drowning polar bears

So I went to see An Inconvenient Truth and frankly the most distressing part was about how polar bears have started drowning because there's not enough ice anymore. It wasn't the scariest part, or the most important part. But the most distressing. They had a cartoon polar bear swimming in an endless sea. Poor bear. Why is the suffering of animals so particularly distressing? Like the pets left behind in Katrina. Is it just sentimentalism? I'm sure the cartoon quality makes it cuter than an actual bear and therefore more available for sentimental response. But still. Poor bears. They really are endangered.

But of course the most irritating parts of the movie are the things it leaves out, like Gore's shabby environmental track record, or that part of the problem might actually be capitalism. The end credits encourage mostly individual actions, and the website points to "free-market" mechanisms for controlling CO2 emissions. I mean, I suppose, fine, I'll go get me some flourescent bulbs. It's a point. But it hardly seems enough to save the poor bears.

wrr: pride

I'm glad to report that yesterday Portland did not suffer an earthquake, a tsunami, or a terrorist attack, nor did the Bonneville dam collapse. All of these events were predicted by a Salem Pastor as God’s punishment for our celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride, as reported on Alas, a blog, as well as by the Portland Mercury.

Pride celebrations usually occur in June in commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots, when police raided the Stonewall bar in New York, and the patrons, especially drag queens of color, fought back. Clashes between police and the gay and lesbian community continued for several days, and the incident is considered a turning point in the modern gay movement. Marches were held the next June in New York and San Franciso, and Pride Parades and events now occur all over the world, including Sao Paolo, Jerusalem, Taipei, and, of course, Portland.

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, gay and lesbian activists attempted to hold Russia's first gay pride march in Moscow, timed to coincide with the 13th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia. Although the march was thwarted by opposition from police and from nationalist and fundamentalist opponents, organizers considered the turnout a sign of victory, as queer Russians claimed their rights to public space.

But in the US, Pride events have other problems, too. Ryan Murphy, on his blog liberalserving,
bewails the commodification of pride, asking,

From a spontaneous riot of trans women and other sundry queers who were fed up with police harassment evolves . . . - a corporate branding opportunity?. . . .
How can they crap all over us in legal discrimination after constitutional amendment but throw products and advertising at us like we're Jane Q American?

Charlie Hinton, writing last month in dissidentvoice.org, recalls that

In 1975, [he] became a founding member of an historic organization called Bay Area Gay Liberation. This was the time of the war against Viet Nam, the civil rights movement, black power, brown power, and women’s liberation. [Queers] became the next group to challenge the traditional values of heterosexual white male ruling class dominance. . . .
The idea behind gay liberation is that no one is free until all are free. The politics of liberation advocate building a united movement to overcome all forms of discrimination and oppression, if LGBT people are someday to be truly free. . . .
In the late 1970s, a gay rights approach to gaining equality became the dominant ideology in the lesbian/gay movement, replacing the gay liberation approach. The idea behind gay rights is more limited -- build a movement that addresses strictly gay issues -- housing and job discrimination, military, marriage/partnership, etc. and unite solely on the basis that we’re gay; Gay Pride Day [being a] good example.

Hinton advocates returning to a liberation approach.

At the very least, gay men should unite with women to protect choice and reproductive rights. The same groups are trying to take away all our rights (as well as any rights for immigrants and prisoners) and it’s stupid and self-defeating not to join forces to fight them together. . . .
In the bigger global picture, it’s the same anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-democratic Right wing forces that drive the conservative agenda, which includes the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and unquestioning support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. . . .
Do we make the world safer with more war and more and bigger weapons, or with more justice and equality that all can share?

And speaking of Iraq, Gary Leupp, also on dissidentvoice, observes that even

Leaving aside the daily “collateral damage” killings of Iraqi civilians, and the occupiers’ failure to accomplish the most basic reconstruction goals, the collapse of law and order and accompanying empowerment of fanatic religious militias has made life hell for women, Christians and other religious minorities, and intellectuals, [and, of course, for queers]
Last month Ali Hili, who used to run a gay nightclub in Baghdad, told The Times of London he knows of more than 40 Iraqi gay men killed this year. “We could never envisage this happening when Saddam was overthrown,” the 33-year-old now in exile declared. “I had no love for the former president, but his regime never persecuted the gay community.” He told Democracy Now!, “It’s a very dark age for gays and lesbians and transsexuals and bisexuals in Iraq right now. And the fact that Iraq has been shifted from a secular state into a religious state was completely, completely horrific.”
In April 2005, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani declared that homosexuals should be killed in the “worst, most severe way.” [and Iraqi militia have been] tracking down and brutally murdering gay men and boys. Last month, following the murder of a 14-year-old boy by the Iraqi police, al-Sistani removed the anti-gay male fatwa from his website (retaining one against lesbians). Not that this will necessarily change the militiamen’s behavior towards gays.
Al-Sistani is of course viewed by the occupiers as an ally of sorts, since he has discouraged armed resistance and commands the respect of the . . . Shiite politicians. So while officially “troubled” by the bourgeoning misogyny, religious intolerance, anti-intellectual and homophobic plagues unleashed by the illegal overthrow of the former regime, U.S. spokespersons can’t attack too squarely the Muslim fundamentalist repression exercised by their sometimes allies.
“If someone is in danger of being slaughtered or persecuted, we do all we can to stop it,” says Army Maj. Joseph Todd Breasseale, chief of the Media Relations Division of the Multinational Corps in Iraq. In other words, the U.S. military, which officially regards bans gays who are out unsuitable for military service, does want to stop the slaughter of Iraqi gays. But he adds:
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, when we’re in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, ‘Here’s these issues that are going to repel 80 percent of the population and this is what we want to inflict on you.’ We’re trying not to get into too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing.” That’s what Breasseale told the Washington Blade, the capital’s GLBT newspaper.

So let me get this straight. [Leupp continues] In this “fledgling time,” while the primordial chaos of the criminal invasion still prevails, the occupiers -- bogged down in suppressing resistance to their presence, slaughtering civilians in the process -- haven’t much wherewithal to prevent other, indigenous Iraqi slaughter. . . .The occupiers have better things to do than to “get into” the “values judgment issue” of shooting 14-year-old gay boys, especially if 80% of the population has no problem with that. That’d be “inflicting” somebody else’s values (although not, apparently, the Major’s), and that just wouldn’t make sense, would it?

So doing the “right thing” must mean doing something else: publicly acknowledging that gay people shouldn’t be murdered, probably, and it’s not the occupiers’ policy that they should be. But, hey, this is the Iraqis’ business. At least they’re free now.

racial profiling ok'd

Racial profiling of immigrants, that is, because foreigners evidently don't deserve the same rights as real Amurkans.
from the NYTimes (registration required):
Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely

A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that the government has wide latitude under immigration law to detain noncitizens on the basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation. . . .
This is the first time a federal judge has addressed the issue of discrimination in the treatment of hundreds of Muslim immigrants who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks and held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported. . . .
"This decision is a green light to racial profiling and prolonged detention of noncitizens at the whim of the president," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the detainees. "The decision is profoundly disturbing because it legitimizes the fact that the Bush administration rounded up and imprisoned our clients because of their religion and race.". . .
"The executive is free to single out 'nationals of a particular country' and focus enforcement efforts on them," the judge wrote. "This is, of course, an extraordinarily rough and overbroad sort of distinction of which, if applied to citizens, our courts would be highly suspicious.". . .
"It doesn't seem to limit the motives the government has to have in being slow in removing them; it could even be just basic neglect," [a lawyer] said. . . .
But David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and a co-counsel in the lawsuit, said the ruling was the only one of its kind and made New York "an equal protection-free zone" because the government can detain immigrants wherever it chooses. . . .

wrr: iran, irant, irate

The US administration’s recent reversal on the question of diplomatic negotiations with Iran may have left us breathing a bit easier, but some observers remain skeptical. The roots of that skepticism go back to a history available in any standard encyclopedia—Britannica, for instance. In 1951, Mohammad Mossaddeq was democratically elected prime minister of Iran, and immediately nationalized the country’s oil industry. In 1953 a coup funded by the CIA overthrew Mossaddeq’s government. The Shah returned to Iran, and a Western multinational consortium accelerated Iranian oil development. There was no further talk of nationalization, as the Shah repressed political dissent within Iran. Opposition to the Shah led, of course, to his ouster in 1979 by a coalition of leftist and religious dissidents, and ultimately to the current Islamic republic.

Tom O’Donnell in an article for Z magazine
draws some of the evident conclusions from this and other evidence.

Just as the true reasons for the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq were not “weapons of mass destruction” or “links to Al Qaeda,” so too, the true reason for the present U.S.-Iran crisis is not the ostensible “nuclear threat” posed by Iran. Rather, the American push against Iran’s nuclear program and for “regime change” is about maintaining American hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf Region.

As one might not learn from the mainstream media, but can learn from other sources including the United Nations website, Iran has signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, under which states have the right to pursue nuclear power. To that end, they have been trying to enrich uranium for fuel, a very different matter than building a bomb or even than enriching uranium for use in a bomb. As Juan Cole has pointed out on his blog, the Iranians have something like the ability to make those old Mickey Mouse watches that glowed in the dark because they were painted with radium.

Hans Blix, chair of the U.N.'s WMD Commission, noted on a recent Democracy Now that there are reasons why the Iranians might want nuclear weapons:

They see 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq and they see American bases in Pakistan and in Afghanistan and more American military activities to the north of them. . . .It is not inconceivable that [they] may feel that their security is being threatened.

Especially with US politicians saying all options are on the table.

But O’Donnell argues that

even if they were near to building a nuclear bomb, Iranian nukes would not, per se, be why Washington is out to remove the mullahs from power. Just this February, Bush was . . . pleased to recognize India as a nuclear power . . . . He did this after India sided with the U.S. against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency {the I.A.E.A}. So too, Bush hasn’t insisted that Pakistan, a country which admits to having proliferated nuclear weapons . . . give up its illegally developed nuclear weapons – rather, he called Pakistan a “close ally” of America.

Neither India, nor Pakistan, nor Israel has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Mina Hamilton on dissidentvoice.org points out that

Israel's nuclear facilities have never been inspected by the I.A.E.A or any other representative of the international community. The existence of the nuclear arsenal sitting deep underground in the Negev desert continues to be scrupulously ignored by . . . most . . . US establishment media. Also off the radar is the fate of UN Security Resolution 687 [which] ended the Gulf War of 1991. It was signed by the US and called for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

O’Donnell argues that

the reason for U.S. hostility to Iran can neither be explained by nukes nor by Islamic fundamentalism, nor, for that matter, by any Iranian support for terrorist organizations. Rather, the uncompromising first principle for Washington when it comes to Iran, or to any other state in the Persian Gulf Region, is that the U.S. and the U.S. alone shall remain the regional hegemon – which is … about oil.
… Whoever has predominant influence in this region has their hand on “the global oil spigot” – a prize which brings enormous power and leverage far beyond the region itself, reaching over every country and enterprise that needs the region’s oil. Washington has worked since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to keep Iran … from once again becoming the oil-producing powerhouse it was under the shah, . . .

O’Donnell points out that since 1996 the US has imposed sanctions on Iran to block development of its oil and natural gas resources, and the sanctions have been devastatingly successful . . . They have preserved U.S. hegemony in the Gulf Region from any significant threat by Iran, and, as a bonus to the U.S., have greatly weakened the Iranian economy and the mullahs’ domestic position.

They have also prompted potential concessions we hear little about. Juan Cole has noted on his blog that in 2003 Iran offered the US full cooperation with the IAEA-- and more--including Recognition of Israel within 1967 borders. In response, Bush reprimanded the Swiss embassy for daring to forward the proposal, because, Cole argues, Bush and his various constituencies (including the military-industrial complex…) do not want peaceful relations with Iran.

And they may not get what they do not want.

Frida Berrigan and William Hartung, writing on TomPaine.com last week, observe that the US proposal--that Iran will be allowed to continue its enrichment program, as long as it agrees to first suspend all activity, and “prove” that its intentions are entirely civilian—sets the bar awfully high. They note that,

One administration official has indicated that a rejection of the U.S. overture by Iran may in fact be the White House’s objective. Such a rebuff would allow the Bush administration to take forceful action without being seen as unreasonable unilateralists.

This cynical approach is similar to U.S. actions in the run-up to the Iraq war, when President Bush falsely claimed that a diplomatic solution was possible even after the decision to attack Saddam Hussein's regime had been [taken].

Berrigan and Hartung ask,

What would the United States be doing if it were truly committed to a diplomatic resolution? In addition to pursuing a more gradual approach that would give the negotiating process months or years, not weeks, to bear fruit, non-aggression pledges by the United States and Israel might get things moving.. . . . The clearest route to a nuclear-free Iran, is a nuclear-free Middle East. [and ] The clearest route to a nuclear-free Middle East is concrete steps towards nuclear disarmament by nuclear heavyweights. And that has to start with the heaviest heavy of all—the United States of America.

hell, meet handbasket