Tibetan Self-Immolations Rise as China Tightens Grip

By ANDREW JACOBS
March 22, 2012 - NYtimes.com

MAQU, China — Like many children of Tibetan nomads, Tsering Kyi started school relatively late, at age 10, but by all accounts she made up for lost time by studying with zeal.

“Even when she was out at pasture with her parents’ flock, there was always a book in her hand,” a cousin said.

That passion for learning apparently turned to despair this month when the Maqu County Tibetan Middle School, in Gansu Province near Tibet, switched to Chinese from Tibetan as the language of instruction. The policy shift has incited protests across the high-altitude steppe that is home to five million Tibetans and a far greater number of ethnic Han Chinese.

On March 3, a few days before the start of the spring semester, Tsering Kyi, 20, emerged from a public toilet at the town’s produce market, her wispy frame bound in gasoline-soaked blankets that had been encircled with wire, relatives and local residents said.

In a flash she was a heap of flames, her fist raised defiantly, before falling to the ground, residents said. She died at the scene.

Over the past year 29 Tibetans, seven of them in the last three weeks, have chosen a similarly agonizing, self-annihilating protest against Chinese policies. Of those, 22 have died.

Beijing, alarmed about the threat to stability in a region seething with discontent over religious and cultural controls, has responded with an assortment of heavy-handed measures. Officials have described the self-immolators as outcasts and terrorists, blamed the pernicious influence of Tibetan exiles and flooded the region with checkpoints and paramilitary police officers in flak jackets.

Communist Party leaders have also introduced a “monastic management” plan to more directly control religious life. As part of the plan, 21,000 party officials have been sent to Tibetan communities with the goal of “befriending” monks — and creating dossiers on each of them. Compliant clergy members are rewarded with health care benefits, pensions and television sets; the recalcitrant are sometimes expelled from their monasteries.

At some temples, monks and nuns have been forced to publicly denounce the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader whose name is often invoked by self-immolators. The freedom of movement that allowed monks to study at distant monasteries across Tibet and four adjacent provinces has been curtailed.

“They claim we are free to practice our religion but in fact they keep pulling the reins tighter and tighter so we can hardly breathe,” said a 22-year-old monk from Qinghai Province, who like many Tibetans keeps banned pictures of the Dalai Lama in his room and on his cellphone.

Senior officials have trumpeted the new approach, which includes the distribution of one million national flags and portraits of Mao Zedong and other party leaders — with a requirement that they be displayed at homes and monasteries. “Temples have undergone a delightful change since the new management methods were put into place,” Xinza Danzengquzha, a top Tibetan official, said this month in Beijing.

Such measures, however, may be having the opposite intended effect. Robert Barnett, director of the Modern Tibet Studies Program at Columbia University, said that the government’s more intrusive approach to monasteries, the heart of Tibetan society, is a reversal of self-management policies put in place in the 1980s. “History suggests it is unlikely to work,” he said.

The antipathy, never far beneath the surface, is erupting into plain view with greater frequency. In the past week, several protests have broken out, including two in Qinghai Province that were led by students angry over the introduction of Chinese-language textbooks for subjects like chemistry, math and geography. In January, exile groups say 31 people were shot, at least one fatally, when police officers opened fire on demonstrators in Drango County, in Sichuan Province. In Diru County, in the Tibet Autonomous Region, 20 of the 22 monasteries have been closed, according to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

Spasms of unrest have coursed through modern Tibetan history with some regularity since 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled to India after a failed uprising. Between 1987 and 1989, the region was rocked by protests that were brutally crushed. The most recent crackdown began in March 2008, when rioting in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, led to the death of at least 19 people, most of them Han Chinese. In the weeks and months that followed, exile groups say a far greater number of Tibetans died.

But Tibetan scholars and exiles say the current resistance campaign is unlike anything seen before. The tactic — public, fiery suicides that do not harm bystanders or property — has profoundly moved ordinary Tibetans and bedeviled Chinese officials. Just as significant, they note, is that the protesters are mostly young — all but nine of them under 30.

Tsering Kyi was one of them. According to family members, she was a thoughtful student whose hard work earned her a place on the school’s honor roll. But in 2010, she joined classmates who took to the streets of this dusty county seat to protest the new Chinese-language textbooks and the decision to limit Tibetan to a single class. In the clampdown that followed, several teachers suspected of encouraging the protest were fired and the headmaster, a popular Tibetan writer, was sent to work on a dam project, according to local residents.

Tsering Kyi’s death has been widely publicized by Tibetan activist groups eager to draw attention to the self-immolations. The Chinese state news media, which has ignored most of the cases, reported that she was mentally unstable after hitting her head on a radiator. Her grades started to sag, the official Xinhua news agency said, “which put a lot of pressure on her and made her lose courage for life and study.”

In interviews, several Tibetan residents and relatives of Tsering Kyi’s contemptuously waved away such assertions. Instead, they were eager to discuss her devotion to her Tibetan heritage and the final moments of her life. When she emerged from the public toilets in flames, they said, the market’s Han Chinese vegetable sellers locked the front gate to prevent her from taking her protest to the street. No one, they claim, tried to douse the fire.

When the police arrived, they forced witnesses to remain inside the market and returned Tsering Kyi’s body to the bathroom. Then, after collecting everyone’s cellphones, they methodically went through the devices and deleted any photographs of the incident.

In interviews last week with two dozen monks and ordinary Tibetans in Qinghai and Gansu Provinces, many said that they expected the fiery suicides and protests to continue to spread beyond Aba, the county in Sichuan Province where the majority of the self-immolations have taken place. “From the outside, everything looks so pretty here, but on the inside, everyone is boiling.” said one lama at a monastery in Rebkong, a major tourist draw in Qinghai famous for its intricate thangka paintings.

The lama, who asked for anonymity because speaking to foreign reporters can lead to severe punishment, said monks were expected to attend “patriotic education” sessions that consist of pro-government propaganda. “I don’t want trouble with the authorities, but I can’t control their rage any longer,” he said of the monks.

In Gansu Province, security at the sprawling Labrang Monastery was visibly tighter, and emotions more raw. Monks there said the accumulation of indignities, years in the making, was followed by two days of street protests in 2008 that led to a wave of detentions and beatings.

Many Tibetan monks are unable to get passports and the Han, they said, often treat them with contempt. “We can’t even speak our minds on the phone because the police are listening in,” said one 39-year-old who ducked into a reporter’s hotel room to share details about life for Labrang’s 1,400 monks.

He described how the police had raided the white-walled monastery complex one night as everyone slept, kicking in doors, smashing computers and tearing up photographs of the Dalai Lama. At least 180 monks were detained that night. “They ran out of handcuffs, so they started tying our wrists with rope they found in the monastery,” he said.

The monks were eventually released but Labrang, one of the most important religious sites in Tibetan Buddhism, is a changed place. Video surveillance cameras hang from the eaves of hallowed temples and plainclothes police officers mingle with the faithful. “They never fool us because they hold their prayer beads with their right hand, and every Tibetan knows to hold them in their left hand,” one monk said.


Shi Da contributed research.


Horrific anti-China protests become Tibet's norm
By Tim Sullivan Associated Press

Wednesday, March 21 2012 6:30 a.m. MDT


For more than a year the deadly protests have swept the Tibetan plateau, waves of people burning themselves alive in a widening challenge to Chinese rule.

The prime minister of Tibet's government-in-exile calls them acts of desperation. The Dalai Lama says they give China an excuse for even harsher crackdowns. But to many Tibetans, they are carefully reasoned attempts to bring attention to an often-forgotten cause.

"These are intelligent people who knew what they were doing," said Tenzin Choekyi of the Tibetan Youth Congress, a prominent Dharmsala, India-based activist group. "What is the ultimate thing you can offer? It's your life."

In Tibet, the horrific has become normal.

More than two dozen Tibetans, many in their teens or 20s, have set themselves on fire since early 2011 in an unprecedented series of suicide-protests. In the moments before they are overwhelmed by pain or tackled by Chinese security, they cry out for the Dalai Lama's return to Tibet, for an end to China's crackdowns or for their homeland's independence.

There is little sign that the immolations could lead to a broad uprising. But they have embarassed Beijing and are testing Chinese policies across the Tibetan plateau. The protests also have taken place far from the Tibetan heartland, showing opposition to Beijing's rule is geographically more widespread than ever.

Most of the immolations have occurred in ethnic Tibetan regions in China's Sichuan and Qinghai provinces.

While the most restive towns have been effectively sealed off, some details have emerged: the Buddhist monk who drank gasoline before dousing himself with fuel and setting himself alight; the two young men who set themselves on fire, then ran together into the streets shouting for the return of the Dalai Lama; the nun, seen in a video distributed by activists, walking along a busy street engulfed in flames.

At one point, a woman tosses a white scarf — a Tibetan offering of respect — at her feet.

"The self-immolations don't hurt anybody else. They just want people to see that there are problems here," said a young schoolteacher in trendy faded jeans in the small Tibetan town of Hongyuan, in China's Sichuan province. He spoke on condition of anonymity fearing retribution by Chinese officials.

Until recently, though, such protests were rare among Tibetans, raised in an enveloping Buddhist culture that normally discourages suicide.

While there had been a handful of earlier Tibetan suicide protests, the recent surge began March 16, 2011, when a 20-year-old monk at Sichuan's Kirti monastery burned himself alive, apparently to mark the anniversary of a 2008 protest brutally crushed by Chinese forces.

The burnings spiked in October, and then again in January. There have been at least seven so far in March, activists say.

The Kirti monastery, which has emerged as a center of political activism, has been the focus of the protests, with at least 14 current and former monks among the self-immolators.

The monastery and the town around it, Aba, have been flooded with Chinese forces. Soldiers and police in riot gear now line the town's streets, and more have been posted inside the monastery. But they have been unable to stop the protests.

The roots of the self-immolations lie along Tibetan periphery. Aba, like most of the towns that have seen recent suicides, is well over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.

Until the 1990s, China's most repressive policies were concentrated on the official Tibetan Autonomous Region, with Tibetans living to the east, in Sichuan and Qinghai, given freer reign. When protests shook Lhasa in the 1980s, they barely touched Sichuan.

"These areas had not been part of a Tibetan state for centuries, and were outside the administration of the old Tibetan government, yet now we often hear of people there raising the Tibetan flag or calling for freedom for Tibet," Robert Barnett, a professor of modern Tibetan history at Columbia University, said in an email.

"It's not that these people are radical, it is that China's policies, especially since its decision in the 1990s to insult the Dalai Lama and to treat monasteries as threats, has turned a formerly complex Tibetan cultural sphere into a relatively unified sphere of political dissent."

The trouble began in the late 1990s, as a divide between Beijing and Tibetans began growing over the Panchen Lama, the second-highest Tibetan religious leader. In 1995, the Dalai Lama named a 6-year-old boy as the reincarnated Panchen Lama. But the boy and his family soon disappeared, and Beijing gave another boy the title.

When monks in Sichuan spoke out, Beijing's policies began reaching deep into monastic life. Monks were pressed to accept the Panchen Lama, to declare their fealty to China, to denounce the Dalai Lama. As senior monks died, China forbade the traditional searches for reincarnated successors, forcing the monks to look abroad for guidance, toward more politicized monasteries in exile.

In Tibet, where monasteries often serve encompassing roles — school, cultural center, home to the sons of local families who have become monks — Beijing's moves created a bitter cycle of revolt and repression, with Tibetan protests leading to ever-more official interference, which in turn sparked more protests.


Aba now looks like an occupied town.

During a clandestine late February visit by an Associated Press reporter, roadblocks guarded every road into the town, while members of Chinese security forces massed along the main street and outside the monastery.

"People have never seen the type of restrictions that exist now in Aba," said Lobsang Yeshe, a monk from the town who fled to India more than a decade ago. He is now based at Kirti's brother monastery, in Dharmsala, which keeps in close contact with Aba.

He said the crackdown and what he calls "the invisible troubles" — everything from the influx of ethnic Han Chinese to Tibetan nomads encouraged to settle into permanent homes — have nurtured the self-immolations. Tibetans, he said, have no choice but to harm themselves in protest.

"The Tibetans who made the decision to self-immolate, who can question them?" he demanded. "This is their choice. This is their own method of nonviolence."

But why suicide by self-immolation? No one knows. Some see inspiration in the Arab spring, and the Tunisian vegetable seller who helped inspire it by setting himself on fire. Others look to a history of Buddhist immolators: Vietnamese monks who burned themselves alive in the 1960s, angry over government crackdowns; Chinese monks who killed themselves in political protests during the last imperial dynasty.

Beijing, though, sees them as part of a decades-long campaign by the Dalai Lama to carve Tibet away from China. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters that the Dalai Lama and his aides were trying to incite more self-immolations, calling their activities "terrorism in disguise."

The Dalai Lama, who fled Lhasa in 1959 and now lives in exile in India, insists he only wants more autonomy for Tibet.

A year after the suicides began, many details are unanswered. Many protesters have been dragged away by police, and it is unclear how many survived. Activists say dozens of people have been arrested, accused of encouraging the immolations.

Meanwhile, a handful of Tibetans have begun to speak out against the self-immolations.

Tsering Woeser, a well-known poet living under virtual house arrest in Beijing, posted a recent online appeal calling for an end to the suicides, signing the appeal with two other Tibetan intellectuals.

"Tibetans must cherish life and live with resilience. Regardless of the magnitude of oppression, our life is important, and we have to cherish it," the March 8 appeal said.

At least four Tibetans have set themselves on fire since then.

Sullivan reported from New Delhi and Dharmsala; Wong reported from Aba and Hongyuan; Associated Press writer Charles Hutzler contributed from Beijing.








22 self-immolations reported in past year
Published: March. 23, 2012 at 10:15 AM


MAQU, China, March 23 (UPI) -- Seven people have set themselves on fire in recent weeks in protest of Chinese policies against Tibetans, activists say.

The New York Times said China has tightened controls against the 5 million Tibetans who live in Gansu province, near Tibet. The newspaper said 22 Tibetans have died in the past year by self-immolation.

China blamed the deaths on the influence of Tibetan exiles and has boosted the police and military presence in the region. Thousands of Communist Party leaders have been sent to Tibetan communities to develop relationships with monks, rewarding those who are cooperative and sometimes expelling, from their monasteries, those who are not.

Monks and nuns have been forced to publicly denounce Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, the newspaper said Friday.

Student protests were reported in China's Qinghai province after the introduction of Chinese-language textbooks. Exile groups say one person was killed and 30 others injured when police fired at demonstrators in Drango County in Sichuan province.

The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy said 20 of 22 monasteries have been closed in Diru County in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The New York Times said the most recent self-immolation death, that of a 20-year-old student named Tsering Kyi, has been widely publicized by Tibetan activists. The official Xinhua news agency said the young woman set herself on fire after a head injury caused her grades to decline.


© 2012 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: 'There is no real hunt. It's fixed'

Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau's more ethically murky practices


Paul Harris in Irvine, California

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 March 2012 12.50 EDT



Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.

"They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did," Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.

It is an astonishing admission that goes that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.

Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial tactics: the use of "confidential informants" in so-called entrapment cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist "attacks" at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net suspects.

In the case of the Newburgh Four – where four men were convicted for a fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx – a confidential informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for help with the attack.

In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a New Jersey military base, one informant's criminal past included attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.

Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens. "The way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It's such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It's fixed," he said.

But Monteilh has regrets now about his involvement in a scheme called Operation Flex. Sitting in the kitchen of his modest home in Irvine, near Los Angeles, Monteilh said the FBI should publicly apologise for his fruitless quest to root out Islamic radicals in Orange County, though he does not hold out much hope that will happen. "They don't have the humility to admit a mistake," he said.

Monteilh's story sounds like something out of a pulp thriller. Under the supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor created a fictitious French-Syrian altar ego, called Farouk Aziz. In this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange County – the long stretch of suburbia south of LA – and pretended to convert to Islam.

He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist sympathizers.

Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County's Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.

Monteilh does not look like a spy. He is massively well built, but soft-spoken and friendly. He is 49 but looks younger. He lives in a small rented home in Irvine that blends into the suburban sprawl of southern California. Yet Monteilh knows the spying game intimately well.

By his own account Monteilh got into undercover work after meeting a group of off-duty cops working out in a gym. Monteilh told them he had spent time in prison in Chino, serving time for passing fraudulent checks.

It is a criminal past he explains by saying he was traumatised by a nasty divorce. "It was a bad time in my life," he said. He and the cops got to talking about the criminals Monteilh had met while in Chino. The information was so useful that Monteilh says he began to work on undercover drug and organised crime cases.

Eventually he asked to work on counter-terrorism and was passed on to two FBI handlers, called Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen. These two agents had a mission and an alias ready-made for him.

Posing as Farouk Aziz he would infiltrate local mosques and Islamic groups around Orange County. "Paul Allen said: 'Craig, you are going to be our computer worm. Our guy that gives us the real pulse of the Muslim community in America'," Monteilh said.

The operation began simply enough. Monteilh started hanging out at mosques, posing as Aziz, and explaining he wanted to learn more about religion. In July, 2006, at the Islamic Center of Irvine, he converted to Islam.

Monteilh also began attending other mosques, including the Orange County Islamic Foundation. Monteilh began circulating endlessly from mosque to mosque, spending long days in prayer or reading books or just hanging out in order to get as many people as possible to talk to him.

"Slowly I began to wear the robes, the hat, the scarf and they saw me slowly transform and growing a beard. At that point, about three or four months later, [my FBI handlers] said: 'OK, now start to ask questions'."

Those questions were aimed at rooting out radicals. Monteilh would talk of his curiosity over the concepts of jihad and what Muslims should do about injustices in the world, especially where it pertained to American foreign policy.

He talked of access to weapons, a possible desire to be a martyr and inquired after like-minded souls. It was all aimed at trapping people in condemning statements. "The skill is that I am going to get you to say something. I am cornering you to say "jihad"," he said.

Of course, the chats were recorded.

In scenes out of a James Bond movie, Monteilh said he sometimes wore a secret video recorder sewn into his shirt. At other times he activated an audio recorder on his key rings.

Monteilh left his keys in offices and rooms in the mosques that he attended in the hope of recording conversations that took place when he was not here. He did it so often that he earned a reputation with other worshippers for being careless with his keys. The recordings were passed back to his FBI handlers at least once a week.

He also met with them every two months at a hotel room in nearby Anaheim for a more intense debriefing. Monteilh says he was grilled on specific individuals and asked to view charts showing networks of relationships among Orange County's Muslim population.

He said the FBI had two basic aims. Firstly, they aimed to uncover potential militants. Secondly, they could also use any information Monteilh discovered – like an affair or someone being gay – to turn targeted people into becoming FBI informants themselves.

None of it seemed to unnerve his FBI bosses, not even when he carried out a suggestion to begin seducing Muslim women and recording them.

At one hotel meeting, agent Kevin Armstrong explained the FBI attitude towards the immense breadth of Operation Flex – and any concerns over civil rights – by saying simply: "Kevin is God."

Monteilh's own attitude evolved into something very similar. "I was untouchable. I am a felon, I am on probation and the police cannot arrest me. How empowering is that? It is very empowering. You began to have a certain arrogance about it. It is almost taunting. They told me: 'You are an untouchable'," he said.

But it was not always easy. "I started at 4am. I ended at 9.30pm. Really, it was a lot of work … Farouk took over. Craig did not exist," he said. But it was also well paid: at the peak of Operation Flex, Monteilh was earning more than $11,000 a month.

But he was wrong about being untouchable.

Far from uncovering radical terror networks, Monteilh ended up traumatising the community he was sent into. Instead of embracing calls for jihad or his questions about suicide bombers or his claims to have access to weapons, Monteilh was instead reported to the FBI as a potentially dangerous extremist.

A restraining order was also taken out against him in June 2007, asking him to stay away from the Islamic Center of Irvine. Operation Flex was a bust and Monteilh had to kill off his life as Farouk Aziz.

But the story did not end there. In circumstances that remain murky Monteilh then sued the FBI over his treatment, claiming that they abandoned him once the operation was over.

He also ended up in jail after Irvine police prosecuted him for defrauding two women, including a former girlfriend, as part of an illegal trade in human growth hormone at fitness clubs. (Monteilh claims those actions were carried out as part of another secret string operation for which he was forced to carry the can.)

What is not in doubt is that Monteilh's identity later became public. In 2009 the FBI brought a case against Ahmad Niazi, an Afghan immigrant in Orange County.

The evidence included secret recordings and even calling Osama bin Laden "an angel". That was Monteilh's work and he outed himself to the press to the shock of the very Muslims he had been spying on who now realised that Farouk Aziz – the radical they had reported to the FBI two years earlier – had in fact been an undercover FBI operative.

Now Monteilh says he set Niazi up and the FBI was trying to blackmail the Afghani into being an informant. "I built the whole relationship with Niazi. Through my coercion we talked about jihad a lot," he said. The FBI's charges against Niazi were indeed later dropped.

Now Monteilh has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the FBI. Amazingly, after first befriending Muslim leaders in Orange County as Farouk Aziz, then betraying them as Craig Monteilh, he has now joined forces with them again to campaign for their civil liberties.

That has now put Monteilh's testimony about his year undercover is at the heart of a fresh legal effort to prove that the FBI operation in Orange County unfairly targeted a vulnerable Muslim community, trampling on civil rights in the name of national security.

The FBI did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

It is not the first time Monteilh has shifted his stance. In the ACLU case Monteilh is now posing as the sorrowful informant who saw the error of his ways.

But in previous court papers filed against the Irvine Police and the FBI, Monteilh's lawyers portrayed him as the loyal intelligence asset who did sterling work tackling the forces of Islamic radicalism and was let down by his superiors.

In those papers Monteilh complained that FBI agents did not act speedily enough on a tip he gave them about a possible sighting of bomb-making materials. Now Monteilh says that tip was not credible.

Either way it does add up to a story that shifts with the telling. But that fact alone goes to the heart of the FBI's use of such confidential informants in investigating Muslim communities.

FBI operatives with profiles similar to Monteilh's – of a lengthy criminal record, desire for cash and a flexibility with the truth – have led to high profile cases of alleged entrapment that have shocked civil rights groups across America.

In most cases the informants have won their prosecutions and simply disappeared. Monteilh is the only one speaking out. But whatever the reality of his year undercover, Monteilh is almost certainly right about one impact of Operation Flex and the exposure of his undercover activities: "Because of this the Muslim community will never trust the FBI again."

Hype Session 2 - Herbal Hype

Hype Session 1 - Herbal Hype

Cruel and Unusual Punishment in the U.K.

Rioting in London, Woolrich August 8 2011

The Racist Right

What were two Republicans thinking, calling Obama 'tar baby' and 'boy'?
Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado and commentator Pat Buchanan, a former candidate for president, both apologized Wednesday for using racially charged terms to refer to Obama.

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / August 3, 2011
Atlanta --Christian Science Moniter--

The specter of two national Republican figures apologizing for calling President Obama, the first African-American president, alternately a "tar baby" and "boy" gave new fuel to speculation on the left that, underneath much of the criticism of the president and his policies, lurks the shadow of racism.

Last week, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R) of Colorado, on a Denver talk radio show, said, “Even if some people say, ‘Well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that,’ they will hold the president responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get it, you’re stuck, and you’re a part of the problem now and you can’t get away.”

The term tar baby comes from the 19th century Uncle Remus stories, where B'rer Fox uses a doll made of a lump of tar to trap B'rer Rabbit, who gets more stuck the more he pummels and kicks the tar baby. In more recent parlance, tar baby is widely considered racial slur.

Other Republicans, including Sen. John McCain and Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, have in recent years apologized for using the phrase "tar baby," although in reference to various government policies and projects, not a black man.

And then Tuesday night, former GOP presidential candidate and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan, in a tête-à-tête with the Rev. Al Sharpton, referred to Obama as "your boy." “My what?” Sharpton shot back. “My president, Barack Obama? What did you say?”

Mr. Buchanan hinted that he was using a boxing analogy, replying that the president was "your boy in the ring."

Lamborn, who apologized to Obama in a letter, said in a separate statement Wednesday that he shouldn't have used a term "that some find insensitive" and meant to criticize presidential policies that have "created an economic quagmire for the nation, and [which] are responsible for the dismal economic conditions our country faces."

“Some folks took what I said as some kind of a slur,” Buchanan said on Wednesday. “None was meant, none was intended, none was delivered.”

Nevertheless, to some critics, the gaffes are illuminating bits of evidence to underscore what many believe is an essentially racist view of Obama by some in America's conservative circles.

Given that language is the primary purveyor of our deepest thoughts, as well as the fact that language use is often unconscious, "even a slip of the tongue can reflect the kind of prevalence of racism that still exists within our culture," says Shawn Parry-Giles, director of the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership at the University of Maryland in College Park. "Progressives would say it's part of a larger conspiracy to target voters to use Obama's race as a means to help defeat him."

For especially conservative critics of the president, on the other hand, the gaffes hint how the shifting sands of language and perception have become intensified in the not-quite-post-racial Obama era, where some attempts to criticize the president have far overshot the lines of political correctness.

Progressives and tea party members, moreover, continue to be embroiled in a war of words and images where liberals charge tea partyers with latent racism for some depictions of Obama, and tea party folks say their critics use derogatory terms tied to social class.

"You talk about intent and reception in politics, where intent does matter, but reception is everything," says Professor Parry-Giles. "In an ideal world, when these situations happen ,they can be a source of productive discussion about how language can harm and hurt, and that what may have been appropriate 20 years ago or part of the vernacular is no longer there. Oftentimes, though, it just ends up being a partisan moment on either side."

Fear The Radical Right and witness its assault on freedom

The Tea Party Doctrine - Kings of Patrimonialism
and Mujahideen Jihadist Theology

- Anders Brevik
- Jared Lee Loughner
- English Defense League
- Hutaree
- Christian Terrorism
- Lionheart (EDL expatriate)

*Big men, that is politicians who distribute resources to their relatives and supporters- are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, including the U.S. congress. If political development implied movement beyond patrimonial relationships and paternalistic politics, one also had to explain why these practices survived in many places and seemingly modern systems often reverted to them. (pXIII)

*The conservatism of societies with regard to rules is then a source of political decay. Rules of institutions created in response to one set of environmental circumstances become dysfunctional under later conditions, but they cannot be changed due to people heavy emotional investments in them. This means that social change is often not linear- but rather follows constant small adjustments to shifting conditions- a pattern of prolonged stasis followed by catastrophic change. (p44)

*...the struggle to replace "tribal" politics with more impersonal form of political relationship continues in the twenty-first century (p50)

* the reciprocal exchange of favors between leaders and followers, whose leadership is won rather than inherited based on the leaders ability to advance the interest of the group; i.e. patron politics, political machines (p78)

*But of all the ways to make distinctions between people and classes, inequality of taxation is the most pernicious and most apt to add isolation to inequality. Tax exemption was (is) the most hated of all privileges.(p351)

*Democratic public's do not necessarily always resist high taxes, as long as they think they are necessary for an important public purpose like the defense of the nation. What they dislike is taxes being taken from them illegally, or public monies that are wasted, or that go to corrupt purposes. (p419)

*The idea of the equality of recognition- The rise of modern democracy gives all people the opportunity of ruling themselves, on the basis of the mutual recognition of the dignity and rights of their fellow humans. (p445)

*Two types of political decay- institutional rigidity and repatrimonilization- oftentimes come together as patrimonial officials with a large personal stake in the existing system seek to defend it against reform. And if the system breaks down altogether, it is often only patrimonial actors with their patronage networks that are left to pick up the pieces. (p454)

*The ability of societies to innovate instiutionally thus depends on wherther they can neurtralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform. Sometimes economic change weakens the position of existing elites in favor of new ones, who push for new institutions. (p456)

Quotes from Francis Fukuyama arguablu Neo-Conservative book The Origins of Political Order

Boycotting fascism?

Policies that have frustrated Palestinians for years are now being applied to middle-class Israelis, too.
Mark LeVine
--aljazeera--
During the last week angry young residents of Tel Aviv have been staging a sit-in, or, more accurately, a tent-in, along fashionable Rothschild Boulevard to protest their being priced out of the housing market in Israel's cultural and economic capital. The protests have drawn the attention of the Israeli and international media, with The Guardian even comparing the protesters to the pro-democracy revolutionaries in Egypt and other Arab countries.

The protests might be new, but the process against which the tent-dwellers are protesting has been going on in Tel Aviv, like other world cities, for at least two decades. But until recently, the main victims of high housing prices weren't young middle-class Israeli Jews no longer able to afford to live close to the cultural and economic action in Tel Aviv, but poor Palestinian residents of Jaffa who were being pushed out by gentrification and had nowhere else to go.

In the wake of the 1948 war, when Jaffa, like most other Palestinian towns and villages, was emptied of the vast majority of its population, the once-proud city turned poor and decrepit neighbourhood of Tel Aviv underwent a process of Judaisation, with only around 5,000 of the former population of at least 70,000 Palestinians remaining. That population increased several-fold in later decades, but when Jaffa suddenly became a fashionable neighbourhood for Israel's emerging yuppie Jewish class beginning in the late 1980s, prices began to rise.

By a variety of legal and economic mechanisms the growing Palestinian population was squeezed out of Jaffa's remaining neighbourhoods like Ajami and Jebaliya, which were quite desirable because of their seaside location. Residents complained of a clear policy of Judaisation through planning and other mechanisms, but were rebuffed when they took their case to the Tel Aviv municipality.

"What can we do; the market is the market," more than one official would declare. In other words, it wasn't the explicit policy of the state, but rather natural market forces that were pushing working-class Palestinians, and their Jewish neighbours, out of these neighbourhoods.

Of course, this argument was nonsense. The Israeli state has been deeply involved in the neoliberalisation of the country's economy, of which Tel Aviv was the natural epicentre. As part of this process it was quite adept at using so-called "market forces" as part of its toolbox for enabling greater Jewish penetration of Palestinian towns and neighbourhoods that were deemed priorities for Judaisation. That Jews were also victims was not relevant, as they were being replaced by even more Jews, and those pushed out always had "somewhere else" to go.

Young Jews could "pioneer" neighbouring towns like Bat Yam - the equivalent of moving from Manhattan to less-desirable but soon-to-be-gentrifying parts of Brooklyn or Queens in the 1980s. Palestinians, however, had literally nowhere to move to except a few Palestinian cities which themselves were experiencing housing shortages.

Resistance was largely futile; more than one Palestinian family set up tents to live in Jaffa's ill-kept parks after being evicted from their homes, both as a protest against their eviction and because they couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The tents became part of the landscape after a while, and ultimately disappeared.

In the meantime, gentrification continued apace, whether faux-Ottoman-era monstrosities like the Andromeda Hill development or the even more perverse Peres Centre for Peace, built - tellingly - on land expropriated from Jaffan refugees including the neighbourhood's cemetery, whose remaining gravestones teeter on the hill along the Centre's southern border.

Meanwhile, late last year the Israeli Supreme Court okayed the construction of a housing development for a religious Zionist group in the heart of Ajami, on refugee land leased to them by the Municipality and Israeli Lands Administration, despite strong protests by local Palestinian residents and Israeli human rights groups.

And while this process plays out, the remaining Arab parts of Ajami suffer from drugs, violence and government neglect (as illustrated in the 2010 film "Ajami"), while activists who press too hard against the situation can be assured of receiving various grades of the "Shabak education" that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have always experienced when they challenged the basic premises of Israeli rule.

From markets to boycotts?

As long as this process was confined to Jaffa, most Israelis, including residents of Tel Aviv, didn't think too much about it. After all, what was happening in Jaffa was the same thing that happened across the country for decades; it was the modus operandi for how the State of Israel was built.

What's different today? Today it's middle-class Israelis who are being pushed out and have nowhere to go; at least not anywhere they want to go. Rich Israeli expats and Diaspora Jews who've bought up much of Ajami's housing stock are now also among the most important buyers of apartments in Tel Aviv, while the young Ashkenazi Jews who are currently living in tents are being told that they should move to the "periphery" and pioneer far less desirable parts of the country than Tel Aviv's satellite towns.

Gay activists complain that they only feel at home in Tel Aviv, while would-be cultural creatives have little desire to move to development towns populated by working-class Mizrahi Jews or recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union or Ethiopia.

This is a fascinating story, you might be saying to yourself. But what does it have to do with a story about "boycotting fascism," as this column is titled? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The suffering of young Israelis at the hands of the Tel Aviv housing market illustrates a larger phenomenon which is presently affecting the fabric of Israeli society as a whole: Processes and policies which for years or even decades have been deployed on or affected the Palestinian community, on both sides of the Green Line, are now affecting mainstream Jewish Israelis negatively as well. But hardly anyone understands the genesis of the problem, and so the anger is either misdirected or dissipates because, after all, the market is the market: what can you do?

Another example of this process is the debate surrounding the passing last week by the Knesset of the so-called "Anti-Boycott" bill that has now made it illegal for Israelis to call for or engage in boycotting Israel or even the settlements or settlement-made products, allowing the boycott's targets to sue boycott supporters for damages without having to prove actual harm from the action.

The new law has caused a firestorm of protest in and outside Israel, with left-wing critics claiming it will lead outsiders to wonder if "there is actually a democracy here", and, even more damaging, to argue that its
passage heralds the arrival of fascism in Israel, whether "quiet" or "purposeful and palpable".

Among the arguments that this law reflects such a move is that it restricts freedom of expression, reflects a clear tyranny of the majority within Israeli politics, erases the distinction between Israel and the Occupied Territories, will cripple efforts of various peace groups to help resuscitate the moribund peace process, and is part of a larger process to strip the Supreme Court of its independence. More broadly, in the words of
the usually conservative Maariv columnist Ben Caspit, it represents a right wing that "is running amok" and threatening the supposedly democratic fabric of Israel.

But just as with the housing problem in Tel Aviv, these claims hold true only if one is considering Israeli Jewish society. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, and much more so for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel has always been - to use the word presently in play - fascist.

Fascism or nationalism the problem?

The basic formula for fascism, that of a highly militarised, corporatist state that manages relations between labour and capital in the name of a mythically defined "people" to the exclusion of all those deemed outside the collective, well defines the kind of ethnonationalism that has long dominated Zionist ideology.

Moreover, the kind of exclusivism that is at the heart of all nationalist identities is ramped up on ideological steroids in the authoritarian nationalist discourses that underlay fascism, as the Italian and German experiences have tragically shown. Ethnonationalisms, and particularly those that emerge in settler colonial settings such as Israel, South Africa, the United States, Australia and French Algeria, are also based on extreme forms of exclusivism and territorial expansionism that must deny basic rights and even humanity to indigenous populations in order to achieve the goal of securing control and/or sovereignty over the "homeland".

Israeli geographer Juval Portugali defines nationalism as the "generative social order" of Zionism, cementing the relationship between the Jewish/Israeli people and the territory it reclaimed. This generative order has historically been exclusivist far more often than it has been open to plural identities, which is why the (re)emergence of nationalisms have so often brought war in their wake - especially when they have been joined with a colonial settler project.

In Israel this process is evidenced in the powerful role of the Israeli state and army in all aspects of the life of the country, from the socialist Labour-dominated pre-1948 period through the neoliberal present. It has shaped a political reality in which Palestinians, whether citizens of the Israeli state or occupied inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, have always been accorded lesser rights, by law and custom, than Jews.

Political theorists might reasonably argue that Israel doesn't fit the classic mode of a fascist society, particularly since its ruling parties and ideologies do not self identify as such. But if you're Palestinian, the fact that the fascist tendencies have been "silent" to Israeli Jewish or much of the world's ears has not lessened their painful impact.

And so it is not surprising, to recall the complaints of those criticising the new anti-boycott law, that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have long been deprived of the basic civil and political rights of equal citizenship. Their freedom of expression has long been curtailed to varying degrees, they have always suffered from the tyranny of the Jewish majority, there has never been a distinction between the Occupied Territories and Israel (thus the massive expansion of the settlement enterprise even during Oslo), and the Supreme Court has never stepped outside the mainstream Israeli political consensus supporting the occupation - whether of Jaffa or East Jerusalem.

Put simply, the Left has "run amok" in the territories as much as the Right. Indeed, the whole notion that there is a basic difference between the Zionist Left and Right has historically been little more than a "good cop-bad cop" rhetorical strategy to confuse foreigners about their basic agreement on core issues surrounding control over the territory of Mandate Palestine.

Of course, Palestinians have long understood this, even if Americans and Europeans have chosen to remain more or less wilfully ignorant. Labour, Likud or Kadima: the occupation just keeps grinding on. (As I write these lines, Haaretz is reporting the the IDF Civil Administration is engaged in yet another major land grab in the heart of the West Bank, trying to have large tracts of land, including those containing "illegal" outposts, declared state land so they can be permanently taken over by Israel in advance of any peace agreement.)

The future of boycotts

Against this long-term level of institutionalised domination and discrimination, Palestinians have tried many means of resistance, none of which have proved very successful to date. In a recent column I have discussed some of the culturally-grounded, non-violent means of resistance that might achieve a measure of success against the power of the Israeli state.

As Yousef Munayyer points out in his recent op-ed, the new anti-boycott law has at least had the salutory effect of stimulating more interest in the boycott and larger BDS movement. He also points out, quite rightly, that since the occupation cannot exist without the massive support of the Israeli state, the whole premise of most of the movements against whom the law is intended - left-wing Israeli groups seeking to boycott settlement products or cultural/educational institutions - is deeply flawed, since only by taking on the entire apparatus of the Israeli state can a boycott movement hope to stop the occupation juggernaut.

The challenge confronting such a movement, however, is that ideologies sharing the DNA of fascism are genetically predisposed to believing that the world is against them and that their existence is constantly in peril from within and without. In the Israeli case, the more successful a boycott movement becomes, the more the Israeli state, with the support of a large share of the public, will feel justified in using any means at its disposal - from shooting unarmed protesters to launching massive propaganda campaigns - to fight back.

Moreover, its leaders and their foot-soldiers are becoming more willing to demonise and act against even members of the collective who challenge official ideology and policies. This is of course not unique to Israel today, nor to the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, as William Cook's July 21 op-ed describing similarities between Israeli and American government subversions of freedom of expression makes clear. And the rabid hatred of left-of-center Norwegians by mass murderer Behring Breivik attests to the ease with which this disease can spread to even the most seemingly stable and democratic societies.

Against such a powerful adversary, Palestinians and their supporters in the BDS movement will need to craft an extremely creative and persuasive set of arguments, and the strategies to spread them globally, in order to have a chance of overcoming the overwhelming advantages possessed by the Israeli government and its supporters. In my next column, I'll look at some of the key principles, strategies and tactics of the movement today and explore how their strengths and weaknesses bode for the near future of the struggle against the Occupation.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at the University of California: Irvine, and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the soul of Islam (Random House 2008) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

German Innocent but Accused of Terrorism by USA

Brit pol: 'Right-wing nutters' stop debt deal
--politico.com--
By: Reid J. Epstein
July 25, 2011 06:35 AM EDT

A top British finance minister says the world’s biggest economic threat is from “right-wing nutters” in Congress who would send the U.S. government into default.

Speaking to the BBC about the European rescue package for troubled Greece, U.K. Business Secretary Vince Cable said Washington’s political showdown over the debt ceiling threatens to overshadow financial troubles on the continent.

“The irony of the situation at the moment, with markets opening (Monday) morning, is that the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few right-wing nutters in the American congress rather than the euro zone,” Cable said on Sunday, Reuters reported.

Cable is the second-ranking member of the left-wing Liberal Democratic Party in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats joined Conservatives to form a coalition government after the 2010 British elections.

Cable drew controversy in December when he was caught on tape saying he was “declaring war” on News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. Prime Minister David Cameron then stripped Cable of his authority to rule over the News Corp. takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB and forced him to apologize.

"Dispatches: Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola" a British Channel 4 documentary. Political activist and journalist Mark Thomas travels to South America, India and the US to investigate the way in which Coca-Cola and its suppliers operate and the extent to which they upholds moral and ethical obligations.

"The Cost of a Coke Revisited" a documentary by Matt Beard. Since 1990, 8 Colombian union workers have been murdered in Coca-Cola bottling plants. This film investigates why schools around the world have kicked Coke off of their campuses and labeled Coke as the drink of the death squads. Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Film Council of Columbus.


--Coca Cola uses Death Squads--

Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election
By John Thorpe
Benzinga Staff Writer
July 21, 2011 1:07 PM

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush.

Ironically, it won't be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives — including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data — were compromised.

Fitrakis isn't the only attorney involved in pursuing the truth in this matter. Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. He asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. His response sent a chill up my spine.

"Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not," Spoonamore said. In case that seems a bit too technical and "big deal" for you, consider what he was saying. SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.

The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system's design structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was SmarTech.

Spoonamore (keep in mind, he is the IT expert here) concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and (when desired, as in this case) altering the data. It's how hackers swipe your credit card number or other banking information. This is bad.

A mirror site, which SmarTech was allegedly supposed to be, is simply a backup site on the chance that the main configuration crashes. Mirrors are a good thing.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.

In fact, GovTech was run by Mike Connell, who was a fiercely religious conservative who got involved in politics to push a right-wing social agenda. He was Karl Rove's IT go-to guy, and was alleged to be the IT brains behind the series of stolen elections between 2000 and 2004.

Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.

"He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared," said Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a book on the scandal.

Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's missing emails disappeared to.

Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.

Harvey Wasserman, who wrote a book on the stolen 2004 election, explained that the combination of computer hacking, ballot destruction, and the discrepancy between exit polling (which showed a big Kerry win in Ohio) and the "real" vote tabulation, all point to one answer: the Republicans stole the 2004 election.

"The 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed," Wasserman said.

Mark Crispin Miller also wrote a book on the subject of stolen elections, and focused on the 2004 Ohio presidential election. Here is what he had to say about it.

There were three phases of chicanery. First, there was a pre-election period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to cut down on the number of people who could register, to limit the usability of provisional ballots. It was really a kind of classic case of using the letter of the law or the seeming letter of the law just to disenfranchise as many people as possible.

On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are many similar stories to this. And other things happened that day.

After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, which was court ordered and which never did take place. The Republicans will say to this day, 'There was a recount in Ohio, and we won that.' That's a lie, one of many, many staggering lies. There was never a recount.

And now, it seems, there never will be.

You can reach the author by email john@benzinga.com or on twitter @johndthorpe.

Rick Scott's dirtiest deeds
By Lisa Rab
published: July 14, 2011
--MiamiNewTimes--

"I've seen the mountaintop!" shouted a woman blowing a whistle and marching in combat-style boots down Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach.

"We shall overcome Rick Scott's tyranny!" added a man who followed closely behind, limping a little.

At least 50 members of the disgruntled masses gathered outside the Palm Beach County Convention Center on this brutally warm March morning, when Gov. Rick Scott was about to give a speech. Scott had just introduced some of the budget proposals that would earn him the wrath of citizens across the state. Teachers, police officers, advocates for the disabled, retirees — people from all walks of life would soon be unified in their hatred of Florida's most powerful politician.

By May, a Quinnipiac University poll put Scott's approval rating at a dismal 29 percent. This week, the Broward Police union is hosting a "Party to Leave the Party" protest against Scott in which cops who are Republicans plan to switch their voter registration and abandon the GOP en masse.

In response to this widespread discontent, Scott has urged supporters to send prewritten letters to the editors of local newspapers."Rick Scott deserves our unwavering and enthusiastic support," the letters say. He also uses recorded phone messages to tout his policy decisions, irritating voters with robocalls about pill mills and government spending cuts.

Born in Illinois, Scott , 58, was raised by a truck-driver dad and a mom who worked odd jobs. For about three years beginning when he was a toddler, his family lived in public housing — a humble beginning Scott emphasized in his campaign. By the time Scott was 10, his family had moved to a three-bedroom suburban house in Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended high school and college.

He earned a law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and worked for a big firm in town before starting a health-care company called Columbia. He built his fortune at Columbia, eventually merging with Hospital Corporation of America and growing the enterprise to one of the world's largest health-care companies, with more than 340 hospitals and 550 health-care offices in 38 states. But the flush times ended abruptly.

In 1997, as FBI agents raided its offices and hospitals in several states, Columbia/HCA's board of directors forced Scott to resign. The feds alleged the company had paid kickbacks to doctors in exchange for patient referrals and had overcharged Medicare. The U.S. Justice Department called the resulting criminal case the largest health-care fraud in American history. Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and paid $1.7 billion in fines. Scott was never charged.

He did, however, testify in a separate deposition in an unrelated civil case against Columbia/HCA in 2000. When asked basic questions, including whether he was ever employed by Columbia/HCA, Scott refused to answer, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. In media interviews, Scott has said, "You have to take responsibility for what happens under your watch." But he also said he didn't know the company was doing anything wrong.

In 2003, Scott moved to Naples with his wife. Last year, the billionaire ran for governor as a political novice, in a surprise campaign funded primarily by $60 million of his own money. Elected in the Tea Party wave that swept the country, he preached about fiscal austerity and promptly took a knife to cherished social safety nets. In a brief, 60-day legislative session, he implemented a wide-ranging conservative agenda.

He slashed funding for public schools, disabled people, and the unemployed; gave health-care companies control of Medicaid; and privatized nearly all of the prisons in the southern part of the state. Meanwhile, he enacted some of the most restrictive voting laws Florida has seen since the 2000 election debacle.

In June, as the public outcry against his policies continued, one of Scott's top staffers resigned and another was transferred to the state Department of Veterans Affairs. The governor, watching his ship sink, hired a Tallahassee insider as his new chief of staff. He also backed off one of his most controversial executive orders, which required state employees to undergo drug tests.

Despite these changes, the influence of Scott's first, combustible legislative session has already been enormous. Here, New Times takes stock of his dirtiest accomplishments.

Outsourced Prisons to His Political Donors

Last year, the private prison industry gave nearly $1 million to political campaigns in Florida, according to the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in Politics. The majority of the cash went to Republicans, and the largest chunk, $822,000, came from the GEO Group, a Boca Raton-based prison company formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections. (GEO also contributed $25,000 to Scott's inauguration party.) The prison lobby's influence on the Republican-dominated Legislature was immediately evident.

In early February, Scott proposed a plan to transfer 1,500 inmates from state-run lockups to private ones. The next month, lawmakers in the state Senate slipped language into their massive budget bill that privatized nearly all of the state prisons in 18 counties, including Broward and Palm Beach. The budget passed in May, opening the door for the GEO Group and other companies to begin bidding for contracts.

Proponents said the prison contracts will go only to bidders who reduce costs by 7 percent, saving the state about $27 million a year. But a legislative analyst who testified before the state Senate in February admitted it was tough to figure out the cost savings, because private and public prisons often operate differently. "They're never apples to apples," analyst Byron Brown said.

And a 2010 study of prisons in Arizona, which also has a cost-savings requirement for its private lockups, questioned whether outsourcing is the cheapest option. The Arizona state auditor found that medium-security private prisons cost $1,200 more per inmate a year than state-run facilities. Reviewing prison studies in other states, the auditor also noted "cost savings from contracting with private prisons... are not guaranteed."

Enacted Jim Crow-Style Voting Laws

After squeaking into office with just 61,550 more votes than his opponent, Scott wasted no time in disenfranchising people who might oust him in the next election cycle. In March, the Florida Clemency Board — composed of Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other members of his cabinet — passed a ban on felon voting rights, forcing nonviolent offenders to wait five years after completing their sentences to apply to have their rights restored.

The new rule turned back the clock on Florida's voting laws. During the 2000 election, thousands of voters were wrongfully purged from the rolls because they were misidentified as felons. That mishap brought to light the painful fact that Florida had the largest number of disenfranchised felons in the nation — a disproportionate swath of whom were African-American.

Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist heeded the outcry over this injustice and made it easier for ex-felons to get their voting rights restored. But Scott undid all of their reforms, dismissing the racist implications of his decision.

The felon voting ban dates back to the years just following the Civil War. It was zealously employed — just like poll taxes — to keep African-Americans from voting, says Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor of public administration at Florida State University. "It was used to target and weaken voting rights for blacks, and that is what they're doing with it today," he says.

Scott wasn't done. In May, the Legislature passed new election requirements that can be used to prevent less-wealthy people — those who work long hours and move frequently — from voting. The law makes it tougher for get-out-the-vote groups to register new voters, requires voters to use a provisional ballot if they have moved from one county to another and not registered the address change before Election Day, and reduces the number of early voting days from 14 to eight.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit in Miami seeking to block implementation of the new law. Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida branch of the ACLU, called the law "a trifecta of voter suppression."

Mandated Drug Testing for State Workers and Welfare Recipients

You know something has gone terribly wrong when a concerned group of Key West citizens feels the need to send a communal vat of urine to Florida's governor.

The group, called the Committee for the Positive Insistence on a Sane Society (PISS), collected the urine samples to protest an executive order that Scott issued in March, requiring all state employees to submit to drug tests. "Floridians deserve to know that those in public service, whose salaries are paid with taxpayer dollars, are part of a drug-free workplace," he said at the time.

In June, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit calling the pee test unconstitutional. Scott suspended the order, pending the lawsuit, although state Department of Corrections employees will still be tested.

He campaigned on, and delivered, a separate law signed in May that requires prospective recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — cash welfare for families with children — to pass a drug test. This rule struck close to home for Scott. He has a brother in Texas who has struggled with bipolar disorder, has a criminal history that includes drug possession, and now receives social security insurance.

With this law, Florida might be repeating an old mistake. Thirteen years ago, the state launched a pilot program to drug-test recipients of cash welfare, and it was an utter failure. Only 3.8 percent of the 8,800 people who took the test failed it. This little government experiment cost the state $2.7 million, and the program was ultimately scrapped, according to PolitiFact.com.

How's that for fiscal austerity?

Fought the Prescription Drug Database

At first, Scott seemed determined to allow Florida's deadly pill-mill addiction to flourish. In February, he proposed repealing the law that created a prescription drug database designed to track the sale of narcotics. He argued that the database, intended to help spot patients who are "doctor-shopping," was an invasion of privacy. His backers in the Legislature also argued that the database didn't solve the problem because doctors weren't required to check it before dispensing drugs.

Still, in a state where seven deaths a day are blamed on prescription drug abuse, Scott's opposition to the database seemed bizarre. Lawmakers and police officials around the country — particularly in states such as Kentucky, whose OxyContin drug trade is fueled by Florida's pill mills — bellowed in protest. Even Scott's fellow Republican Attorney General Pam Bondi fought to keep the database. Finally, Scott reversed course and agreed. In June, he signed a law that strengthens criminal penalties for overprescribing drugs, requires pain clinics to register with the state, and prohibits most doctors from dispensing narcotics.

Privatized Medicaid

In Broward County, doctors and patients have been participating in an experiment with privatizing Medicaid since 2006, when then-Governor Bush enacted reforms he said would control skyrocketing costs and improve care through competition. The pilot program hit many pitfalls, but that didn't stop Scott from signing a law to expand it statewide. Now 3 million of Florida's poorest citizens, including children, pregnant women, and elderly residents of nursing homes, will learn the joys of dealing with HMOs.

Currently, Medicaid patients either enroll in a state-contracted HMO or visit doctors who accept Medicaid's fee for the services they perform. Under the new plan — proposed by Scott's transition team and sponsored by Sen. Joe Negron (R-Stuart) — patients must enroll in private HMO plans. The HMOs will have more power to change the "scope, duration, and level of benefits," says Laura Goodhue, executive director of the community health advocacy group Florida CHAIN. She fears the HMOs will limit services and deny claims.

In the pilot program that has been operating in Broward and four other counties since 2006, the results have been troubling. According to a 2008 Georgetown University review of the program, a majority of doctors complained that their patients were having a more difficult time getting care because of the maze of paperwork and limited benefits.

"The complexity of the program has grown, causing confusion and increased administrative burdens for consumers and providers," the report says. "Access to needed services appears to be worsening, according to both physicians and beneficiaries."

"The only way to save money is to delay and deny care," Goodhue says. "People are getting the runaround."

A state-funded study by University of Florida researchers shows that Medicaid expenditures decreased in Broward and Duval counties during the first two years of the pilot program but cautioned, "It is not known whether these savings are sustainable over time."

The saving grace might be that before it can be implemented statewide, the reform plan must be approved by federal officials, because more than half of Medicaid's funding comes from the federal government, Goodhue says.

Acted Sketchy About Solantic

Let's say you're a billionaire who amassed his wealth running a health-care company and then decided to run for governor. Immediately after taking office, you begin proposing and supporting legislation regarding health-care issues: privatizing Medicaid, requiring drug tests for state workers and welfare recipients, opposing a database that would track the sale of addictive prescription drugs. Unfortunately, the citizens of Florida are not total morons, and they realize that you, as governor, might actually profit from some of these proposals.

Turns out you still own a chain of urgent-care clinics that happen to offer $35 drug tests! Technically the $62 million investment in Solantic is in your wife's name. You moved it to the Frances Annette Scott Revocable Trust a few days before taking office. But it's tough to believe you're not still raking in the dough.

So do you apologize? Do you stage a public mea culpa and admit your conflict of interest? Not if you're Rick Scott. Instead, you wait for the media and the public to get so angry that someone files an ethics complaint against you. Then you rush to sell off your shares in the company. That's not suspicious at all.

Axed Funding for People With Disabilities

Need to trim your budget? There's no swifter solution than taking money from people who are physically incapable of fighting back.

The state Agency for Persons With Disabilities was running a $170 million deficit this spring when Scott decided to start slicing. Tasked with supporting 30,000 people with developmental disabilities, the agency had never been good at living within its means. Since 2005, it has shifted 5,000 clients from its waiting list to its roster but has never sufficiently increased its budget, says Kimberley Thompson, director of community relations for Sunrise Community, a Miami-based nonprofit agency that serves the disabled. Scott insisted he was rescuing the agency by forcing it to tighten its belt.

He issued an emergency order cutting payments to caregivers — the behavioral therapists, nurses, and others who care for people with cerebral palsy, autism, and other disabilities — by 15 percent. The government sets their fees based on the service they provide — anything from driving clients to the grocery store to speech therapy — so the impact of the payment cut varied widely. But some smaller, nonprofit providers said the cuts would put them out of business, Thompson says.

After a storm of protests from concerned parents and advocates, the state Legislature found a way to temporarily fill the budget gap, and Scott rescinded his emergency order. The agency's funding was restored for 2011, but it now must make 4 percent cuts for the fiscal year that starts in July.

Thompson is glad Scott changed his mind but says the governor and legislators need to learn more about how the agency for the disabled is run and where the money goes.

"I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he didn't intentionally harm thousands of people around the state," she says. "Once he was educated, he did make a better decision."

Gave Tax Breaks to Businesses; Cut Jobless Benefits

The day after winning the election, Scott announced Florida was "open for business." He wasn't kidding.

In the budget proposal he made public in February, he suggested lowering the state's corporate income tax rate by 2.5 percent, or $459 million. But an ounce of sanity prevailed in the Legislature, and in May, Scott was forced to settle for a measly $30 million cut. This translated to an average savings of about $1,100 a year for small businesses, although it also gives tax breaks to larger corporations.

Scott and the Republican-dominated Legislature were far less generous to the state's legions of laid-off workers. Florida already has some of the most meager unemployment benefits in the nation — $229 a week — and now those sparse checks will end sooner, after 23 weeks instead of 26. Even more frightening, in the future, benefits will be tied to the unemployment rate, decreasing as the jobless rate goes down.

Yes, you read that correctly. If more people have jobs and are paying taxes, unemployment benefits will go down. For example, when the state unemployment rate is at or below 5 percent, the unfortunate few without jobs can collect unemployment for only 12 weeks. If the Florida unemployment rate reaches or exceeds 10.5 percent (as of May, it was at 10.6 percent), laid-off workers can collect their full 23 weeks of benefits.

This slap in the face to jobless workers was accompanied by a 10 percent cut in the unemployment tax paid by businesses. Thoughtful, no?

Shuns Emails, Reporters, and the Sunshine Law

Rick Scott doesn't hide his disdain for Florida's open government laws. In February, he invited three powerful state Senate leaders to his mansion for a private dinner. They discussed, among other topics, his budget proposal.

This was strange, because when three senators gather to discuss legislative business, Senate rules require the meeting to be open to the public. But the citizens of Florida didn't get a dinner invitation.

In March, Scott scheduled a coffee date with ten legislators. When a Miami Herald reporter inquired about who would be attending and what the politicians would discuss, Scott's spokesman snapped at him, saying the event was "purely social." Then he canceled the coffee date.

Scott, meanwhile, told workers at the Department of Elderly Affairs that he doesn't use email — which is a convenient way to avoid creating a public record of his conversations.

"I don't have email," he said in March. "It's easier if I never get emailed. I get embarrassed by it that way. It's not as easy to communicate."

Before publishing this article, New Times called Scott's press office three times to request an interview. On the third phone call — 11 days after the original request — Scott's press secretary gave a nonanswer.

"We have received your multiple requests, and if we can accommodate that, someone will let you know," Lane Wright said.

But clearly, no one had let us know. Instead, a government spokesman — whose entire job is to answer questions from the public — was employing the silent treatment. "We are not gonna be commenting for this story," Wright finally conceded.

Shocking.

Lied About High-Speed Rail Money

A proposed high-speed bullet train between Tampa and Orlando wasn't a politically sexy idea. Some critics questioned how many people in this gas-guzzling, highway-loving state would ride a train to Disney World.

But Florida's own transportation department predicted the train would make money from the start, and the federal government was willing to pony up $2.4 billion of the estimated $2.6 billion in construction costs. As gas prices reached $4 a gallon, the train looked more and more like sound public policy.

But Scott chose to believe a study by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank partially funded by oil companies, that called into question the number of people who would ride the train. He feared taxpayers would be on the hook for future costs. His general counsel, attorney Charles Trippe, had told the Florida Supreme Court that $110 million in state funds had already been spent on the proposed rail project.

So Scott sent the money back to Washington.

Only later did the citizens of Florida learn that Scott was fudging the numbers. Turns out the state had spent only $31 million. Trippe apologized to the court, but the money was already gone by then.

About $400 million of Florida's train funds were rescinded by Congress and used to solve the federal budget crisis. The other $2 billion was redistributed to rail projects in the Northeast, Midwest, and California. So our friends in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are benefiting now from Scott's creative accounting.

Meanwhile, Scott angered his Tea Party backers by approving the $1.3 billion SunRail, a slower, commuter rail line in the Orlando area. Scott said he feared he'd lose a legal battle if he axed the project.

Gutted Environmental Protection Programs

While campaigning for governor, Scott called the Department of Community Affairs, the state agency charged with overseeing local development projects, a "jobs killer." He said he'd heard complaints that development permits were issued too slowly. (That building boom? It was a myth.)

Once he was elected, his transition team made the unabashedly prodevelopment suggestion of merging community affairs with the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Transportation, forming a new entity called the Department of Growth Leadership.

That plan never materialized, but the Legislature followed Scott's lead and began gutting programs. In May, the state Senate quietly passed a bill that killed the Department of Community Affairs, farming out its various duties to other government agencies. The Legislature also agreed with Scott's proposal to chop property tax funding for local water management districts — including a 30 percent, $128 million budget cut for the South Florida Water Management District, the agency charged with restoring the Everglades. (And he appointed onetime incinerator czar Juan Portuondo to the SFWMD.)

Scott was also determined to end funding for the state's Florida Forever program, which buys land to conserve for parks and forests. State lawmakers proposed a way to rescue the program by selling off surplus land in order to buy more. But in May, Scott used his line-item veto power to ax that plan from the budget.

Slashed Public Education Funding

Public schools lost about $542 per student in this year's education budget — an 8 percent funding cut that wouldn't seem so troubling if it weren't accompanied by so many other changes to the education system.

Florida teachers, already some of the lowest-paid in the nation, will now see their raises and job security tied to students' test scores. They will be fired if their annual evaluations are "unsatisfactory" two years in a row, and they will have to contribute 3 percent to their pension funds, a change they consider a pay cut. The merit pay bill, known as the Student Success Act, was a top priority for Scott and was the first to get his signature in March.

Maribah Haughey, a retired teacher who spent 21 years in Palm Beach County schools, was livid about the pay cuts. "All of this is going to drive a lot of young teachers out of Florida," she said. "The salaries suck anyway. What are they making, $30,000 a year?"

Meanwhile, virtual charter schools — which are privately run and publicly funded — were approved under a "Digital Learning" bill that also requires all students to take one online course before graduating. In addition, high-performing charter schools got a break on the fees they must pay to school districts. After signing these school-choice bills in June, Scott promoted them in private and charter schools across the state, telling reporters he now wants to create savings accounts that allow parents to pull their kids out of public schools and pay for private school instead.

Yes, it seems Scott would rather invest taxpayer money in private and charter schools — which are now, thanks to his policy reforms, subject to less public oversight — instead of trying to help the struggling public classrooms where most kids spend their days.

July 7 Turkmenistan blast at weapons depot

Brutal conditions under the oppresive Belarus regime...

Science of Spying- 1965 CIA Propoganda

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State ... "

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter sent to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut.

Conservative doctrine continues to plague the poor.