[Marxism-Thaxis] Imperialist warpigs run kangaroo court in NYC
Should be a good model for what Barrage Obushwa has in mind though. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/nyregion/04siddiqui.html?themc=th excerpt But after Judge Berman allowed Ms. Siddiqui to testify last week, she claimed that assertions that she had fired a weapon at officers was “the biggest lie.” The weapon was never in her hands, said Ms. Siddiqui, who explained that she was merely trying to escape from the station because she feared being tortured. She had been arrested the day before; in her purse were instructions on making explosives and a list of New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. But the charges in the case were not terrorism-related and were restricted to the events in a 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station, which is why prosecutors hinged their arguments on the testimony of nine people who were in it or close by. One of those witnesses was a chief warrant officer, whose name was withheld at the prosecution’s request. He limped to the stand using a cane because of injuries sustained in an unrelated roadside bombing in Afghanistan. Defense lawyers argued that an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4 suggested it had not been shot. They used a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also pointed out inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired. Ms. Siddiqui’s lawyers said they had not decided whether to appeal. They suggested that prosecutors had played to New Yorkers’ anxieties about terror attacks. “This is not a just and right verdict,” Elaine Sharp, one of Ms. Siddiqui’s lawyers, said outside the courtroom. “In my opinion this was based on fear but not fact.” As that verdict was read on Wednesday, 11 guards stood around the edges of the wood-paneled courtroom. “Today, a jury has brought Aafia Siddiqui to justice in a court of law for trying to murder American military and law enforcement officers, as well as their Afghan colleagues,” prosecutors said in a written statement. Perhaps the most riveting day of the trial was a week ago, when Ms. Siddiqui took the stand over the objections of her lawyers, who had fought her testimony until the last minute. Ms. Siddiqui recited a long list of academic achievements, including a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University. But she suggested that her studies of chemicals did not equip her to be a terrorist. “To answer your question, I don’t know how to make a dirty bomb,” she said, adding that she “couldn’t kill a rat myself.” In response, prosecutors asked her about six hours of target practice she completed while she was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which a witness verified. One of the most sensational parts of Ms. Siddiqui’s testimony was her claim of being held in a secret prison. Ms. Siddiqui and her children, according to Ms. Sharp, were taken at gunpoint by forces backed by the United States in 2003 while traveling in Karachi, Pakistan. Ms. Sharp said these events, and a traumatic subsequent detention, could explain Ms. Siddiqui’s outbursts. She added that her client was not anti-Semitic but pro-Palestinian. And she sent a message through reporters, some of whom were from Pakistan: “Dr. Siddiqui wants you all to know that she doesn’t want there to be violent protests or violent reprisals in Pakistan over this verdict.” ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] James O'Keefe's Race Problem
James O'Keefe's Race Problem By Max Blumenthal Salon Feb 3, 2010 http://www.salon.com/news/james_okeefe/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O'Keefe's past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O'Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O'Keefe, called him was one of the all-time great journalists and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly declared he should have earned a congressional medal. His right-wing admirers don't seem to mind that O'Keefe's short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O'Keefe at a 2006 conference on Race and Conservatism that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People's Project, shows O'Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O'Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. But O'Keefe and fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti- Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP. According to One Peoples Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O'Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me the table was filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. We can say for certain that James O'Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that, Jenkins said. O'Keefe's attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client's role in the conference. O'Keefe's racial issues can be seen in many of his prior stunts, of course. The notorious ACORN videos highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp, deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he baited African-American office workers into making statements that could be perceived as incriminating. There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory spectacles like the affirmative action bake sale O'Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they were students at Rutgers University. During the event, O'Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and African-Americans while whites were forced to pay exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced, would eat free.) By O'Keefe's own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University's dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O'Keefe claimed his next roommate was an Indian midget ... who smelled like shit. The roommate left, however, and was replaced by a greek kid. The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O'Keefe had called his neighbors niggers, prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a complete lie, writing, I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names. The following year, despite this record, O'Keefe secured a dream job in the conservative movement, employed by the Leadership Institute, a Northern Virginia-based outfit that serves as the movement's most prolific youth training operation. There, O'Keefe met Marcus Epstein, a fellow ideologue who as editor of a conservative publication at the College of William and Mary assailed Martin Luther King Jr. for philandering and plagiarism and challenged his patriotism and Christianity. Together, O'Keefe and Epstein planned an event in August 2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with their ambitions. Epstein invited white nationalist Jared Taylor and homophobic white-grievance peddler John Derbyshire of the National Review to speak at the Leadership Institute's
[Marxism-Thaxis] Rightwinger David Brooks
Rightwinger David Brooks makes the anti-white supremacy argument on Avatar. Go figure. (smile) Actually, the Indian meaning of Avatar sort of supports the critics,”a deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth” Avatar From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ten avatars of Vishnu (clockwise, from upper left): Matsya, Kurma, Varaha, Vamana, Krishna, Kalki, Buddha, Parshurama, Rama Narasimha, and Krishna (centre)In Hinduism, Avatar or Avatāra (Devanagari अवतार, Sanskrit for “descent” [viz., from heaven to earth]) refers to a deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth, and is mostly translated into English as “incarnation”, but more accurately as “appearance” or “manifestation”.[1] CB January 8, 2010 Op-Ed Columnist The Messiah Complex By DAVID BROOKS Readers intending to watch the movie “Avatar” should know that major events in the plot are revealed. Every age produces its own sort of fables, and our age seems to have produced The White Messiah fable. This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization. Avid moviegoers will remember “A Man Called Horse,” which began to establish the pattern, and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” More people will have seen “Dances With Wolves” or “The Last Samurai.” Kids have been given their own pure versions of the fable, like “Pocahontas” and “FernGully.” It’s a pretty serviceable formula. Once a director selects the White Messiah fable, he or she doesn’t have to waste time explaining the plot because everybody knows roughly what’s going to happen. The formula also gives movies a little socially conscious allure. Audiences like it because it is so environmentally sensitive. Academy Award voters like it because it is so multiculturally aware. Critics like it because the formula inevitably involves the loincloth-clad good guys sticking it to the military-industrial complex. Yet of all the directors who have used versions of the White Messiah formula over the years, no one has done so with as much exuberance as James Cameron in “Avatar.” “Avatar” is a racial fantasy par excellence. The hero is a white former Marine who is adrift in his civilization. He ends up working with a giant corporation and flies through space to help plunder the environment of a pristine planet and displace its peace-loving natives. The peace-loving natives — compiled from a mélange of Native American, African, Vietnamese, Iraqi and other cultural fragments — are like the peace-loving natives you’ve seen in a hundred other movies. They’re tall, muscular and admirably slender. They walk around nearly naked. They are phenomenal athletes and pretty good singers and dancers. The white guy notices that the peace-loving natives are much cooler than the greedy corporate tools and the bloodthirsty U.S. military types he came over with. He goes to live with the natives, and, in short order, he’s the most awesome member of their tribe. He has sex with their hottest babe. He learns to jump through the jungle and ride horses. It turns out that he’s even got more guts and athletic prowess than they do. He flies the big red bird that no one in generations has been able to master. Along the way, he has his consciousness raised. The peace-loving natives are at one with nature, and even have a fiber-optic cable sticking out of their bodies that they can plug into horses and trees, which is like Horse Whispering without the wireless technology. Because they are not corrupted by things like literacy, cellphones and blockbuster movies, they have deep and tranquil souls. The natives help the white guy discover that he, too, has a deep and tranquil soul. The natives have hot bodies and perfect ecological sensibilities, but they are natural creatures, not history-making ones. When the military-industrial complex comes in to strip mine their homes, they need a White Messiah to lead and inspire the defense. Our hero leaps in, with the help of a pack of dinosaurs summoned by Mother Earth. As he and his fellow freedom fighters kill wave after wave of Marines or former Marines or whatever they are, he achieves the ultimate prize: He is accepted by the natives and can spend the rest of his life in their excellent culture. Cameron’s handling of the White Messiah fable is not the reason “Avatar” is such a huge global hit. As John Podhoretz wrote in The Weekly Standard, “Cameron has simply used these familiar bromides as shorthand to give his special-effects spectacular some resonance.” The plotline gives global audiences a chance to see American troops get killed. It offers useful hooks on which McDonald’s and other corporations can hang their tie-in campaigns. Still, would it be totally annoying to point out that the
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Rightwinger David Brooks
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html On 2/4/10, Ralph Dumain rdum...@autodidactproject.org wrote: I can't discern where this was published. It's miraculous that a little shit like David Brooks would be so perceptive about AVATAR, or maybe AVATAR really is just standard-issue entertainment for simpletons . . . including the left. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] HOW CHASE BANK HAS LEFT HOMEOWNERS IN LIMBO
HOW CHASE BANK HAS LEFT HOMEOWNERS IN LIMBO By Paul Kiel, ProPublica Homeowners who may well be eligible for the mortgage loan modification program are being denied because their troubles were not deemed permanent. http://www.alternet.org/story/145546/how_chase_bank_has_left_homeowners_in_limbo ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Rightwinger David Brooks
I think of this as a particularly American thing--see Last of the Mohicans. Some of it has to do with the guilt felt over how Americans drew on the native Americans for imagery, agriculture, and even political organization and yet generation after generation ran and justified genocide against the Nations. The colonials even dressed up in what colonials thought the natives might look like in order to have their Boston Tea Party. OTOH there is Lawrence of Arabia, but even in film treatment, that is a study in subtlety and irony compared to anything Cameron might produce. If Cameron (who is Canadian, isn't he?--another Canadian living the American dream) has his largely unknown Australian actor hero adopting an American/North American accent, that is definitely one giveaway. I remember everyone telling me to go see his Aliens back in the 80s, and I thought it really sucked, no where near as good as the original Alien film. Then everyone was keen on his take on Terminator, the second film, which again lacked any sense of fun found in the low-budget original. Then came that godawful Titanic. That could have been a decent film if he had avoided the Romeo-Juliet lovestory and never ever cast that nasally Leonardo DiCaprio as an Irishman who we would have to look at and listen to for 2 and half hours of screen time. I think the only other sadist to do that for a popular audience is the over-rated Martin Scorcese, who keeps putting Leonardo in is his films. My wife really wants to go see this Avatar, but I'm worried about headaches and motion sickness, something a lot of bigscreen films here in Japan give me, without the 3D gimmick. Also, there is very little treble since no one follows the English anyway, and special effects films like this come across as just one large bass explosion after another. I wonder if those (all the Japanese) who have to follow a film like this in sub-titles will get reading-motion sickness trying to do it. Or perhaps most are opting for the 'dubbed' version. The 'treble' issue gets so bad for me that I often find myself reading the sub-titles in order to follow the dialogue in most loud Hollywood productions. At any rate, I'll probably see it and emerge 'fightin' mad' and all fired up for the revolution like Louie Proyect. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
