U.S. ‘Dirty Oil’ Imports Set to Triple.. WHAT Is “Dirty Oil”??

U.S. imports of what environmentalists are calling “dirty oil” are set to triple over the next decade, raising concerns over the environmental impact of extracting it and whether pipelines can safely transport this Canadian oil.

The United States currently imports over half a million barrels a day of bitumen from Canada’s oil sands region, according to the Sierra Club. That number, Sierra Club says is set to grow to over 1.5 million barrels by 2020. That represents nearly 10% of the country’s current consumption.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s overall Canadian oil production numbers are in-line with the Sierra Club’s projected pace.

Bitumen is a heavy, tar-like oil. It needs to be heavily processed in order to be turned into more viscous, easier to refine, crude oil. Because it’s so thick, to make it more viscous and move it by pipeline, it gets diluted with natural gas liquids.

Besides the sheer amount of energy and water needed to process and extract bitumen, environmentalists say it’s more dangerous to move because it’s more corrosive to pipelines than regular crude.

While the industry maintains bitumen is safe, the danger of transporting it is one of the reasons there is so much opposition to the Keystone pipeline expansion, which is supposed to carry it, among other oil products.

“We’ve got all this unconventional crude, and we’re completely unprepared for it,” said Michael Marx, a senior campaign director at the Sierra Club. “It’s definitely more dangerous” than regular oil.

Marx says bitumen is not only more abrasive than traditional crude, it’s 15 to 20 times more acidic.

The Sierra Club, along with other environmental groups, recently put out a report showing that pipelines in Alberta, where bitumen is commonly transported, had 16 times the number of leaks than pipelines in the United States, which generally don’t carry it.

Plus, when bitumen does leak, environmentalists say it’s harder to clean up. Unlike regular oil, they say it’s heavier than water, meaning it will sink to the bottom of lakes, rivers or bays.

“We just don’t have the technical sophistication to vacuum oil off the bottom of a river,” he said.

Bitumen currently comes into this country via a pipeline running from Alberta to Wisconsin and in the original Keystone pipeline that terminates in Illinois.

But Canada is planning on vastly increasing the amount of oil — and bitumen — that it gets out of its oil sands region. To get that oil out, more infrastructure needs to be built.

Along with the proposed Keystone expansion, other ideas call for pipelines to Canada’s West Coast, to the Atlantic Coast through New England, and an expansion of rail lines. All of these routes would pass through sensitive ecological areas.

Canada’s oil industry rejects the “dirty oil” moniker.

They say it is more energy and water intensive than some forms of light crude, but not more so than many of the other heavy oils used in the Untied States from places like Mexico, Venezuela, or even California.

The pipeline industry says transporting bitumen isn’t any more dangerous than transporting regular crude.

They point to other studies that show it’s not any more abrasive or corrosive to pipelines.

The Alberta-to-U.S. bitumen pipeline leak comparison isn’t fair, they say, because Alberta uses a different metric to measure pipeline leaks.

More importantly, the industry says the pipeline companies would not agree to carry this stuff if it really was destroying their systems.

“No pipeline operator would want to spend billions of dollars to transport something their pipeline can’t handle,” said Andy Black, president of the U.S.-based Association of Oil Pipe Lines.

Plus, he said refineries, which are basically a massive twist of steel pipes, would not want this stuff if it really was more corrosive.

In case of a spill, Black said he hadn’t heard of any regulator suggesting bitumen is any more difficult to clean than regular crude.

The industry says that because the bitumen is blended with natural gas liquids, it does not sink in water.

For now, what all sides seem to agree on is the need for more study.

“Right now, there’s such an information deficit,” said Nathan Lemphers, a policy analyst at Pembina, a Canadian environmental group that supports oil sands development but thinks it needs more regulation.

The U.S. Department of Transportation, which regulates oil pipelines in the United States, said it is studying the transport of bitumen to see if it is any more dangerous, as required by the recently-passed pipeline safety bill.

The industry is hoping the study will prove them right.

“A study that is completed carefully will hopefully put to rest this allegation,” said Black.  

NO ONE Wants to be Romney’s VP Pick… How Strange? Does Short Straw get the Dubious Honor?

Florida Senator Marco Rubio appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday and was asked if he would accept a nomination for Vice President. Jeb Bush, Rubio’s mentor, has said he hopes Romney will choose Rubio as his Vice President. When asked by CNN’s Cindy Crowley, Rubio laughed it off and said, “that’s very nice of Jeb and I hope he’ll say yes if future President Romney asks him.” He later declined to say whether he would accept the nomination if asked. He said he wanted to respect Romney’s decision making process “Up to now it’s all been theoretical, we have a nominee now, and our nominee, Mitt Romney, the leader of the Republican Party, has a vice presidential process in place,” Rubio said. “And I think from this point moving forward, I think it’d be wise for all Republicans to kind of respect that process, myself included, and say moving forward, we’re going to let his process play itself out.”

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels appeared on Fox News Sunday and said he doesn’t expect Mitt Romney to ask him to be his Vice President. ”We haven’t had the conversation, and I don’t expect to have it… This is a hypothetical question that will probably stay that way.” Daniels went so far as to say that if Romney did tap him to be his VP, he would demand he reconsider. ”You will remember what William F. Buckley said when he ran for mayor of New York and was asked what he would do if he won. He said he would ‘demand a recount.,’ Rubio said. “I think I would demand reconsideration and send Mr. Romney a list of people I think could suit better.”

Senator Joe Leiberman appeared on Fox News Sunday to talk about the ongoing Secret Service scandal. He assured he wasn’t worried any of the agents leaked information during the party, but that potential enemies could use behaviour like this against them “The answer I’m going to give is not conclusive, but from everything I’ve heard up until this point, no evidence that information was compromised,” he said. But if agents are ”acting like a bunch of college kids on spring weekend [...] then people who are hostile to the U.S., people who actually want to attack the president of the United States, will begin to take advantage of that vulnerability.”

Leiberman, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, also appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday and said that he has launched an inquiry into the Secret Service scandal. He said he’ll send a list of questions to Secret Service director Marc Sullivan, and when the Secret Service have finished their investigation into the matter, then they’ll decide if they want to pursue it further. His main concern is whether the incident in Colombia was an exception, or if there is a pattern of poor behaviour:

Rep. Peter King told NBC’s Meet the Press that, “anyone who’s found to be guilty” will lose their job.” King added that he, “ would expect within the very near future to have several other Secret Service agents leaving the agency.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings and Senator Harry Reid appeared on CNN’s State of the Union to talk with Cindy Crowley. Reid said what the Secret Service agents did was stupid. “You don’t necessarily change behavior, but you certainly set the tone of what you want,” responded Cummings. “You can’t legislate people not being stupid, but certainly you can uphold the high standards of this organization…” Both agreed more firings were on the way.

David Axelrod appeared on CNN’s State of the Union to discuss close polling numbers between Obama and Romney. He told Cindy Crowley that people “don’t know” Mitt Romney yet. Axelrod said that when Americans realize what Romney’s ideas on the economy really are, they’ll think “this seems familiar. We tried this. This was a big failure.”

Axelrod also appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and made similar comments about Romney’s economic policies. “I think that Governor Romney at the early stage gets a bit of an advantage because he has this moniker of businessman and people assume that because of that that somehow he’ll bring some magic elixir to the economy,’ explained Axelrod, before adding, “but when they get under the hood and see what he’s actually proposing: more massive tax cuts for the wealthy, fewer rules for Wall Street, deep cuts in the things we need to grow – education, research and development, energy – I think people are gonna say, ‘hey we’ve seen this movie before and it didn’t work,’”

Marco Rubio was busted for accepting illegal donations

Florida Senator and current VP nomination contender Marco Rubio was busted for accepting illegal donations for his Senate campaign in 2010. Politico reports that the FEC fined Rubio in March for accepting $210,000 in “prohibited, excessive and other impermissible contributions” that Rubio failed to refund or “redesignate” within the campaign’s accepted time-frame. 

Co-Sponsor Marco Rubio also Dropped His Support for PIPA

Rubio’s crimes, per Politico:

Even after an internal audit, the Rubio campaign failed to identify more than $83,000 in improper or incorrectly characterized contributions, according to a March 19 agreement between the campaign and the FEC.

An FEC review showed that the improper donations came from more than 100 individuals, and in two cases, the campaign accepted corporate contributions, which are illegal. Marco Rubio for Senate also accepted nearly $26,000 for the primary race even after the primary election was already over.

Rubio was only fined $8,000 for his $210,000 mistake, which is all made more trivial when you consider the campaign rose over $21 million in total. Many are starting to think the news will prove to be a vulnerable target for attack ads against the Florida Senator, should he win the VP nomination. He’s repeatedly said that he doesn’t want the nomination, or that he won’t comment on not wanting it. 

This isn’t the first time Rubio’s had trouble with financial paper work, and made mistakes that could be seen as potential targets for opponents. As Daily Intel’s Andre Tartar points out, Rubio struggled with personal debt in 2010, and nearly had one his house’s fore-closed. There’s also the trouble with Rubio’s murky family history. 

Giant Cannibal Shrimp More Than a FOOT Long

Giant cannibal shrimp more than a FOOT long invade waters off Gulf Coast

• Tiger shrimp are native to Asia though there have been more sightings in recent years
• Prawns are known to grow to the size of lobsters and eat smaller shrimp

A big increase in reports of Asian tiger shrimp along the U.S. Southeast coast and in the Gulf of Mexico has federal biologists worried the species is encroaching on native species’ territory.

The shrimp are known to eat their smaller cousins, and sightings of the massive crustaceans have gone up tenfold in the last year, biologists say.

The black-and-white-striped shrimp can grow 13 inches long and weigh a quarter-pound, compared to eight inches and a bit over an ounce for domestic white, brown and pink shrimp. 

 

Behemoth: This black tiger shrimp was caught in 210 feet of water off the coast of Louisiana; an invasion of giant cannibal shrimp into America’s coastal waters appears to be getting worse

Family meal: Tiger shrimp have been known to eat their smaller cousins

Scientists fear the tigers will bring disease and competition for native shrimp. Both, however, can be eaten by humans.

‘They’re supposed to be very good,’ Pam Fuller, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN. ‘But they can get very large, sorta like lobsters.’

 The last U.S. tiger shrimp farm closed in Florida in 2004, without ever raising a successful crop, according to a USGS fact sheet about the species.

Reports of tiger shrimp in U.S. waters rose from a few dozen a year – 21 in 2008, 47 in 2009 and 32 in 2010 – to 331 last year, from North Carolina to Texas.

‘That’s a big jump,’ Ms Fuller told the Associated Press.

 

Worrying: If tiger shrimp continue to eat the other shrimp population, fisherman’s livelihoods may be affected (file photo)

 

Massive: Some scientists have compared to tiger prawns to be the size of small lobsters

And those are just the numbers reported to the government.

‘I’ve had fishermen tell me they have quit bringing them in. 

‘They are seeing large numbers in their catch – multiples per night,’ said Morris, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Centre for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research in Beaufort, North Carolina.

The increase ‘is the first indication that we may be undergoing a true invasion of Asian tiger shrimp,’ he said.

‘Nobody knows what happened to their stock. But they have not been commonly caught in the area where that fish farm was,’ she said.

 She said hundreds were caught along South Carolina, Georgia and Florida after a storm hit a South Carolina shrimp farm in 1988, but none was reported in U.S. waters for the next 18 years. Six were reported in 2006, and four in 2007.

To find out whether last year’s increase was a one-time spike or the vanguard of an invasion, the agencies are asking people to keep a wide eye for tiger shrimp, to report where and when they find them, and bring back frozen tiger shrimp to help learn where they’re coming from.

AND FROM CNN:

Scientists: Giant cannibal shrimp invasion growing

An invasion of giant cannibal shrimp into America’s coastal waters appears to be getting worse.

Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that sightings of the massive Asian tiger shrimp, which can eat their smaller cousins, were 10 times higher in 2011 than in 2010.

“And they are probably even more prevalent than reports suggest, because the more fisherman and other locals become accustomed to seeing them, the less likely they are to report them,” said Pam Fuller, a USGS biologist.

The shrimp, which can grow to 13 inches long, are native to Asian and Australian waters and have been reported in coastal waters from North Carolina to Texas.

They can be consumed by humans.

“They’re supposed to be very good. But they can get very large, sorta like lobsters,” Fuller said.

While they may make good eatin’ for people, it’s the eating the giant shrimp do themselves that worries scientists.

“Are they competing with or preying on native shrimp,” Fuller asked. “It’s also very disease-prone.”

To try to get those answers, government scientists are launching a special research project on the creatures.

“The Asian tiger shrimp represents yet another potential marine invader capable of altering fragile marine ecosystems,” NOAA marine ecologist James Morris said in a statement. “Our efforts will include assessments of the biology and ecology of this non-native species and attempts to predict impacts to economically and ecologically important species of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.”

Scientists are uncertain how many of the giant shrimp are in U.S. waters.

In 1998, about 2,000 of the creatures were accidentally released from an aquaculture facility in South Carolina. Three hundred of those were recovered from waters off South Carolina, Georgia and Florida within three months.

Farming of the giant shrimp ended in the United States, but they were caught again off Alabama, North Carolina, Louisiana and Florida.

Five were caught off Texas last year, according to Tony Reisinger, country extension agent for the Texas Sea Grant Extension Service.

Scientists don’t know if  there is a breeding population in U.S. waters. Tiger shrimp females can lay 50,000 to a million eggs, which hatch within 24 hours.  Or the shrimp may be carried here by currents or in ballast tanks of marine vessels.

The latest study will look at the DNA of collected specimens.

“We’re going to start by searching for subtle differences in the DNA of Asian tiger shrimp found here – outside their native range – to see if we can learn more about how they got here,” USGS geneticist Margaret Hunter said in a statement. “If we find differences, the next step will be to fine-tune the analysis to determine whether they are breeding here, have multiple populations, or are carried in from outside areas.”

Louboutin Does Cinderella Homage With New Glass Slipper

The fashion world’s love affair with fairy tales continues withChristian Louboutin designing a pair of shoes inspired by Disney’s Cinderella.

If you’ve given up on an actual pumpkin coach and a real Prince Charming, glass slippers can still be a part of your fairy tale – thanks to designer Christian Louboutin.

The animated picture is being rereleased this  fall, and in honor of this the French shoe guru will offer aninterpretation of the iconic “glass slipper” worn by the movie’s namesake.

The Louboutin glass slipper is being released in conjunction with Disney’s Diamond Edition of “Cinderella” this fall, a combo-pack which includes two Blu-Ray discs and a DVD with bonus features, celebrating the beloved classic animated feature, first released in 1950.

“I have been so lucky to have crossed paths with Cinderella, an icon who is so emblematic to the shoe world as well as the dream world,” the designer told Women’s Wear Daily on April 26

The shoes will include the Louboutin signature red soles, seen on Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham, and many more celebrities.

Fashionistas will have to wait until the summertime to see the shoe, although it is said the creator, famous for his red-soled talons, will put his own “magic touch” on the famous footwear.

This won’t be the first time the Brothers Grimm fairytale shoe has provides a source of inspiration.

Maison Martin Margiela created its own interpretation of the iconic glass slippers a few years back for a limited edition range. Disney Bridal offers princess-inspired gowns and Mouawad launched a Disney engagement ring line in 2009.

Fairy tales were also the theme for the Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2012 collection, which was described as “spring-like and magical” by creative director Marc Jacobs.

Meanwhile, Snow White also looks set to be a major source for fashion trends this year thanks to the release of a new Hollywood interpretation of the tale, Snow White and the Huntsman. The film has already inspired a Benefit Cosmetics beauty kit allowing fans to recreate protagonist Kristen Stewart’s pale beauty, and Charlize Theron’s Evil Queen character boasts an extensive haute couture wardrobe. 

Although the price of the slippers hasn’t been released, a pair of Louboutin shoes starts at about $600 and can cost up to several thousand dollars.

If you’re hoping to snag the slippers, check the Cinderella Facebook page for images and updates on the shoe.

Hugh Hefner Declares War on GOP Bedroom Politics

Hugh Hefner is ready for war — not against his former wives or girlfriends, but against conservative politicians thrusting their viewpoints into other people’s bedrooms.

In a rare move, the founder of Playboy magazine picks up his pen and writes an editorial in the May issue of the men’s magazine. The politics website Politico.com notes in his editorial, headlined “The War Against Sex,” Hefner blasts “repressed conservatives … [for] pounding on America’s bedroom door.”

“For months I have watched the rhetoric building,” writes Hefner. “Last October, in an interview with an evangelical blogger, Rick Santorum promised to defund birth control on the grounds that contraception is ‘a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.’

 

“Ron Paul was no better, believing that the birth control pill did not cause immorality but that immorality creates the problem of wanting to use the pill. Mitt Romney vowed to see a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and to overturn Roe v. Wade.” 

He also references Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, who was lambasted by conservative talk-show show Rush Limbaugh as “a slut” and “a prostitute” after testifying to congress about employers paying for birth control.

The Hef  promises not to let down his guard on America’s sexual freedom: “We won’t let that happen. … Welcome to the new sexual revolution.”

But not everyone is eager to have Hefner waving a flag for women’s rights. The women’s business news site, TheJaneDough.com, noted that while it appreciated Hefner’s defense of Fluke and his defense against GOP values, he’s a “notorious girlfriend collector” and “hardly one to preach about women’s rights.”

” Though many argue he had a role in the sexual revolution and provided lots of opportunities for women, he also sends the message that it’s acceptable to juggle multiple significant others at once, all the while objectifying them publicly.”

The GOP Does Not Even Know How Badly They Are Behaving

 Former Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman hinted he might depart the party in favor of a more-inclusive unnamed third party. Or did he? That seems to the debate following an interview with Jeff Greenfield.

 I like Huntsman. He had the right measure of conservative credentials along with a moderate approach to many of the most fervent issues in politics. And his experience in Asian foreign policy is unmatched in the history of U.S. presidential candidates. That’s what we need as China continues rev up its economic muscle.

So what makes Huntsman — always the loyal Republican – suggest he could depart the party of Lincoln within a few years? The answer is simple: The Republican Party is becoming so exclusional that it is difficult to reach out to independents and crossover Democrats.

 Huntsman has reluctantly given his endorsement to Mitt Romney. As a lifelong Republican, I can relate. I reluctantly will support Romney not because I think there is anything wrong with him — he’s more than qualified — just that he is uninspiring and, unfortunately, will have to move to the right on most issues to protect his base as the campaign unfolds.

 Last year, the Washington Post opined that Republican Party politics had devolved to a “coalition of intense policy demanders … own agendas that aim to get the voters.” Long gone are the days of campaigning on the major issues and doing what is right on all issues. These days, candidates from both parties are forced to pander to their base just to garner enough votes to win. Moderation in politics seems to be a bad thing, which is why candidates like Huntsman and the presumptive nominee Romney have such trouble gaining widespread support.

This has to change. We need more Republicans of the caliber of former Sen. Howard Baker. He knew how to govern and to compromise without sacrificing his principles. That’s the cure for America today.

Jon Huntsman Fed Up With the GOP Decides to Leave

It’s an exhilarating, if somewhat mystifying, experience to find yourself a supporting player in a modern media maelstrom. It’s even more instructive to learn that a dust-up over a few words can obscure a much more significant message.

“My first thought was, this is what they do in China on party matters if you talk off script.” 

Those words were spoken Sunday night by Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor and Republican presidential candidate, in a public interview with me at New York’s 92nd Street Y. Huntsman was describing how his comments about the potential appeal of a third party got him disinvited to speak at a Republican National Committee event in Florida.

Before dawn, websites were reporting the quote under headlines like “Huntsman compares GOP to Communist Party of China.” By sunrise, Huntsman was on “Morning Joe,” scoffing that “bottom-feeder” blogs had taken his comments out of context. By midday,Buzzfeed–the target of Huntsman’s critique–had posted a lengthy video excerpt from my interview to argue that no, he had not been taken out of context.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Huntsman was painting with a brush so broad as to compare the Republican Party with Communist China. For one thing, Huntsman is not yet under house arrest with his Internet access forbidden.

But here’s what the dust-up missed. If you take all of what he said to me over some 90 minutes, it is all but certain that John Huntsman is not going to be a Republican much longer.

Yes, he has endorsed Mitt Romney for president, though his expression when he does so has all the spontaneous pleasure of the star of a hostage tape. He cites President Barack Obama’s failure to work the levers of power to accomplish change–intriguingly, he contrasts Obama not with a Republican president, but with Bill Clinton–and Romney’s understanding of the free market and job creation. (Huntsman was animated in scorning Republican candidates who called for a hard line on China or protective tariffs–notions that Romney has enthusiastically embraced.)

The real message he is carrying is that both parties–the “duopoly,” as he calls it–are paralyzed by polarization and inertia, and that the Republican Party in particular is pursuing an “unsustainable” course.

Why, I asked him, shouldn’t Republicans learn from their 2010 midterm victory that an unswerving opposition to Obama is politically profitable?

Because, he replied, “It’s unsustainable. It can’t last more than a cycle or two. … With the political center hollowed out, the American people are going to say, who’s going to populate the center where you’ll get things done.”    

His distance from the party whose nomination he sought goes beyond tactics. When he recalled his first appearance on a debate stage with his rivals, he said he remembers thinking two thoughts. First: “The barriers to entry are very low.” Second: “In a nation of 315 million people … is this the best we can do?” 

If he was including himself, this is a remarkable example of self-deprecation. If he was talking about his rivals, it is an extraordinary indictment, because it includes the man he is supporting for president.

There was more to what Huntsman said than party politics. Listening to him describe his concerns over the emerging generation of Chinese leaders–because they were shaped not by the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but by enormous economic growth, they‘re likely to be more nationalistic and “hubristic,” he said–you realize you’re listening to a political figure who served as an ambassador to three Asian nations (Singapore and Indonesia as well as China). His understanding of the Asian-Pacific region surpasses that of any presidential candidate in history.

When he talks of his three urgent priorities for change—term limits, campaign finance reform, and congressional redistricting–you can detect a touch of naiveté. Term limits have been a reality for years in California, where they have fed, not halted, a dysfunctional government. Campaign finance reform is beyond the reach of any political leader unless and until the Supreme Court stops thinking of money as speech, leading it to strike down such laws on First Amendment grounds. 

You can also hear in his critique of his party the voice of a candidate who tasted enormous popularity–he won re-election as governor of Utah with 77 percent of the vote–and who may have been wounded by the peremptory dismissal of his presidential prospects. (My belief is that his campaign was doomed as soon as he became President Obama’s ambassador to China. In this political climate, no Republican who served under Obama was going to win the GOP presidential nomination.) The charge of “sour grapes” or “sore loser” will not be far from the lips of many Republicans.

Why does this add up to a conviction on my part that Huntsman has one foot out the door of the Republican Party, and is likely placing a bet on his belief that a third party will be increasingly attractive to the electorate, perhaps not this year, but by 2016?       

One reason isw he contrasted Republicans from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon with the current party orthodoxy. Could Ronald Reagan be nominated today? I asked. “Likely, no,” he said. 

And here’s what he said when a member of the audience posed this question to him: “Given the present direction and positions the party has taken … is there room for people like you?”

Well, he answered, “I’m sitting here as a Republican.” But after he talked with great enthusiasm about the rise of the unaffiliated voter and the challenge to the political duopoly, I posed one more question.

“Why do I get the feeling,” I asked him, “that if we have this conversation a couple of years from now, you will not be sitting here as a Republican?”

“Because,” he said with a smile, “you’re a good journalist.”

Flattery aside, the answer couldn’t have been clearer.

Why Autistic Children Are Bullied More — and Bully in Return

Despite the growing awareness, bullying is still common in schools these days. Some kids are bullied and some bully others. But, as a new study finds, kids with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have an even harder time with bullying, being many times more likely than their neurotypical siblings to have experienced it in their lifetimes. Even more disturbing, autistic kids may be intentionally triggered into having meltdowns by bullies who know how to push the right buttons. 

The new study, from Kennedy Krieger’s Interactive Autism Network, surveyed families with autistic and non-autistic siblings from all over the country, asking about their experience with bullying in the past and present. 

Almost two-thirds of autistic children had been bullied at some point in their lives, and they were three times more likely than neurotypical kids to be bullied in the past three months. This was even true for home-schooled autistic children, who were sometimes educated at home precisely because of the bullying issue. “After a horrible year in 3rd grade,” said one mother, “where he was clinically diagnosed as depressed (he has always been anxious), I pulled my son out of public school and am homeschooling him this year. He is doing much, much better without the constant name calling and being singled out for his ‘weird’ behaviors!” 

The three most common types of bullying were verbal, or, in other words, psychological in nature: “being teased, picked on, or made fun of” (73%); “being ignored or left out of things on purpose” (51%), and “being called bad names” (47%). But almost a third of autistic children also experienced physical bullying – being shoved, pushed, slapped, hit, or kicked. 

Even more disturbing was the fact that over half of the autistic children surveyed had experienced intentional triggering of meltdowns or had been “provoked into fighting back.” One mother said, “Often kids try to upset her because they find it funny when she gets upset and cries. She is overly emotional, and they seem to get a kick out of this.” 

Bullying was most pronounced in regular public schools (43%), but better in special education public schools (30%), and lowest in regular private schools and special education private schools (28% and 18%, respectively). 

Oddly, when the team broke down bullying as a function of the different types of autism (Asperger syndrome, autism, and “other ASD”), they found that children with Asperger syndrome were actually the most bullied group. Since Asperger is a higher functioning form of autism, this is peculiar. The researchers aren’t sure why this is true, but one hypothesis is that it’s because people with Asperger are often highly intelligent but can still have considerable social deficits, which makes them, in effect, the “perfect target.” 

How does your family cope with bullying?Children with autism are also more likely to bully others: About 20% of kids with autism bullied (vs. only 8% of neurotypical children). According to the report, many of these kids may actually be both bully and victim, which is somewhat more common in children with developmental or emotional problems. Children with ASD who bully may do it unintentionally. “My son doesn’t realize he is bullying,” said one parent. “He is trying to get other kids to pay attention to him so he does it by grabbing their ball away from them or getting ‘in their face’ when they say to stop.” Another parent said, “Our boy… may take an object from another child or scream when unhappy but any purposeful cruelty, he would never do.” 

And for autistic children who are being bullied and bully in return, they may not have the social skills to avoid or to get themselves out of the situation. According to the report, “Unlike victims who are more passive, bully-victims insult their tormentors or otherwise try to fight back in a way that only makes the situation worse.” 

Finally, a critical issue that the report brings up is whether bullying may cause people with autism to develop more mental health problems as a result. Some studies have suggested that any child who is bullied has a greater risk for everything from headaches and stomachaches to anxiety, depression, and suicide. 

Parents, caregivers and schools work hard to help kids with autism gain social skills and emotional tools, and the idea that bullying could negate this work is disheartening. “Bullying can undo all our efforts,” Connie Anderson, of the Interactive Autism Network, told NPR. “I think that’s the most devastating thing about it. Children on the spectrum can be anxious anyway. This can just put them over the top and undo all the good that everyone’s trying to do.” 

Autistic Child Bullied and Taunted By TEACHERS

Stuart Chaifetz Secretly Tapes His Autistic Son at School, Discovers He’s Being Bullied by Teachers

By Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine | Parenting 

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After sending his son to school wearing a wire, Stuart Chaifetz found out that his son, Akian, was being bullied …When his 10-year-old son, Akian, started getting into trouble at school, Stuart Chaifetz was stunned. The notes from Horace Mann Elementary School in Cherry Hill, N.J., said that Akian, who has autism, was having violent outbursts and hitting his teacher and his aide – behavior that the boy had never exhibited before. 

“I could not understand why this was happening,” Chaifetz, a 44-year-old animal rights activist in New Jersey, wrote on his website. “I had never witnessed Akian hit anyone, nor could I dream of him lashing out as had been described to me.” 

In October 2011, he met with Akian’s teachers and school therapists. A behaviorist was called in, but during several classroom visits he didn’t see Akian become violent. “He tried to create a scenario that would push Akian so far that he would lash out,” Chaifetz explained. “And Akian did not.” 

“If Akian was pushed and didn’t do anything, what was setting him off?” his dad wondered. After six months of meetings yielded no answers, he decided that he needed to know what was happening in his son’s class. Like Akian, all of the other kids in his class also have autism, and complications from the disorder prevent them from being able to communicate to their parents about what goes on in the classroom. 

“The morning of February 17, I put a wire on my son, and I sent him to school,” Chaifetz says in a video he created to showcase the audio clips. “What I heard on that audio was so disgusting, vile, and just an absolute disrespect and bullying of my son, that happened not by other children, but by his teacher, and the aides — the people who were supposed to protect him. They were literally making my son’s life a living hell.” 

The recordings are raw and intense. Angry adults yell at kids to “shut up,” “shut your mouth,” and “knock it off.” Adults have inappropriate personal conversations in front of the children, discussing how drunk they were the night before, complaining about their husbands, and talking in detail about adult issues. More than once, an adult goads Akian to the point of tears — and then laughs at him. 

“Go ahead and scream,” one adult hisses menacingly at Akian. “Because guess what? You’re going to get nothing… until your mouth is shut.” 

And later: “Oh, Akian, you are a bastard.” 

“The six and a half hours of audio I had proved that my son wasn’t hitting the teacher because there was something wrong with him — he was lashing out because he was being mocked, mistreated and humiliated,” Chaifetz writes on his website, No More Teacher/Bully. “His outbursts were his way of expressing that he was being emotionally hurt at school.” 

Chaifetz gave the entire six-and-a-half-hour recording to the Cherry Hill School district (you can hear more of the clips here). One aide, Jodi Sgouros, was fired. Another aide and the teacher, whom theCollingswood Patch identifies as Kelly Altenburg, were reassigned but not fired. 

“I don’t know why the teacher wasn’t fired,” Chaifetz writes on his blog. “Maybe the District had no choice; perhaps tenure or HR regulations did not permit them to do so. I know that they were sincere and shocked when they found out what happened. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in this.” 

On Tuesday, officials at the Horace Mann School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, directed calls from Yahoo! Shine to the Cherry Hill School District’s offices; a call to a spokesperson there was not immediately returned. Cherry Hill Public School District spokesperson Susan Bastnagel told the Collingswood Patch on Tuesday only that the incident is “an internal personnel matter that the district took seriously and handled appropriately.” 

Chaifetz disagrees, and has started a Facebook page and launched a petition at Change.org calling for the teacher’s dismissal. He’s already gathered nearly 18,500 signatures. “No one who treats children like that, who calls them vicious names, who humiliates them, who batters them verbally, deserves to be a teacher,” Chaifetz says in the video.

“How is it possible that teachers and staff can do these things, and you have evidence — not just accusations, but evidence — and they’re still teaching?” he said in an interview with Babble.com. To me, that’s the bigger outrage here. How many times has this happened before? How many times will it happen again if I remain quiet?”

For his part, Chaifetz says that what he really wants from the teacher and aides involved is a public apology and a willingness to take responsibility for their actions. 

“I want an apology, not for me, but so one day I can play this video back for my son and say Akian, you didn’t deserve anything that happened to you,” he says in the video. “I’m not going to sue anybody. I’m not going to file a lawsuit. It’s not about money. It’s about dignity. This is to reclaim my son’s dignity.” 

Leaf Company Horns In On Andrew Luck’s Fame on Eve of Draft.

Andrew Luck is being sued just before the draft

By MJD | Shutdown Corner 

Getty Images

Warning: This story shows how desperate Leaf Company is to drum up business. In a highly unusual move they have reversed the course of normal legal contests to try and get fame for themselves on the eve of the draft.  Have they no shame?? How about Ethics?? 

It’s a big week in the life of Andrew Luck, who will be the No. 1 draft pick, but it won’t be 100 percent pleasant. Amidst the pre-draft publicity tour, the draft night celebration and all the upcoming press obligations in Indianapolis, he’ll also have to worry about a lawsuit. He’s being sued by Leaf Trading Cards.

The Leaf people produced a few Andrew Luck cards, using a picture of him at the 2008 U.S. Army All-American Bowl, a high school All-Star game. Luck’s people sent them a cease-and-desist letter, saying that they don’t have the legal right to profit from an image of Luck. The Leaf people say they do indeed have the right to use images from the All-American Bowl. Now they’re suing Luck.

Here’s a snippet of a press release from Leaf, via PFT:

“Leaf Trading Cards is disappointed that it was forced to submit this matter to the judicial system,” lawyer O. Luke Davis, III said in a press release. “We are confident, however, that the court will find that Leaf has the right to produce and sell the Andrew Luck trading cards.”

I still don’t get why they’re suing Luck. Couldn’t they just ignore the cease-and-desist and keep doing what they’re doing, and if they eventually have to defend themselves from a Luck lawsuit, then just do that? Isn’t that how this typically works? If anything, I think Andrew Luck should sue them for putting his name in the same sentence as “Leaf” so close to the NFL draft.

Perhaps it’s the case that the Leaf people saw an opportunity to get their name in the newspaper and pounced on it. There’s more than one way to make money off of Andrew Luck’s name, I guess. One just hopes that they pay closer attention to their spelling in their legal documents than they do with their trading cards. Oof. That’s embarrassing. Call more attention to that, Leaf Company.

Women Willing to Date You For A Price… WOW

What’s Your Price – Website Reviews

REVIEW NUMBER ONE:

Review of WhatsYourPrice.com

Whats Your Price – Homepage

WhatsYourPrice.com intrigued me from the very start because of all the hype it’s gotten since it was launched by the same people from SeekingArrangement.com. What’s got people’s panties in a twist over this new sugar daddy dating site? Well, it’s probably the blatant honesty that’s freakin’ everyone out. This doesn’t work like your average dating site where you register and then pay a membership to get the most from the service. The deal here is that you offer payment to the people that you want to date and if your offer is accepted, then you get to arrange your first date with that person. We all know that a sugar daddy-sugar baby relationship is based around money. The sugar baby is rewarded financially for the time she devotes to her sugar daddy, but for some reason putting it out there with tag lines like “For the Generous – Date beautiful people – Guaranteed” and “For the Attractive – Get Paid for Dating – Guaranteed”, has got some people upset. Well, I say kudos for the honesty and clarity! This honest and real approach is the same reason why I appreciated their other site in the first place so how can I not marvel at the fact that WhatsYourPrice.com takes it a step further?

REVIEW TWO:

Dating Site Asks Women What’s Your Price, Is It Really Prostitution?

WEDNESDAY OCT 19, 2011 – BY BRITNI DANIELLE

When I first heard the commercial for the dating site WhatsYourPrice.com I thought it was a joke. As I listened to the description of the site–which allows users to set prices they’d either pay or charge for dates–I couldn’t help thinking it sounded a little like prostitution.

I made a note to myself to go to the website to check it out (for curiosity’s sake) and, yeah, I’m still convinced that it’s verrrrrry close to prostitution.

WhatsYourPrice.com breaks users into two categories: The attractive (women) and The generous (men). It allows women to create profiles and name their own price for a date. So, if you think you’re worth $100, you can charge that amount for a first date. The man would then pay you $100, and you’d make money simply by going out on the date. On the flip side, a “generous” user can say he’d pay $100 for a date, and interested women can vie for his interest and snag a date that would pay them (the woman) $100.

Although the site insists the money is to illustrate interest and not sex, it sounds a little creepy to me. But according to the site’s testimonials seems to work.

One user wrote: “I had a wonderful date with a wonderful guy on Sat Oct.1st.He was a gentleman.He flew in from NYC,w had a great time.And the way he gave me the money was very creatve.So thank you for your site.”

While another (a Black woman), said: “It was nerve racking at first, wasnt really sure what to talk about but as the date progressed (and the drinks kept rolling in) It turned out to be a wonderful date and I left with cash in hand!!!”

Yet another user wrote: “I had a wonderful evening with a true gentleman!
He gave me 300. for our date and I enjoyed the evening so much we have a second date planned next week! I can hardly wait to see him again!”

And the most interesting review so far, included a morning after: “Within the first 10 days I have been on four dates through the site, and what’s interesting is that the money aspect means something different each time. I had one date give me back my money… the next morning. In bed.”

One thing I noticed as I scrolled through the site was that most of the testimonials included descriptions of cash exchanges, shopping sprees, and 5-star restaurants. But what I didn’t notice very much of (besides people of color), however, were love connections. Most of the women raved about the “polite” and “sweet” men they met, but very few talked about meeting “the one.”

I know dating can be tough, but by making men pay for not only the date (going dutch isn’t an option), but also the mere OPPORTUNITY to go out on the date, seems a little weird.

But what do you think? Does paying for a chance to date weed out the lames or is this site just another place to advertise the oldest job in the world?

Would you sign up?

REVIEW NUMBER THREE:

From Freakonomics

Freakonomics is no stranger to studying prostitution, as discussed in Superfreakonomics. We are slightly less familiar, however, with a gray area of prostitution — “dating websites” that connect rich customers with attractive poor customers. Though these are by no means a new phenomena, a website has recently come to our attention that uses a dating website platform to ask what we all wonder about in one context or another: what’s your price?

Whatsyourprice.com auctions off dates and claims to be inspired by the charity dating model. It is divided into two halves: “Date Generous People” and “Date Attractive People” — apparently you’re either looking for one or the other. Upon a cursory read, the generous users seem to be overwhelmingly male, and the attractive users overwhelmingly female (and pictured in bathing suits). Each profile includes an “About Me” section and a “First Date Expectations” section. Several “attractive” members, it should be noted, specify that they will not fly Economy Class.

The homepage states:

Stop wasting time. Successful and generous people will pay for the chance to impress you on a first date. Traditional online dating can cost you both time and money. Here, you‘ll enjoy meeting people who will fight to show you they are worth your time.
Join Now, it’s 100% Free

Founded by Brandon Wade, the site purports to simply be upholding the tenets of capitalism. Wade describes himself as a graduate of MIT and the founder of websites seekingarrangement.com and seekingmillionaire.com.  Are you noticing a theme here? In his own words:

When capitalism is mixed in with dating, all of a sudden people start concluding “it must be prostitution.” But does paying money for a cup of coffee every morning mean Starbucks is engaging in prostitution? Does paying for gas every time you fill up at the gas station mean that Mobil or BP is pimping? Does donating money to the Church every Sunday morning equate religion to prostitution? Obviously not, and obviously buying a First Date isn’t either.

The original homepage included a man surrounded by five women holding price tags; it has since been changed to something more demure. The site has three easy steps: uploading a profile, negotiating a price, and setting up a date. It also includes some helpful dating etiquette reminiscent of craigslist warnings:

* Do Not pay or ask anyone for payment prior to meeting for a date
* If someone asks you to send money by Western Union, report them immediately
* Generous members are expected to pay for the date (there’s no going dutch here)
* Our advice: Pay 50% of the date at the start of the date, and 50% at the end
* Do Not accept personal checks or cashier’s checks – there’s just too much fraud

One wonders, though, what services are being provided in a date. Conversation? Company? Something more? The “First Date Expectations” section on individual profiles doesn’t clarify much, either.  In his blog posts, Wade often quantifies aspects of dating in terms of age, gender, income, etc. He gives insights into what kind of money is involved in these dates and writes:

Results of our study:  Men seeking casual or no-strings-attached relationships paid an average of $121 for a first date, whereas single men looking for serious long-term relationships paid an average of $194 for the opportunity of finding love.  However, men who seek only casual or no-strings attached relationships tend to be serial daters and more prolific, paying for first dates over 2.1 times more, than commitment-minded men.

Whatsyourprice.com has been featured on several media outlets, including HuffPo, the San Francisco Chronicle and Fox Business News.

So we must ask, dear reader, what’s your price?

The 70′s Show Stars Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis Reunited in Reality

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis are not doing much to squash rumors that they’re dating. One week after photos surfaced of the two on a sushi dinner date, the former “That ’70s Show” co-stars spent a four-day weekend together holed up in the beach town of Carpinteria, California, just south of Santa Barbara. When they did come out of hiding , it was for more sushi, Starbucks, and to pick up sunflowers, which the casually-dressed “Black Swan” actress was seen carrying around before they hopped back in Kutcher’s Lexus. One thing’s for sure: The two are clearly not trying to impress each other. While the “Two and a Half Men” actor wore shorts paired with hiked-up red socks, Kunis looked like she had just rolled out of bed with her usually straight hair curly and messy.

Although they insist they are not friends with benefits, a source close to Kutcher, 34, tells People that he has long held a torch for 28-year-old Kunis, who played his girlfriend on the Fox series. “He was so in love with her for a while when they worked together. He thought she was a goddess, was always talking about how beautiful she is. But she was with Macaulay [Culkin] for a lot of that time and also just generally gave off a not interested vibe.”

But now that she is no longer with the “Home Alone” star (they split in 2010) and Kutcher separated from wife Demi Moore last November amid reports he had cheated, the time could be right. Or, this could just be Kutcher sowing his wild oats to make up for the eight years he was with Moore, who’s 15 years his senior. “He’s not looking for anything serious,” another source tells People. “He always talked about Mila like a little sister. They’re definitely close pals and have been. I think if anything she’s a good time for him.”

Yeah, but is he good for her?

and from another source:

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis may deny being more than friends, but their actions speak louder than words.
 
The longtime pals and former “That ‘70s Show” costars have set the rumor mill ablaze by spending some quality time together during a recent three-day getaway to the coastal town of Carpinteria, Calif.

According to People, the genetically-blessed twosome traveled from Los Angeles to the quaint ocean side city south of Santa Barbara last Thursday. They reportedly had a sushi lunch date the following day, before photographers spotted Kutcher and Kunis buying sunflowers and blueberries from a roadside fruit stand.

On Saturday, the pair seemingly spent plenty of time in private as they weren’t seen publicly again until the next day, when they headed back to L.A. Kutcher was spotted taking in the Lakers game solo Sunday night.
 
In addition to their weekend retreat, Kutcher, 34, and Kunis, 28, spent some one-on-one time with each other on April 15. The two were photographed furniture shopping together before grabbing dinner at Asanebo in Studio City and then later retiring to Kutcher’s new Hollywood Hills home.
 
Kunis’ rep denied reports last week that the pair’s friendship had turned romantic.
 
“They have been friends for years and had dinner with a bunch of people that night,” the actress’ spokeswoman told the Daily News at the time.
 
Though reps have not commented on the pair’s latest outing together, a source told People that a romance may be under way.
 
The “Two and a Half Men” star has reportedly had a longtime crush on Kunis, who played his on-and-off love interest on-screen for eight years on their FOX sitcom.
 
“He was so in love with her for a while when they worked together,” the source told the magazine. “He thought she was a goddess, was always talking about how beautiful she is. But she was with Macaulay (Culkin) for a lot of that time and also just generally gave off a not interested vibe.”
 
“It never happened, but I’m not surprised by this – at all,” added the source.
 
Still, Kutcher may not be looking to settle down with the “Friends with Benefits” actress anytime soon.
 
“He always talked about Mila like a little sister. They’re definitely close pals and have been,” said the source. “I think if anything she’s a good time for him. But he’s not looking for anything serious.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/mila-kunis-ashton-kutcher-romance-rumors-heat-costars-weekend-getaway-article-1.1066620#ixzz1t15WLFNn

Displaced Palestinians Face Discrimination in Arab World

Discrimination in the diaspora

Many Palestinians face social and professional restrictions living in Arab countries.

Since the establishment of the state of Israel, the number of Palestinians living in Arab countries has grown to nearly five million. They are often denied citizenship, and have few legal or economic rights in their host countries.

Many point to a failure of integration as the root cause of such discrimination. Arab host governments claim this is done to maintain pressure for the “right of return.”

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Since the establishment of the state of Israel, the number of Palestinian refugees has grown to 4.6 million, the vast majority in Arab countries. Though many were born outside of Palestine, or have lived elsewhere for the majority of their lives, Palestinian refugees still have few legal rights and limited economic opportunities. This cartoon reads “the trapped Palestinian refugees on the Jordanian-Iraqi border.”

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1. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the main organisation responsible for providing services to Palestinian refugees, only operates in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories, Syria, or Lebanon. Below are the most recent figures available for the number of Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA criteria.

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   In addition, the figures for Palestinians in other Arab countries include 250,000 in Saudi Arabia, 70,000 in Egypt, and 3,000 in both Kuwait and Iraq (each down from much larger figures before the first and second Gulf wars).
   
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   Discrimination is common against Palestinian refugees in Arab countries. Below, a clip from an MTV Lebanon programme demeans the situation of Palestinians. Lebanon’s Christian parties are strongly against granting rights to Palestinians, saying loosening of restrictions would lead to tawteen, or naturalization.
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   In this video, Queen Rania of Jordan speaks at an anniversary commemoration for UNRWA. Although Jordan is the only Arab country where Palestinian citizens are granted citizenship and voting rights, political and social discrimination against Palestinians still exists. Raw footage of a brawl between Palestinian-Jordanian and “East Bank” Jordanian football fans is available here.
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   In late 2010 a socioeconomic survey of Palestinians in Lebanon found that 63% of working age Palestinians in Lebanon were unemployed, compared to 9% of Lebanese citizens. The same study showed that Palestinian refugees spent $170 per month on average. This video shows the conditions of one refugee camp in Beirut.
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   The Nahr al Bared camp, one of the few sites of social and economic integration for Palestinians and Lebanese, was destroyed in 2007 in a clash between the Lebanese forces and the group Fatah al Islam. The destruction of the camp displaced over 27,000 residents, many of whom have since returned even though the camp has not been rebuilt. In June 2008, four Gulf countries promised to foot half of the $328 million to rebuild the camp, but no money from that pledge was received until Saudi Arabia donated $25 million in June 2009 and another $10 million in 2011. The Dubai Red Crescent also donated $6 million.
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   Iraqi Palestinians mostly fled to neighbouring Jordan or Syria after the American invasion in 2003, but some thousands were trapped in refugee camps on the borders with Iraq. Though some conditions have improved since the height of the war, refugees still in in the border camps lack legal status, freedom of movement and freedom to work.
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   An art installation, “Return of the Soul,” was displayed in Beirut and Edinburgh commemorating the Nakba. Below, Ghada Karmi introduces the installation. More photos are available here.
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Why Arab women still ‘have no voice’

Why Arab women still ‘have no voice’

Amal al-Malki, a Qatari author, says the Arab Spring has failed women in their struggle for equality.

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Is the Arab Spring a movement leading to more freedom and equal rights?

Not for women, according to Amal al-Malki, a Qatari author who is very concerned about the rights of women in the Arab world.

She is largely skeptical of recent developments and says, if anything, the Arab Spring has only highlighted the continuing “second-class citizenship” of women in the region.

She argues that despite some progress made Arab women are still largely absent in the public arena.

“We have no voice. We have no visibility… And I am telling you, this is why women’s rights should be institutionalised, it should not be held hostage at the hand of political leaderships who can change in a second, right? Governments should be held responsible for treating men and women equally.”

Will the Arab Spring deliver its promises to everyone? Or is there reason to believe that women will be left behind? What has changed for women in the Arab world?

On this episode of Talk to Al Jazeera, we talk to Amal al-Malki, a woman not afraid to ring the alarm bells, about women’s rights in the Arab world, political and social empowerment and Islamic feminism.

Work Sharing: The Way for States to Reduce Unemployment in the US

Individual US states should implement a ‘work sharing’ policy of reducing worker hours rather than laying them off.

Washington, DC - It is clear that we are not going to see any major action from the federal government to reduce unemployment any time soon. There is no hope that this Congress will support another round of stimulus and not much more hope from the next Congress, even if the Democrats somehow regain control.

What that means is that we are looking at a long, painfully slow recovery. Assuming that the economy continues to generate 200,000 jobs a month, roughly its average over the last three months, we will not get back to more normal levels of unemployment until somewhere near the end of the decade.

And it is certainly plausible that progress will be worse. That story assumes a recovery lasting for more than a decade, something the United States has never experienced.

This means that we should expect to see a labour market in which millions of workers will be unable to find jobs for long into the future. They will be unable to adequately support their families, and may even lose their homes, all because the folks in charge of running economic policy don’t know what they are doing.

US unemployment drops to 8.2 per cent

While economic policy is best made at the national level, as a result of the bill that extended the payroll tax cut, there is a policy that states can pursue that might make a real difference. This bill included a provision that calls for the federal government to pick up the tab for state spending on work sharing as part of the state’s unemployment insurance programme. This means that states can save themselves a great deal of money if they can encourage employers to use work sharing as an alternative to layoffs.

Work sharing, formally known as “short work”, is an arrangement whereby employers reduce the hours of their existing work force instead of laying off workers. For example, if an employer was going to lay off 10 workers, she can instead have the same reduction in labour time by reducing the hours of 50 workers by 20 per cent.

Under the unemployment insurance system, workers would typically be entitled to roughly half of their pay if they were laid off. Under the short work system, the government would make up roughly half of the lost wages for workers who were put on short time. In this example, if their hours were cut back by 20 per cent, the government would make up half of the lost wages, or 10 per cent of their total wages. This leaves the worker earning 90 per cent of their former wages while working 80 per cent of the time.

The bill that extended the payroll tax cut included a provision that was taken from a bill originally proposed by Senator Jack Reed and Representative Rosa DeLauro that reimburses states for the money that they spend on their short work programme. This gives the 23 states that already have short work programmes in place an enormous incentive to promote work sharing as an alternative to laying off workers.

While the unemployment benefits that would be paid to laid off workers come directly out of the state’s unemployment insurance fund, the state would be reimbursed 100 per cent for the money paid to workers who have their hours cut. The states that don’t currently have programmes in place could also receive federal money to establish short work programmes.

No relief in US unemployment drop for teens

At the moment, less than 40,000 workers nationwide are on short work programmes. To increase this number, states will first have to publicise the system. Many employees don’t even know that the programme exists.

States should also try to increase the flexibility of the system. Most of these programmes were put in place more than 30 years ago. In many cases they are overly bureaucratic. For example, an employer may be required to specify in advance exactly which workers will have their hours reduced, and by how much time over a three to six month period. Such restrictions can make the short work system sufficiently unattractive that few employers will want to go this route.

However, there have been notable success stories. Germany’s unemployment rate is lower today than at the start of the recession largely because it has encouraged employers to keep workers on the payroll working fewer hours rather than laying them off. Its growth has been no better than growth in the United States over the last four years. 

There are also examples in the United States of companies that use work sharing effectively. In addition to keeping workers on the job, companies also benefit from retaining skilled employees. As a result, when demand picks up they need to only increase hours rather than search for and train new workers.

There also could be longer term benefits from work sharing. Workers in the United States spend many more hours on the job than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. We are the only wealthy country that does not guarantee workers some amount of paid vacation, sick leave, or parental leave. If work sharing gets workers used to the idea of working less for somewhat less pay, perhaps it will lead to a new push for getting the sort of guaranteed time off that workers in other countries take for granted. That would be a huge bonus from a policy that at the moment also offers the best hope for getting unemployment down to more acceptable levels before the end of the decade.

French Like Americans… BOTH are Unimpressed With Presidential Candidates

French campaign fails to enthuse voters

Presidential poll predicted to see high voter abstention as candidates fail to connect with people hungry for change.

PARIS, France - France might be facing some of the toughest economic challenges in decades, but many voters are unconvinced that any of the candidates running for the presidency are capable of rescuing the country from the current crisis.

Voting is not compulsory in France, and an opinion poll published by Ifop for the Journal de Dimanche weekly newspaper on Sunday predicted 32 per cent of the population would abstain from voting this coming weekend.

This is particularly high, even compared to the 2002 presidential election, which saw a 28 per cent abstention rate in the first round.

The rate of non-participation plummeted to 16 per cent in 2007, an election that pitted the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy against the Socialist Party’s Segolene Royale. Both candidates then had broken the mould of what their respective parties traditionally represented.

Few surprises

There are few such surprises in this year’s selection of candidates, in an election predicted to lead to a runoff between Sarkozy, the sitting president, and Francois Hollande, the long-time leader of the Socialist Party.

Spotlight coverage of April 22 presidential election

A group of Popular Movement (UMP) activists, braving the bitter wind to hand out pamphlets for Sarkozy’s re-election bid, agreed that the 2012 campaign has failed to engage the French public.

One of them, Veronique Baldini, said she anticipated a high rate of absenteeism in both rounds of voting, on April 22 and May 6. 

“I don’t know why so many people are saying they will abstain,” said Baldini, who is the deputy mayor of the 16th district of Paris. “Maybe it’s because the campaign on the television hasn’t been particularly exciting.”

It had lacked the rigorous and rousing debates that marked French campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, and the candidates avoided saying anything too contentious.

Baldini said the 2007 presidential elections had been more exciting because Sarkozy had a much more compelling opponent in Royale.

“Royale was a much less conventional candidate, but Hollande is very controlled and avoids anything controversial,” the UMP official said.

Milaret Katja says she sees no point in voting in either round of elections [Al Jazeera/Yasmine Ryan]

She acknowledged that all of the candidates were guilty of neglecting the very issues that mattered most to many French people.

“It’s true that they have talked enough about the crisis, about unemployment, which seems to be a fundamental issue for many French people,” she said.

With just days left for the first round of the election, the cover of the left-wing Marianne magazine voiced the scepticism so many are feeling about the candidates.

“The biggest lies of the campaign,” it read, illustrated with images of the leading candidates all holding their hands over their hearts, their mouths open as they woo potential voters.

Milaret Katja, a young woman living in the 16th district, said she would not be voting because she did not believe it would make any difference which candidate wins. 

Neither Hollande or Sarkozy, nor any of the other candidates, offered a palatable alternative in her view.

“I think it’s become too much about the personalities and not enough about the policies,” she said, arguing French presidential campaigns have become increasingly superficial.

“These American-style campaigns have no substance. It’s bullshit.”

Little enthusiasm

David Zoher, who recently turned 18 and will be voting for the first time, said he would be doing so without much enthusiasm for the candidates.

“I’m going to vote because it’s my duty as a citizen, but none of the candidates really excited me,” he said.

He does not support Sarkozy’s policies, because he thinks they have favoured the wealthy at the expense of the majority of the population.

He is deciding between Hollande and Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-left candidate, but harbours no high expectations of either bringing about real change..

“I don’t think changing the president in France will change much,” he said. “It won’t overcome the crisis.”

Poignant tale of the Once-Thriving Greek Community in Egypt

“I feel lucky. Everyone has a homeland. But we, the Greeks of Egypt, have two homelands. Sometimes I am asked: ‘How did you feel in Egypt?’ I felt at home. I was never a stranger.”
Popi Deligiorgi

Greeks and Egyptians are connected by ancient history. Both peoples are descendants of two of the world’s oldest known civilisations.

At the start of the 20th century there were about 200,000 Greeks in Egypt. Today, the Greek community there has approximately 1,000 members.

It was a community that once controlled 80 per cent of Egypt’s financial life, founded the first bank, established the country’s first theatres and cinemas, and produced the first wines and cigarettes.

But this thriving community departed with the rise to power of Gamal Abdel Nasser and pan-Arab nationalism.

This film follows several Greek citizens who undertake a return visit to Egypt, the land where they were born and raised.

They visit their old homes and neighbourhoods as well as former family businesses, and they search for the Egyptian friends they left behind.

 

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2012/04/20124212646347121.html via @ajenglish

Decades of American Missteps in Foreign Policy Requires The social media peace corps

The social media peace corps

Unfortunately after decades of  wrong choices and missteps in American Foreign Policy NO amount of PR or rebranding techniques can address the primary goal of neutralising anti-American sentiment. Obama tried to follow his predecessors in maintaining the Status Quo and has found himself in a NEW WORLD  that is spewing forth decades of Contempt for America and how its Foreign Policies have negatively affected the lies of so many. We now face a NEW Arab World so ANTI ISRAEL that it  endangers all the middle East….. and America’s relationships thorough the region which are already severely damaged  by Bush Era atrocities. So how will social media help….. 

.

‘Tunisia is one of our oldest friends in the world,’ President Obama said when US Peace Corps reopened operations in the country [EPA]

Washington, DC -  After a 16 year hiatus, the US Peace Corps is reopening operations in Tunisia. The first group of volunteers is scheduled to arrive this year and their assignments will focus on English language training and youth skills development in order to help prepare Tunisian students and professionals for future employment.

Why would a middle-income country participate in a US programme that historically engages lower-income countries such as Vietnam and Mali? Tunisia boasts the best education system in Africa, and the only other Arab countries the Peace Corps operates in are Jordan and Morocco, which rank much lower than Tunisia in the UNDP human development index. 

“Tunisia is one of our oldest friends in the world,” President Obama said when announcing the resumption of the programme last October, pointing out that Tunisia was one of the first countries to recognise the United States. “I told the prime minister that, thanks to his leadership, thanks to the extraordinary transformation that’s taking place in Tunisia and the courage of its people, I’m confident that we will have at least another two centuries of friendship between our two countries. And the American people will stand by the people of Tunisia in any way that we can during this remarkable period in Tunisian history.”

Thus, the decision regarding the Peace Corps seems to be the latest example of the United States attempting to react positively to the Arab uprisings, which had their start in Tunisia in December 2010. Considering that the Arab world’s views of the US and President Obama are increasingly negative, with 73 per cent of Arabs seeing Israel and the US as the two most threatening countries, there is a great need for the United States to alter its relationship with the region. But by focusing on providing services and aid as a way of shoring up its image, the US is failing to truly understand once again what is at the core of anti-American sentiment in the region.

Back in 2006, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report for the House International Relations Committee attempted to review the reasons for anti-American sentiment in countries with significant Muslim populations. The goal was to examine what the US could do to improve its image and reduce the tension between “Muslims and Americans” and thereby improve relations between the “West and everyone else”. Considering that the majority of Arabs are Muslims, several Arab countries were included in the report. 

Putting aside the problematic use of terms, what we learned from US citizens abroad was that our public diplomacy strategy was paralysed. But this was not entirely true, considering the new smart marketing and public relations campaigns the US was engaged in under Charlotte Beers’ innovative leadership as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. 

Public diplomacy strategy

Facebook was big, and perhaps there were interactive US websites that could be utilised. Twitter was not yet officially part of the foreign policy and diplomacy toolbox and neither were pre-approved blogs. We learned about the Echo Chamber, a Karen Hughes initiative for information sharing about lessons learned in other countries. Then there were her “Listening Tours” to the region, which tended to revert to “Talking At” tours.

During the recent Social Media Week in DC, State Department officials shared their updated tactics. The tone was not that different from six years ago. For example, several explained how Tweeting from embassy missions aided Foreign Services Officers in sharing the message of the US when they were limited in face to face interactions with foreign publics, due to restricted physical security measures. The “democratisation of information access” was supposed to be aiding in our public diplomacy strategy by making our diplomats more accessible to the people in the countries they were serving.

What was very clear, however, was that the foreign policy message itself had not changed. And here is where the problem lies: our public diplomacy strategy continues to be divorced from our foreign policy. What the State Department either fails to realise or refuses to address is that no amount of PR or rebranding techniques can address the primary goal of neutralising anti-American sentiment – because the problem is not that Arabs don’t get the US message, but rather that they get it loud and clear every time the US chooses to support oppressive regimes instead of promoting human rights.

From a pragmatic point of view, why would anyone decide to change his or her point of view about the US just because a newer technology is projecting the same message? It is like turning the volume up (or down) on a new song by the same musical artist. The voice is the same. Obama might choose to overlook US support for the 24-year dictatorial regime of Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, but the people of Tunisia won’t be quick to forgive and forget just because Americans are now coming to teach them English, or that there are US agencies Tweeting job tips to them.

Maybe it’s time for the US to engage in “raw listening” and realise that the problem isn’t that way the message is being relayed – but the message itself. 

Considering Buying an Apple i-PAD…. These Reviews May Help.

I was not about to rush out and get the newest latest and greatest without a through review… SO… Here are three that helped me make up my mind… I hope they are helpful to you as well !

The First review:

I was able to secure the new iPad at our local Apple store this morning, as ours wasn’t too busy, but I also got to spend a little time with a review model beforehand. In any case, I’ll take you hands-on with the new model, plus I’ll share my experience from my past two years of iPad ownership altogether, especially for those who haven’t yet had an iPad to call their own. I’ll also reveal a treasure trove of info on how you can legitimately download tons of quality apps and games for free, in hopes of making this the most helpful iPad review on Amazon!

My review tends to run long, so I’ve organized information by section, with headings, to make it more helpful for those just looking for specific info. For example, see the heading “Downloading Apps and Games” for the info on obtaining free apps and games!

First, let’s quickly cover what’s new, and what each means for you:
+ Retina Display – twice the resolution of the iPad 2, at 2048 x 1536 pixels (264px/in)
+ 5 megapixel rear-facing camera – take photos with over 8x higher resolution and quality than the iPad 2 (but still no flash)
+ Dual-core 1GHz A5X processor with quad-core graphics – better multitasking and flawless high-res graphics performance
+ 4G LTE capable – faster mobile connections on AT&T and Verizon when in 4G-LTE-covered network area

If you’re considering the now-cheaper iPad 2, here’s a quick recap of what was new last year:
+ Dual-core 1GHz A5 Processor – better multitasking, 9-times faster graphics
+ 3-Axis Gyroscope – allows for higher precision and more motion gestures
+ Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound pass-through with Apple Digital AV Adapter (sold separately)
+ Rear-facing camera – supports 960 x 720 sized photos (0.6 megapixels), plus 720p HD videos
+ Front-facing VGA-quality camera – VGA-quality is a resolution of 640 x 480 (0.3 megapixels)
+ Verizon 3G model now available – no longer limited to just AT&T for the WiFi+3G model
+ Thinner, lighter and smoother with contoured back – feels more comfortable in your hands

The iPad 2 brought a lot more new features to the iPad lineup, but the 3rd generation iPad still brings us some welcome new features. First, it sports the new A5X processor. Don’t be confused though, it’s not really that much better than the iPad 2′s, and it’s not technically a quad-core processor. The CPU itself remains dual-core, but the graphics processor built-into the CPU chip can compute 4 streams of graphics information, thus making the graphics aspect of the A5X processor quad-core. It’s confusing, I know. To be honest, there was no noticeable improvement in performance over the iPad 2, except maybe behind the scenes where it handles 4x more pixels. In general, everything on the new iPad runs just as smooth as it always has, which is as to be expected from Apple! But I imagine the new processor has particularly been used to speed up image processing for the new 5 megapixel camera, making photography just about as snappy as it is on the iPhone 4S, which I own as well. 4G support was also a nice surprise that had been rumored.

On the other hand, other rumors didn’t exactly pan-out, including an SD card slot for photos and file storage, nor the possibility of a smaller, more manageable 7″ iPad model, but I’m still holding out hope for one in the future. Thankfully, the price stays the same for these new models, but that is as to be expected. As a boon for those who don’t really plan to use the new high-res camera nor need the Retina display or 4G speed, the iPad 2 is going to stick around for a while longer, with a new lower price for those in the market!

===== My Background =====

I’m a website and mobile app developer who’s created a few apps and games for iOS devices, including the iPad. I also develop websites, so I like to ensure that those sites look and perform well on the device too, since it’s continually growing in popularity for surfing the Web with over the past two years. I’ve spent lots of time with both the iPad and various Android-based tablets, and I have to be honest… apps are what make the iPad (and other iDevices) so great. Android tablets have the benefit of price and size, but Android apps available for tablets are terribly mediocre! They’re also not as responsive as the iPad, at least not after you load them up with apps, games and other junk.

I’m no Apple fanboy, but I can recognize quality hardware and software when I see it, and as far as 10″ tablets are concerned, the new iPad simply can’t be beat, but that’s mostly due to Apple’s knack for high-end hardware, plus the ridiculously huge following of quality app developers that Apple can boast about. With over 200,000 apps just for the iPad alone, there’s more than enough to keep you busy!

===== First Impression =====

Unboxing any new device certainly has its appeal, but the iPad has an allure all its own, and the new model is just as touch-worthy as its older siblings, especially when it’s fresh out of the box and accompanied by that scent synonymous with new electronics. But when you turn it on for the first time it becomes clear: there’s something different about this new model, especially if you’ve been using the iPad 2 for a while. There’s a rich, vibrant crispness to the image that wasn’t there before. It’s almost like the screen isn’t there at all, as if the silky-smooth graphics are just floating there.

===== Interaction Experience =====

Thanks to the powerful processor, animations and transitions remain smooth on the new iPad, even on a Retina screen with 4-times more pixels! Plus, text on the new model is crisper than ever, even in apps that haven’t been retweeked for the new Retina display. Meanwhile, where the iPad really shines is with its continuation of a phenomenal multi-touch interface that is second to none, seriously. Android tablets and other devices may tout “multi-touch” support, but usually this just means they support 2-finger gestures like pinch-style zooming. The iPad touch-screen, on the other hand, supports up to ten simultaneous touches. Nothing new here, but still worth mentioning, especially for tablet newcomers. So if an iPad app ever needs to support that many touches, the iPad is ready. For example, the most common app supporting ten simultaneous touches is the piano app.

===== So What Can the iPad Actually Do? =====

Naturally, there are things you can do with the iPad right out of the box. You can browse the Web with Safari, set up your email, download your photos and videos to your iPad via iTunes, as well as shoot new photos and videos using either of the two built in cameras. You can also surf YouTube and watch your favorite videos via Apple’s built-in YouTube app. There’s also an iPod built in, so you can listen to your favorite tunes via the Music app, or download new music via the iTunes app. Another popular iPad app is iBooks, which lets you download and read e-books on your iPad. You can also jot notes, manage your calendar and contacts. You can even chat with other Apple-device users via FaceTime (over WiFi only). Of course, the fun and usefulness of the iPad doesn’t stop there. The App Store app is your portal to unending games and utilities. One thing Apple has been really good at is showing off just what you can do with the iPad. App developers have undoubtedly been busy creating unique experiences through their iPad apps, most of which have yet to be rivaled by (or ported to) Android and other tablets.

You can also download two additional Apple-made apps: iBooks, which lets you download and read ebooks easily on your device, and iWork, Apple’s office-document editing suite, a trilogy of apps which consists of: Pages (for editing word processing documents), Numbers (for editing spreadsheets) and Keynote (for editing PowerPoint-like slideshows); Each of the three apps can be downloaded separately for $9.99 each. Completely reworked for the iPad, the complete iWork suite will set you back a whole thirty bucks. So be aware of that before you go ahead and grab the iPad for use with work-related document editing, and so forth.

Also note that if you do intend to use the iPad for heavy writing or word-processing purposes, you’ll find that your ability to type quickly will be greatly inhibited by the virtual keyboard. Thus, you should snag the external keyboard as well, but I’ll explain a few typing techniques below. Either way, be prepared to pay more than merely the price for the iPad alone if you intend to transform the iPad into something a little more productive than it might be for you out of the box.

===== Downloading Apps and Games =====

Downloading apps on your iPad couldn’t be easier. Once you set up your iTunes account with a password and credit card, all you need to do is find the app you want from the App Store, tap the button at the top with the app’s price, then tap again to confirm. Enter your password (once per session), and voila, you just bought an app. Behind the scenes, Apple charges your card for the amount of the app plus tax, while you’re already off enjoying your new app. This ease of access is a blessing and a curse, because you can easily empty your wallet if you’re not carefully considering each purchase.

All apps in the App Store range in price from Free and 99 cents on up, always incrementing in whole dollar amounts (1.99, 2.99, 3.99, etc). The maximum price for an app is set to $999.99, of which there are only eight currently priced so outrageously. And don’t even think of toying with them. Apple does not allow refunds on apps you have purchased–all sales are final!

Now for the juicy money-saving secrets of the App Store!!

With the proper resources, you can legitimately download thousands of high quality apps for free. I do it all the time and it is perfectly legal. You see, Apple allows developers to temporarily put their apps on sale (and even drop the price to free). Usually they do this to get you to write some rave reviews for their apps. The secret to success is having the resources to help you spot these special app sales–so you know when and where to get them during these often extremely-limited-time promotions.

There are several resources you can use, both on the Web and on the iPad itself. I prefer to use an app called “AppShopper” that lists all apps that recently went on sale or dropped to free. You can filter just iPad apps, or show iPhone apps as well, and you can also filter just the free products or just the sale apps. But so many apps go on sale, making it hard to cut through the clutter, which is where AppShopper truly shines: the “popular” tab shows only the most popularly downloaded sale apps. If several other people aren’t downloading an app, you won’t see it listed there! AppShopper is a phenomenal little gem, and it has gotten me tons of apps FREE! It also has a companion website that lists the same apps. You can even create an account and track the apps you own, so you don’t end up trying to redownload them if they go on sale again! It also supports watch lists (via your account) with push notifications, and can alert you whenever an app you’re interested in goes on sale. It’s a real thing of beauty! There are other apps such as AppZappPush, AppSniper, AppAdvice, Apps Gone Free, and more, but none of them leverage the power of the masses to help you filter out the unwanted apps. Feel free to check them out if you like, though!

===== Typing on the iPad =====

Typing on the iPad can be annoying at times, but I mostly chalk that up to it being 10-inches. Being touted more as a Web browser and email device than an e-book reader, with the added potential that you’ll be using it to edit office documents, typing on the device can quickly become a concern. First, realize that the iPad’s no laptop–you won’t be speed-typing, so it may not be conducive for heavy usage like typing lengthy emails or blogging, let alone writing this review. With that in mind, there are a couple approaches you can try to determine what typing method is right for you. The ideal method might also change depending on where you are and how the iPad is oriented when using it.

Typing Method #1: Thumbs
The most flexible approach is to type with your thumbs, which can be done whether sitting or standing. In portrait mode: grasp the bottom of your iPad with your palms facing each other, and your pinky fingers towards you for the iPad to rest on. To stabilize the iPad and prevent it from flopping over and falling out of your hands, stretch both of your index fingers upwards towards the top of the iPad as much as is comfortable. Using your thumbs, hunt & peck the keys on the virtual keyboard to your heart’s content. Alternately, thanks to iOS 5, thumb-typing in landscape mode has now become painless. Normally, the keyboard is still docked to the bottom of the screen, and can be hard to reach the center of the keyboard with thumbs. However, if you press and hold the show/hide button on the bottom right corner of the keyboard. You can then choose to split the keyboard, with makes it easier for your thumbs to reach all keys, when the iPad is in landscape mode. You can also choose to undock the keyboard, which centers it vertically on the screen, instead of at the bottom.

Typing Method #2: Full Fingers
I’ve found this next method to be even more useful, though it requires you to be is best used while seated, with the iPad in resting in your lap, or on something soft, preferably with the iPad in landscape mode. With the iPad situated securely on your legs, you’ll find it becomes easier to type with your full range of digits (fingers), like you would on a full sized physical keyboard. I find it slightly awkward, though, to hit the spacebar frequently with the side of my thumbs as you typically would on a physical keyboard. Still, whether you use your thumbs for the spacebar, or decide to use your fingers instead, you’ll still find yourself typing slightly faster than with the thumbs-only hunt-and-peck method. Also, this typing method doesn’t work well with the iPad resting any anything hard and flat like a desk or table, as the rounded backside of the iPad causes it to wobble uncontrollably while trying to type. However, if placement on a hard surface is a must, you might try putting something soft under the iPad to stabilize it.

Typing Method #3: Speech to Text
Now, Apple has brought us an even more convenient way to type, thanks to Siri! Just hit the microphone icon on the lower-left side of the keyboard, and start speaking. In most cases, your words will be transcribed into the currently active text field, with potentially mis-interpreted words underlined in blue. Just select any such word, and a list of possible alternates will pop up for your choosing. You can also speak most punctuation, such as ‘period’, ‘open-paren’, ‘close-paren’, ‘hyphen’ and more. At times though, network congestion does hinder the ability for this feature to work properly, so hopefully that will improve over time.

Other methods of typing on the iPad include the external keyboard, as well as third party speech-to-text transcription apps, but with Siri’s voice transcription feature built in, the latter is no longer necessary.

===== Web Browsing =====

Alongside email, and spending money in the app store, Web browsing is one of Apple’s biggest suggestions for using the device. The iPad was born to surf the Web, but content on the Web is often best viewed vertically, and the new Retina display’s 2048×1536 resolution renders that content more crisply than ever, especially in portrait orientation (vertical). Working within the Safari Web-browsing app, the interface is swift and responsive.

However, not all your sites will work desirably on the iPad. Apple closed-mindedly refuses to support Adobe Flash on the iPad (as it has with the iPhone/iPod Touch). However, regardless of whether Apple likes it or not, Flash is being used around the Web, not only for advertising and video but for many other uses from graphs to product comparisons, but they don’t seem to care anyway. The same lack of support is true of Java, AIR, Silverlight and others though. So expect some of your sites to only be supported to a certain degree, if not entirely in some cases. This can be a bit of a bummer until Flash starts being replaced with other technologies like HTML5′s canvas technology, which is poised to take on some of Flash’s most familiar capabilities. Alternately, you can jailbreak your iPad (when a jailbreak is released for the new model), which would allow you to circumvent the Flash limitation.

Granted, I don’t often actually find myself surfing the web with the iPad for a few reasons. First of all, I prefer the display to be parallel with my face, but for the iPad that means craning my neck downwards and after a while that gets tiring. I also tend to do a lot of typing on the sites I use, and typing a lot on the iPad isn’t really an enjoyable experience. There are however some keyboard alternatives if you decide that on-screen typing isn’t for you. I just find it easier to work from a laptop when I’m on the go, and the 11″ MacBook Air fits that bill simply enough for me. Finally, when I browse the Web (on my computer), I typically have more than 9 tabs open at any given time. I say that because the iPad’s browser limits you to 9 tabs. If you rarely use more than 9 tabs when browsing the Web though, the iPad may be right for you.

===== Email, IM and Social Networking =====

Email on the iPad’s Mail app is best viewed in landscape mode, as it allows you to see both your list of messages on the left as well as the selected message itself on the right. It also makes managing emails easier, such as moving messages to other folders (or to the trash). Another reason for landscape mode is to make typing those lengthy emails easier (using typing-method #2 mentioned above).

You can have multiple email accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, MobileMe, Microsoft Exchange and other custom POP3 and IMAP accounts.

Important Note: With the growing number of portable web connecting devices, there is one concern I want to express on your behalf. When you close the Mail app, it continues running in the background, even after disconnecting from one WiFi hotspot and reconnecting to another. My concern with this is that if haven’t set up your e-mail with a secure connection, and you connect to a public WiFi hotspot that a malicious user is monitoring, then the instant your mail app connects to the hotspot to check your e-mail, your e-mail credentials may be suddenly compromised. To avoid this you definitely want to be using some kind of secure connection for your e-mail if at all possible. Web-based email such as Gmail typically support this out of the box, and Gmail accounts are the easiest to setup on the iPad.

===== Media =====

If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s comforting to know that you audio/video experience will be similar on the iPad. You can watch videos via the YouTube app, which has been updated for the iPad to show YouTube HD videos beautifully. While the 1024×768 resolution of the iPad is a standard 4:3 ratio, not a widescreen 16:9 ratio, the HD videos as well as other video (including downloads from the iTunes store) display just fine, albeit with black bars. Some may not like that though, but I don’t see a wide-screen iPad coming to market for a while.

The Netflix and Hulu+ apps are great for members of those online video streaming services. Netflix videos stream quickly and even moving the play position back and forth in the timeline, the movie starts playing very quick without much time rebuffering the video. For those who want to watch live TV, I also recommend getting yourself a Slingbox and snagging the SlingPlayer app to stream live TV to your iPad. I do that, and it works quite well!

===== Photography and Video =====

The new iPad brings a phenomenal new high-quality 5MP camera to market that picks up where the iPad 2′s half-megapixel camera left off. 5 lenses inside the aperture, and the more powerful processor, combine to create the sharpest iPad image yet. Even low-light pictures are better than ever, though there’s still room for improvement there. There’s also a new iPhoto app from Apple (for five bucks) that lets you organize, edit and share your photos right on the iPad!

As if that’s not enough, there’s built-in Picture Frame mode that lets you use the iPad’s gorgeous Retina display to showcase your favorite photos, using clever transition effects like “Dissolve” with “Zoom in on Faces”, or the nifty multi-photo “Origami” effect. In this review’s comments, I’ll include a helpful link to an article that shows you how to set up and use this mode.

Plus, you can now record full-HD (1080p) videos, instead of just the previous 720p videos. Though I must warn you, in you plan to shoot a lot of video with the iPad (or even the iPhone 4S), you’ll want to go with a 32GB or 64GB model! These incredibly high-quality videos take up an incredibly large amount of storage space!

===== Productivity =====

Productivity carries numerous definitions. Usually its “getting something done” though some people tend to believe that it’s the ability to focus without being distracted, which I see as one of the iPad’s strengths considering it currently does not support multitasking (yet). In the context of software though, applications that allow you to edit office documents are commonly referred to as productivity software. Apple’s own suite of productivity apps, collectively called “iWork”, has been re-created from the ground up just for the iPad. (Previously it was only available for Macs.) For work-minded individuals, it will probably one of the most popular uses of the iPad. There are three apps in all: Pages is a word processing app that allows you to create and edit word processing documents. Then there’s Numbers, which allows you to create and edit spreadsheets. Finally there’s Keynote, which lets you create or edit presentations and slideshows (including PowerPoint files). So far, I’ve found the latter to be pretty invaluable in giving personal presentations within small groups or one-on-one meetings.

However, there is a whole category of iPhone and iPad-specific apps dedicated to productivity, and are consequently located under the category titled “productivity” in the categories section of the app store. Remember, any app that works for the iPhone will run on the iPad, but do note that there are some exceptional productivity apps made or updated for the iPad specifically. Some notable iPad-specific productivity apps include Bento (personal organization/information management), Things (project management), iTeleport (remote desktop/VNC), Layers (drawing/painting), and GoodReader (best PDF+ reader around).

===== Gaming =====

If you’re like me, you probably don’t have time for games. Ultimately, I still see the iPad as a productivity device more than as a gaming console. Regardless, the iPhone and iPad changed the game on that. Millions of people use their computers for gaming, and with the iPhone and iPod Touch having taken on a clear role as a gaming console that has been as revolutionary for mobile gaming as the Wii was for living-room gaming, it goes without saying that the iPad is, and will continue to be, a decent platform for playing games. Most Android games look terrible on tablet-sized screens, but iPad game developers have taken care of us with good quality iPad versions of most iPhone games. Board games and lap-friendly games are also perfect for the iPad. Meanwhile, I suspect that games heavily dependent on device-rotation and other accelerometer-based interaction may quickly wear you out do to the weight of the iPad. I got tired of playing EA’s Need For Speed: Shift after about 5 minutes. Resting the iPad on my knee didn’t help much.

===== Printing =====

Printing with the iPad is really hit-or-miss. The ability to print documents right from your iPad came along last year, with the iOS 4 update, but there are some caveats. Your printer must support “AirPrint” or, if yours doesn’t, you might have some success working with some software called Printopia (if you have a Mac with a shared printer). Google AirPrint or Printopia for more info and device compatibility. From there, printing is easy. The iPad will walk you through the process of locating the printer and setting up the printing options the first time around. For more information about printing with your iPad, I’ll linked to some informative off-site pages in the first comment for this review.

===== Security =====

With portable devices, there should always be some level of concern regarding the safety and protection of your data. The iPad deliver surprisingly well in the area, providing several layers of security to protect your data. You can require complex passcodes to securely access important information, encrypt data whether stored or transferred over WiFi, and even remotely wipe everything from your iPad instantly in the event of theft or loss (with subscription to Apple’s MobileMe service).

===== Praise =====

+ Apple continues its trend of creating the best multi-touch experience around. Android doesn’t even come close
+ The Retina Display – Phenomenal! Kudos for bringing it to the iPad as well as the iPhone and iPod touch
+ High performance 1GHz A5X processor – provides performance power for cutting-edge gaming and multitasking
+ Multitasks like a dream with iOS 5 and the powerful dual-core central processor
+ Rear camera – 5 megapixel photography goodness, plus it can do 1080p HD video (up from 720p)
+ 4G LTE option – It’s clearly the next big thing for improving connection speed when away from WiFi

===== Dissappointments =====

+ No 7″ model – the 10″ model is just too bulky sometimes
+ No true GPS – IP-based location just doesn’t cut it, and GPS has no subscription fee or contract to use like assisted (cellular) GPS does
+ No 128GB model – would have been useful for high-res videos that look great on the Retina display, or hold more of those huge 1080p videos
+ No USB or SD card slot – for storage expansion, or more importantly, importing pics from your external camera to the new iPhoto app
+ Front facing camera – great for FaceTime communication, but it only works over WiFi, Apple isn’t even letting it work over 4G!

===== The Bottom Line =====

If you already have an iPad 2, perhaps there isn’t enough new to warrant purchasing the new model, unless you really want the Retina display. If you have the original iPad, it’s probably worth getting though, seeing all the new additions that carried over from the iPad 2. If you’re considering

Overall, the iPad still sets the pace for most other tablets in its 10″ class, but I personally find all 10″ tablets to be a bit bulky and somewhat unwieldy. Particularly, I find it awkward to use the iPad where I want to use it most: lying in bed, or sitting on the couch with it in my lap. On the couch, where a laptop is comfortable resting on your lap, with the screen parallel to your face, whereas the iPad needs to be angled up, and your head angled downward. This can be a after a while. In bed, it’s just too heavy and bulky, and I’ve dropped the thing square on my face several times.

The solution? I’ve been begging Apple for a 7″ iPad for two years now. Jobs said no, but, with all due respect, he’s no longer calling the shots, so I say let’s see what Tim Cook can indeed cook up for us! If 10″ is comfortable for you, then it’s definitely worth 5 stars. Personally though, I can’t quite give it 5 until Apple releases a 7″ version. But I realize ratings are subjective, so call me a critic if you want. In all honesty, the iPad really is the best 10″ tablet around, and I would give no other tablet more than 3 stars. I’ll continue to keep mine around simply because it does have it’s uses, especially for Web and app development, but also for occasional gaming, and when not in use, it still makes a great digital picture frame with the aforementioned Picture Frame mode! (See the Photography and Video section)

I hope you’ve found this hands-on review helpful.

 

THE SECOND REVIEW I FOUND USEFUL

 Apple iPad MD364LL/A (32GB, Wi-Fi + Verizon 4G, White) NEWEST MODEL (Personal Computers)

This review is for iPad 2 owners trying to decide whether to upgrade. It also might be helpful for people deciding between buying a “new iPad” and an iPad 2 (which is now just 399, 100 bucks cheaper than the cheapest “new iPad”).

I was perfectly happy with my iPad 2, a wifi-only model with 32gb. When Apple announced the new iPad, I typed up a long list of reasons why I shouldn’t buy it. And then I bought one anyway. (I’ll be giving my iPad 2 to my parents.)

You’ve probably already read up on the new iPad and know the list of new features it has, and how the specs compare to the iPad 2′s specs. But comparing specs on paper is different than comparing the actual experience of using the two products, and the experience matters more than the specs. I can tell you which of those features, at least to me, really makes the experience of using the new iPad better. And there’s only one: the display.

I do a lot of reading on the iPad, and this is where the retina display really matters. Text is very sharp, even for very small fonts, and this makes reading on iPad much more comfortable. I’ve been reading Steve Jobs on my iPad 2 (using the Kindle app); I read the next chapter on the retina iPad and then tried to read the following chapter on the iPad 2 again, and going back to the iPad 2 was unpleasant. I had similar results when I compared reading articles on websites using Safari and when reading a few pages of War and Peace in the iBooks app on the retina iPad vs. iPad 2. After reading on the new iPad, you just won’t want to go back to reading on iPad 2.

If you read a lot on your iPad, this to me is a compelling reason to upgrade, and perhaps the only compelling reason.

What about photos? Videos? Games? Here, you can tell the difference, and the retina display is better. But in terms of how much the retina display increases my enjoyment of viewing pictures, video, and games, it is not enough to justify the cost of upgrading.

On both iPads, I compared hi-res pictures I took at the Chicago Botanic Gardens using a DSLR with a good lens. On iPad 2, your eye can indeed discern individual pixels if you look closely enough, whereas on the retina iPad, it’s like looking at a real print of the photo. But after looking at the pictures on the retina iPad, and even noticing the differences, it was still quite nice to view them again on the iPad 2. Similarly for video: I watched a scene from the Breaking Bad season 4 finale on both devices, and while it looked a bit better on the retina iPad, it still looked great on iPad 2. Streaming hi-res movie trailers looked better on the retina iPad, but still looked great on iPad 2. For streaming video from Netflix, I could not tell any difference, most likely because the resolution of the source material isn’t any higher than the iPad 2′s display.

I’m less of a gamer than most iPad users, but I did try Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy (a game supposedly optimized for the retina display) and Plants vs. Zombies HD (an older game). PvZ looks exactly the same on both, Sky Gamblers looks better on the retina iPad but it still looks very awesome on the iPad 2.

In short, you can notice the difference the retina display makes for photos, videos, and games. Yet, the experience of using the iPad 2 is still quite excellent. The fact is that, even at a lower resolution, the iPad 2′s IPS display is exceptional.

What about the other specs? Is it worth upgrading to get a newer processor, for example?

No. I really don’t notice a difference in performance. The retina iPad is super fast, but so is iPad 2. Some apps load a little faster, others I can’t tell. But the speed difference, if any, isn’t enough to make the retina iPad more enjoyable to use than iPad 2.

What about battery life? The retina display has 4x the pixels of the iPad 2 display and requires a lot more power, which would drain the battery faster. But the new iPad also comes with a much bigger battery inside (that’s why it’s 1/10 of an inch thicker and an ounce or so heavier than iPad 2). Apple says battery life is about the same, and that seems to be true in my experience in the four weeks since I bought it. (I bought it March 16 and I’m editing this paragraph on April 13.)

What about the improved camera? Sure, it takes better pictures than the joke of a camera on iPad 2. But do most people use their iPad for photography, anyway? If you have an iPhone 4 or 4S, your camera is just as good or better, and it’s more convenient for taking pictures than using the iPad. Ditto for most smartphones. And only the rear-facing camera was improved; the front-facing camera is just as crappy as before. And that’s a shame, because the front camera is the one I’d actually use (for skype and facetime).

What about dictation? I find it works about 80%, less in a noisy room. Sure, it is easier to dictate and then edit the few errors that result than to type something from scratch on the iPad’s on-screen keyboard. But I don’t think most people will use the dictation feature enough for it to matter in the upgrade decision. People who write a lot on the iPad will already have an external keyboard (or should get one).

So, for me, the only new feature that matters enough to justify the upgrade is the retina display.

But there’s one other reason you might upgrade: If your iPad 2 is a wifi-only model and you think it would be handy to also have 3G/4G connectivity. (Or, if you bought an iPad 2 with 3G and you never use the 3G, now is your chance to buy an iPad without it and save $130.) I bought a new iPad with 4G so that I could use it when I’m traveling and away from a hotspot. Which isn’t very often, but I figured it would be handy to have.

What about 3G vs. 4G? If you have an iPad 2 with 3G, should you upgrade to enjoy the faster speed of 4G? The answer is only if you use it a lot.

4G on the new iPad is very fast. My iPad 2 doesn’t have 3G, so I can’t say how much faster. My verizon iphone 4S has 3G and it’s way slower than a wifi connection, but 4G on the new iPad is at least as fast as a good wifi connection.

That said, the cellular service is not cheap, so most people use it only when wifi is not available, which is not very often. You have wifi at home, at work perhaps, at most coffee shops and libraries and hotels. The exception would be people that have an expensive plan with a high data allowance; if that’s you and you use cellular connectivity a lot, then you have a good reason to upgrade. 4G is crazy fast.

The bottom line:

Upgrading is a tough call, because it’s expensive. The difference between what you’ll get if you sell your iPad 2 and what you’ll spend for a similarly configured retina iPad is probably around $250, maybe a little more. And if you upgrade, you might want more memory since apps designed for the retina display take up more space than standard apps.

I recommend that most iPad 2 owners upgrade only if they really want or need the retina display, especially for people who do a lot of reading on iPad. Or, if they bought a wifi-only iPad 2 and always regretted not getting cellular internet, now’s their chance.

If neither of these is true for you, stick with your iPad 2. It is still an absolutely great device, and still a very worthy purchase for people who want an ipad but can’t afford or don’t need the retina display.

The THIRD Review I Found Useful

Apple iPad MD328LL/A (16GB, Wi-Fi, White) NEWEST MODEL (Personal Computers)

For the last 20 years, I have steadfastly refused anything apple — I think it was the cult-like mentality that turned me off. Also, the fact that the devices are so easy to use, to borrow a phrase, even a cavegirl could do it (as evidenced by my very non-technical sisters and friends.) Of course, being a UNIX geek, I was steadfastly against the Apple software/iTunes/iEverything model. You can do anything you want on UNIX — there is no one to save you from yourself. The UNIX motto: “We sell ROPE!” (Of course, I have hung myself numerous times on said rope including the time I accidentally erased the entire hard drive (including operating system) on a UNIX system at the now defunct Bear Stearns!

But then I was given a shiny new Macbook Pro for my new job and I started having… doubts. For example, the terminal application under Apple OS is hauntingly like my beloved UNIX — including having vi and grep and the “/” pointing the “RIGHT” way. I figure any system that allows me to use VI can’t be completely evil.

I have played with many tablets — all android. I started out with the Motorola Xoom and then settled on the Asus Transformer. The thing that won me over about the Transformer was that the display was better than any I had seen… until now.

I purchased my first iPad this weekend sight unseen because I read that with the new retinal display, reading now became nearly comparable to the original Kindle/eInk technology. Despite my love of gadgets, I’m growing weary of having a Kindle, a Tablet, a Laptop, an MP3 player — not to mention all the peripherals one needs to support them.

So the first thing I did with the iPad was installed the Kindle app. I also have my Asus transformer here at work. I downloaded the same book and COULD NOT BELIEVE MY EYES! I never expected there to be such a noticeable difference. On the Asus transformer, you can actually see the individual pixels. On the iPad, it looks as smooth as an eInk display.

The thing about the iPad (and Apple products in general) is that it is the little details that have won me over. For example, the scrolling on the iPad is SOOO much smoother than the Transformer. When you swipe on the transformer to scroll through the list of books, it lurches and jumps and trying to finally control where the scrolling starts and stops is frustrating.

Also, the apps just work and don’t need to be updated every day — which just gets really old.

There are 2 areas I have found where I prefer non-apple products:

1. Performance — though I don’t have this problem with the current iPad because it is brand-spanking new. However, I expect that soon the apps that have been written more “frugally” for the earlier generation processors will soon bloat to suck up the faster processors of the new iPad.

2. Apple’s “control freak” mentality — DON’T like is having to jump through some hoops to use my music library from Amazon (I try to use iTunes as little as humanly possible). I also miss the ability to have my own wall papers and control the layout of the screen a bit.

However, the downsides are much smaller since I don’t wind up having to act as a beta tester for the tablet or the apps. I’m a software quality assurance engineer and while I am more than capable of troubleshooting my systems and getting them to work, I guess at this point, when I’m just using the web and a computer for my own enjoyment, I don’t want to have to do that work anymore… I just want to focus on my music or my books or the web article.s

Upshot: I guess there is a reason certain technologies and products become defacto standards — it is because they are legitimately the best. The iPad 3 is no exception — it sets the bar over any android alternative. Microsoft is fighting back with their Windows 8 mobile phone (the Lumia) which ALSO uses a retinal display. But Microsoft has a long way to go to achieve the type of platform consistency that you get with Apple. I like only having to know how to use one interface. Apple allows that because the iPad acts like the iPhone which is a basic version of their computer OS.

I will still always love my UNIX… the fact that apple is actually reuniting me with my beloved vi and grep and still providing me with a beautiful pleasurable stable platform is a huge bonus!

MY BOTTOM LINE… YEA, I GUESS I AM SOLD ON THIS NEWFANGLED CONTRAPTION…

Africa: Huge Water Reserves Under Continent

Researchers have found thatAfrica has huge reserves of water underground, which they estimate are more than a hundred times the annual renewable freshwater resources.

Their findings, published in the academic journal Environment Research Letters, show that the largest reserves are in aquifers in the north African countries of Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Chad and Sudan.

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The scientists used existing data, but for the first time this data was collated to give a continent-wide picture. They estimate that there are 0.66 million cubic kilometres of groundwater storage under Africa.

However, the researchers emphasise that it is important to take into consideration the rate at which this stored water can be replenished.

Whilst the largest reserves lie across the arid region of north Africa, these were filled five thousand years ago when the region was much wetter. There is plenty of water under this area, about seventy five meters deep, but whatever is taken out is not replenished.

Other factors to be taken into account are the geological characteristics of the underground water reservoirs. For example, if the groundwater is very deep underground it cannot be accessed by hand pump.

The researchers find that “for many African countries appropriately sited and constructed boreholes will be able to sustain community handpumps and for most of the populated areas of Africa, groundwater levels are likely to be sufficiently shallow to be accessed using a handpump”.

One of the report’s authors, Helen Bonsor of the British Geological Survey, told AIM that it is not appropriate to downscale the report’s findings, and that their work does not deal with the quality of the water stored. It thus does not deal with the issues of salinization or contamination, although she said that in general the stored water is purer than surface water. She stressed that the report is intended to encourage debate and more local research.

There is certainly a large amount of water under Mozambique, and the paper estimates that there are 6,290 cubic kilometres of groundwater stored under the country, with particularly large reserves under Maputo province.

The groundwater in Mozambique is replenished at a rate of between 25 and 100 millimetres per year, and is stored relatively close to the surface. The paper shows that the aquifer productivity for much of Mozambique is high.

The British Geological Survey has also been undertaking a one year research project funded by the British government’s Department for International Development, looking at the resilience of African groundwater to climate change.

That research found that “groundwater possesses a high resilience to climate change in Africa and should be central to adaptation strategies”.

Striking a Balance Between Cyber War and Cyber Peace

.Greater dependence on networked computers and communication leaves the US more vulnerable to attack than others.

.Cyber warfare is the one of the most dramatic potential threats to be faced [EPA]

Two years ago, a piece of faulty computer code infected Iran’s nuclear programme and destroyed many of the centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Some observers declared this apparent sabotage to be the harbinger of a new form of warfare, and United States Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta has warned citizens of the danger of a “cyber Pearl Harbour” attack on the US. But what do we really know about cyber conflict?

The cyber domain of computers and related electronic activities is a complex man-made environment, and human adversaries are purposeful and intelligent. Mountains and oceans are hard to move, but portions of cyberspace can be turned on and off by throwing a switch. It is far cheaper and quicker to move electrons across the globe than to move large ships long distances.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201241510242769575.html

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US steps up cyber propaganda war

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The costs of developing those vessels – multiple carrier task forces and submarine fleets – create enormous barriers to entry, enabling US naval dominance. But the barriers to entry in the cyber domain are so low that non-state actors and small states can play a significant role at low cost.

Political shift

In my book, The Future of Power, I argue that the diffusion of power away from governments is one of this century’s great political shifts. Cyberspace is a perfect example. Large countries such as the US, Russia, Britain, France and China have greater capacity than other states and non-state actors to control the sea, air, or space, but it makes little sense to speak of dominance in cyberspace. If anything, dependence on complex cyber systems for support of military and economic activities creates new vulnerabilities in large states that can be exploited by non-state actors.

Four decades ago, the US Department of Defence created the internet; today, by most accounts, the US remains the leading country in terms of its military and societal use. But greater dependence on networked computers and communication leaves the US more vulnerable to attack than many other countries, and cyberspace has become a major source of insecurity, because, at this stage of technological development, offence prevails over defence in this realm.

The term “cyber attack” covers a wide variety of actions, ranging from simple probes to defacing websites, denial of service, espionage and destruction. Similarly, the term “cyber war” is used loosely to cover a wide range of behaviours, reflecting dictionary definitions of war that range from armed conflict to any hostile contest (for example, “war between the sexes” or “war on drugs”).

At the other extreme, some experts use a narrow definition of cyber war: a “bloodless war” among states that consists solely of electronic conflict in cyberspace. But this avoids the important interconnections between the physical and virtual layers of cyberspace. As the Stuxnet virus that infected Iran’s nuclear programme showed, software attacks can have very real physical effects.

A more useful definition of cyber war is hostile action in cyberspace whose effects amplify or are equivalent to major physical violence. In the physical world, governments have a near-monopoly on large-scale use of force, the defender has an intimate knowledge of the terrain and attacks end because of attrition or exhaustion. Both resources and mobility are costly.

In the cyber world, by contrast, actors are diverse (and sometimes anonymous), physical distance is immaterial and some forms of offence are cheap. Because the internet was designed for ease of use rather than security, attackers currently have the advantage over defenders. Technological evolution, including efforts to “re-engineer” some systems for greater security, might eventually change that, but, for now, it remains the case. The larger party has limited ability to disarm or destroy the enemy, occupy territory, or use counterforce strategies effectively.

Potential threat

Cyber war, though only incipient at this stage, is the most dramatic of the potential threats. Major states with elaborate technical and human resources could, in principle, create massive disruption and physical destruction through cyber attacks on military and civilian targets. Responses to cyber war include a form of interstate deterrence through denial and entanglement, offensive capabilities and designs for rapid network and infrastructure recovery if deterrence fails. At some point, it may be possible to reinforce these steps with certain rudimentary norms and arms control, but the world is at an early stage in this process.

 

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201241510242769575.html

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If one treats so-called “hacktivism” by ideological groups as mostly a disruptive nuisance at this stage, there remain four major categories of cyber threats to national security, each with a different time horizon: cyber war and economic espionage are largely associated with states, and cyber crime and cyber terrorism are mostly associated with non-state actors. For the US, the highest costs currently stem from espionage and crime, but over the next decade or so, war and terrorism could become greater threats than they are today.

Moreover, as alliances and tactics evolve, the categories may increasingly overlap. In the view of Admiral Mike McConnell, the US former director of national intelligence: “Sooner or later, terror groups will achieve cyber-sophistication. It’s like nuclear proliferation, only far easier.”

The world is only just beginning to see glimpses of cyber war – in the denial-of-service attacks that accompanied the conventional war in Georgia in 2008, or the recent sabotage of Iranian centrifuges. States have the greatest capabilities, but non-state actors are more likely to initiate a catastrophic attack. A “cyber 9/11″ may be more likely than the often-mentioned “cyber Pearl Harbour”. It is time for states to sit down and discuss how to limit this threat to world peace.

 

Which Economy Is It, Stupid?

Let’s be REAL: The state of voters’ finances influence elections, but there are many interacting and counteracting measures to study as well.

When economic indicators are ‘good’, such as high levels of employment, incumbent candidates tend to do well [REUTERS]

Since James Carville famously wrote “The Economy, Stupid” in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters, the mass public has become increasingly familiar with what is one of the more important “facts” discovered by political scientists: US presidential elections are undoubtedly affected by the state of the economy.

The question of which part of the economy matters most, however, still remains unsolved. Nate Silver has two very interesting recent posts on this topic. In one, he makes the claim that the key figure is 150,000 jobs per month: if the US economy performs better than that between now and the elections, Obama has a good chance of being elected.In the second, he subjects a whole host (43 to be precise) of different economic variables to the test of predicting 16 different US presidential election results, and then compares which of these variables performs best; again his payroll job growth variable does quite well. Also recently, The Monkey Cage’s Larry Bartels, also writing in the New York Times, highlights changes in real disposable income (which comes in tenth on Silver’s list), a long time favourite variable of political scientists studying US politics.

Both posts are worth reading, as they continue to provide irrefutable evidence of a link between economic conditions and election results in the US. Moreover, the question of which economic conditions matter most is of both academic and pragmatic interest. Whether it is actually possible to study this in an empirically satisfying matter when limiting oneself to US presidential elections, however, remains an open question. As Silver notes:

“When you’re testing 43 different economic indicators over a sample of just 16 elections, the best-performing ones are likely to have been a little lucky. In fact, the relative rank of the economic indicators has historically been very inconsistent: those that perform best over one set of elections do not do much better over the long-term.”

In my book on economic voting in post-communist countries in the 1990s, I took a slightly different tack. Rather than try to parse out the effect of different economic variables on election results, I used the best data I had available to try to get a general estimate of how parties would perform when the economic environment was “good” as opposed to “bad”. Now I was doing something quite different – trying to use regional variation in economic conditions to predict regional variation in election results one election at a time – but at the end of the day I wonder how much more we can really claim with 16 elections to draw on in the US beyond the (very valuable) observation that better economic conditions help the incumbent, while worse economic conditions hurt the incumbent.

As Silver aptly notes, a variable that does well through 13 elections can suddenly perform poorly in the 14th, and then where are we? Most obviously, I think this probably follows from the fact that an awful lot of Silver’s 43 variables co-vary with one another. If his results showed three variables with huge effects and then 40 with no effect, I would think we were on to something quite important. Instead, however, we see a gradual decline across all the variables, suggesting to me at least that after four more presidential elections we might still see the same gradual decline, but with a reordering of the rankings.

Indeed, the most interesting thing from Silver’s horse race type of analysis is probably the variables that have norelationship with vote outcomes. And while these may also be the result of random noise, there is one that is worth mentioning, which is unemployment.

I have always been struck by the lack of unemployment measures in most of these US economic voting models, and Silver suggests why this is the case: in his data at least, unemployment has no effect on election results in US presidential elections (as a side note, while I used a variety of variables in my models in post-communist countries, unemployment is an – if not the most – important driver of the results). Silver does, however, find a very strong effect for change in unemployment between January-September of the election year, which actually overlaps very nicely with Bartels’ basic claim in his piece that voters are myopic, heavily weighting recent economic developments at the expense of economic developments from earlier in one’s term.

So once again, we may be in a situation where economic variables co-vary with one another (we would expect growth in real disposable income to go up as unemployment comes down), but we can make some interesting observations about the time-frame within which the economy matters.

Libya: A Feudal Disaster in the Making

Federalism in Libya: Tried and failed

Given Libya’s history and infrastructure, appeasement of local actors via regional autonomy is a recipe for disaster.

- In today’s Libya, local is king. Yet, if Libya is to become a functioning state that derives its legitimacy and stability from resource extraction, wealth distribution, and empowering its citizens, the interim government of the National Transitional Council (NTC) must become king.

In the run-up to the June elections many militias and civil society organisations are lambasting the interim government’s mission to centralise authority rather than its lacklustre results at achieving that task. On March 5, notables in Benghazi – Libya’s second city and capital of the Eastern region of Cyrenaica – proposed to compensate for the ineffectiveness of the central NTC authorities by asking them to relinquish certain powers to sub-state bodies such as an autonomous Cyrenaican provincial government. On April 17, they met again to demand that NTC authorities change the election law and stake their claim to Libya’s resource rich Sirte basin.

At the start of April, clashes in Libya’s main southern cities of Sebha and Kufra led to similar calls for special regional autonomy arrangements, dubbed “federalism” in the Libyan political discourse. These calls for the delegation of overlapping, autonomous, and ill-defined powers to localities and regions bear only the vaguest resemblance to types of federalism that exist in the United States, Germany, or India. Worse than being ill-named, such proposals are ill-timed as it is manifestly impossible to act upon them until the constitutional convention is convened following the elections.

The militias remain powerful

There are many valid reasons why Libyans would trust local actors over central ones. The local militias courageously vanquished Gaddafi and in many areas have provided a modicum of security and social welfare functions in his wake. In fact, in the absence of functioning NTC institutions throughout most of Tripolitania – Libya’s Western region – the militias have become judge, jury, prison guard, and executioner. Rather than focusing on rebuilding infrastructure or creating a functioning bureaucracy, the militias tend to concern themselves with the populist issues of purging the Libyan state of those who served under Gaddafi and attending to the needs of their home communities. These issues are highly popular with wide swathes of the Libyan population.

Nevertheless the time has come where militias and local activist groups constitute the primary barrier to stability, reconstruction, and a democratic transition. Paradoxically, the aloof technocrats of the NTC are Libya’s only real hope. Tragically, these technocrats appear more hapless every day. The primary pillar of the NTC campaign to curb the militias has been offering a one-time demobilization payment to revolutionary fighters in exchange for registration with the Warrior’s Affairs Committee. Rather than successful causing fighters to either join the national army or return to civilian employment – the ostensible aims of the programme - after awarding $1.4bn, the NTC has determined that much of the money was fraudulently awarded and has actually reinforced militia solidarity. After this announcement on April 10, fighters protested against the NTC in Tripoli and raised new traffic checkpoints.

Even well-thought out NTC demobilization programmes will not succeed if the conditions that nourish the militias remain. Just recently necessity gave rise to a new militia in the Arab town of Rugdalein – an area that remained loyal to Muammar Gaddafi until his very last days. Men from Rugdalein knew they needed to prepare to stand their ground, as they watched Libyans from other localities known for supporting Gaddafi, such as Tuwarga, being forcibly evicted from their homes. On April 2, the predominately Berber militias from Zwara attacked men, women, and children in Rugdalein and scores were killed in an example of traditional Libyan feud settling. In the eyes of the inhabitants of Rugdalein, the central government was powerless to protect them and only their militiamen defended their community.

History of Federalism

Amid the ongoing tumult, over-eager commentators warn that Libya is poised to fracture along regional, tribal, and provincial lines. Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, has written in an Al Jazeera English Opinion piece that federalism is the only solution which would be in fitting with Libyan history.

The reverse is true. Federalism was tried in the Kingdom of Libya between 1951 and 1963. It facilitated dysfunctional governance, widespread corruption, and redundant government offices at the national and provincial levels simultaneously enacting conflicting policies. Provincial legislators and bureaucrats were local notables protecting their fiefdoms – similar to the militias and regional strongmen of today. Taxation policy was subject to a provincial veto rendering wide-scale planning unwieldy.

When Libya was a poor desert economy prior to 1961, central planning and streamlined infrastructural budgets were not yet necessary. However, with the influx of oil wealth post-1961, federalism needed to be abandoned when the inefficiencies it fostered impeded the rapid development of Libya that would otherwise have been possible. Protracted battles in 1963 over which authorities had the right to tax foreign companies operating in Libya were its final death knell.

Federalism is divisive

Today’s Libya requires the rapid creation of nation-wide institutions and human capital that Libyan history shows is incompatible with federalism. Yet, the proponents of federalism wish to decide taxes and budgets at the provincial level – a sure recipe for gridlock. Furthermore, one of the few positive legacies of Gaddafi’s rule is his construction of extensive water and oil pipelines that link the provinces together. For example, much of Libya’s oil is extracted in Cyrenaica and brought via pipelines to the Sirte Basin, while the majority of Libya’s groundwater comes from aquifers in southern Cyrenaica but is consumed in the populous areas of Western Tripolitania. A return to a “federal” governmental model would inevitably endanger these gains unleashing a competition over strategic resources – especially those in the Sirte Basin where Cyrenaica and Tripolitania meet.

Creating a functional chain of command

The NTC’s current failings point in another direction – careful delegation of local powers to the spontaneous organisations that arose in each town and region during the uprisings, creating a chain of com­mand that links these organisations to the central government. Misratans should run their town’s affairs through their new democratically elected local council and Benghazi transparency activists must be involved in their local governance – but only as representatives of the central government and not as their own fiefdoms.

In post-Gaddafi Libya, peripheral actors will continuously rebel if they do not feel they have a say in their own governance. Federalism is not the only way to give them that say. In fact, the discourse surrounding federalism has proved so toxic that the Benghazi declaration of March 5th unleashed scores of anti-federalism protests, leading to NTC officials stating that they would use force to prevent an Eastern federal region from coming into being. Further backlash was occasioned by the April 17 meeting of the pro-federalism “Congress of the People of Cyrenaica”.

Like Afghanistan and Yemen, Libya may be yet another country in which the culture and history of peripheral actors does not allow them to easily accept a subordinate position, even to a central authority they accept as legitimate. However, Libya is certainly the only example of an oil-rich Arab country where the periphery remains dominant; usually the economic requirements of the extractive industries necessitate nationwide infrastructure and coherent chains of command. Given Libya’s history and shared infrastructure, appeasement of local actors via promises of regional autonomy is a recipe for confusion and inefficiency. In the long-term, enshrining a federal system would almost certainly doom the implementation of any coherent, countrywide development plan.

 

 

 

 

 

Did “Hip Hop” Help the Arab Spring Movement??

From protest songs to revolutionary anthems

Protesters of the Arab Spring are realising the power of music, and finding their voices in styles from folk to hip hop.

Arab hip hop has become one of the defining cultural motifs of the revolts of the last eight months’ [GALLO/GETTY]

“My music may be soft, but I’m a warrior on stage.”

So explained Tunisian folk rock singer Emel Mathlouthi as we sat in the restaurant of the African Hotel after almost eight hours of rehearsal for a concert she performed at the Museum of Carthage two days later. It was a defiant remark, coming in response to a discussion of the much-celebrated role of hip hop in the Tunisian revolution, and Mathlouthi certainly had a point.

Rappers like Tunisia’s El General have received hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits (See YOUTUBE Below):

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Repeated international attention for writing their songs supporting the revolution. But watch Mathlouthi’s rendition of “Kilmati Houra” (My Word is Free) (Beow:

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 which she performed on the street on amidst the crowd on Bourghiba Avenue on a chilly winter’s evening in the middle of the revolution, and the power of a simple voice, without drum machines, effusive anger and the other aspects of hip hop, becomes clear.
On the Street, but not of the Street?

There are many reasons Arab hip hop has become one of the defining cultural motifs of the revolts of the last eight months. It’s gritty, angry, and evokes the kind of urban imagery – poverty, unemployment, police brutality, lack of life chances – that were at the heart of hip hop culture before it was taken over by bling. Today, Tunis, Cairo and other Arab capitals have, in one sense, inherited the mantle of Compton, Oakland or Brooklyn, where much of the most famous political American rap emerged.

In contrast, Mathlouthi’s songs recall the generation prior, reminding us of folk music’s powerful role in the American civil rights and anti-war struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. And so it was not surprising that as we talked about the evolution of her music, she turned to singers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan before I could mention them.

“At first, I had rock band and we played covers of hard bands like In Flames, the Dark Tranquility, The Gathering and Italian gothic group Lacuna Coil. But then I switched to softer music after listening to Baez and Dylan, and realised what you could do with just a guitar and voice. My music became more revolutionary as it became softer.”

Mathlouthi’s insight about the power of softness struck a chord with me, as it mirrored precisely the experience of Egypt’s Ramy Essam, another metalhead turned acoustic singer who became one of the main voices of Tahrir Square.

Already sold on the importance of hip hop to the Tunisian revolution, when I first heard Essam’s version of his soon to be famous song “Irhal” (“Leave Now!” the Egyptian equivalent of the ubiquitous slogan “Dégage!” In Tunisia), featuring just him singing over his acoustic guitar, I immediately called a producer friend to work on a hip hop remix with drums and bass. To my ears, they would help turn a great protest song into a revolutionary anthem. But as soon as I watched the crowd react to him performing it live in Tahrir a few days later it became clear that the extra instrumentation were superfluous.

Some Examples Arab rap and Hip Hop

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Reinventing tradition

A generation before either Essam or Mathlouthi were born, legendary Egyptian singer Sheikh Imam and his oud, often joined by his reknowned poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, inspired Egyptians with their highly charged songs that railed against state violence and the sufferings of Egypt’s – and by extension the Arab world’s – poor and working classes. Negm’s famous “The Donkey and the Foal”, which has long been understood as an allusion to Mubarak and his son and would-be successor Gamal, was also set to music by Essam, w

“I started Tanboura as a response not merely to local oppression, but to the penetration of a commercial aesthetic that almost destroyed traditional music in egypt, and the mentality and authentic values that existed with it.”Zakaria Ibrahim, founder of Tanboura and director of El Mastaba Center for Egyptian Folk Music

ho, like Mathlouthi and just about every other singer or rapper I know, has been strongly inspired by Sheikh Imam.

Another generation of traditional musicians today carries the mantle of Sheikh Imam and the still very much alive Ahmed Fouad Negm, whose devil-may-care attitude and humorous and poetic style of attacking Mubarak in the final years of his rule became a template for the artistically rich protests at Tahrir.

But it wasn’t just Negm’s poetry that brought a traditional feel to the Tahrir protests. One of the main musical highlights of the 18 day protests was the performance by celebrated folklore group Tanboura. They brought a tradition of protest music from the Suez Canal region that has taken on Nasser, Sadat and the Israeli occupation with equal vigor. For their actions members have, like Imam and Negm before them, faced prison and worse at the hands of the regime.

For Zakaria Ibrahim, founder of Tanboura and director of El Mastaba Center for Egyptian Folk Music, Tanboura’s popularity is inseparable from its dual role as a voice of protest and a regenerator of traditional styles of music that recently were in danger of disappearing completely.

“I started Tanboura,” Ibrahim explains, “as a response not merely to local oppression, but to the penetration of a commercial aesthetic that almost destroyed traditional music in Egypt, and the mentality and authentic values that existed with it.”

Scholars might blanche before such a seemingly rose-colored view of “tradition” and “authenticity”, given that so-called traditional and authentic Egyptian culture is certainly not free of prejudice, oppression and violence. But Ibrahim’s focus here is on music, not society as a whole.

“Before it was just our traditional music in the street. People shared it because it expressed their hopes and needs. We sang against repression, against longing to go home after the Israeli conquest of Sinai, we had the same desires to ask for democracy and holding the government accountable, and just like today we went to prison for it. But then with the commercialisation of music songs changed completely. Instead of people sharing, now it became just commercial, without art, while the remaining traditional groups had to play for Mubarak and be controlled by his system to survive. They lost their freedom.”

Of course, the plight of musicians was no different than the plight of Egyptians more broadly. What’s interesting is that the same forces of neoliberalism – strongly associated with Gamal Mubarak and his cronies – that many analysts believe ultimately turned the old guard of the military-economic elite against the Mubaraks also drove traditional musicians like the members of Tanboura onto the streets.

“Mubarak was using the opening to the West to flood market with Western music,” Ibrahim explained, “but offered no support for traditional music. Now at least we can hope for support.”

Tradition and hybridity

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Next Music Station: Tunisia

 The popular protests that toppled Ben Ali and Mubarak succeeded in good measure because the dictatorial regimes they confronted were unable to stop the uncontrolled flow of information, whether through social media or satellite networks like  Al Jazeera (which in fact made unprecedented use of social media in its coverage of the protests).

The ability to share knowledge unbound by once powerful government censorship regimes both linked activists and protesters together and brought the realities of government repression and lies into clearer public view than ever before.

Among the most powerful forces for encouraging the unrestricted spread of knowledge and culture through the internet and its multifaceted forms of social media is the Creative Commons movement, of which, not surprisingly, Al Jazeera has been a major supporter.

As an academic and musician I have long felt that encouraging unrestricted, and as important, free circulation of knowledge and cultural products enabled by the use of Creative Commons’ legal mechanisms is crucial for the future of both art and scientific/academic knowledge in the global era.

At the beginning of July, Al Jazeera and Creative Commons joined together to sponsor the 3rd Creative Commons Arab Regional Meeting and Concert, fittingly held in Tunis. As many of the participants at the meeting, from Creative Commons Chairman Joi Ito to Tanboura member and one time Sheikh Imam disciple Yasser Shoukry, explained to Al Jazeera  journalist and tech expert Bilal Randaree, there is a strong affinity between the principles of Creative Commons and those of the Arab Spring.

Coming to the meeting I already had first hand experience of the activist and political implications of the kinds of circulation of knowledge enabled by Creative Commons. What I could not have imagined, however, was how the community created by CC could bring together traditional and contemporary forms of artistic production in ways that produced truly powerful and innovative hybrid forms of music and art.

For the meeting and concert we brought together well over a dozen artists from Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Morocco, and the US. Free of the pressure of creating a commercially viable product, our traditional singers from Egypt, Yasser Shoukry, and Tunisia, Alia Sellami, brilliantly teamed up with Tunisian rap groups Armada Bizerta and Lak3y and Gazan rapper Ayman Mghamis, to write two songs that epitomised the ongoing struggles faced by the young people who have led the Arab revolutions.

This includes the difficulty young Arabs face merely to travel outside their countries (many of the invited Gazan participants couldn’t get visas, while those that did waited three days at the border to get out. Ramy Essam was not permitted to leave Egypt), and the need to continue the revolutionary impetus even as the urge to return to “normalcy” grows by the day.

Blending the poetry of Negm and Abdel Rahman al Abnudi, Shoukry and Sellami provided the vocal foundation over which the rappers could let fly with some of the most intimate yet powerfully delivered truths of the struggles they have faced, and their peers continue to face, whether in Tunis, Cairo, Gaza or beyond.

For our part, the musicians brought together traditional Moroccan guimbris with acoustic guitars, distorted and multi-affected electric guitars and some incredibly funky bass guitar and percussion players thanks to the willingness of members of the other groups who participated in the concert to join our Creative Commons jam.

After only a few hours of rehearsing we had developed two powerful songs that gave our rappers and singers a unique sound which they used to collaborate over with a joyful vengeance. The rappers spat ou

“Among the greatest challenges facing artists…is the difficulty of actually creating the physical spaces for them to meet and collaborate.”

t in angry stacatto the realities of the moment in which we found ourselves; while Shoukry and Sellami offered voices of beauteous, calm tradition to remind us of where we’ve been and how to move beyond it to the next level.

And through it all, musical direcor and Moroccan metal pioneer, Reda Zine, focused on the Gnawa rhythms and melodies which have linked West African not only to southern Africa, but east across the entirety of North Africa and the Middle East. All guitarist/bloger Kerim Bouzouita and I had to do was add few choice guitar riffs and we had officially created a new genre of world music that has yet to be named.

The collaboration was a great success by the closing concert, and the musicians have pledged to complete writing and recording the songs so that they can be proplerly released via a CC license – which would allow other artists to build on our foundation to craft new and even better versions of the song. Two art workshops also joined the creative process, producing several wonderful videos that will be worked in more definitively once the songs are completed.

It is clear, from our experience, that among the greatest challenges facing artists in particular, and especially those particpants in the ongoing struggles for social and political change, is the difficulty of actually creating the physical spaces for them to meet and collaborate. This meeting and concert showed that however important new media and hi tech communications have clearly become, they are still no substitute for face to face interaction (a point equally well proven in the success of the revolutions once they actually moved from facebook to the streets in collaborative action).

At the same time we will continue to try to reach out to those who couldn’t meet with us through these forms of social media. We will bring them into the musical and visual dialogue as much as possible with the hope, always, that at the end of the day we’ll all be sharing the same real stage – whether at Tahrir, the Carthage Museum, or hopefully in the near future, the Damascus Citadel or rebuilt Pearl of Bahrain.

AND Just in case you wonder if these things can go viral.. see this video with almost 1.7 million views….

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MUSIC CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN

THE WORLD

Conundrum: Protect speech or society?

The online conundrum: Protect speech or society?

What is MOST interesting to me in this article is that MOST Americans do not know, understand. or care about the censorship that is talking place HERE in the USA and abroad… hence we will ultimately lose our First Amendment Rights by legislation and fear mongering. 

Look at how countries are prosecuting people for what they say on social media.

Many post to Facebook and Twitter the same way they speak privately to their friends. 

Online conversations, however, are public and may be limited by law especially when it comes to controversial speech. Even countries that put a premium on free expression are prosecuting netizens for things they post. 

Do these laws infringe on free speech or ensure civilised society? 

In an effort to comply with speech laws around the world, Twitter announced in January it would block tweets and user accounts that violate domestic laws. This picture shows how some users feel about the new policy. 

1. This is an example of what a user might see if a Twitter account has been censored or blocked due to a country’s speech standards.
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3. This is what Twitter users would find if they tried to view a tweet that has been censored in another country.
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   In India, Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra was arrested for sharing a political cartoon with his friends that criticised West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. This is the political cartoon that caused Mahapatra’s arrest. The picture parodies the situation where the Chief Minister fired one of her party members, Dinesh Trivedi, for raising the railway fares.
    
   
    
   In Turkey, the government is investigating famous pianist and composer Fazil Say, who is accused of offending Christianity, Judaism and Islam as well as causing public resentment on Twitter. If found guilty under Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code, he could face between six months to three years in prison. This links to his Twitter page.
    
   
    
   Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code explains the restrictions on expression (it can be found under Chapter 3: Offences against Society). 

    

   It states: “Anyone who openly incites sections of the population to enmity or hatred toward another group on the basis of race, social class, religion, or sectarian difference, in a manner which may present a clear and imminent danger in terms of public safety shall be sentenced to imprisonment of from one to three years.” 
    
   
    
   1. Although Twitter removed Say’s tweets, the hashtag #FazilSay was trending on Twitter in support of the composer. 
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      Let’s support @Fazil__Say in his brave & witty twitters for the Turkye we used to love but under threat by humourless bigotists #FazilSay
       
   3. World famous Turkish pianist investigated for anti-religious tweet. Turkey 500 years behind, far from achieving freedom of speech. #FazilSay

       
   4. This image captures the slew of Liam Stacey’s controversial tweets after popular football star Fabrice Muamba suffered heart failure during a match in the UK on March 17 (Disclaimer: the link to this screenshot contains explicit content.). After pleading guilty to “racially aggravated harassment,” 21-year-old Stacey is serving 56 days in prison and faces expulsion from his university. Stacey’s Twitter account has been deleted. 
       
      
       
      Another example of Stacey’s controversial tweets posted on March 7.
      http://stats.storify.com/record/click?sid=4f8834ec52eb83935e73c326&redirect=http://www.flickr.com/photos/61221198@N05/7084825259
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      Fabrice Muamba’s girlfriend, @ShaunaMuamba, posted to Twitter the following picture to show the vast support behind the footballer after Stacey’s tweets drew anger from some fans.
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      Also in the United Kingdom, John Kerlen, a blogger who goes by the alias Olly Cromwell, is under scrutiny for calling his local Bexley councillor vulgar names via Twitter. Section 127 of the Communications Act of 2003 makes it possible to charge an individual with “improper use of public electronic communications.” Some reports say he may face up to six months in prison.
      
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      This photo is posted on Kerlen’s blog where he sounded off about authority figures using the same type of language for which he was found guilty. 
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      1. One Twitter user compares Kerlen’s case with that of Stacey. “
      2. @SeanInSpain Hmm, this bothers me in a way the Liam Stacey conviction didn’t. Is that logical or just my own feelings on n-word vs c-word?
      3. The hashtag #FreeTheBexleyOne has become popular with those supporting Kerlen.
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         Problem using C word to describe politicians is it’s a breach of Official Secrets Act! #FreeTheBexleyOne
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      5. Dear @BexleyCouncil How do you feel being nationally infamous for assaulting free speech as default response to criticism? #freethebexleyone
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         freedom of speech does not exist MT “@edsbrother: A man has been convicted of swearing on twitter. bit.ly/Iz3UZp #freethebexleyone”
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         On April 14, Muslim-American Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to serve 17 years in prison on charges of “supporting Al Qaeda” and expressing “sympathetic views” to the group, as well as conspiring to “murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq.” The charges came after Mehanna translated documents from Arabic to English and posted his controversial views online. Click here for the translated document
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         A poem Mehanna wrote is also the background of the Twitter account @FreeTarek.  
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         This is a photo of protesters outside Mehanna’s trial..
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         In another UK case, Merseyside Cadet Amy Graham was arrested on April 10 on charges of “racial aggravation”. On April 9, she tweeted, ”I hate Muslims with a passion” under the Twitter handle.
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          @AmyJgra. Her account has since been suspended. The story can be found here. 
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         .In the US, UCLA student Alexandra Wallace posted a video in March attacking Asians which quickly went viral. Because of the university’s policy supporting free speech and expression, Wallace was not expelled. She later withdrew from the university.  
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Southern Sudan Withdraws and Promotes Peace

Sudan Declares ‘Liberation’ of Heglig As Juba Announces SPLA Pullout

Juba-Khartoum — Sudan announced on Friday that its armed forces defeated South Sudan army and regained full control of oil-producing region of Heglig, shortly after Juba announced immediate withdrawal of its army.

South Sudan’s information and media minister, Barnaba Marial Benjamin, on Friday told reporters in Juba that the country’s president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, had ordered the immediate withdrawal of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) from Heglig.

“The Republic of South Sudan announces that SPLA troops have been ordered to withdraw from Panthou (Heglig),” Benjamin said.

“An orderly withdrawal will commence immediately, and shall be completed within three days,” he added.

Shortly after South Sudan’s announcement, Sudan’s defense minister Abdel Rahim, Mohamed Hussien appeared on state television to declare the liberation of Heglig.

Hussein said that Sudan’s army (SAF) liberated the area after defeating SPLA forces.

Heglig was occupied by the SPLA last week, leading to the worst standoff between Sudan and South Sudan since the latter seceded last year.

The outbreak of military confrontations followed months of failed negotiations between Khartoum and Juba over border demarcation, citizenship and oil exports.

Spaniards Furious over EU Imposed Reforms. Vow to Fight!

Spaniards fight back against reforms

Government’s fiscal and social initiatives are met with anger

Protesters throw stones at the police in central Barcelona during a general strike in Spain March 29, 2012. REUTERS/Gustau Nacarino

1. The political coalition “Izquierda Unida,” or United Left, began an online campaign called “Our cuts will be with a #Guillotine.”  The campaign is an answer to the austerity measures and their way of expressing their dissatisfaction with their system of governance and the monarchy, which they say does not represent them. The campaign’s aim is to create a “Third Republic with more rights and more democracy.” 
   
   
   
2. Share
   

   Frente a los mercados #IIIRepública y #Guillotina http://pic.twitter.com/f1YZgRrn

   Standing up to the markets #ThirdRepublic and #Guillotine
   
   
3. Youth and university groups representative of the movement tweeted out the following images, which feature and define articles of the Second Republic’s constitution and compare them to today’s laws and practices in Spain. 
4. For example, the image below defines the first article of the Second Republic’s constitution as saying “Spain is a democratic Republic of all types of workers, which organises itself through liberty and justice.”  The 2012 reality is “Labour reform and cuts to social and civil liberties.” 
5. Share

   
   #Guillotina Contra la reforma laboral y los recortes de derechos sociales y civiles #IIIRepública http://pic.twitter.com/F0OUC5Ew

    #Guillotine Against labour reform and cuts to social and civil liberties.
   
   
6. The following image describes how Article 48 of the Second Republic stipulates that education will be secular. In 2012, however, the state finances religious education and allows the presence of the Catholic Church’s teachings in public schools. 
7. #Guillotina En defensa de la enseñanza de calidad. La educación a la escuela, la religión a la iglesia #IIIRepública http://pic.twitter.com/78wWDsqV

    #Guillotine In defense of a quality education. Education to schools, religion to churches. #ThirdRepublic
   
   
8. Others joined in on the online conversation with the hashtag #Guillotin
   
   
9. A los que votaron PP y ahora lloran por lo que se está aprobando. #guillotina

    To those who voted for PP (Spain’s Popular Party, which is conservative) and are now crying for what has been approved #Guillotine
   
   
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    ¿Recortes sociales, malestar general, ausencia de soberanía, borboneos? Tenemos la solución: #Guillotina. Nuestra experiencia nos avala

    Social cuts, general discomfort, absence of sovereignty? We have the solution: #Guillotine. We are backed by experience. 
    
    
11. The top image features a headline from the Spanish newspaper “El Pais” that reads: “[Prime Minister] Rajoy announces cuts of 10 billion to Health and Education.” The second headline, from the website Publico, reads: The Church receives 10 billion a year from the treasury. 
12. 
    Rajoy, a tí sí que te vamos a dar nosotras recortes… #Guillotina @Acontracorrent http://pic.twitter.com/TEuSddJn

    Rajoy, we will definitely give you cutbacks. (Mariano Rajoy is the current Prime Minister of Spain and is part of the People’s Party).  
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    Y llevamos 5 meses de legislatura. Quedan 3 años y medio… #guilloti
    We’re 5 months into this term. There’s 3 years and a half left…#guillotine
    
    
14. The following tweets allude to the recent proposal by Spain’s Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz to criminalise calls for violence on social networks (which spurred the hashtags #HelloDictatorship and #IAmACriminal) that disturb the public peace. 
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    Que la #guillotina sea violencia, pero que condenar a generaciones enteras a la misera y precariedad no lo sea #GrandesMentirasDeLaHumanidad
    That the #guillotine is violence, but condemning entire generations to misery and deprivation is not is one of #HumanitysGreatLies
    
    
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    Convertir en TT el hastag #Guillotina no incita violencia. Cobrar dinero x cada noche ingresado en un hospital SI ES INCITAR A LA VIOLENCIA

    Making the hashtag a trending topic does not incite violence. Charging money for each night spent at a hospital DOES INCITE VIOLENCE.
17. Spaniards have been using the hashtag #HolaDictadura or, “Hello Dictatorship,” to criticise the country’s Popular Party, current reforms and proposals of laws they say infringe on their rights. 
    
    
18. “
    .@PPopular #populares una cosa es tener una supuesta Mayoria Absoluta(28% de C. electoral) y otra cosa es abusar de ella #holadictadura

    . The Popular Party #popular One thing is having a supposed absolute majority (28% of electoral) and another thing is abusing of it. #HelloDictatorship
    
    
19. “
    “Esta primavera vuelven los 70″ –¿En la ropa y complementos? –No no, en el código penal #holadictadura

     “This spring the ’70s are back” –”In clothes and accessories?”–No, in the penal code. #HelloDictatorship
    
    
20. 

    #HolaDictadura A los tenebrosos tiempos del Imperio regresado hemos! http://pic.twitter.com/4tKiwhxr

    In the words of Dark Yoda: To sinister times the Empire has gone back! (The image reads, “Come on over to the dark side” next to the Popular Party logo.)
    
    
21. “
    Hay que darle gracias al gobierno por recordarnos que somos mucho mas peligrosos tomando plazas que rompiendo cosas #holadictadura

      Let’s give thanks to the government for reminding us that we are much more dangerous taking to the streets than breaking things #HelloDictatorship
    
    
22. “
    Si la resistencia pasiva a la autoridad es considerada atentado, pues habrá resistencia activa porque cuesta lo mismo. #HolaDictadura

    If passive resistance to authority is considered an attempt, then there will be active resistance because they cost the same. #HelloDictatorship
23. Share
    

    A partir de ya, si no llamas “AMADO LÍDER” a Rajoy, eres ETA #HolaDictadura http://twitpic.com/98h58s

    By now, if you don’t call Rajoy “BELOVED LEADER,” you are ETA ( Basque separatist group) 
    
    
24. The hashtag #SoyCriminal or, “I’m a criminal,” also trended when news broke of the Interior Minister’s proposal to criminalise calls to protest. 
25. “
    Feliz 1984 #SoyTerrorista #SoyCriminal #SoyDelincuente
    Happy 1984 #IAmATerrorist #IAmACriminal #ImADelinquent
    
    
26. “
    Primero te llaman antisistema y luego cambian el sistema para convertirte en criminal #SoyCriminal

    First they call you anti-system and then they change the system to make you into a criminal #IAmACriminal

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27. #SoyCriminal y mi delito es seguir pensando que tengo Derechos.

    #IAmACriminal and my crime is to keep thinking I have rights.

 

 

Gulf Of Mexico Fisheries See Serious Decline 2 Years After BP Oil Disaster

Nearly two years after BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen and scientists say things are getting worse.

New Orleans, LA - Hundreds of thousands of people living along the US Gulf Coast have hung their economic lives on lawsuits against BP.

Fishermen, in particular, are seeing their way of life threatened with extinction – both from lack of an adequate legal settlement and collapsing fisheries.

One of these people, Greg Perez, an oyster fisherman in the village of Yscloskey, Louisiana, has seen a 75 per cent decrease in the amount of oysters he has been able to catch.

“Since the spill, business has been bad,” he said. “Sales and productivity are down, our state oyster grounds are gone, and we are investing personal money to rebuild oyster reefs, but so far it’s not working.”

Perez, like so many Gulf Coast commercial fisherman, has been fishing all his life. He said those who fish for crab and shrimp are “in trouble too”, and he is suing BP for property damage for destroying his oyster reefs, as well as for his business’ loss of income.

People like Perez make it possible for Louisiana to provide 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US.

But Louisiana’s seafood industry, valued at about $2.3bn, is now fighting for its life.

‘The shrimp are all dead’

Perez is not alone.

“They said they’d make things right and they never did,” said Nicholas Harris, a fourth-generation oyster fisherman in eastern Louisiana. “Business has been s****y, and BP kept low-balling us with how much money they said they’d give us for compensation, so we got our attorneys involved.”

Harris, like Perez, is suing the oil giant for property damage and loss of income.

His family has a 4,000-acre private lease for oysters, but it was destroyed when the State of Louisiana diverted fresh water from the Mississippi River in a failed attempt to flush BP’s oil from the oyster fishing grounds in his area.

The situation in Mississippi for shrimpers is nearly as grim.

“I was at a BP coastal restoration meeting yesterday and they tried to tell us they searched 6,000 square miles of the seafloor and found no oil, thanks to Mother Nature,” Tuan Dang, a shrimper, told Al Jazeera while standing on a dock full of shrimp boats that would normally be out shrimping this time of year.

Mississippi shrimper Tuan Dang is not catching enough shrimp to turn a profit – just one of many in the Gulf Coast seafood industry affected by the BP disaster [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

Dang’s fishing experience has been bleak.

“Normally I can get 8,000 pounds of brown shrimp in four days,” he explained. “But this year, I only get 800 pounds in a week. There are hardly any shrimp out there.”

When he tried to catch white shrimp, he said he “caught almost nothing”.

He is suing BP for loss of income, but does not have much hope, despite recent news of an initial settlement worth more than $7bn. “We’d love to see them clean this up so we can get our lives back, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”

Shrimp boat captain Song Vu is hoping that he will catch more shrimp next season, because the last times he fished he caught very few [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

Song Vu, a shrimp boat captain for 20 years, has not tried to shrimp for weeks, and is simply hoping that there will be shrimp to catch next season.

His experience during his last shrimping attempts left him depressed.

“The shrimp are all dead,” he told Al Jazeera. “Everything is dead.”

BP has ‘taken its toll’

Henry Poynot, the owner of Big Fisherman Seafood in New Orleans, has been selling seafood for 28 years.

Al Jazeera asked him how his business was doing.

“2010 was the worst year we’ve had in 15 years,” he said. “Then 2011 was worse than 2010. Some of this was the economy, but most of it is due to BP. BP has taken its toll.”

Seafood vendor Henry Poynot says people are buying less seafood than ever, a situation he blames on the BP oil disaster [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

Given that 20 per cent of the total US seafood production comes from the Gulf Coast – where the major commercial fishing ports bring in over 1.2 billion pounds of fresh seafood annually – this is not good news.

Poynot said that many people, even some of his employees, continue to be afraid to eat seafood from the Gulf, for fear of contamination by BP’s oil and dispersants.

“It’s hard to believe the impact of the spill,” Poynot added. “I have heard that some folks are still catching tar balls in their crab traps.”

Apparently, the fact that the State of Louisiana received $18m from BP for the Louisiana Seafood Safety Plan to test seafood, water and soil from across the coast is not helping to assuage fears.

Keith Ladner, a third-generation seafood processor in Bay St Louis, Mississippi, has it even worse.

“I’m worried about the entire seafood industry of the Gulf being on the way out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera in Biloxi, Mississippi. “We have taken constant hits like Katrina, the economy, and now BP. I’m now unsure how many of us will come back from this.”

Ladner reiterated what Al Jazeera has been hearing from fishermen, seafood processors and distributors all along the coast – that there has been a two-thirds drop in brown shrimp production, and white shrimp season was basically non-existent.

“The only brown and white shrimp we see now are from Texas or western Louisiana, where the oil didn’t impact directly,” he said. “And for oysters, Mississippi’s oyster reefs have been closed since the spill started. I have not purchased one single sack of oysters since the spill, and I won’t eat any from this area.”

Ladner was in the process of rebuilding his business after Hurricane Katrina completely devastated it, and was set to reopen new facilities on May 1, 2010.

BP’s oil disaster began on April 20, 2010.

“I’ve had no way to generate income because of the spill, and I’ve been shut down to this day,” he explained. “I’m waiting for the fisheries to come back, and I cannot reopen until, or unless, they do.”

Ladner’s business, which transported Gulf seafood to 15 states, remains closed. Ladner has filed a lawsuit against BP for loss of income. He remains wary about his future.

“Looking at the scene now, should I invest what I need to invest to get back to where I was before, if these fisheries don’t come back?” he asks. “We’re dead in the water until the fishermen go back to work. The whole economy will feel it.”

‘Worst crisis I’ve seen’

Fishermen and scientists continue to deal with the aftermath of BP’s disaster.

Louisiana’s oyster harvest in 2010 was the lowest in 44 years, due to BP’s oil disaster. Scott Gordon, Mississippi’s director of the Shellfish Bureau of the Office of Marine Fisheries, said in the summer of 2010, “I fully expect to have 100 per cent mortalities of the oysters in the western Mississippi Sound”. His predictions have come true [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

“We are in the worst crisis I’ve ever seen,” Brad Robin, a sixth-generation fisherman and seafood proprietor, told Al Jazeera last September, while out on a boat surveying the crippled oyster population where he fishes. “The [oyster] industry might do 35 per cent this year, if we’re very lucky.”

Dr Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer and a marine and oyster biologist, and Tom Soniat, a University of New Orleans oyster biologist, invited Al Jazeera to accompany them, Robin, and Robin’s son to check for recovering oyster populations.

The marsh area outside of Yscloskey, Louisiana was severely affected by massive fresh-water diversions from the Mississippi River. The choice to divert river water was made to flush the marsh in order to prevent oil from washing in, but the fresh water has killed all the oysters, and Cake believes dispersed oil came in anyway.

Further complicating things, Cake has pinpointed at least two invasive species that do not bode well for a recovery of Louisiana’s oysters.

“We are finding sponges growing on our oysters,” Cake told Al Jazeera. “They encrust the oyster shell and that prevents new spat [baby oysters] from attaching to grow new oysters. We don’t know why this is happening, but we think it came in response to the fresh water and oil. This is the first time we’ve seen it.”

The sponge is chalinula loosanoffi, and is native to Ireland, the Netherlands, and the upper East Coast of the US.

Cake has also found a worm, poydora aggregata, native to Maine, which attaches itself to oysters and fouls their shells.

“I’m worried these sponges and worms could wreak havoc on the industry,” Cake said.

Louisiana’s oyster harvest in 2010 was cut in half, to a 44-year low, due to BP’s oil disaster. Scott Gordon, Mississippi’s director of the Shellfish Bureau of the Office of Marine Fisheries, said in the summer of 2010, “I fully expect to have 100 per cent mortalities of the oysters in the western Mississippi Sound”.

His predictions have come true.

Professor Soniat explained that the oyster industry is afflicted with “multiple impacts”.

“First the oil spill took away their fishing season,” he said of the fishing ban put in place after the BP disaster. “Second, the fresh-water diversion took away the oysters; and third, the programme of having oystermen harvest shells from their leases to try to re-seed other areas killed the oyster reefs.”

Cake recently told Al Jazeera that many of the Gulf fisheries “have already collapsed” and the only question is “if or when they’ll come back”.

“If it takes too long for them to come back, the fishing industry won’t survive,” he added.

Given that after the Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska in 1989, herring have still not come back enough to be a viable fishing resource, this does not bode well for the Gulf seafood industry, whose fisheries are – according to scientists like Cake and Soniat – still in the initial phase of collapse.

Using “HIP HOP” as a Foreign Policy Tool

Leveraging hip hop in US foreign policy

Diplomats and officials use the music of the oppressed to connect with disaffected Muslim youth.

The US government wants to improve its tarnished image abroad by sending out ‘hip hop envoys’ [GALLO/GETTY]

In April 2010, the US State Department sent a rap group named Chen Lo and The Liberation Family to perform in Damascus, Syria.

Following Chen Lo’s performance, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was asked by CBS News about US diplomacy’s recent embrace of hip hop. “Hip hop is America,” she said, noting that rap and other musical forms could help “rebuild the image” of the United States. “You know it may be a little bit hopeful, because I can’t point to a change in Syrian policy because Chen Lo and the Liberation Family showed up. But I think we have to use every tool at our disposal.” 

The State Department began using hiphop as a tool in the mid-2000s, when, in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the resurgence of the Taliban, Karen Hughes, then undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, launched an initiative called Rhythm Road. The programme was modelled on the jazz diplomacy initiative of the Cold War era, except that in the “War on Terror”, hip hop would play the central role of countering “poor perceptions” of the US. 

In 2005, the State Department began sending “hip hop envoys” – rappers, dancers, DJs – to perform and speak in different parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The tours have since covered the broad arc of the Muslim world, with performances taking place in Senegal and Ivory Coast, across North Africa, the Levant and Middle East, and extending to Mongolia, Pakistan and Indonesia.

The artists stage performances and hold workshops; those hip hop ambassadors who are Muslims talk to local media about being Muslim in the US. The tours aim not only to exhibit the integration of American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote democracy and foster dissent.

“You have to bet at the end of the day, people will choose freedom over tyranny if they’re given a choice,” Clinton observed of the State Department’s hip hop programme in Syria – stating that cultural diplomacy is a complex game of “multidimensional chess”.

“Hip hop can be a chess piece?” asked the interviewer. “Absolutely!” responded the secretary of state.

Much has been said about the role of hip hop in the Arab revolts. French media described [fr] the Arab Spring as le printemps des rappeurs ["The spring of the rappers"]. Time Magazine named Tunisian rapper Hamada Ben Amor (aka El General) – a rapper who was arrested by Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali – as one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2011″, ranking him higher than President Barack Obama.  

Hip hop revolution

It is true that since protests began in Tunisia in December 2010, rap has provided a soundtrack to the North African revolts. As security forces rampaged in the streets, artists in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi were writing lyrics and cobbling together protest footage, beats and rhymes, which they then uploaded to proxy servers. These impromptu songs - such as El General’s Rais Lebled - were then picked up and broadcast by Al Jazeera, and played at gatherings and solidarity marches in London, New York and Washington. 

But the role of music should not be exaggerated: Hip hop did not cause the Arab revolts any more than Twitter or Facebook did. The cross-border spread of popular movements is not a new phenomenon in the Arab world – the uprisings of 1919, which engulfed Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, occurred long before the advent of the internet, social media or rap music.

And the countries in the region with the most vibrant hip hop scenes, Morocco and Algeria, have not seen revolts. Western journalists’ focus on hip hop – like their fixation on Facebook and Twitter – seems partly because, in their eyes, a taste for hip hop among young Muslims is a sign of moderation, modernity, even “an embrace of the US”.

Interviewer: “Hip hop can be a chess piece?”Hillary Clinton: Absolutely!”

What is absent from these discussions about rap and the breakdown of Arab authoritarianism is the role that states – in the region and beyond – have played in shaping and directing local hip hop cultures. From deposed Tunisian dictator Ben Ali’s mobilisation of hip hop culture against Islamism to the embattled Syrian regime’s current support of “pro-stability rappers”, to the US government’s growing use of hip hop in public diplomacy, counter-terrorism and democracy promotion, regimes are intervening to promote some sub-styles of hip hop, in an attempt to harness the genre towards various political objectives.

The jazz tours of the Cold War saw the US government sent integrated bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman to various parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East to counter Soviet propaganda about American racial practices, and to get people in other countries to identify with “the American way of life”.

The choice of jazz was not simply due to its international appeal. As historian Penny Von Eschen writes in her pioneering book Satchmo Blows Up the World, in the 1950s, the State Department believed that African-American culture could convey “a sense of shared suffering, as well as the conviction that equality could be gained under the American political system” to people who had suffered European colonialism.

Similar thinking underpins the current “hip hop diplomacy” initiatives. The State Department planners who are calling for “the leveraging of hip hop” in US foreign policy emphasise “the importance of Islam to the roots of hip hop in America”, and the “pain” and “struggle” that the music expresses.

A Brookings report authored by the programme’s architects – titled “Mightier than the Sword: Arts and Culture in the US-Muslim World Relationship” (2008) – notes that hip hop began as “outsiders’ protest” against the US system, and now resonates among marginalised Muslim youth worldwide. From the Parisian banlieues to Palestine to Kyrgyzstan, “hip hop reflects struggle against authority” and expresses a “pain” that transcends language barriers. 

An ironic choice

Rappers whom Muslim youth relate to often disagree with US foreign policy [GALLO/GETTY]

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Moreover, note the authors, hip hop’s pioneers were inner-city Muslims who “carry on an African-American Muslim tradition of protest against authority, most powerfully represented by Malcolm X”. The report concludes by calling for a “greater exploitation of this natural connector to the Muslim world”.     

The choice of hip hop is ironic: The very music blamed for a range of social ills at home – violence, misogyny, consumerism, academic underperformance – is being deployed abroad in the hopes of making the US safer and better-liked. European states have also been disptaching their Muslim hip hop artists to perform in Muslim-majority countries. Long before the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the British Council was organising hip hop workshops in Tripoli, and sponsoring Electric Steps, “Libya’s only hip hop band”, as a way to promote political reform in that country. 

Rap is also being used in de-radicalisation and counter-terrorism initiatives. American and European terrorism experts have expressed concerns over “anti-American hip hop”, accenting the radicalising influence of this genre. Others have advocated mobilising certain sub-genres of hip hop against what they call “jihadi cool”. 

Warning that Osama bin Laden’s associate Abu Yahya al-Libi has made al-Qaeda look “cool”, one terrorism expert recommends that the US respond “with one of America’s coolest exports: hip hop”, specifically with a “subgroup” thereof.

“Muslim hip hop is Muslim poetry set to drum beats,” explains Jeffrey Halverson in an article titled Rap Is Da Bomb for Defeating Abu Yahya. “Add in the emotional parallels between the plight of African-Americans and, for example, impoverished Algerians living in ghettos outside of Paris or Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and the analogy becomes even clearer.”

But it’s unclear how “Muslim hip hop” will exert a moderating or democratising influence: Will a performance by an African-American Muslim group trigger a particular calming “effect”, pushing young Muslim men away from extremist ideas? Nor is it clear what constitutes “Muslim hip hop”: Does the fact that Busta Rhymes is a Sunni Muslim make his music “Islamic”?   

Moreover, while references to Islam in hip hop are – as these public diplomacy experts note – legion, they are not necessarily political or flattering. In December 2002, Lil Kim appeared on the cover of OneWorld magazine wearing a burqa and a bikini, saying “F*** Afghanistan”. 

50 Cent’s track “Ghetto Quran” is about dealing drugs and “snitchin’”. Foxy Brown charmed some and infuriated others with her song “Hot Spot”, saying, “MCs wanna eat me but it’s Ramadan.” 

More disturbing was the video “Hard” released in late 2009 by the diva, Rihanna, in which she appears decked out in military garb, heavily armed and straddling a tank’s gun turret in a Middle Eastern war setting. An Arabic tattoo beneath her bronze bra reads, “Freedom Through Christ”; on a wall is the Quranic verse: “We belong to God, and to Him we shall return” – recited to honour the dead, and not an uncommon wall inscription in war-torn Muslim societies. 

The point is that not all Islam-alluding hip hop resonates with Muslim youth. Those hip hop stars – Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Rakim – who are beloved among Muslim youth are appreciated because they work their Muslim identity into their art and because they forthrightly criticise US foreign policy.

At the recent BET hip hop Awards, Lupe Fiasco performed his hit “Words I Never Said”, with a Palestinian flag draped over his mic. (“Gaza Strip was getting burned; Obama didn’t say sh**,” he rapped.) But neither Lupe nor Mos are likely to be invited on a State Department tour.

For State Department officials, the hip hop initiatives in Muslim-majority states showcase the diversity and integration of post-civil rights America. The multi-hued hip hop acts sent overseas represent a post-racial or post-racist American dream, and exhibit the achievements of the civil rights movement, a uniquely American moment that others can learn from.  

But it’s unclear how persuasive this racialised imagery is. Muslims do not resent the US for its lack of diversity. Where perceptions are poor, it is because of foreign policy, as well as, increasingly, domestic policies that target Muslims. 

Perhaps the greatest irony of the State Department’s efforts to showcase the model integration of US Muslims, and to deploy the moral and symbolic capital of the civil rights movement, is that these tours – as with the jazz tours – are occurring against a backdrop of unfavourable (and racialised) media images of Quran burnings, anti-mosque rallies and anti-sharia campaigns, as one of the most alarming waves of nativism in recent US history surges northward.

US diplomacy’s embrace of hip hop as a foreign policy tool has sparked a heated debate, among artists and aficionados worldwide, over the purpose of hip hop: whether hip hop is “protest music” or “party music”; whether it is the “soundtrack to the struggle” or to American unipolarity; and what it means now that states – not just corporations – have entered the hip hop game.

Hip hop activists have long been concerned about how to protect their music from corporate power, but now that the music is being used in diplomacy and counterterrorism, the conversation is shifting.

The immensely popular “underground” British rapper Lowkey (Kareem Denis) recently articulated the question on many minds: “Hip hop at its best has exposed power, challenged power, it hasn’t served power. When the US government loves the same rappers you love, whose interests are those rappers serving?”

Hishaam Aidi is editor, with Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), and a fellow at the Open Society Foundation in New York.  For more on race, hip hop and geo-politics, please see this longer study by Dr Aidi.

Scandal Sheds Light On Sex Business In Colombia

Secret Service Prostitute Scandal Sheds Light On Sex Business In Colombia

 

The Secret Service scandal, involving a reported 20 Colombian prostitutes and members of the U.S. government agency employed to protect President Obama at the Summit of Americans in the port city of Cartagena, has shed light on the business of prostitution in Colombia.

The Secret Service became embroiled in controversy when it was revealed that a Colombian woman claimed to hotel officials and law enforcement that a Secret Service agent owed and refused to pay her the money for her services.

The 11 Secret Service agents, many of them married, brought 20 or 21 Colombian women to the beachfront Hotel Caribe, reported the Daily Mail. The 20 prostitutes supposedly involved in the Secret Service scandal were reportedly from the Pley Club, a gentleman’s club located in the low-rent district of Cartagena, Colombia, where girls dance on stage, in a shower or in “pley rooms” where fantasies become reality. Other locations are reportedly under investigation, as well, and no specific location has yet been identified. 

Anyone visiting the Hotel Caribe overnight was required to leave identification at the front desk and leave the premises of the hotel promptly at 7 a.m. However, when a woman failed to leave, the hotel staff notified the police. The woman, reportedly a dancer/prostitute from the Pley Club, told authorities that one of the Secret Service agents owed her $47 and still had not paid. This woman has been identified as Dania Suarez. 

“There was a dispute the next morning when one of the women did not leave the room,” said Rep. Peter King, R-NY, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. “Police came and she refused to leave until she was paid for her services.” The incident was then reported to the U.S. Embassy.

New reports Wednesday revealed further depravity.

“When I went upstairs I walked into a messy room. The room was littered with two whiskey bottles – and a line of white powder, I believed to be cocaine, was on top of a round glass table in the room,” a hotel employee from Hotel Caribe told The New York Post.

FOX News later reported on Wednesday that a Colombian state agency announced an investigation will be launched into the Secret Service scandal to determine if underage prostitutes were involved in the incident. The report came from the Colombian daily El Tiempo, which said that although no formal complaints have been issued about underage prostitutes, the head of Colombia’s Institute for Family Wellbeing, Maria Rosario Blanco, wants to move forward with the investigation.  

Prostitution is legal in Colombia in designated “tolerance zones,” according to the 2008 Human Rights Report published by the U.S. Department of State.However, enforcement of the restriction to these zones is difficult to maintain. Such lax prostitution laws are making Colombia a haven for sex tourism. The Human Rights Reports states that prostitution in Colombia is exacerbated by both poverty and internal displacement.

Sex workers can be found walking around the Cartagena region, in the streets, the bars, the hotels and the private clubs, looking for ready and willing customers. The New York Times reported that these women can charge $300 or more to go out with the customers. 

Some prostitutes think that the recent Secret Service scandal will bring more customers to their city.  ”Now we are world-class, with the president’s bodyguards coming to try out Colombian girls,” one freelance prostitute who works the streets of Cartagena told The NY Times. She moved from her hometown, Cali, because she preferred the “well-heeled foreign clients” in Cartagena.

However, prostitution remains a dangerous business.  

In its 2007 Trafficking in Persons Report, the State Department found that Colombia is one of the Western Hemisphere’s “major source countries for women and girls trafficked abroad for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation.”

Child prostitution is a serious issue in Colombia. Colombia’s Institute for Family Wellbeing reported that approximately 35,000 Colombian children are in the sex business, with an estimated 2,000 in Cartagena.

Sex workers in Colombia have even banded together against this problem, refusing to set up underage girls with potential clients, reported FOX News. These sex workers have also enlisted the help of taxi drivers, hotel employees and restaurants workers as well.

The “I am the Wall” project of Colombia was set up to combat underage prostitution. The title of the group references the colonial-era walls that surround the city of Cartagena, reported FOX News.

“Unfortunately, tourists arrive here with money and they’re allowed to do anything,” a Cartagena prostitute and participant in the project named Damaris told Agence France Presse last summer. ”What I’m asking is to impose limits. When they ask for kids for sex, don’t give them information. Remember that they’re kids and that they, like your children, are worth more than any tip.”  

Despite the legality of prostitution in Colombia, solicitation of sex by Secret Service agents is considered inappropriate behavior.

This Secret Service scandal in Colombia might not be as unorthodox as it may sound. The Wall Street Journal reported about a motto amongst current and formal officials in the Secret Service known as “wheels up, rings off.”

“According to current and former officials, ‘wheels up, rings off,’ has long been a running joke among men in the agency, meaning that for some agents, wedding rings were optional after the plane took off, particularly for foreign travel assignments,” wrote The Journal’s Laura Meckler and Keith Johnson.

Secret Service agency spokesman Edwin Donovan said he had heard the term, but clarified to The Journal that it was not in “wide use.” Donovan said the phrase could have originated with other professionals who travel frequently. “The Secret Service has thousands of personnel that participate in hundreds of trips a year all around the world without incident,” he said.

Take a look at up-close photos of prostitution in Cartagena, Colombia, in the following slideshow. 

Palestinian Youth and the Healing Arts

Youth in Gaza and Jenin break out in artistic resistance that threatens Israel’s master narrative. AND ISRAEL IS NOT PLEASED WITH THIS FOR OBVIOUS RESONS.

The Jenin Freedom Theatre lies in the heart of the Jenin Refugee Camp, and serves as an artistic outlet for Palestinian youth [Jenin Freedom Theatre]

“We have slogan here. ‘From river to the sea, everyone should be free.’”

Thus explained acting teacher Nabeel Raee as we drove through the beautiful sand-colored West Bank hills on the way from Jenin to Nablus, and then onto Ramallah, where we would part ways. 

Raee is an original member and current acting teacher at the Jenin Freedom Theatre, whose director, the well-known Palestinian-Israeli actor Juliano Mer-Khamis, was gunned down outside the theatre on April 4 by still unknown assailants. It’s hard to overstate the tragedy of Mer-Khamis’s murder, so important was his role at the avant garde of Palestinian and Israeli arts. According to most every member of the Freedom Theatre’s extended family-Palestinians, Europeans, Americans and even Israelis-Mer Khamis’s vision and experience were at the core of the Theatre’s groundbreaking use of art as an instrument not merely of resistance, but of healing and transcendence as well.

Indeed, the Freedom Theatre’s philosophy of artistic production remind us that resistance, healing and transcendence must proceed in tandem for any of them to bear fruit. This insight has made plays such as “Alice in Wonderland” and “Waiting for Godot” – to name just two of the company’s recent productions – into powerful weapons against oppression that also open new spaces for imagining a different future.

Zacharia Zubaidi, another of the Theatre’s founders with Mer-Khamis, was still a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades when he followed his dream into the theatre. He explains this dynamic most succinctly: Far more than can violence, art forces people to look at Palestinians differently. “It makes them see us differently and question their basic assumptions about who we, and through it, they are.”

A threat to many quarters

It might well never be known precisely why Mer-Khamis was killed; Israel’s removal of Mer-Khamis’s body along with all the forensic evidence soon after his murder has made it impossible for Palestinians to conduct a proper investigation and Israeli authorities have provided little help. Assuming it was Palestinians, several members of the troupe agreed that his art did not merely challenge local moral conventions; his attempts to build an alternative form of resistance threatened Palestinians whose power, however limited, is drawn from the kind of violence the Freedom Theatre has worked to transcend.

As one of the first generation of students reflected in explaining the violence and conservatism of Jenin today: “Occupation, checkpoints, martyrs, settlements – look what Israel has done to us.” After decades of occupation, violence and repression, being an artist in Jenin can be as dangerous as being a fighter.

Yet Mer Khamis’s death has not broken the spirit of the company, who only two months after his murder remain not just defiant, but – somehow – even joyful. Students, teachers and staff go about the daily business of teaching and taking classes, writing scripts and film treatments, and rehearsing for performances amidst threats and fear of further violence. Several female first year students have been forced to withdraw from performances, but women remain at the core of the JFT.

The courage of the JFT reminded me why artists will risk so much merely to stage a play or perform a  song.  As another student explained to me over coffee in one of the Jenin’s few nice Coffee bars: “The Theatre is a way to open a new generation and be in contact with people from all over the world, and that’s our future.”

The spring of Arab revolutions

If the openness and intellectual maturity of 20-year old actors from the Jenin refugee camp is inspiring, the resilience and audacity of their peers in Gaza borders on astonishing. Even regular viewers of Al-Jazeera would have a hard time understanding the levels of destruction Gazans have lived with for at least a decade. Returning after a several years absence, I felt like I’d stumbled into a giant archaeological dig, only above ground. Each new layer of rubble has added its sad archive to the one below it.

Yet perhaps even more than in Jenin and other West Bank cities, young people in Gaza are erupting in the kind of creative resistance that threatens not just Israel’s master narrative of the occupation, but Hamas’s violent hold on the Strip as well.

There is a saying making its way around Palestinian circles: “The Palestinian winter gave birth to the Arab spring.” For me, the first hint of that spring occurred when a new movement, “Gaza Youth Breaks Out,” put out their now (in)famous manifesto in December of 2010, right around the time the protests in Tunisia erupted. As I explained in my column devoted to GYBO, the manifesto began with a scream: “”F*** Hamas. F*** Israel. F*** Fatah. F*** UN. F*** UNWRA. F*** USA!” (the verb is spelled out, and was written originally in English because the Arabic equivalent does not have anything close to the power and anger of the English word). It ends by declaring “We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of these feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore.”

From Juliano to Vittorio

The GYBO manifesto was, to my mind, the first salvo in a generational war for independence that pushed its way into world consciousness with the uprising in Tunisia and Egypt. An act of extreme will by young people who have nothing left to lose, its poetic metre and naked eloquence are a work of art as powerful as the theatrical ouvre of the Jenin Freedom Theatre (not surprisingly, the manifesto is widely appreciated by JFT members).

As in Jenin, it was an outsider to Gaza, the Italian ISM activist Vittorio Arrigoni, who helped inspire the movement that became GYBO. Like Juliano Mer-Khamis in Jenin, Arrigoni was not native to Gaza, but his arrival in 2008 on the first Free Gaza Flotilla and fearless activism and reporting during the 2009 Gaza invasion and on behalf of local fishermen led to his adoption by innumerable Gazans as one of their own.

Most of the young activists, bloggers, musicians and artists I know found in Arrigoni both a friend and an inspiration. His mantra, “Stay human”, well summarises what can only be described as the prime directive of life for Gazans under a dehumanising siege. But like Mer-Hamis, the power of Arrigoni’s message, and his status as an outsider to the insular community of Gaza, threatened the wrong people, and so despite all that he had sacrificed to protect Gazans and share their sufferings he was murdered by extremists less than two weeks after Mer-Khamis, in circumstances that remain equally murky.

Yet also like Mer-Khamis, Arrigoni’s ideas have become even more powerful in death. As the Gazan rap group Darg put it in the song “Onadekum,” written about him, Arrigoni inspired young Gazans to “write resistance on every wall in my brain, brother”.

Even more than in Jenin, every day life is an act of resistance in Gaza, and the Strip’s burgeoning rap scene (first brought to the world’s attention in the 2008 documentary “Slingshot Hiphop” by Palestinian-American filmmaker Jackie Salloum) along with its growing community of bloggers, filmmakers and other culture producers are on the front lines of that struggle, which these days pits them against Hamas as much as Israel. “In order to get shot at by Israel, we have to get beaten up by Hamas,” explained one of the founders of GYBO, describing the seemingly ludicrous routine of having to fight Hamas cops or militiamen just to get close to the Erez checkpoint to protest the ongoing Israeli siege, where they can expect to be shot at by the IDF. Over two dozen children were shot by the IDF merely for collecting rubble near the Erez border last year.

Ahmed Rezeq, a young rapper and recently joined member of GYBO explained it this way as we sat near the sea and he worked on the lyrics for a new song: “I can’t go to the university, I have nothing except my words.” Sitting next to him, his friend and fellow rapper Mohammed Antar elaborated, “art is crucial because it leads people to the truth. It shows them how we suffer and how much we struggle; that we are human.”

With the increasing international attention being given to Gazan hiphop, suddenly rappers from the Strip are being invited to perform across Europe and beyond. But it remains very difficult to get out; even with the so-called “opening” of the Rafah crossing the majority of artists and bloggers remain trapped, “despite everything trying to create our lives”.

Indeed, the strategic maturity, never mind courage, of the GYBO community is hard to grasp fully, all the more so when you realise so many of these activists (women as much as if not more than men) who are so sophisticated and worldly, have never left the Gaza Strip.

Trapped in the world’s largest prison, they have created a boundless virtual world through their online activism, which reaches out and connects them to other youth-based movements for democracy and human rights. Scholars have yet to grasp the ways in which these virtual connections are reshaping and ultimately prying open the far more constrained physical geography they are forced to inhabit. But one factor clearly motivating their push to get out is the double unhomeliness the clearly feel living in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Gazans live, in the words of GYBO founder Osama Shomar, in a double, triple occupation, or even more – thus the multiple curses of the manifesto’s opening line. A female blogger and co-founder of GYBO explains it this way: “It feels like it’s not even our country anymore. A policeman put a gun at my head and threatened to shoot me. I couldn’t imagine, is this guy a Palestinian like me? He couldn’t be Palestinian and do this.”

But it’s not just Hamas that is a threat to the attempts by GYBO to build a new culture of resistance and unity. Equally as dangerous is the hijacking of the youth movement by various outside forces. “We’re more known, but we’re getting weaker. Suddenly everyone is throwing money at us. We didn’t take money from anyone when GYBO started but now NGO people with access to money and fancy meals are coming in, and once you get into that orbit and you have the ngo-ification of resistance, it’s game over.”

From one country to one world

Osama was lamenting how easily powerful movements can be coopted as we sat in his friend’s apartment on a warm night and he and some comrades took turns playing video games on the computer. As we sat there, another founder of GYBO, Abu Yazan, stopped by. He was supposed to be in Egypt on the way to Europe to meet with other activists but he wasn’t allowed out (he finally got out the next day after a long wait). It was 1:19 am, almost four months to the moment since I was sitting with a similar group of young activists at Tahrir Square, wondering what the future would bring when Hosni Mubarak’s departure from power was still a fantasy.

In a few minutes most of us would head for the beach, where, even at 3 in the morning, groups of young men and even families hang out barbecuing and playing soccer the way, in a normal place, people would be doing twelve hours later. As Abu Yazan and I sat down to talk the subject turned to the United States and how difficult it will be to bring peace and justice to Israel/Palestine as long as Americans remain so brainwashed and apathetic.

“Don’t worry,” he declared. “One day American kids will rebel, they will say enough, let’s have peace, let’s tear down borders and have one world.” I was shocked. These words matched, almost to the letter, what a young activist told me as we sat in a similarly large apartment above Tahrir Square at the same time of night, pondering the implications of the still inchoate Egyptian revolution. “If this can work here, it could spread to the whole world,” he told me as a group sat around talking, exhausted from another day of protests.

Thoughts like these can seem almost laughably utopian. But in places like Gaza or Jenin, where the practical and reasonable have long ago been rendered impossible, utopian dreams don’t seem so crazy.

 

The Mathematics of the Arab Spring

Since ousting their leaders, Egypt and Tunisia are facing difficult choices on balancing the influences of foreign aid.

Egypt and Tunisia are now officially on the international donor community’s radar.

The World Bank and the G8 are already planning different ways to sponsor the so-called Arab Spring. Many Arabs are speaking out against a possible Euro-US “hijacking” or “containment” of the regional movement through this type of ”cheque book diplomacy”.

I will argue here that this position is not intellectually robust, and that the Arab Spring demands dialogue, not political and cultural protectionism. There is a moment of confidence across the Arab geography: Arabs can hold their own.

This bodes well for recasting Arab-West relations, as it veers away from a return to hollow views of cultural and socio-political autarchy.

Simply crying “US hands off the Arab Spring” is not the answer.

From Zoelick to Cameron

The British prime minister seems to be right on track for lending support aimed at democratic reconstruction in Egypt and Tunisia.

Cameron has earmarked £110m ($180m) for development over the next four years, echoing the G8 outlook on the Arab uprisings.

How exactly the money will be distributed and whether it will be spent on projects that support the rule of law, freedom of press and pluralism is missing from Cameron’s transcript.

This new-found enthusiasm for spending generously on the Arab Spring – whether by Obama, Cameron or the “International Misery’ Fund” - echoes the World Bank’s April message in support of the Arab Spring.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick set the tone in favour of a participatory citizenry which will develop good governance - shorthand for the rhetoric of accountability, transparency and efficiency in the political economy of developing areas.

The sub-text: Funds for what?

There are opportunities, but also perils, in Western aid aimed at supporting the Arab uprisings. It depends on how you read between the lines – especially when the text articulates that aid donation is a function of realpolitik: the goal of which is to limit immigration and extremism.

The EU has recently been called upon to “humanise” its immigration laws; addressing this as an area of non-monetary aid so that Arabs are able to access opportunities that Europeans may be willing to offer.

As for fighting extremism, no-one is naive enough to believe that democracy alone will stamp out extremism. Likewise, aid aimed at fighting extremism can actually imperil institution-building and risk a return tomukhabarat ["secret police"] regimes that kill, imprison, torture and ignore the rule of law. This is a declarative objective of the Western financial charm offensive; such an attack was recently revealed by the G8 in Normandy.

A confused agenda whose facade is “democracy promotion” – and its substance “fighting terrorism and immigration” – will fail to achieve attention as a recipient or a donor. It will obfuscate, rather than clarify, the role played by Western governments in the “Arab Spring”.

The mathematics of Arab democracy

Aside from the British support pledged, there are additional billions that have had a Pavlovian effect on the Egyptian and Tunisian prime ministers, respectively, Essam Sharaf and Beji Caid el Sebsi.

The aim is “good governance” without causing basket-case economies. Sharaf is seeking to offset the immense damage to the country’s tourism industry caused by the uprising, while el Ssebsi has built a case based on refugee influx.

Both are also scrambling for a cut of the four billion in aid and loans to be contributed by the US.

Freer access to EU markets is another aim of both men. There is no shortage of EU cash, but the question is whether this will be as “charitable” as the aid that was invested into eastern and central Asian democratic transitions via the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

In any case, there is still much to be revealed about the reins attached to these packages when they finally see the light of day.

Zoellick’s cheque book is also on offer - and there are hints of billions in World Bank funds for the Arab Spring countries. More to the point, Zoellick’s rhetoric hints at creative methods that aim to fund community empowerment which would bypass the state and target the people directly through their communities instead.

Whether the shareholders in the Bretton Woods financial system – US, China, Japan, and the EU – sharpen or blunt Zoellick’s creativity remains to be seen. Money, unfortunately, is not given to further only values (note the stress on values by Obama in his speech to the British parliament), but also to further the donors’ interests.

Autonomy vs autarchy

Two fundamental principles must be understood in order to grasp the mathematics of the Arab Spring.

On the Arab side, return to autarchy is self-defeating. Pride and greatness have been returned to Arabness, and there is no longer any need to engage in autarchic brands of discourse. Autarchy has been the fundamental currency of dictators keen on secluding the Arab masses from the flow of ideas hostile to their own selfish rule. This has been done in the name of all kinds of ideologies.

This is the moment for spreading cosmopolitanism of good governance, moral protest, anti-authoritarian resistance, and social justice. This is a shared space - in which Arab narratives and struggles engage with like-minded currents transcending geography and time.

“Hands off our Arab Spring”-type narratives ignore the global voices and ethical forces who are joining in this emancipatory moment being ushered in. So to recoil via autarchic propositions goes against the spirit of this movement.

It is as if they are claiming that the Arab Spring has not recharged the batteries of self-confidence enough for Arab nations to engage the outside world with confidence, self-assertion and a greater capacity for self-representation.

Autarchy only reinforces Orientalist narratives that have misrepresented Arabs for so long through images of invisibility, inferiority, and an incapacity to speak back.

Conditionality in reverse

Similarly, no patronage from the Western powers is needed.

Arabs in Tunisia and Egypt have reclaimed - and in Libya, Syria and Yemen are in the process of reclaiming – the right to self-govern.

Hence the current moment demands a transition from the idea of conditionality imposed by the donors to a new conditionality, in reverse, imposed by the recipients of the funds. That is, good governance must be thought of as a two-way street: where there are equal obligations on the donor and the recipient.

The donor community has generally flouted its own rules of good governance by plugging authoritarian rule into the global financial system by way of handouts, grants, and funds.

These have typically had much to answer for in terms of reproduction of autocracy, corrupt regimes – the likes of which WikiLeaks has revealed Western governments’ intimate knowledge of – and the procurement of technology of oppression that prolong dictatorship; Mubarak and Ali are but two examples of this.

The injustice and irony in all of this is that debt incurred by non-representative regimes is still counted as legally binding, which shackles the oppressed citizenry to billions that are owed from morally questionable transactions organised by the very institutions that have preaching “good governance” since the early 1990s.

Democratisation: from mathematics to morality

A return to ethical basics and conditionality is necessary, and can acheived by these means:

• Funds and grants are to be dispensed only to governments “of the people” – which means democratically elected governments, complete with a system of legitimate checks and balances. Right now, this excludes the transitional governments of Egypt and Tunisia. Both have presented cases for billions of dollars from the funds on offer by the West, however, neither is representative of the people.
• Technical aid, materials or training for the military, police or intelligence must be in accordance with the rules of upholding democratic rule and the principles of good governance - meaning that they are subject to transparency, and with full knowledge and approval of elected parliaments and other civic bodies and institutions.
• Aid, including that given to non-governmental organisations, must not limit the choice of recipients when it comes to choosing a developmental path. It must not be subject to the values and interests of the donors whose free market economies, in this instance, are very difficult to replicate in an Arab world – the goals of which include robust sustainable development solutions and distributive mechanisms aimed at equal opportunity, social justice, and poverty eradication.
• The bulk of aid must be geared towards addressing “the two Ds”: i) democratic consolidation, with the root problem of youth disaffection, loss and disenfranchisement, and ii) distribution to deal with the acute problems of marginalisation – which is the root problem of youth disenfranchisement.
• Civic-capacity building must be factored into the process of aiding Arab democracy-building. And it must include the re-training of police forces and the dismantling of the apparata of oppression one by one. Police and intelligence forces have traditionally been the enemies of the Arab populace. This must change.

Through conditionality in reverse, good governance becomes a mutually binding contract. It will ensure that Arab-Western political and economic engagement is underpinned by ethics of shared obligations and responsibility. By doing it this way, external finances will bring relief, goodwill, dialogue and friendship instead of burdening the Arab and Western worlds with fear, distrust and acrimony.

The currency of freedom

It still remains to be seen how, and even if, the masters of world finance put their money where their mouth is. In particular, for now, no dispensing of aid must proceed until elected representatives of the people – and independent civil society groups – are in a position to deliberate and reflect freely on the terms and plans of the aid to be given.

The only given in this discussion is that the organisers of Tahrir Square and Habib Bourguiba Avenue have spoken in favour of dignity and freedom, which is the currency of the Arab Spring. There is no need to fear for these masses and their epic resistance against tyranny.

It is a resource they can, if need be, also direct towards resisting financial hegemony.

What is reassuring about the new-found morality of resistance is that it rejects autarchy. It speaks the lingua franca of freedom - which transcends geography, religion, nationality and ethnicity. It uses Western technological innovations for the purpose of self-empowerment.

On both accounts, the protesters have resisted and continue to refuse living under tyranny or on disconnected islands.

Arab revolutions mask economic status quo

Despite talk of a “new social contract”, financial powers seek to maintain their grip on the poor of the Middle East.

Business and trade were hard hit by the uprisings across much of the Arab world – and now the IMF and World Bank say they want to help economies get back on their feet. But privatisation and enforced ‘structural adjustment’ will keep many of the poorest on their knees [GALLO/GETTY]

The World Bank and IMF have been restructuring the economies of the Middle East for decades, with largely negative results. Yet they are poised to play a major role in the post-revolutionary efforts to stabilise Egypt, Tunisia and other post-authoritarian states.

The post-1967 era of the Middle East can, in many ways, be defined by the turn towards market liberalisation across the region, although the attempts by Western lending institutions to pressure local governments to initiate structural reforms goes back to the Nasser period. From the start of the 1970s-era infitah, or opening, under Anwar Sadat, there have been over a dozen episodes of mass protest and even revolt against IMF and World Bank-imposed austerity measures. Not just in Egypt, which has had at least four such episodes, but in Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey as well.

At times local governments made some effort to resist the imposition of what is today referred to as “Washington Consensus” policies, which advocate trade liberalisation, privatisation, opening economies to foreign goods and investment, stabilising budgets and exchange rates, and cutting government expenditures and presence in the economy. As one left-wing paper headlined a story in 1978: “Egypt puts the IMF on notice, heralding new era of economic development.”

But the new era was stillborn; Egypt would soon be far too tightly enmeshed within the US-led order to pursue an independent path towards development, continuing a history of frustrated economic development that stretches from the mid-19th century, when Muhammad Ali’s attempt at independent modernisation was met by a joint European-Ottoman front that ultimately forced Egypt – and the Ottoman state – into a European-dominated economic fold that, within three decades, led both states to bankruptcy (and soon thereafter, for Egypt, to more than half a century of British occupation).

Today, some Egyptian observers argue that one of the main reasons the army was willing to sacrifice Mubarak was because of its anger at the increasing power of his son Gamal and his colleagues, such as former - and recently convicted - IMF official Youssef Boutros-Ghali, who were accruing significant power through the financialisation of the economy and other policies that weaken the power of the army and the more traditional national capitalist elite.

In short, resentment against the kind of neoliberal policies championed by the IMF and World Bank runs deep in Egypt and other Arab countries. Today, even senior officials of the Bank and Fund blame the imposition of “Washington Consensus” models of restructuring developing economies for helping create the situation of economic hopelessness that sparked the Tunisian revolution.

While few people are making the link today, such policies also helped torpedo the Oslo peace process. They justified the economic integration through physical separation and isolation of Palestinians within the Occupied Territories that became a defining motif of the so-called peace process, reinforcing Israeli economic dominance over Palestinians in the same manner that its territorial footprint in the West Bank grew wider rather than trimming down, which is what most people assumed would happen on the way to a final status agreement.

Lessons learned?

Despite the less than encouraging history of involvement in the region, the World Bank, IMF and other mainstream institutions have all sought to insert themselves into the economic reform process that most observers believe must accompany political reform in order for the latter to succeed. At least, at the leadership level, officials are saying the right words. Bank head Robert Zoellick argues that “we must act now … In revolutionary moments, the status quo is not a winning hand”.

Zoellick has declared that the Bank understands that “we need a new social contract where governments listen to their people and include them in their development process”. Similarly, incoming IMF chief Christine Lagarde admitted that one of the lessons of the region’s uprisings is that “if priority is to be accorded to inclusive and sustainable growth, issues of justice, security and employment, particularly in the private sector, can no longer be addressed separately”.

Similarly, in a heated exchange with Egyptian pro-democracy activist Wael Ghonim, then IMF head Dominique Strauss Kahn admitted that the Bank had erred in helping to prop up the Mubarak regime and offering analyses which celebrated policies of the government which clearly were harming the interests of most Egyptians.

Both the IMF and the Bank now state loudly that the Arab Spring has taught them the appropriate “lessons” and that they now realise that “we have to listen to people” and help ensure that wealth is now “for everyone” and not just the privileged few.

Such language – of inclusiveness and accountability to the broader population, of focusing on human development rather than merely aggregate economic indicators - is laudable, and reflects the commitment of the Bank specifically to support the millennium development goals. Yet it runs hard into almost insurmountable obstacles.

First, the entrenched institutional ideology and policies of the Fund and Bank. Thus, for example, increasing “productivity” and “efficiency” in the Egyptian or Tunisian economies would demand trimming supposedly bloated workforces, at a time when the institutions’ leaders have admitted that joblessness is among the most difficult problems faced by Egypt and its neighbours. Similar problems occur with opening economies too far towards foreign investment and export-oriented growth, when the strengthening of locally based production, consumption and credit would be more beneficial.

Second, the desire to change course runs into the problem that the larger structural imbalances in economies such as Egypt – rampant corruption and concentration of wealth tied to long-term authoritarian rule – are globally systemic in nature. They mirror (in fact amplify) problems that plague the most market-devoted advanced industrial countries, such as the United States. But at the same time they are exacerbated by the fact that US policy has long had little interest in encouraging the kind of autonomous development that the Bank and Fund now say they support.

In the case of Egypt (and the Middle East more broadly), the US supported Mubarak and other dictators because he backed US policies which were antithetical to the desires and interests of most Egyptians. Neither authoritarian governments nor their patrons have any interest in encouraging the development of a robust civil society and autonomous middle-class led economy, now named among the chief goals of the Bank and Fund. Rather, keeping civil societies relatively weak (or at least disempowered) and individual citizens dependent on the state are among the few tools governments have left to maintain some form of control, or at least power, over populations.

Despite this obvious reality, it remains almost impossible to find officials or researchers associated with the Bank or Fund acknowledging that disparities in economic and political power within developing countries and between their nations and more powerful countries impacts the way policies are experienced on the ground.

A more realistic portrayal of the view of Washington Consensus insiders to the Arab Spring comes from a recent report issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Written by two former senior Bank officials, Uri Dadush and Marwan Muasher, it called on the Fund and Bank to step in to ensure that political changes sweeping the region didn’t encourage governments to abandon Washington Consensus policies.

Bluntly, the authors warn that “there is a significant possibility that the government that ultimately emerges out of this crisis will renounce previous economic reforms as misguided and argue that they contributed to the region’s plight … It is in the large economies’ own interest to insure that economic reforms continue apace with political reforms.” Worse, they fear, local governments might “lose faith in liberal economic reform” and “essentially ‘buy’ peace with domestic handouts and new spending packages”.

Roots of de-development

The roots of the neoliberal policies against which not merely “ordinary” Arabs, but even the leaders of the Bank and Fund would seem to be pushing run extremely deep, to the emergence of a global capitalist system in the 16th century that was inextricably tied to the rapid development of European empires and all the violence and exploitation they wrought – through centuries of imperial power, colonial rule, and enforced exploitation and slavery.

Equally important was the rise of nation-state ideologies and institutions that helped manage the increasingly globalised economic order. When colonised peoples finally achieved independence and sought to create autonomous institutions and networks, they were met with concerted efforts to frustrate their drive towards independent development, setting up a showdown between Arab “socialism” and Western capitalism that lasted for the better part of the 1950s and 1960s.

Despite the conflict with the United States and other Western powers, this period was in fact marked by unprecedented levels of both economic growth and relative economic equality within ostensibly socialist-inspired societies such as Egypt, Syria or Iraq. But by the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, leaders of these countries began to integrate themselves into the Western political-economic fold, and such growth and egalitarian distribution of wealth changed for the worse.

I explored this trend and the experience of globalisation more broadly in the Middle East in my 2005 book Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil. What was striking about the data I collected was both how often growth was the result of following policies at odds with the Washington Consensus model, and how following this model produced greater inequality and poverty in countries where there was economic growth. For this and other reasons, it’s not surprising that the region was largely left completely out of mainstream analyses of economic globalisation in the 1990s and first half of the 2000s, as if the world did not include the Middle East.

Instead, analyses by the IMF and World Bank “extensively praised this stabilisation success in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco”, ignoring the social costs of policies such as reducing the size of the public sector through privatisation, removing controls over investment, eliminating subsidies and most tariffs on imports and  liberalising trade regimes. Nor was there significant analysis of the “conditions” attached to loans granted by the Fund or Bank, which demanded that recipient governments engage in significant “structural adjustments” of their fiscal and monetary policies that could go against the interests of the majority of a population, especially during periods of economic downturn – when people are already living at the margins.

Such policies of “conditionality” made loans into tools of policy by Western governments. Such policies could afford sides being based on very inaccurate modelling of how real life economies function or have no appreciation for political circumstances or economic realities of poor people, because their main function was to help pry open developing economies to foreign control. In the process, across the region, structural adjustment encouraged the destruction of existing industries and even deindustrialisation more broadly.

At best, more critical scholars have observed, IMF and World Bank loans have often been used as if they were remittances, being distributed to the population in “inefficient” ways to maintain social peace while strategic public sector investment was significantly reduced (particularly in Egypt). At the same time, the negative impact of the structural adjustment policies attached to them have forced Western donors, such as Sweden, to redirect aid away from encouraging local development and towards ameliorating the worst negative effects of the adjustments forced upon local economies.

Recutting the pie

In a recent article for al Jazeera, Oxford University Egypt expert Walter Armbrust makes two key points that need to be borne in mind as the World Bank, IMF and other international financial institutions seek to reorder the economies of the region for a supposedly post-revolutionary political economic landscape. First, he points out that the corruption that everyone now laments was, in fact, “a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatisation” that was “less a violation of the system than business as usual”.

Not only that, such practises were not just endemic to Egypt. They are “as American as apple pie” – part of the larger global system I mentioned above. As Armbrust points out, in sheer scale, audacity, and – incredibly – legality, the conflation of business and government in the US makes the same process in Egypt look like amateur hour by comparison.

Ultimately, what this analysis reminds us is that even if IMF or Bank officials might have gone a bit soft, the US under President Obama, as under his predecessors, has as little interest or ability to change a system it has profited from enormously over the past half century. Ultimately, neither the generals of Egypt’s Supreme Military Council, nor the barons of Wall Street (and their allies among the generals in the Pentagon) will willingly allow anything more than “cosmetic changes” to the political economy of either country.

And so when Egypt’s finance minister, Samir Mohamed Radwan, exclaims to a Chamber of Commerce audience that, “it’s very simple, I need cash” to keep the economy functioning – while Egypt struggles with billions in debt and lost revenues from the uprising, it is still quite difficult to imagine the “I” he mentions representing the “we”, of all of Egypt, Mr Radwan officially represents. With tens of billions of dollars in loans, aid and investment slotted to enter Egypt in the next few years, a system which has been nourished by industrial scale corruption for decades will find it hard to suddenly function efficiently and for the good of the average Egyptian rather than the economic elite which still controls the country – even if that elite has had to sacrifice a few of its own to maintain power.

The struggle for these billions, far more than inter- or intra-religious conflict, changes in Egypt’s foreign policy orientation, or the power of the youth movement that toppled a dictator, will likely decide the future of the country for the next generation.

Sex Robots Are The Future… Now that is SAD!! Where is the Love?

First Edition of this Story:

Four Sex Robots You Can Buy Today 

Robots can replace humans for a variety of jobs, but prostitution seems like a profession that will stay human-only. That may not be the case, however, according to a new study. Researchers envision a future in which robots take the place of traditional sex workers in Amsterdam clubs, providing a safe, clean place for people to engage in their carnal desires.

In the year 2050, an increase in sex trafficking and an outbreak of incurable sexually transmitted diseases draws people towards robots instead of humans, according to Ian Yeoman, paper coauthor and associate professor of management at Victoria Management School in New Zealand. He foresees hundreds of robots of every ethnicity roaming clubs in Amsterdam, providing “all inclusive service” for $10,000.

“Amsterdam’s red light district will all be about android prostitutes who are clean of sexual transmitted infections, not smuggled in from Eastern Europe and forced into slavery,” Yeoman wrote in the paper. “The city council will have direct control over android sex workers controlling prices, hours of operations and sexual services.”

The new sex industry will be a boon for the city, as it will draw in more and more tourists but eliminate many of the problems that come with prostitution, such as drug use and violence, according to the paper.

If you cannot wait until 2050, there are options available today. Though not as sophisticated as the robots Yeoman predicts, here are four sex robots that are currently for sale.

 

 Second Edition of Same Story:

They don’t spread disease and they can’t be sold into sex slavery.

Those are just two of the advantages of robot prostitutes, which will be edging out their human competition in the sex tourism market by the year 2050,according to an article published in the journal Futures.

The Dominion Post, which found the study, writes that sex tourists will shell out about $10,000 Euros for services ranging from massages and lap dances to intercourse, according to the article.

The researchers lay out why this scenario will be the future of sex tourism:

Human trafficking, sexual transmitted diseases, beauty and physical perfection, pleasure for sex toys, emotional connection to robots and the importance of sex in Amsterdam are all driving forces.

But some are not so sure that robots will be replacing female sex workers any time soon.

CBS Las Vegas spoke to Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Carson City, Nev.

“Those Australian researchers ought to come to the Bunny Ranch to see what real American sex is like – there’s no way to duplicate it,” Hof told CBS Las Vegas. “At the Bunny Ranch, we say ‘it’s not just the sex, it’s an adventure’ – and often times it’s more about the adventure than it is the sex.”

Time will tell.

Is the Occupy movement being hijacked?

After a quiet winter and with a rival group – 99% Spring – emerging, we examine the development of the Occupy movement

After a quiet winter, Occupy Wall Street is gearing up again for a summer of protest. Four months after they were evicted from bases across the country, protesters are emerging once more to camp out in New York’s financial hub.

“I believe the way to change the system is to change it from within as well as on the exterior. We need to bring this to all fronts not just on the outside with our demonstrations … we as [the] American people need to occupy the legislative body.” - Walid Hakim, an Occupy protester running as Democrat, South Carolina

It is a movement that, at its peak, brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets of the US – united by a common anger at the excesses of the financial industry, and a dismay at government unwillingness to rein it in. 

There is a day of mass protest and a general strike planned for May 1. The renewed demonstrations will undoubtedly be accompanied by renewed questions about the movement itself – some say is too unfocused in its objectives.

The Occupy movement tapped into a sense of discontent at the global economic situation and there were many similar demonstrations across the world that preceded it. But the first protest under the ‘Occupy’ banner took place in New York on September 17, 2011.

“Here you have an individual who’s going off and pursuing his own course of action, not in the name of Occupy but in his own name, and again he is an individual and not someone who has powerful connections, resources etc. I also hope that folks in South Carolina and the Occupy movement don’t end up becoming simple campaigners.” - Mike King, an East Bay activist from the University of California, Santa Cruz

By October 2011, the movement had spread across the US with protests in Washington DC, Oakland in California and Cleveland in Ohio, among other places.

At the same time the Occupy protests went global. By mid-October, protests were taking place in hundreds of cities around the world. 

But now a rival group has emerged – called the 99% Spring – which says it wants to train protesters for a campaign of peaceful protest.

Critics have denounced the group as a Democratic Party attempt to galvanise support for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Nonetheless, some former Occupy protesters are now advocating that change should come from within the government itself. 

So with a rival action group emerging, how is the Occupy Wall Street movement developing? Is the movement’s message in danger of getting hijacked by Obama’s re-election campaign?

Inside Story Americas discusses with guests: Nathan Schneider, a writer with The Nation and The New York Times; Karunga Gashusha, a former Wall Street analyst turned Occupy protester; and Mike King, an East Bay activist from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“This is a real resistance movement and not simply a PR campaign and by this I mean the movement itself. It’s got to go beyond talking about message, it’s got to go beyond changing the conversation. It has to disrupt power, it has to create structures that can challenge the structures of power that are currently in place. And co-option is always a two-way street or it can be. I think this is a case of co-option. These are groups, many of whom are sympathetic to what the Occupy movement has done and now they want to get in on the game. They are never going to be able to do it in a way that is as radical as the [Occupy] movement on their own.”  

Nathan Schneider, a writer with The Nation and The New York Times 

 

FACTS: THE 99% SPRING MOVEMENT

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• It seeks to train people in methods of direct action
• It is sponsored by unions and mainstream democratic groups
• The movement has organised hundreds of training groups between April 9 and April 15
• It intends to target annual shareholders meetings
• It provided pre-made training material for groups
• The group calls for higher taxes on the wealthy in the US and for more rights for workers
• It is supported by dozens of groups including trade unions and organisations like Moveon.org and Greenpeace
• Organisers say it does not seek to co-opt the Occupy movement

Will This Be The Year of an ” AMERICAN” SPRING?? Lessons From the Arab Spring.

The revolution begins at home

The 400 richest Americans amass more than the poorest 180 million Americans

What is occurring on Wall Street right now is truly remarkable. For more than two weeks, in the sanctum of the great cathedral of global capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.

They have created a unique opportunity to shift the tides of history in the tradition of other great peaceful occupations from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s to the democratic uprisings across the Arab world and Europe today.

While the Wall Street occupation is growing, it needs an all-out commitment from everyone who cheered the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, said “We are all Wisconsin”, and stood in solidarity with the Greeks and Spaniards. This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or healthcare, or thinks they have no future.

Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. And perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.

Real potential

At some point the number of people occupying Wall Street – whether that’s five thousand, ten thousand or fifty thousand – will force the powers that be to offer concessions. No one can say how many people it will take or even how things will change exactly, but there is a real potential for bypassing a corrupt political process and to begin realising a society based on human needs not hedge fund profits.

In-depth coverage of the global movement

After all, who would have imagined a year ago that Tunisians and Egyptians would oust their dictators?

At Liberty Park, the nerve centre of the occupation, more than a thousand people gather every day to debate, discuss and organise what to do about our failed system that has allowed the400 richest Americans at the top to amass more wealth than the 180 million Americans at the bottom.

It’s astonishing that this self-organised festival of democracy has sprouted on the turf of the masters of the universe, the men who play the tune that both political parties and the media dance to. The New York Police Department, which has deployed hundreds of officers at a time to surround and intimidate protesters, is capable of arresting everyone and clearing Liberty Plaza in minutes. But they haven’t, which is also astonishing.

Growing attention

That’s because assaulting peaceful crowds in a public square demanding real democracy – economic and not just political – would remind the world of the brittle autocrats who brutalised their people demanding justice before they were swept away by the Arab Spring. And the state violence has already backfired. After police attacked a Saturday afternoon march that started from Liberty Park the crowds only got bigger and media interest grew. 

The Wall Street occupation has already succeeded in revealing the bankruptcy of the dominant powers – the economic, the political, media and security forces. They have nothing positive to offer humanity, not that they ever did for the Global South, but now their quest for endless profits means deepening the misery with a thousand austerity cuts.

Even their solutions are cruel jokes. They tell us that the “Buffett Rule” would spread the pain by asking the penthouse set to sacrifice a tin of caviar, which is what the proposed tax increase would amount to. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to sacrifice healthcare, food, education, housing, jobs and perhaps our lives to sate the ferocious appetite of capital.

That’s why more and more people are joining the Wall Street occupation. They can tell you about their homes being foreclosed upon, months of grinding unemployment or minimum-wage dead-end jobs, staggering student debt loads, or trying to live without decent healthcare. It’s a whole generation of Americans with no prospects, but who are told to believe in a system that can only offer them Dancing With The Stars and pepper spray to the face.

Yet against every description of a generation derided as narcissistic, apathetic and hopeless they are staking a claim to a better future for all of us.

That’s why we all need to join in. Not just by liking it on Facebook, signing a petition at change.org or retweeting protest photos, but by going down to the occupation itself.

There is great potential here. Sure, it’s a far cry from Tahrir Square or even Wisconsin. But there is the nucleus of a revolt that could shake America’s power structure as much as the Arab world has been upended.

Instead of one to two thousand people a day joining in the occupation there needs to be tens of thousands of people protesting the fat cats driving Bentleys and drinking thousand-dollar bottles of champagne with money they looted from the financial crisis and then from the bailouts while Americans literally die on the streets.

To be fair, the scene in Liberty Plaza seems messy and chaotic. But it’s also a laboratory of possibility, and that’s the beauty of democracy. As opposed to our monoculture world, where political life is flipping a lever every four years, social life is being a consumer and economic life is being a timid cog, the Wall Street occupation is creating a polyculture of ideas, expression and art.

Yet while many people support the occupation, they hesitate to fully join in and are quick to offer criticism. It’s clear that the biggest obstacles to building a powerful movement are not the police or capital – it’s our own cynicism and despair.

‘Pantomime progressivism’

Perhaps their views were coloured by the New York Times article deriding protestors for wishing to “pantomime progressivism” and “Gunning for Wall Street with faulty aim”. Many of the criticisms boil down to “a lack of clear messaging.”

But what’s wrong with that? A fully formed movement is not going to spring from the ground. It has to be created. And who can say what exactly needs to be done? We are not talking about ousting a dictator; though some say we want to oust the dictatorship of capital.

There are plenty of sophisticated ideas out there: end corporate personhood; institute a “Tobin Tax” on stock purchases and currency trading; nationalise banks; socialise medicine; fully fund government jobs and genuine Keynesian stimulus; lift restrictions on labour organising; allow cities to turn foreclosed homes into public housing; build a green energy infrastructure.

But how can we get broad agreement on any of these? If the protesters came into the square with a pre-determined set of demands it would have only limited their potential. They would have either been dismissed as pie in the sky – such as socialised medicine or nationalising banks – or if they went for weak demands such as the Buffett Rule, their efforts would immediately be absorbed by a failed political system, thus undermining the movement.

That’s why the building of the movement has to go hand in hand with common struggle, debate and radical democracy. It’s how we will create genuine solutions that have legitimacy. And that is what is occurring down at Wall Street.

Now, there are endless objections one can make. But if we focus on the possibilities, and shed our despair, our hesitancy and our cynicism, and collectively come to Wall Street with critical thinking, ideas and solidarity, we can change the world.

How many times in your life do you get a chance to watch history unfold, to actively participate in building a better society, to come together with thousands of people where genuine democracy is the reality and not a fantasy?

For too long our minds have been chained by fear, by division, by impotence. The one thing the elite fear most is a great awakening. That day is here. Together we can seize it.

The US Facing another Economic “Titanic” Failure

Are we on the deck of another Titanic?

The US housing bubble is what caused the global economic meltdown, but politicians are still dawdling.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s TARP legislation reportedly helped just 30,000 people

 

New York, NY - Are we in a countdown to an economic collapse?

 

The other day, I was in a restroom papered over with pages of the New York Times from the Great Depression. It was very eerie – some of the stories sounded very contemporary.

 

Every day we seem to be reading about new waves of layoffs and cutbacks, when we hoped to be reading about new jobs and recovery.

 

Sony just announced it will “shed” ten thousand jobs worldwide (is that like a sheep shedding wool?). That’s six per cent of its staff. Yahoo has also announced thousands of layoffs. Maybe, Facebook will offer us one its pricey new infographics showing where all the jobs are going.

 

Last week, world stock markets were in the toilet, with European markets leading the descent. Corporate profits are said to be way down.

 

Not surprisingly, writing in the Financial Times, billionaire moneyman George Soros now sounds like a very worried man:

 

“Far from abating, the euro crisis has recently taken a turn for the worse. The European Central Bank relieved an incipient credit crunch through its longer-term refinancing operations. The resulting rally in financial markets hid an underlying deterioration; but that is unlikely to last much longer.

“The fundamental problems have not been resolved; indeed, the gap between creditor and debtor countries continues to widen. The crisis has entered what may be a less volatile but more lethal phase.”

 

That’s another term to worry about - ”lethal”.

 

In the US, the Republicans are about to dump $200 million dollars into partisan TV commercials to blame Obama for the whole crisis, as if one politician can press a button and order the intricate global capitalist system to rise and fall.

 

At the same time, their failure to pass any legislation that can ameliorate the crisis has been motivated by kamikaze politics driven by the desire to bring Obama down, no matter the cost to the public.

 

The only new economic initiative they and the Democrats have agreed to is a so-called JOBS act that many experts fear will neutralise financial regulations and lead to a new wave of financial crime.

 

That doesn’t mean that Obama doesn’t share responsibility by what he’s done, or failed to do.

 

For example: The total failure of Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to help homeowners in distress. TheTARP bill, allegedly, was not just for bank bailouts, but for mortgage relief. Thanks to incompetence, only 30,000 people were helped over two years – despite the millions in, or facing, foreclosure. That is a disgrace.

 

The International Monetary Fund, aware that it was the US housing disaster that was behind the international financial meltdown, is appealing to Washington to provide mortgage relief as a global economic priority.

 

Reports the Washington Post: “Ahead of the IMF’s spring meetings next week, agency analysts have been warning that household debt - in particular, mortgages that are in default or that exceed the value of the borrower’s home – is dragging down growth in developed countries at a time when the global economy is struggling to revive.”

 

But, even if anyone in Washington is listening, there’s no evidence that they have had the capacity or commitment to act after all these years. They were too busy on the campaign trail recently, focused on the so-called Buffett Rule reforms that don’t go far enough – and were rejected by the Senate anyway.

 

Romney is even more of a joke. His cowboy capitalist antics in the private equity markets diverted millions into his own pocket. And now he backs the Ryan budget which proposes taking an axe to all government programmes with no new jobs or revenue in sight.

 

Both parties may have been complicit in creating this mess, but it is that corporate party with no logo that is to blame, whatever accusations the politicians bandy about.

 

I asked the Canadian economist Leo Panitch about how this unnamed corporate “party” operates, and he assured me it’s a system thing, not just a matter of decisions made by a conspiratorial elite.

 

“Globalisation is not a matter of markets escaping states,” he told me. He continued:

 

“It’s states that make markets, that free markets, that organise markets, and that when a crisis happens, as they inevitably do, take the responsibility not for preventing those crises which they can do, but containing them.

“I don’t think there’s an external force controlling the American state. The American state is capitalist to its core in the very way it’s organised. If you put Danny Schechter on top of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve would keep on doing what it’s doing, right? We need a very differently organised Federal Reserve.

“So we need to restructure the capitalist state so that it functions in a way that doesn’t reproduce capitalism and capitalist-socialist relations. It doesn’t do it because there’s too much influence from Wall Street. It does it because it is structurally embedded with Wall Street … the state is structured to be reproducing their power and authority in the society.”

 

At the same time, the so-called free market state is more involved in backing capitalism than protecting the people a democratic state should be protecting, and that is irrespective of political party.

 

What’s pathetic is that the media rarely explains why we are in the situation we are in – that is how the ruling forces in our so-called “free enterprise” system encourage policies that transfer wealth away from the working class and the middle class in the US, and into their own pockets.

 

At the same time, Occupy Wall Street seems to be banking on a general strike it hopes to pull off on May Day. Not a few political observers worry that calling for a massive shut down at this point is premature – and not the same as having the organisational network to pull it off. 

 

Rhetoric and reality may be at odds here.

 

The movement still seems a bit lost after it lost its base camps in parks across the country. It is hard to be an Occupy Movement with nothing being occupied – and no strategy for mobilising the mainstream of the 99 per cent.

 

As activists take to sleeping on sidewalks on Wall Street, some of their boosters at the Canadian magazineAdbusters are calling for a “fight to the finish”, not against the upholders of the status quo in the one per cent, but against those who don’t subscribe fully enough to their anarchist principles and theories of “horizontalism”. This litmus test is a prescription for a serious schism.

 

With the only opposition focused on economic inequality about to be divided, and politicians focused on power games, the real problems of the “lethal” future that George Soros fears may be drawing near.

 

Like the Titanic that sank a hundred years ago this week, the western economy is facing icebergs it doesn’t want to see or navigate around.

China, Africa, Sudan but the West Has No Strategic Plan For Any of Them

China: A force for peace in Sudan?

Beijing has invested billions in the oil-rich country and may now have to step up to ensure stability prevails.

While southern leaders want political independence from the north, economic realities may keep them tied to the north[Reuters]

As the world anxiously watches the southern Sudanese vote on whether to secede, one country has more to lose than most if civil war returns to Sudan.

With an estimated 24,000 of its citizens living there and billions of dollars worth of investments in the country, China is the key foreign player in Khartoum.

When the US oil giant Chevron pulled out of Sudan – beginning in 1984 when three of its employees were killed and culminating in 1992 when it finally sold all of its Sudanese interests – the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) stepped in.

It now has controlling stakes in the biggest energy consortiums operating in Sudan, giving China an estimated 60 per cent share of the 490,000 barrels of crude oil produced daily.

It also constructed the 1,500km pipeline that connects the oil fields of the south with Port Sudan in the north – from where the oil is exported.

But with oil accounting for more than 90 per cent of government revenues in the south, compared to just over 40 per cent in the north, there is a possibility that Khartoum could close the pipeline should the south vote for independence.

This decision would not only be devastating for the underdeveloped and oil revenue-dependent south, but would also disrupt China’s oil supply.

Friends in the south

To secure access to south Sudan’s resources, China has started building closer ties with Juba

To counter this and to secure access to the south’s resources after secession, China has started to build closer ties with the south.

Beijing, to the chagrin of the West, has supported the right of African nations to run their domestic affairs without outside interference, which partly explains the booming trade between the continent and the Asian power.

But by communicating with the government of South Sudan while it is not an official sovereign entity, it is partially abandoning its ‘non-interference policy’ and its traditional reluctance to engage with separatist movements – motivated in part by its own experiences in Tibet and Taiwan.

Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, says this is because the “Chinese priority is oil”.

“They openly opposed the independence option to start with, but then realised that it would happen and now say they are neutral,” Dowden explains.

“They are beginning to realise that a strict ‘non-interference’ policy is political and diplomatic nonsense. The very relationship between China and an African state is a political act that has implications. The relationship creates a political dynamic that implies support for the ruling group.

“The Chinese are beginning to realise that since so much of African politics is driven by groups or individuals below the official state level they will have to understand and engage with these dynamics. That means meeting leaders of the opposition, negotiating with local chiefs and kings in areas where the Chinese operate even though they have no status at official national level.”

A Chinese consulate was established in Juba, the southern capital, in September 2008. In November 2010, it was upgraded to ambassadorial level, and Li Zhiguo, China’s former envoy to Bahrain, was appointed consul general in Juba.

In October 2010, a delegation of Chinese government leaders visited Juba, where they met with the secretariat of the south’s ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). Salva Kiir, the leader of the SPLM, and other southern Sudanese government ministers, have also visited Beijing and multiple projects have progressed in the region.

Chasing Chinese investment

Ian Taylor, a professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews’ School of International relations and author of China’s New Role in Africa, says: “China has implemented various projects in the south and plans more, like building universities, hospitals … and water projects.”

After years of neglect, the underdeveloped south is in desperate need of investment and, according to He Wenping, the director of the African Studies section at the Institute of West Asian & African Studies (IWAAS) at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, understands that “oil cooperation between the north and south is the key for their future development”.

“China’s involvement in the field, including post-referendum economic construction in many other fields, is also important,” He added.

But many southerners have complained about the refineries that have been built on their land and the resulting environmental problems, like water contamination and sprawling lakes of toxic waste, and say that they have seen little of the wealth generated by oil production.

The Chinese are allegedly involved in negotiations over a new 1,400km pipeline, which would link South Sudan to the Kenyan port of Lamu, where it also intends to develop infrastructure. Once completed, the pipeline could serve as an alternative route for the land-locked south.

This development would see about 80 per cent of oil revenue shift from Khartoum to Juba. And despite the assurances of Liu Guijin, China’s special envoy to Darfur, that “China wishes to cooperate with the north and the south,” some suspect that Chinese investments will shift along with the revenue.

But while Beijing’s approach towards Juba is pragmatic, with securing the oil flow the central goal, China has invested an estimated $15bn in the north and is likely to want to maintain its relationship with Khartoum.

Furthermore, Khartoum has proved itself to be a reliable trade partner and ally, while a new government in the south will be an unknown figure in China’s calculations.

So, while CNPC is setting up a branch in Juba, the company remains headquartered in Khartoum.

“It [the secession of the south] wouldn’t have [a] big influence on the current China-Sudan relations,” He says. “While maintaining the traditional good relations with the north, China will also establish good relations with the south.”

From bilateral to trilateral

The Chinese-built Merowe Dam provides Sudan with a stable power grid and revenues from energy sales [EPA]

But with both the north and south rearming, Beijing is keen to ensure that the referendum does not result in renewed instability, which could threaten its multi-billion dollar investments and potentially impact its growing interests in neighbouring countries like Ethiopia, Chad and Libya.

“Beijing is a supremely pragmatic actor. It is in China’s best interests that the vote goes smoothly and the probable secession by South Sudan is permitted to go ahead peacefully,” Taylor says.

China has sent a delegation to the south to observe the referendum and a foreign ministry spokesman has stressed Beijing’s hopes that the vote will be held in a “fair, free, transparent and peaceful atmosphere and that all parties involved should be committed to peace and stability”.

In turn, the government of South Sudan has assured China that its investments will be protected if the south secedes from the north.

“We have given assurances to the Chinese leadership delegation to protect the Chinese investments in southern Sudan, and are desirous to see more investment in the future,” Pagan Amum, the secretary general of the SPLM, reportedly said.

But despite China’s growing ties with the south and the south’s need for investment, southerners may not have entirely forgotten Beijing’s traditional support for Khartoum. And as US sanctions will only apply to the north should the south secede, the new country could potentially be open to new investors from the West.

Beijing’s efforts to turn its bilateral ties into trilateral relations may just pay off, however, and the repercussions of this could stretch far beyond oil production.

He says China has already played a key role in ”consolidating the smooth implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [the 2005 agreement that brought the civil war to an end and which included the provision of a referendum on independence for the south]“.

Dowden suggests that China could be just as critical to ensuring that peace is maintained after the referendum as, should the south vote to secede, the two sides enter a six-month transition period during which thorny issues such as border demarcation and oil revenue sharing will be negotiated.

“They could be a force for peace if they play their cards right and understand what is going on,” Dowden says. “One of their most important pools of oil lies under the border so they will be desperate to make sure a war does not break out.”

Liberals have forgotten how to make the religious case for liberal causes

Liberals should fight back against conservative dogma by fighting fire with fire, but seem to have forgotten how.

The contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act has sparked controversy among conservatives

New Haven, CT - Every four years, the United States spasms with all sorts of manufactured outrage in the run-up to the election. 2012 is no exception. The latest in fake politics is being called “Rosengate”, named after a Democratic strategist who said Mitt Romney’s wife has never worked a day in her life.

She was right. Ann Romney, a mother of five married to a quarter-billionaire, is indeed unqualified to speak to the economic concerns of the average working American woman. But Romney had been polling badly with women and this was a chance to turn the tables. Now it was President Barack Obama who was being anti-mother! Mothers work, too, you know! Yes, but that’s not the point. No matter. The right-wing media echo chamber has been ringing since. 

Republicans aren’t entirely to blame. The Democrats are partly responsible for this spun-from-thin-air controversy, because of a decision they made during a genuine controversy over the so-called contraception mandate.

First, a refresher: The contraception mandate is part of the historic health care reform law called the Affordable Care Act. It requires that all employers cover birth control in their insurance plans. This applies even to employers affiliated with churches. That’s where the heart of the dispute lies. Forcing church-affiliated employers like colleges and hospitals who believe in birth control is a sin to pay for birth control could be a violation of their constitutional rights. Prominent Catholics, not just conservative ones, rejected the rule. In response,Obama modified the rule so insurance companies bear the burden, not the church-affiliated employers.

Republicans, taking a cue from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, head of the United States Conference of Catholics Bishops, saw an opening. They started to hammer Obama for his appearing to attack the freedom of religion. They did this even after Obama modified the rule. Democrats never bothered to take up the fight on religious grounds. Instead, they chose, with good reason, to denounce the GOP’s “war on women”.

This was a rare instance in which being right yielded political dividends. The GOP and its conservative media allies, ie, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, revealed themselves to be unreconstructed champions of bald-faced chauvinism. Romney has suffered from an enormous gender gap. Women still prefer Obama.

But now, with this fake outrage over the fake slander of working mothers, Republicans now enjoy the appearance of a balanced counterweight to the liberal charge of being anti-woman. Not only that, Republicans have, because Democrats gave it to them, the moral high ground. The Democrats are anti-mother as well as anti-religion.

A liberal killed the Christian liberal star

It didn’t have to be this way. Democrats could have argued in the name of the Sermon on the Mount, an unimpeachable source of biblical authority in keeping with the egalitarian spirit of Obama’s health care legislation that may have gained wide appeal among women voters who already express more concern about health care than they do balanced budgets.

But they didn’t. Why?

Part of the reason is obvious. Conservatives are so much better at using religion as a rhetorical weapon. But that isn’t a natural outcome of party affiliation or innate ideology. Liberal Democrats gave up on religion a long time ago.

The Republican Party used to be widely viewed as the party most willing to drive the humanity out of working-class Americans by using the bloodless forces of laissez-fairecapitalism. William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate, fought against that. He was the champion of the common man, a populist philosopher and the chief spokesman of a nearly extinct strain of ideology:Christian liberalism. Bryan’s worldview went on to become central to the building of the New Deal.

1925 might be the year in which Christian liberalism died, and, as is typical in the history of American liberalism, American liberalism is a prime suspect in the crime.

That was the year in which Darwin’s theory of evolution stood trial in Dayton, a small town in rural Tennessee. Bryan in effect defended revealed religion while arguing against the teaching of evolution in public schools while famed civil libertarian Clarence Darrow argued for evolution.

In what will forever be remembered in the annals of bad legal manoeuvers, Bryan allowed himself to be cross-examined. The whole wild affair was famously preserved by HL Mencken, who wrote in a July 21 dispatch for theNew York Times:

“Darrow drew from Bryan that he knew little of comparative religion, very little of geology, nothing of physiology, and hardly anything that would interest a man seeking light on the vast questions of evolution and religion on which he had written for years. He took refuge again and again in his faith in the written word of the Bible. If what science he had learned did not agree with that, he did not believe it and did not want to know.”

So a liberal killed the Christian liberal star, and since 1925, it has been unfashionable, to say the least, for liberal commentators to sound preachy. To the contrary, liberals are supposed to be the voice of reason, pragmatism and enlightenment; they oppose ignorance, prejudice and the madness of the masses. Liberalism, as the late Daniel Bell suggested, is the ideology of no ideology. It is the practical application of technical knowledge to situations in need of repair. Which is damn hard to get excited about.

Obama’s new health care law, especially, one could argue, in providing equitable access to birth control to the poorest among us, keeps watch over the sick, the meek and the mild. It’s the kind of law most beloved of the God of the New Testament, the God of mercy, compassion and peace. It’s hard to imagine a more ideal time to make the religious case for liberal causes, but I worry that liberal Democrats have forgotten how to do that.