News Items from the Internet

Privatizing the Post Office

Edward S. Herman forwarded the article “Murderous Reform: A Plan to Privatize Postal Profits at Public Expense” by Gray Brechin in which Brechin notes that the National Academy of Public Administration released a “Work-in-Progress” report entitled “Restructuring the U.S. Postal System: The Case for a Hybrid Public-Private Postal System.” The Academy’s study is billed as an “Independent Review of a Thought Leader Proposal to Reform the U.S. Postal Service.” Unfortunately, no study conducted by a four-person panel chaired by David M. Walker, the former President and CEO of the libertarian Peter G. Peterson Foundation, can seriously claim either the independence or non-partisan objectivity that the Academy itself boasts.

The proposal is predictably one-dimensional as befits those who seemingly have little or no sense of the public service mission for which the Post Office was created 238 years ago. Nowhere in the proposal is there any mention of unions, let alone of living wages, so one can only presume that a primary means of reducing costs will be to drive down the income of those postal employees who remain after the USPS is radically downsized and diminished as proposed.

The report also simplistically states that “the root cause of the postal crisis is the historic change in how we communicate,” omitting other forces now undermining it, such as Congress itself. Nor does it mention the invaluable artistic, historic, social, environmental, and commercial function of many post offices currently being thrown onto the market with virtually no oversight.

It neglects to say that a commercial real estate firm (CBRE) chaired by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, is profiting from the sale of properties paid for by taxpayers for well over a century.

Finally, there is no serious discussion of alternatives characteristically described in such reports as “out of the box” for making the USPS solvent again, such as reviving the U.S. Postal Savings Bank and providing other public services currently available outside this country. That is because the self-proclaimed thought leaders who framed the report do not actually seek to save the Postal Service but to “reform” it virtually out of existence.

Unleashing the power of market forces did not work so well in 1929 or in 2008, and it will not do so again as those very forces seek to finish off the public sector as a competitor once and for all.

For the complete text of this article:savethepostoffice.com.

Protests Against Rapes in India

The Institute for Public Accuracy emailed an article by Elora Halim Chowdhury on the rapes in India and subsequent protests. She writes that: “The streets of India and various media outlets around the world have been ablaze the last three weeks with protests and stories about the brutal gang-rape on a moving bus in New Delhi of a 23-year-old medical student. The woman died of injuries from the attack on December 29. Six men were charged with the crimes just yesterday. Some reports in the western media have been pointing fingers at Indian culture, values and attitudes and its animalistic male population.”

Chowdhury points out that violence against women is a global phenomenon—including in the West. The statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours should be seen in context. As the Guardian notes, that equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately 4 times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; but in the U.S. only 24 percent of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction.

Reports in the Indian media have hinted at the depravity of the young men who committed this horrific crime pointing to their squalid living conditions in the Ravi Das slum colony, their lack of education, and poverty as breeders of criminality. While a link can be made between poverty, lack of education and repressive attitudes towards women, violence against women is by no means limited to poor communities. Gender based violence is pervasive, systematic and routine and it cuts across class, caste, religion and nation.

“Questions have been posed in many progressive circles about the mass protests in Delhi and elsewhere in India where thousands of people have taken to the streets crying for justice and changes to archaic laws. Cynical responses to these protests have pointed to the sheer ordinariness of sexual violence in India—against dalits, adivasis, and in ‘conflict’ areas such as Kashmir, the Northeast, and in Chattisgarh. Those cases do not nearly elicit such large-scale moral outrage. Often these are state-sanctioned violence against marginalized communities and rape is deployed with impunity as a weapon of domination. In one particular case the police officer who ordered torture and sexual assault of a tribal woman was later decorated with a national gallantry award, whereas the victim remains in prison. Police officers and politicians routinely make comments that normalize violence against women and blame the victims for their ‘rash and reckless’ behavior. Laws are more concerned with regulating women’s sexuality than protecting their bodily integrity and enabling gender parity.”

For the full text of this article:accuracy.org

Zero Dark Thirty

Tomdispatch.com forwarded “Learning to Love Torture, Zero Dark Thirty-Style” by Karen J. Greenberg in which she critiques the film Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Greenberg points out that Zero Dark Thirty could have been written by the tight circle of national security advisors who counseled President George W. Bush to create the post-9/11 policies that led to Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed “black sites” that added up to an offshore universe of injustice, and the grim torture practices—euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—that went with them. It’s also a film that those in the Obama administration—who have championed non- accountability for such shameful policies—could (and evidently did) get behind. It might as well be called Back to the Future, Part IV, for the film, like the country it speaks to, seems stuck forever in that time warp moment of revenge and hubris that swept the country just after 9/11.

Greenberg lists the seven steps that bring back the Bush administration and should help Americans learn how to love torture, Bigelow-style.

First, rouse fear: Zero Dark Thirty equates post-9/11 fears with the need for torture.

Second, the film undermines the law. Bigelow assumes the legality of the acts she portrays up close and personal, only hedging her bets toward the movie’s end when she indicates, in passing, that the legal system was a potential impediment to getting bin Laden.

Just as new policies were put in place to legalize torture, so the detention of terror suspects without charges or trials (including people who, we now know, were treated horrifically despite being innocent of anything) became a foundational act of the administration. Specifically, government lawyers were employed to create particularly tortured (if you’ll excuse the word) legal documents exempting detainees from the Geneva Conventions, thus enabling their interrogation under conditions that blatantly violated domestic and international laws.

Third, the film indulges in the horror. Zero Dark Thirty eerily mimics the obsessive, essentially fetishistic approach of Bush’s top officials to the subject. Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff David Addington, and John Yoo from the Office of Legal Counsel, among others, plunged into the minutiae of “enhanced interrogation” tactics, micro-managing just what levels of abuse should and should not apply, would and would not constitute torture after 9/11.

On victim after victim, the movie shows acts of torture in exquisite detail, Bigelow’s camera seeming to relish its gruesomeness: waterboarding, stress positions, beatings, sleep deprivation resulting in memory loss and severe disorientation, sexual humiliation, containment in a small box, and more

Fourth, the film dehumanizes the victims. As a result, there is never anyone for the audience to identify with who becomes emotionally distraught over the abuses and, in the process, desensitizes the audience in ways that should be frightening to us and make us wonder who we have become in the years since 9/11.

Fifth, the film never doubts that torture works. Given all this, it’s a small step to touting the effectiveness of torture in eliciting the truth. How many times does the American public need to be told that torture did not yield the results the government promised? How many times does it need to be said that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, 183 times obviously didn’t work? How many times does it need to be pointed out that torture can—and did—produce misleading or false information?

Sixth, the film holds no one accountable. The Obama administration made the determination that holding Bush administration figures, CIA officials, or the actual torturers responsible for what they did in a court of law was far more trouble than it might ever be worth. Bigelow takes advantage of this passivity to suggest to her audience that the only downside of torture is the fear of accountability.

The sad truth is that Zero Dark Thirty could not have been produced in its present form if any of the officials who created and implemented U.S. torture policy had been held accountable for what happened, or any genuine sunshine had been thrown upon it. With scant public debate and no public record of accountability, Bigelow feels free to leave out even a scintilla of criticism of that torture program.

Seventh, employ the media. While the Bush administration had the Fox television series “24” as a weekly reminder that torture keeps us safe, the current administration has Bigelow’s film on its side. It’s the perfect piece of propaganda, with all the appeal that naked brutality, fear, and revenge can bring.

Hollywood, that one-time bastion of liberalism, has provided the final piece in the perfect blueprint for the whitewashing of torture policy. If that isn’t a happily-ever-after ending, what is?

For the full text of this article:  TomDispatch.com.