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Thursday, August 31, 2006 |
Bloggerheads: "Mark Thomas is furious about SOCPA [the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, which includes a protest exclusion zone] and has organised a Lone Demo in Parliament Square whereby as many people as possible apply as individuals to simultaneously demonstrate about anything they like.
The demo will then take place from 6pm at Parliament Square on Thursday the 31st August. If we can get as many people there as possible it should be really good fun and make a serious and important point."
And t-shirts with Arabic words are 'offensive'.
Bloggerheads has more on this.
Slashdot: "In a move that has been termed 'positively Orwellian' by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch, George W. Bush is ending public access to research materials at EPA regional libraries without Congressional consent."
FAS: "The National Security Agency has instructed all of its employees to 'actively' watch for unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the press and online, and to report such disclosures to the authorities."
11:57:43 AM 
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Naguib Mahfouz died at his home yesterday. He was one of the best writers of the Middle East.
11:38:20 AM
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Noami Klein, also in The Guardian: "The Red Cross has just announced a new disaster-response partnership with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a co-production of Big Aid and Big Box.
This, apparently, is the lesson learned from the government's calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina: Businesses do disaster better.
The first step was the government's abdication of its core responsibility to protect the population from disasters. Under the Bush administration, whole sectors of the government, most notably the Department of Homeland Security, have been turned into glorified temp agencies, with essential functions contracted out to private companies. The theory is that entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive, are always more efficient (please suspend hysterical laughter).
'Where has all the money gone?' ask desperate people from Baghdad to New Orleans, from Kabul to tsunami-struck Sri Lanka. One place a great deal of it has gone is into major capital expenditures for these private contractors. Largely under the public radar, billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on the construction of a privatized disaster-response infrastructure: the Shaw Group's new state-of-the-art Baton Rouge headquarters, Bechtel's battalions of earthmoving equipment, Blackwater USA's 6,000-acre campus in North Carolina (complete with paramilitary training camp and 6,000-foot runway).
I call it the Disaster Capitalism Complex. Whatever you might need in a serious crunch, these contractors can provide it: generators, water tanks, cots, port-a-potties, mobile homes, communications systems, helicopters, medicine, men with guns.
But here's the catch: The US government is going broke, in no small part thanks to this kind of loony spending. The national debt is $8-trillion; the federal budget deficit is at least $260-billion. That means that sooner rather than later, the contracts are going to dry up. And no one knows this better than the companies themselves. Ralph Sheridan, chief executive of Good Harbor Partners, one of hundreds of new counter-terrorism companies, explains that 'expenditures by governments are episodic and come in bubbles'. Insiders call it the 'homeland security bubble'.
Unless a radical change of course is demanded, New Orleans will prove to be a glimpse of a dystopic future, a future of disaster apartheid in which the wealthy are saved and everyone else is left behind."
TomPaine: "Recent attempts in Las Vegas and Orlando to restrict sharing food with poor and homeless people are only the latest examples of a nationwide trend by cities to target homeless people.
As homelessness has grown in the United States over the past two decades, so have laws that essentially criminalize those who have no home. In a misguided attempt to grapple with the phenomenon of people living on our streets, city governments have passed laws that make it illegal to sit, sleep and eat in public spaces. These laws criminally penalize our poor and homeless neighbors merely for the fact that they have no place else to go."
ChinaDaily: "In the world's biggest economy, one in eight Americans and almost one in four blacks lived in poverty last year, the U.S. Census Bureau said on Tuesday, both ratios virtually unchanged from 2004.
The survey also showed 15.9 percent of the population, or 46.6 million, had no health insurance, up from 15.6 percent in 2004 and an increase for a fifth consecutive year, even as the economy grew at a 3.2 percent clip."
ThinkProgress: "The Bush record on combating poverty and insuring more Americans is an undisputed failure."
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (pdf report US Census Bureau).
CommonDreams: "More than half of the people who lived in New Orleans before Katrina have still not returned. The poor have no place to return to. Their former houses are in rubble. Housing projects are closed. Poor neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward are still devastated. Inexpensive housing, even rental housing, is hard to find."
11:29:01 AM
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Shock and Awe by Scott Dewar.
The shock and awe in New Orleans hasn't abated yet. Only the rich have been able to rebuild. Watch the Fiore animation.
11:04:11 AM
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