What I Call Journalism

I'm eager to introduce a terrific venture that my dear friend Sarah Stuteville is involved in, by the name of the Common Language Project. This involves aggressive, risk-taking journalism in places most of us tend to shudder at; Cambodia, India, Pakistan, to name a few. The project goal as I get it (caveat: my impression here, not the words of those doing the heavy lifting) is publicizing constructive projects and activities in remote places where our increasingly irrelevant mainstream corporate media don't/won't go and where the gazillions of US corporate dollars sucked out of the middle/lower classes are conspicuously absent, presumably because the profit margin sucks.

To be clear, this program bears no resemblance to the Highlight Magazine happy junk you may have been infected with in the doctor's office way back when. No trumped-up good news crappola. It is Good News in the sense of actual people helping people. Real folks caring for and taking care of each other. Remember when we had that here? These Real Reporter folks are scrabbling to uncover these uplifting scenarios in places far away.

I offer this partly as reinforcement for the progressive principles so critical as we work to become a part of US governance again - we need government because the profit-principle does not compel any corporation to look out for any entity but itself - and, yes, their stockholders. Government absolutely has to be there to regulate that greed. The bottom line, as we all should know, probably with personal experience to back it up, is that true community spirit and support of the common resources are absolutely anathema to the folks desperately using unprecedented levels of secrecy and media-bashing in hopes of hiding their criminality.

As a terrific recent read (Amusing Ourselves to Death) suggests, this edgy work by the Common Language Project folks is not shallow or insipid enough - not to mention not being constantly amusing in the sense of pratfalls and the like - to make it into our mainstream media. These folks are enduring genuine discomfort and risk in the interest of reporting "news." I gather there was formerly some of this available in the era before constant barrages of television, including tv-supervision of preschoolers, turned many of us into folks with an attention span measured in seconds. Real "news" is not something mainstream television offers these days. And of course tv-crippling often leads to no appetite for anything resembling exposition or rational analysis. That impatience and limitation in cerebral skills might explain a good part of the rancid political spectrum these days - name-calling, strawmen, swift-boating, and sleazy political rovian stunts are just the assumed parlance.

I've known Sarah's dad for a good long time, stretching back to high school in the late '60's. He's as close to a soul-brother as I have. We do not get nearly enough time together, but have managed to hang in there via a couple weekends in the mountains and a few social events each year. We've shared high-fives on all but one of the big volcanoes in Washington State so far and interesting experiences on a lot of other peaks in between.

Sarah is a source of wonderment and admiration, with an imagination and courage that are astounding. I cannot do full justice to the venture taken on by Sarah and her co-heroes Jessica and Alex in my own words. I will excerpt a bit here, but suggest you check out their website and strongly encourage a monetary contribution - this is a pretty shoe-string operation from what I can tell, considering the scoops they have been offering up. A donation would be greatly appreciated and might make the difference in their ability to report a story that would otherwise never reach the light of day.

Excerpts from the CLP website:

Siem Reap, CAMBODIA-The landscape is all dust and smoke and heat. In the parched countryside the fields smolder and burn under a brutal sun. March is the height of Cambodia’s dry season and all over the country peasants are clearing and preparing the land for planting rice when the rains come. But here in Chrun, a remote village near the Thai border and a holdout of the Khmer Rouge as late as 1998, the burning land serves another dangerous purpose. These farmers hope the flames will detonate the hundreds of thousands of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) that litter their land--before one of them or their children does.

“This is a dangerous season,” says Aki Ra, a man who has devoted the last fifteen years of his life to de-mining Cambodia, “the farmers are working the land and moving further a field, this is when they are discovering more mines and explosives. They hope that burning the field will also blow up anything, but they don’t know how to do it and it is dangerous for them.”

If anyone knows about the dangers of landmines, it’s Aki Ra. Born in Siem Reap province around 1973, he grew up on war and violence. By the age of five both of his parents had been executed by the Khmer Rouge, and at ten he was given an AK-47 and became one of the many child soldiers that made up their army.

The Vietnamese Army that liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge reached the northwestern regions much later than the rest of the country, and even then the fighting wasn’t over for Aki Ra, who says that for most of his life he only understood the world as being perpetually at war. As a teenage conscript of the Vietnamese he would do much of the landmine laying in areas he would later commit his life to de-mining. See below for a timeline of the war in Cambodia.

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Phnom Penh, CAMBODIA – At first glance, Tumlop 2 village looks like any third world city slum: crowded huts with corrugated tin roofs are scattered along dusty dirt paths, and barefoot children mingle with freely wandering chickens and dogs. Look closer and you’ll find that this community also houses a tidy health center where local women diagnose and treat common ailments. Look even closer and you’ll see that gender relations in this poor and traditional society may be more evolved than in the more wealthy households of the teeming and ever-expanding city that surrounds them.

Inside the health center, a humble but cleanly scrubbed building rising on thin stilts above the scummy green water that surrounds it, large plastic jars of medicinal herbs stand near a modest medicine cabinet, though many prescribed herbal remedies will be made on the spot, using fresh plants growing nearby. Posters promoting literacy and gender equality cover the simple plank walls – this small center is also home to trainings on domestic violence and women’s rights.

Urban Poor Women Development (UPWD), a nonprofit organization located in Phnom Penh, helped the Tumlop 2 community develop its health center in 1998, and the organization’s six paid staff and five volunteers are currently helping 11 slum communities in the area, with plans to add three more this year.

The organization first developed its health program when the international anti-poverty group Actionaid sent a volunteer medical expert from its India program to train UPWD staff in community health care.

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Uttar Pradesh, INDIA--The whirr of old fashioned sewing machines reverberates in the high-ceilinged room. Forty girls dressed in uniform green and yellow salwar kameez bend their heads towards their stitching as shafts of afternoon sunlight warm their identical hairstyles of black looped braids.

In India this scene easily evokes the word sweatshop, and rightly so. Twenty five percent of India’s population lives below the poverty line (defined for rural areas at $8 a month--or enough to buy exactly 2200 calories per day), and impoverished girls and young women are an easily exploited demographic. But here in Anoopshahr Sub-district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), these students at Pardada Pardadi Girl’s Vocational School are not sewing for someone else’s profit, but for their own futures.

While India is currently the second fastest growing economy in the world, it is also home to the world’s largest population of poor people, half of whom are concentrated in three rural states, including UP. In a country where two thirds of the population works in agriculture, mostly as subsistence farmers, stories of technology millionaires seem light years away, and the hope that the recent success of an emerging urban middle class will trickle down is too distant a promise for most rural Indians.

“Everyone in the world is talking about how India is shining,” says Sam Singh, a local man who made his fortune in the United States, and returned five years ago to found the school, “and it’s true, but only for about twenty percent. You have to ask how these twenty percent can fly with the other eighty percent hanging off of them.”

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His Secrets Are More Important Than Ours

Hallelujah. The Blogger organization has poked through my post entrails (eeek!) and concluded I am not a threat to the blog-curity of the nation after all. No more cryptic hoops to be jumped through just to save a draft or publish a post (or, as apparently happened, to be overlooked, causing hard work to be wasted). Until my next offense I guess.

This is a gentle but extremely timely reminder, however, in these times, that a sacrifice of privacy, whether it be freedom to make phone calls, check out library books, or publish blog-posts, should not be willingly relinquished without a fight. Censorship should be suspect on basic principles, and the burden of proof should be much stronger on the privacy/freedom-violaters than on the victims.

Of course it is a different game for the bush brownshirts, who have a seemingly endless string of stupid blunders and gaffes as well as actual criminal actions that must be covered up at all costs lest underking george's dorky incompetence and law-breaking embarrass mom. (Wait a minute - how could she possibly still be embarrassable?? The woman deservedly bears more shame right now than any other live mom I can think of.)

Whereas our private communications are currently I guess fair game for all sorts of intrusive investigation and dissemination, the actions of the executive branch, supposedly done on our behalf and certainly on our dime (though when george does it the charge is a sawbuck) must be routinely hidden. Somehow "national security" and preservation of george's overripe ego have become conflated I gather.

So Much Damage, Such a Nut-case

Reality-based folks may not actually learn much from this Greenwald post. Read it anyway!! It can't hurt (too much!) to be reminded how badly the bush administration has abused the concepts of democracy and freedom while pretending that these are the principles we are (ever so incompetently) insisting on fomenting elsewhere. Of course that was something like the fifth lame explanation for little george's semi-wet dream that getting a second war on was the secret to getting his sorry little testicles to finally drop. Do you suppose Laura has noticed the difference?

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Increasingly, there is simply no role for courts to review the President's actions, nor for citizens to challenge the legality and constitutionality of those actions. A month or so ago I wrote about the administration's rapidly increasing use of the "state secrets privilege" -- once a rarely invoked weapon used by the Government to prevent litigation from exposing critical national security secrets, but now something which the Bush administration routinely exploits to prevent any legal challenge to its behavior. As lawyer Henry Lanman details in Slate today:

Never heard of the "state secrets" privilege? You're not alone. But the Bush administration sure has. Before Sept. 11, this obscure privilege was invoked only rarely. Since then, the administration has dramatically increased its use. According to the Washington Post, the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press reported that while the government asserted the privilege approximately 55 times in total between 1954 (the privilege was first recognized in 1953) and 2001, it's asserted it 23 times in the four years after Sept. 11. For an administration as obsessed with secrecy as this one is, the privilege is simply proving to be too powerful a tool to pass up.

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Who has less credibility to deliver these sermons to the world than George Bush? The stories of the U.S. abducting people, torturing them, and then blocking any judicial review of its behavior are read around the world. Photographs from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are ingrained in the minds of anyone around the world with a television set, as is the Bush administration's insistence that it is unbound by the Geneva Conventions and legal prohibitions on the use of torture. The threat by Alberto Gonzales over the weekend to imprison American journalists was reported prominently in international newspapers, as are stories of the U.S. Government eavesdropping on its own citizens in secret, the creation of secret Eastern European prisons, and the general lawlessness which has prevailed in this country since September 11.

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As we lecture the world about the need for transparency and democracy, and as we continue to proclaim that our foreign policy is based principally on the objective of spreading our ideas about democracy to other countries -- even by military invasion, if necessary -- the U.S. has become a symbol of human rights abuses and anti-democratic measures around the world. We have squandered almost every molecule of moral credibility which we justifiably possessed for most of the 20th Century, particularly since World War II. In so many ways during the last five years, we have become a country which engages in those very practices which always characterized other countries, the ones we were grateful not to live in because they failed to protect the liberties and principles which defined the United States.

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The crux of the Bush administration for the last five years has basically been a competition of contrived, cheap manliness where the winner is he who can wage the most aggressive and fundamental war on American principles of government which have defined our country since its founding. Vesting increased power in the Commander-in-Chief and compiling ever-increasing powers of secrecy have been the only two principles with any recognized value. Those most steadfastly loyal to those two objectives have flourished and consolidated power. As a result, the role of the judiciary and the Congress in our system of government has never been smaller, while the power of the President has never been greater. And the greatest enemy of the administration are checks and balances of any kind -- whether from Congress, the courts or the media.

Blogger Goes NSA?

I'm fighting through the muck here, required by the Blogger folks (are you there as you claimed when I appealed my "sentence", supposedly checking my p's and q's with the idea that my "spam" rating might be reviewed?) as a scum-bag suspected spam-blogger to submit to equivalent of strip-search every time I save or post. It's quite apparent now that the post I lost the other night, probably my most time-intensive post ever, was deep-sixed solely because I did not realize (and had not been informed) that I was subject to some new draconian crappola rules involving this sexy little business of entering a secret code.

Go figure.

Joe: You Too Are Dust in the Wind

Speaking of outrage and anger, my hiatus here is partly a result of loss of important post, despite repeated draft-saves. My trust in Blogger has been seriously undermined. Apparently someone with their head up an orifice of some sort, their own or someone else's, has deemed this a potential "spam-blog," and without any prior notification to me altered the steps needed for posting. You can imagine what I'd like to do with an unopened can of spam.

We'll leave that for another day and spend another couple hours recreating that vital post the Blogger paranoiacs destroyed another day too.

In the meantime, there's this, on subject of progressives (actually all who care about the sorry state of the nation) seemingly beginning at times to get it together. The post is Hamsher's. The key "mainstream" article is Krugman's (thank goodness he has a pulpit, albeit one the Times is desperately trying to squeeze blood out of). The subject is that squeaky little pathetic one-time elected official from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman. Now you connect the dots:

Not long ago Peter Daou talked about how the netroots could not get traction for their issues because there was no message reinforcement between the liberal blogosphere, the Democrats and the traditional media, and we could not effectively create that "triangle" that would carry our narratives to a larger audience.

I think we just witnessed it happening, though not in quite the way anybody envisioned. The liberal blogosphere crafted the narrative — Lieberman is a pariah on the Democratic party and he must go. Elected Democratic officials didn’t step up and support that narrative, but the delegates in the state of Connecticut did (and so did our candidate, Ned Lamont). Now the triangle is completed on the pages of the New York Times, where Paul Krugman echoes the message in a wonderful, tightly crafted piece:

Friday was a bad day for Senator Joseph Lieberman. The Connecticut Democratic Party’s nominating convention endorsed him, but that was a given for an incumbent with a lot of political chips to cash in. The real news was that Ned Lamont, an almost unknown challenger, received a third of the votes. This gave Mr. Lamont the right to run against Mr. Lieberman in a primary, and suggests that Mr. Lamont may even win.

What happened to Mr. Lieberman? Some news reports may lead you to believe that he is in trouble solely because of his support for the Iraq war. But there’s much more to it than that. Mr. Lieberman has consistently supported Republican talking points. This has made him a lion of the Sunday talk shows, but has put him out of touch with his constituents and with reality.

Mr. Lieberman isn’t the only nationally known Democrat who still supports the Iraq war. But he isn’t just an unrepentant hawk, he has joined the Bush administration by insisting on an upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq that is increasingly delusional.

Moreover, Mr. Lieberman has supported the attempt to label questions about why we invaded Iraq and criticism of the administration’s policies since the invasion as unpatriotic. How else is one to interpret his warning, late last year, that "it is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril"?

And it’s not just Iraq. A letter sent by Hillary Clinton to Connecticut Democrats credited Mr. Lieberman with defending Social Security "tooth and nail." Well, I watched last year’s Social Security debate pretty closely, and that’s not what happened. In fact, Mr. Lieberman repeatedly supported the administration’s scare tactics. "Every year we wait to come up with a solution to the Social Security problem," he declared in March 2005, "costs our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren $600 billion more."

This claim echoed a Bush administration talking point, and President Bush wasted little time citing Mr. Lieberman’s statement as vindication. But the talking point was simply false, so Mr. Lieberman was providing cover for an administration lie.

There’s more. Mr. Lieberman supported Congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair, back when Republican leaders were trying to manufacture a "values" issue out of thin air. And let’s not forget that Mr. Lieberman showed far more outrage over Bill Clinton’s personal life than he has ever shown over Mr. Bush’s catastrophic failures as commander in chief.

On each of these issues Mr. Lieberman, who is often described as a "centrist," is or was very much at odds not just with the Democratic base but with public opinion as a whole. According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, only 40 percent of the public believes that we were right to go to war with Iraq.

Mr. Lieberman’s tender concern for the president’s credibility comes far too late: according to a USA Today/Gallup poll, only 41 percent of Americans consider Mr. Bush honest and trustworthy. By huge margins, the public believed that Congress should have stayed out of the Schiavo case. And so on.

Mr. Lieberman’s defenders would have you believe that his increasingly unpopular positions reflect his principles. But his Bushlike inability to face reality on Iraq looks less like a stand on principle than the behavior of a narcissist who can’t admit error. And the common theme in Mr. Lieberman’s positions seems to be this: In each case he has taken the stand that is most likely to get him on TV.

How do I love thee let me count the ways. Krugman hit ‘em all. Every point. What a thing of beauty. I see people walking down the street, oblivious, and I think — do they realize what just happened? Do they know how monumental this is? Do they understand how Chuck Schumer is going to be shitting sideways from now until November, worried about what Lieberman will do next, what he’s going to do next, and what we will do as a result?

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