. And because of the power and the symbolism of the strength of South America and Brazil being the strongest and largest of those countries, it’s clear that I think President Zelaya decided that this was the place that it was best to come to. And when he arrived, they of course opened the doors. The Brazilian authorities report that they did not know ahead of time that he was coming here, but he was welcomed when he came. And his family was reunited here in the embassy for the first time after eighty-six days of being separated.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the President—the head of the coup regime, Roberto Micheletti, has continued his call for Zelaya’s arrest. What does President Zelaya say right now about that?

ANDRES CONTERIS: President Zelaya speaks very positively, in a very reconciling mode. He does not even take seriously what coup regime leader Micheletti is saying. Micheletti is saying that there’s a jail space waiting for President Zelaya. However, President Zelaya is really focusing on the way to truly resolve this crisis by seeking mediation.

Today, it’s hopefully expected that Mr. Insulza, the head of the OAS, will arrive. However, they have closed the airports, and it’s not certain if they will allow the plane to land with Mr. Insulza from the OAS.

AMY GOODMAN: Andres Conteris is speaking to us from inside the embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Brazilian embassy. Roberto Micheletti says that he wants Brazil to hand over the ousted president. Andres, is there a response from Zelaya on that request?

ANDRES CONTERIS: In terms of that request, no, there was no direct response. It’s really treating this coup regime as a nonentity, so much as possible, and not recognizing their authority. Many who were in the streets heard about the curfew that was imposed at 4:00 p.m. yesterday afternoon and held—and was enforced all night, and they did not respond to it, because they believe that President Zelaya is the one president, and he is the only one who can give an order for a curfew. And so, they continued to celebrate in the streets.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Andres is joining us from inside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. We’re also joined from Washington, DC by Mark Weisbrot. He’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and president of Just Foreign Policy. He’s written extensively on the Honduran crisis and is a longtime analyst of Latin American affairs.

Mark, could you explain the significance of Zelaya’s return, particularly coming on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly?

MARK WEISBROT: Yes. Well, I think it will make a big difference. You know, there’s been a big gap from the beginning, since the coup on June 28th. There’s been a big gap between the United States and the rest of the world on this situation. You know, the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, they all said right away that they wanted an immediate and unconditional return of the elected president, Zelaya. And the United States has never really said that. In fact, the Arias accords put all kinds of conditions on his return, including incorporating the people who led the coup into his government and moving the elections forward. And in fact, as Andres mentioned, you know, Brazil has been a strong supporter of Zelaya, and the foreign minister of Brazil said a couple months ago—he complained to Hillary Clinton that these conditions were placed in the Arias agreement, that, you know, this was not what the Organization of American States wanted or the United Nations or anyone else. So he said this publicly. And so, there’s always been this big gap, but the administration has been able to paper it over, because there hasn’t been much attention on Honduras.

And so, now, with the General Assembly and the attention focused by Zelaya’s dramatic return, Obama is going to have to choose sides more than they have in the past. They’ve been very—this administration has been very ambivalent. They’ve gone back and forth, you know, between saying that, you know, he should be restored and then saying really almost the opposite. And on August 4th, they sent a letter, for example, to President Lugar [Senator Lugar], where they backed off quite a bit from supporting Zelaya.

And, you know, Zelaya has been here six times since he was overthrown, here in Washington, and President Obama has not met with him once, even though he’s gotten requests from people who are very close friends and allies of his and Democratic members of Congress.

And so, these are the kind of signals, mixed signals, that this government has sent to the leaders of the coup, and that has strengthened their resolve all the way along. And they’re very stubborn right now, for example. It’s going to take a lot more pressure to get them out of there, a lot more, both international and domestic, from within the United States. There’s going to have to be a lot more pressure on the Obama administration to actually force them to leave.

AMY GOODMAN: And exactly what could the Obama administration do if it was committed to preserving the democratically elected leader Zelaya? What is the relationship the US has with Honduras?

MARK WEISBROT: Oh, there’s quite a bit more they could do. First of all, on August 11th, sixteen members of Congress sent a letter to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and asking them to freeze the assets of the coup leaders, and even the government—they can also freeze their assets. You know, when Aristide, President Aristide of Haiti, was overthrown the first time, George Bush, the first, actually froze some of the assets of the dictatorship and gave it to the government in exile, to President Aristide. And this was, you know, a Republican president who actually—that government actually supported the—or was involved in the coup initially. And so, this is—so this is a minimum they could do.

They could—you know, they could put all kinds of pressure that they haven’t put. And again, you see our Secretary of State, she’s trying to say, well, both sides should do this, both sides—she even said last night that she supported the curfew that this government has put, you know, on people to prevent them from peacefully assembling. And so, this is the kind of thing.

And, you know, there has not been one word from this administration about the human—the massive human rights violations committed by this dictatorship, the thousands of arbitrary arrests and detentions, the beatings. People have been shot and actually killed at demonstrations. These human rights abuses have been denounced by Human Rights Watch, by Amnesty International, by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights of the Organization of American States, by Honduran human rights groups, by Europe. And nothing—nothing—has come out of this administration. I think that really says a lot. That tells you how much this government has not wanted to undermine the dictatorship in Honduras. That’s what’s going to have to change. And I think there’s going to be more international pressure, and hopefully domestic pressure, as well, to change that.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Weisbrot, to the surprise of the coup regime, Zelaya’s return to Honduras, he’s now in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. But if he were in New York and wanted to speak, address the UN General Assembly, what would happen at the United Nations? Who would they recognize?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, they would recognize him, and he would get enormous support. And that was, I’m sure, his other plan: if he hadn’t gone back to Honduras, he would have spoken there. But this, I think, is much more powerful. I mean, that would have gotten maybe, you know, a few lines here and there in the news. This now forces it to the world attention. You’re going to see a lot of support in the United Nations and from various heads of state for Zelaya, a lot more pressure—and here in Congress, too, by the way.

And if your viewers want to do anything, they can contact their members of Congress, and they—you know, there’s another letter going to come from members of Congress stating that Zelaya should return. And also, you know, the School of the Americas Watch has asked for people to write to and call the State Department. So, you know, there’s going to be more and more pressure on them.

And the question is, you know, will they really do what needs to be done to get rid of this government? Because the government there still has their friends here. You know, you had Lanny Davis on the show. They have influential people. They have the Republicans, and they have, you know, a lot of interest in this government, including the military, wants to keep their base there, you know? And there’s all these forces here that don’t really want Zelaya to go back, or if they’re willing to have him go back, they don’t want him to go back as a victor. You know, that’s another thing that they’re very worried about, that he comes off winning, and their friends in the government, in the de facto regime, end up losing. So, again, it’s going to take a lot of pressure, but that pressure has definitely gone up quite a bit with Zelaya’s return.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Weisbrot, I want to go back to Andres in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. Andres Conteris, who’s with Democracy Now! en Español, Democracy Now! in Spanish, he is right near the President now, who’s talking with reporters. Andres, describe what’s happening.

ANDRES CONTERIS: Yes, Amy, I’m right here with the President, and he is speaking. I’m going to let you hear his voice and try to interpret a little bit.

[translating President Zelaya] He “will obligate this dictatorship to enter into dialogue with us. Just the way that they attacked my house and they brutally kidnapped me, this is the way that they are attacking us now even today.”

The President is taking a drink of water now, and we’re going to ask him a question. It’s not possible to get a question in right now, but we will just listen to his response to other questions.

AMY GOODMAN: Andres Conteris is asking President Zelaya a question.

ANDRES CONTERIS: [translating President Zelaya] “That the US should respond and respect the OAS charter. The United States should call for a meeting, an emergency meeting, of the United Nations Security Council. The United States should take every type of trade sanction measure in order to pressure this regime now in power in Honduras.”

That’s the questions I was able to ask Mr. President.

AMY GOODMAN: Andres Conteris, thanks so much for being with us. We will continue to follow this story, bring you more on this tomorrow.

Again, the latest news is that the President, the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, has returned to Honduras after three months, not exactly clear how he made it over the border, but he said he walked, he traveled, not clear who aided him in this, and then ended up within the Brazilian embassy. The coup regime leader, Roberto Micheletti, is demanding of Brazil to turn over Zelaya so that he can arrest him.

Andres Conteris, with Nonviolence International and Democracy Now! en Español, is standing next to the President right now in the Brazilian embassy.

// posted by Alice @ Tuesday, September 22, 2009 0 Comments

Peter Camejo, Socialist Workers Party candidate for US President, 1976.

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of Peter Camejo’s death. He had been battling cancer (lymphoma) for over a year. It was in remission then came back suddenly and killed him.

I spoke to Peter the last week of his life, in fact, just a couple of days before his death while I was in Ohio campaigning with Ralph Nader. Nader and I took turns talking with Peter by telephone. It was apparent that he was going to die, so there were many heartfelt words exchanged. I made sure to tell him that he had much to be proud of, that we loved him greatly, and that we would miss having him at our side.

Most people know Peter Camejo as a three-time Green Party candidate for Governor of California and for his run with Ralph Nader in 2004. Others recall his days with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), when he ran for US President in 1976 (with running mate Willie Mae Reid) against both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

Peter was also an author. He wrote about post-American Civil War politics (Racism, Revolution, Reaction 1861-1877, The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction) and about progressive financial investing (The SRI Advantage: Why Socially Responsible Investing Has Outperformed Financially).

Many of his speeches from his period with the SWP were published by Pathfinder press in pamphlet form including: Who Killed Jim Crow?; Allende’s Chile: Is It Going Socialist?; Liberalism, Ultraleftism, Or Mass Action; How to Make a Revolution in the US; and Cuba and the Central American Revolution.

Peter marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma and participated in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, culminating in his expulsion from the University of California and subsequent run for mayor of Berkeley. It was during this era when then Governor Ronald Reagan declared Peter “one of the 10 most dangerous men in California”.

It is without question that Peter was one of the important members of the American Left of the last half-century. He had combated injustice his entire life and helped plant the seeds for many progressive ideas that are popular now.

None of the things we fight for today: gay marriage, equal rights for women, fair wage laws, immigrant rights, universal health care, would exist had there not been men and women like Peter pushing from one side — agitating and making people uncomfortable. It amazes me how once these ideas are commonplace, we celebrate the politicians who joined the effort at the last moment, when victory was all but assured. There’s little credit given to how we got on the beachhead in the first place.

What does it mean to stand up against something that won’t budge, long before it’s poised to be the majority sentiment?

Peter knew the system would crumble someday. Politics as we know it will someday buckle under the pressure of human desires for a more egalitarian and democratic world. And when it happens, the “successful” politicians will not be remembered. They were the ones that took the easy path. Worked for change on the margin. Wanted the winner’s circle at all cost. Even if it meant denying what they knew to be the truth.

Peter believed the two-party system was a failure, pure and simple. He mused how years from now historians will scratch their heads and wonder how was it that people put up with its oppressiveness? Its days are numbered. Just as slavery was, just as the overt subjugation of woman was, just as concentrated capital’s refusal to pay decent wages and give human beings the benefits they deserve cannot be sustained for much longer.

Peter stood up to say that both parties defended corporations such that the differences, we’re told matter, hardly alleviate any true suffering.

Peter wanted to live in a democracy. He wanted an economic system that produced for human needs not profits. He often said that the only reason someone hires you when you’re looking for a job is that they decide you can make them more money than what they’re going to pay you. He dared to say this was wrong.

He noted that the wealthy mistakenly believed they had earned their wealth and that they believed the poor just didn’t work hard enough. He pointed out that the notion that people should be allowed to do as they please with their earnings overlooked that the manner in which this wealth was invested and enjoyed often meant whether you and I would have a job, whether there would be pollution in the air, and what wars we would be fighting.

Many disparaged Peter’s electoral efforts. The press often refered to the “perennial candidate”, as if to say “here we go again, this candidate doesn’t have a chance”. In their minds they’d say, he barely registered, in terms of percentage of the vote, when he ran for president (91,000 votes or 0.1% of the vote in 1976) or governor (in his best showing, 400,000 votes or 5.3% of the vote in 2002) so why should they cover his efforts?

But Peter wasn’t discouraged by these election results because he understood that the things we fight for today will come to pass, if only by the sheer strength of the logic and decency of the principles we advocate. He was very aware of Latin American examples of minor parties becoming ruling parties in a matter of a single generation.

Peter spoke of Hugo Blanco who led a peasant revolt among the Quechua in Peru in the early 1960s. He was nearly killed by the government and ultimately was given a 25-year jail sentence. Peter visited him at the prison on the Island of El Fronton, during the period of his “exile”. 15 years later in 1978, Blanco was elected to Parliament, as a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

There are many stories like this one, where political efforts are totally marginalized, before becoming the dominant strand. Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva helped found the Brazilian Workers Party in 1980. He ran three times for the presidency unsuccessfully, finally winning the 4th time in 2002.

It only took two decades, Peter would have said.

Peter placed his vision of what was possible in the context of these struggles. He couldn’t be dissuaded of his politics just because they weren’t in fashion yet.

Our society has a way of romanticizing past radicals. We don’t think twice when we see Che Guevara on a t-shirt. Many hold up the agrarian revolution that Emiliano Zapata participated in, and think romantically that they would have fought at his side, but the truth is far from that. How many of these people condemn the efforts of politicians like Peter Camejo? How many would have said the timing isn’t right? How many wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help?

Peter Camejo was a beautiful man. He was unreasonable. He thought the timing was right now. He didn’t capitulate like so many of his contemporaries did. He was a socialist.

–Matt Gonzalez

Peter Camejo’s memoir, North Star, will be published in 2010 by Haymarket Books.

// posted by Alice @ Monday, September 14, 2009 1 Comments

Weil discussed his new book “Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future.”

Weil brought out a number of important issues that have been missing from the loud and long health care reform debate.

He said the entire medical system in America is based on disease management with costly interventions.

Low-tech, less expensive solutions – such as diet, exercise, and mind-body connections – should be emphasized, Weil added.

He recommends integrative medicine be taught in medical schools and used throughout America, adding integrative medicine has outcomes as good or better then conventional medicine.

In addition to taking over the education in medical schools, the pharmaceutical companies have power over members of Congress, Weil said. They’ve blocked discounts for prescription drugs for those with Medicare.

The drug companies have changed the American medical system so that people think the only way to treat disease is with drugs, he said. In the mid 20th century, health care got mixed up with big money, and health care is seen as an industry. It belongs to people who don’t want to see it changed, he said, adding they’re making “rivers” of money.

Here are changes that Weil urges consumers to demand immediately:

• Ban direct-to-consumer marketing and advertising by big pharma.

• Create a National Institute of Health and Healing at the NIH and fund it generously.

• Create an Office of Health Promotion within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and fund it appropriately.

• Teach health promotion and integrative medicine at medical schools and residency programs.

• Require insurers to cover health promotion and integrative care.

• Establish an Office of health Education within the U.S. Department of Education.

• Learn how to take care of yourself.

// posted by Alice @ Friday, September 11, 2009 0 Comments

But I’m not convinced that getting a single-payer system now is politically infeasible. The public would be happy with Medicare for all. Polls have shown that the public loves Medicare. The problem isn’t the public. It’s Congress, which caves in to special interests.

// posted by Alice @ Tuesday, September 08, 2009 0 Comments

Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure.

During those contests, most of Washington's major labor, environmental, antiwar and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party objective -- specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in pursuit of electoral unity.

The effort involved a sleight of hand. These groups begged their grassroots members -- janitors, soccer moms, veterans and other "regular folks" -- to cough up small-dollar contributions in return for the promise of progressive movement pressure on both parties' politicians. Simultaneously, these groups went to dot-com and Wall Street millionaires, asking them to chip in big checks in exchange for advocacy that did not undermine those fat cats' Democratic Party friends (or those millionaires' economic privilege).

This wasn't totally dishonest. Many groups sincerely believed that Democratic Party promotion was key to achieving progressive movement causes. Additionally, during the Bush era, pushing progressive causes and helping Democrats was often one and the same, because those causes primarily indicted Republican obstructionists.

But after the 2008 election, the strategy's bankruptcy is undeniable.

As we now see, union dues underwrote Democratic lawmakers who today block serious labor law reform and ignore past promises to fix NAFTA. Green groups' resources elected a government that pretends sham "cap and trade" bills represent environmental progress. Health care groups, promising to push a single-payer system, got a president not only dropping his own single-payer promises, but also backing off a "public option" to compete with private insurance. And anti-war funding delivered a Congress that refuses to stop financing the Iraq mess and an administration preparing to escalate the Afghanistan conflict.

Of course, frustrated progressives might be able to forgive the groups who promised different results, had these post-election failures prompted course corrections.

For example, had the left's preeminent institutions responded to Democrats' health care capitulation by immediately announcing campaigns against these Democrats, progressives could feel confident that these groups were back to prioritizing a movement agenda. Likewise, had the big anti-war organizations reacted to Obama's Afghanistan escalation plans with promises of electoral retribution, we would know those organizations were steadfastly loyal to their anti-war brand.

But that hasn't happened. Despite Democrats' health care retreat, many major progressive groups spent the summer cheering them on, afraid to lose access and, thus, Beltway status. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that MoveOn.org has "yet to take a clear position on Afghanistan" while VoteVets' leader all but genuflected to President Barack Obama, saying, "People (read: professional political operatives) do not want to take on the administration."

In this vacuum, movement building has been left to underfunded (but stunningly successful) projects like Firedoglake.com, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and local organizations. And that's the lesson: True grassroots movements that deliver concrete legislative results are not steered by marble-columned monoliths, wealthy benefactors or celebrity politicians -- and they are rarely ever headquartered in Washington. They are almost always far-flung efforts by those focused on real-world results, not partisan vanity -- those who don't care about congressional cocktail parties or White House soirees they were never invited to in the first place.

Only when enough progressives realize this truism, will any movement -- and any significant change -- finally commence.

// posted by Alice @ Sunday, September 06, 2009 0 Comments

• 3 September 2009 11.56 BST

Watch a world exclusive trailer from Oliver Stone's South of the Border Link to this video

I've been fortunate to be able to make several films about North America's neglected "backyard" – Central and South America.

1. South of the Border
2. Production year: 2009
3. Country: USA
4. Directors: Oliver Stone
5. More on this film

The low-budget, independently-shot Salvador, about the US involvement with the death squads of El Salvador, and starring James Woods in an Oscar-nominated performance, was released in 1986; this was followed by Comandante in 2003, and Looking for Fidel in 2004, with both of these documentaries exploring Fidel Castro in one–on–one interviews.

Each of these films has struggled to be distributed in North America. I was invited to Venezuela to meet President Hugo Chávez for the first time during his aborted rescue mission of Colombian hostages, held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), during Christmas of 2007.

As is often the case, the man I met was not the man I'd read and heard about in the US media. I was able to return in January 2009 to interview President Chávez in more depth. Was Hugo Chávez really the anti–American force we've been told he is? Once we began our journey, we found ourselves going beyond Venezuela to several other countries, and interviewing seven presidents in the region, telling a larger and even more compelling story, which has now become South of the Border. Leader after leader seemed to be saying the same thing. They wanted to control their own resources, strengthen regional ties, be treated as equals with the US, and become financially independent of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

South of the Border … Oliver Stone with President Hugo Chavez. Photograph: Jose Ibanez

Based on our experiences in Iraq, Americans must question the role of our media in demonising foreign leaders as our enemies. The consequences of this can be brutal.

This is a continuing story. It is going on right now with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Hopefully, in our film, you'll get to hear a far different side of the "official" story.

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 03, 2009 0 Comments

...

The subject of the newest comic-strip sensation, though, might still raise eyebrows: it's the story of the quest for the foundation of mathematics, starring and narrated by Bertrand Russell, the British logician, philosopher, mathematician, reformer, pacifist, activist, jailbird and chronic womaniser. It's set 50 years ago on 4 September, 1939, when Russell arrived at an American university to lecture on "The Role of Logic in Human Affairs" before a sceptical audience, just after Britain had declared war on Germany. The book delves into Russell's past, his childhood and the first inklings of his search for the certainties upon which maths, and therefore all science, ultimately rest.

It's an extraordinary piece of work: the arid title, Logicomix, seems to suggest a genre of brisk, strip-cartoon guides to hard philosophy, like the popular Icon series (eg Introducing Aristotle) instead of an absorbing 350-page narrative about how the search for logic and first principles drove most of its practitioners round the twist and threatened to do the same to the 3rd Earl Russell in the early 20th century.

Early reactions have been positive: "Logicomix is highly original," enthused Posy Simmonds, doyenne of the intelligent literary strip cartoon (Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe), "a rich and enthralling encounter with myth, maths, theatre and the giants of 20th-century philosophy."

The book is the brainchild of two Greek men. Apostolos Doxiadis, 55, is hell-bent on bridging the gap between science and the arts: he's a mathematician but also a translator, actor, writer and movie director. His third novel, Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture, was an international bestseller, published here by Faber & Faber. He once devised a shadow-puppet musical about Jackson Pollock, and wrote a play called Seventeenth Night about the theorems of Kurt Godel. His collaborator on the Russell project is Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of computer science at Berkeley, California; Bill Gates is among his former pupils.

It's an unusually personal project, this five-year labour of love. You can tell because the co-authors portray themselves in the book, drinking coffee, arguing and joshing in their shared offices. Once the script was complete, the artists, Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna, prepared for their mammoth feat of drawing and colouring by going location-hunting across Europe for three weeks, taking thousands of photographs and meeting Russell fans who could describe what it was like to meet him at his time of intellectual turmoil. And it really was turmoil. Russell's mother and sister died when he was two, his father when he was four. He was brought up by his austere Scots Presbyterian grandmother in an atmosphere of repression and religiosity. His bitterly lonely childhood (he contemplated suicide) was enlivened, he said later, by thoughts of sex and glimpses of a totally logical world available through Euclidian mathematics. But even Euclid's maths rested on shaky assumptions and unproven "axioms", so how could it lead to certain knowledge of the world?

Through GE Moore at Cambridge, he discovered Leibniz and Boole, and became a logician. Through Alfred Whitehead's influence, he travelled to Europe and met Gottlob Frege, who believed in a wholly logical language (and was borderline insane) and Georg Cantor, the inventor of "set theory" (who was locked up in an asylum) and a mass of French and German mathematicians in varying stages of mental disarray. Back home he and Whitehead wrestled with their co-authored Principles of Mathematics for years, endlessly disputing the foundations of their every intellectual certainty, constantly harassed by Russell's brilliant pupil Wittgenstein.

If the subject matter seems a little arid, with its theories of types, paradoxes and abstruse language (calculus ratiocinator?), and if its recurring theme of how logic and madness are psychologically intertwined seems a touch gloomy, don't let that put you off. Logicomix tells its saga of human argumentation with such drama and vivid colour that it leaves the graphic novel 300 (Frank Miller's take on the Battle of Thermopylae) looking like something from Eagle Annual.

Its great subject is the historical desire to make the world totally understandable by reason, and it itches us inside the debate. Doxiadis and his team make us feel how cataclysmic was the moment when Kurt Godel, the mathematician, in a lecture, announced: "There will always be unanswerable questions," and proved that arithmetic is "of necessity incomplete" – pulling the rug from under the study of logic. ("It's all over," remarked Russell's friend Von Neumann at the conference, meaning the whole of philosophical reasoning.) By the end, Russell tells listeners: "Take my story as a cautionary tale, a narrative argument against ready-made solutions." It's heartening that such sophisticated dialectics can survive a transition to the idiom of Batman and The Simpsons.

'Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth' is published by Bloomsbury on 7 September (£16.99). To order a copy for the special price of £16.15 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

// posted by Alice @ Wednesday, September 02, 2009 0 Comments