Politics – Page 22 – James Wagner

GUANTANAMO DELENDA EST!

our shame and ignominy abstracted as a color which has become familiar to the entire world

This post is part of a series begun on May 21, 2007, which will continue until the U.S. concentration camps at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere around the world have been razed.

And from Iraq, a related story:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 The number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February, according to American military officers in Iraq.
. . . .
Interestingly, weve found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government the vast majority are inspired by money, said Capt. John Fleming of the Navy, a spokesman for the multinational forces detainee operations. The men are paid by insurgent leaders. The primary motivator is economic theyre angry men because they dont have jobs, he said. The detainee population is overwhelmingly illiterate and unemployed. Extremists have been very successful at spreading their ideology to economically strapped Iraqis with little to no formal education.”

Spreading the blessings of the American corrections system to needy people everywhere.

[fabric color swatch, otherwise unrelated to Guantanamo, from froggtoggs; second image by Benjamin Lowy via the NYTimes]

UPDATE on Deutsche Bank fire

It seems that the tangled story at which I could only hint in my Tuesday post, “Ayn Rand linked to Deutsche Bank skyscraper tragedy?”, has caused some serious bustle around the city desk at the NYTimes.
The lead story on the front page reports that the firm whose creators picked the Ayn Rand hero John Galt for its corporate name was a paper corporation with no employees. It had been assembled to insulate or hide its “integrity”-challenged owners and officers from the view of its clients, the people and officers of the New York community. This is the company which was given the lucrative contract to perform one of the most hazardous and certainly one of the most visible jobs in the city if not in the entire country.
Two firefighters died fighting a fire inside the building last Saturday, probably as the result of criminal negligence.
Meanwhile, inside the same section of the paper we learn in another story that the New York Fire Department hadn’t inspected the Deutsche Bank building’s standpipe or sprinkler system since 1996, in spite of the fact that twice-monthly inspections were mandatory for buildings under demolition. It seems the department was also aware that the sprinkler system was not working. Some have argued that the FDNY was unwilling or unequipped to enter a building permeated with the toxins that had necessitated its condemnation, but since demolition began firefighters had been in the building on at least two occasions for reasons unrelated to the standpipe or the sprinkler system.

[image of the two firefighters from NYFD via Gothamist]

“Purple Hearts” at Jen Bekman

Spc. Sam Ross
21 years old, 82nd Airborne, was wounded May 18, 2003 in Baghdad when a bomb blew up during a munitions disposal operation, leaving him blinded and an amputee. After many, surgeries, Ross was sent home to western Pennsylvania where he lives alone in a trailer, in one of the poorest counties in the state.
Photographed October 19, 2003 in the woods near his trailer in Dunbar Township, Pennsylvania.
“I lost my leg just below the knee. Lost my eyesight. I have shrapnel in pretty much every part of my body. Got my finger blown off. It don’t work right. I had a hole blown through my right leg. You know, not really anything major. I get headaches. And my left ear, it don’t work either.”
“I don’t have any regrets. It was the best experience of my life.”

Cpl. Tyson Johnson III
22 years old, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, was wounded September 20, 2003 in a mortar attack on the Abu Ghraib prison. He suffered massive internal injuries and is 100 percent disabled.
Photographed May 6, 2004 at his home in Prichard, Alabama.
“Most of my friends they were losing it out there. They would do anything to get out of there, do anything. I had one of my guys, he used to tell me, ‘My wife just had my son. I can’t wait to get home and see him.’ And you know, he died out there. He sure did and I have to think about that everyday.”
“I got a bonus in the National Guards for joining the Army. Now I’ve got to pay the bonus back and it’s $2999. The Guard wants it back. It’s on my credit that I owe them that. I’m burning on the inside. I’m burning.”

There is nothing like this “summer show” anywhere in the city, if not the entire country.
Jen Bekman’s current exhibition, “Purple Hearts” neither seeks nor requires an introduction. You may already have seen the book, but walk into the gallery’s very neat pocket space on Spring Street on the Lower East Side before this deceptively-quiet installation closes on August 30. You will leave speechless, if not gasping for breath, while trying to understand how we got to this, and where do we go from here?
Nina Berman began this powerful body of work several years ago . Unfortunately her young portrait subjects had beaten her to it.

The gallery has scheduled a book-signing, reception and talk with the artist on Wednesday, August 29 from 6 to 8pm. Because of the gallery’s small size, those who are interested in attending, or in reserving a book, are asked to rsvp [info@jenbekman.com]

[images from Jen Bekman]

Ayn Rand linked to Deutsche Bank skyscraper tragedy?

skyscrapers have very complex lives

I’ve just read that the name of the sub-contracting company in charge of the demolition at the Deutsche Bank building is the John Galt Corporation. Who is John Galt? I immediately recognized the intriguing literary/political reference within the firm’s name, and, regardless of what we eventually learn about the ultimate responsibility for the death of two firemen this week, the connection is likely to continue the fictional character’s complex association with corporate greed and laissez-faire capitalism .

ADDENDA: I’ve turned up these few bits on the John Galt Corporation by searching Google and its cached links:
The firm is located at 3900 Webster Avenue in The Bronx [718-654-5300]; its principals are former executives of the Safeway Environmental Corp., a firm with its own history of problems; Galt’s work at the Deutsche Bank site was already causing injury and incurring fines before this week; and finally, World Trade Center-area neighbors had expressed serious concerns about the firm’s qualifications since early last year.

[image from wikipedia]

TEAR IT DOWN

Guantanamo. Again.
But this time I’m encouraged by the appearance of a new site devoted specifically to the subject. Amnesty International has just gone public with a new site, tearitdown.org, dedicated to solely shutting down permanently the most notorious of the U.S. concentration camps.

I had purchased the domain they’re using sometime last year with the intention of devoting it to a totally different form of protest, one which would not have addressed such fundamental issues of humanity. When Barry and I were approached by Amnesty’s people I was happy to see it depart for higher purpose.
Bon voyage!

[all images from Amnesty]

of one-party governments, war crimes, collective guilt

Bloggy explains why he and so many of us have abandoned American electoral politics. My own take on it: A people which liked to describe its system as “democratic” has finally been occupied by what our last real “republican” President called “the military-industrial complex”.
After a graceful segue into the subject of war crimes and collective guilt, Bloggy reminds us why these things matter as much today as they did in 1945.

[Tom Tomorrow image from Salon]

U.S. stinginess begins at home

Keeping America out of the red (commie/pinko/welfare-state red) may bury us all.
I’m not much of a statistics guy, and I don’t often trumpet NYTimes editorials, but there’s some very simple numbers inside a short item in this morning’s paper, and it deserves broader notice than it’s likely to get.
Okay, the lead editorial with the sardonic headline, “Amateur Hour on Iran“, is also worth a look, but here’s an excerpt from the one I first spotted, “The Less-Than-Generous State“:

The United States has long had one of the most meager tax takes in the industrial world. Americas social spending on programs ranging from Medicare and Social Security to food stamps is almost the stingiest among industrial nations. Among the 30 industrialized countries grouped in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only four Turkey, Mexico, South Korea and Ireland spend less on social programs as a share of their economy.
Long a moral outrage, this tightfisted approach to public needs is becoming an economic handicap. Shortchanging public health impairs Americas competitiveness. If the United States is to reap the rewards of globalization, the government must provide a much more robust safety net to ensure public support for an open economy and protect vulnerable workers.

Note that the four nations whose public systems are listed as even more selfish than our own are all known for the strength of their family structures – no adequate substitute for a less exclusive approach to conscience, and also not an attribute which individualistic Americans are known for sharing these days.
Hmmm. The richest country on earth, but with diddly-squat for the needy, ditto for the infrastructure, for the arts, for public health, for low-income housing, for public parks, for public transportation, for the elderly, for child care, for adequate public education or any number of the other functions which define a modern civil society; into whose pockets has our great wealth been flowing?

UPDATE: At the time I did this post I was unable to locate a complete image of Breugel’s “Avarita”, and I had to be content with the detail seen at the top. Today I found what I had been looking for, serendipitously. Tom Schreiber was visiting us and he had brought along a copy of Dover Publication’s “Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder“, and there it was. And here it is:

Pieter van der Heyden [after a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder] Avaritia (Greed) 1558 engraving 9″ x 11.5″

[1556 image (“Stinginess”) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from, and in an attribution by, cartage; second, full image from Metropolitan Museum]

Chris Quinn can’t even get a pothole fixed

she’s busy (Quinn sharing with the Police Chief and the Mayor)

Over the past several months I’ve written repeatedly about my frustration and disgust with Chistine Quinn’s attack on our First Amendment rights in her role as City Council Speaker.
She remains completely tone-deaf on the issue, positioning herself somewhere within the cold heart of the NYPD/Republican establishment.
But I’m not a single-issue agitator, and if Tip O’Neil was right when he said “all politics is local“, Quinn’s office should be very worried.
During this same period and starting well before, as one of her local district’s constituents I have been trying to get her office’s attention on the kind of ordinary small-scale problem neighborhood representatives handle all the time – and resolve.
In response to my inquiry about the construction of an invasive animated commercial advertising sign on a public sidewalk next to our home I was eventually told by Quinn’s office that the City authorities had determined that the offending business had no permit for it and could not have been granted a permit had they applied for one because it threatened public safety. The installation would have to be removed within 30 days.
That was March 2, over five months ago, and it’s now eight months since I first made inquiries.
I have been following up with my Council Member’s office ever since to see why nothing has been done. Each time I’ve had to call, and I’ve been told the assistant forgot about it once again but would look into it right away. That has been repeated perhaps eight times.
On July 9 I learned directly from the Department of Buildings that the violation associated with the complaint number I had been given in December had somehow mysteriously disappeared months before. When I asked Quinn’s office if they could get some explanation I was told the person to whom I had been talking over all these months was in a meeting but would call me later that day. On the day after someone else called and said that my file was second from the very top of the first assistant’s priorities and I would hear back from her that very day.
I’ve not been called, and of course the offending installation (a spot-lighted giant revolving cupcake on top of a sidewalk canopy built too close to a hydrant) hasn’t been removed.
For all his transgressions, and they were many, at least New Yorkers can remember Al D’Amato as someone who could get a pothole filled – “Senator Pothole”. What are we going to call Christine Quinn?

[image by Julia Gaines from Newsday]

GUANTANAMO DELENDA EST!

GUANTANAMO MUST BE DESTROYED!

This post is part of a series begun on May 21, 2007, which will continue until the U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay has been razed.

[image, otherwise unattributed, via salvationinc]

Mayor’s office withdraws proposed NYC photo ban

crowd before an animated Norm Siegel at July 27 First Amendment rally

The Mayor’s office has backed off from its outrageous set of proposed rules for people using photography anywhere in New York City. It’s a great victory for a free people alert to the threat of arbitrary government and willing to oppose it, but I’d advise against relaxing any guards.
They’ll be back. City officials said they would redraft the rules
In the end any proposed regulation absolutely must be held to a standard that freely permits photography anywhere in the city so long as people are not interfering with anyone else. Beka Economopoulos, the co-founder of Picture New York said it best:

I already have a permit for my camera; it’s called the First Amendment

Corporations and governmental units of every size have their own surveillance cameras trained on me willy-nilly virtually everywhere I go in this city and at all times of the day and night. I don’t recall their ever applying to me for a permit. I should not have to consult their directives or ask their permission to flip a shutter when I wish to do so myself.