Street Corner Society

The New York Times has a broad overview article, “Beneath a Scandal in British Parliament, Deeper Furies,” on the current crisis in parliamentary rule in Britain.

We do get a passing mention of “a democratic tradition that traces its origins back at least 800 years.” However, the revolutionary era of the mid-1600s is omitted in this account, as is the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Modern democracy in Britain is dated to reforms made in the mid-1800s:

[P]opular resentment [today] has reached proportions that are drawing comparisons to the situation 180 years ago, when the Great Reform Act of 1832 was speeded through Parliament by riots in several cities. That act laid the basis for modern democracy in Britain by widening the males-only franchise and shifting power to the country’s cities from the “rotten boroughs” controlled by rural grandees.

Without a constitutional balance of powers, such as we allow for in the U.S., the British system has inherent weaknesses.

[R]eforms that began in earnest in 1832 began to be rolled back as early as World War I, with governments claiming ever-widening statutory powers, and imposing their will roughshod through their control of pliant parliamentary majorities. The result, the critics say, has been an entrenchment of “parliamentary dictatorship,” with the only moment of meaningful accountability for governments coming at general elections that are held, in normal circumstances, every four or five years.

1830s to 1920s… Hmmm, how might we characterize Britain’s place in the world during the period that was, by this account, the high plateau of effective democratic parliamentary government?

I lived in England in 1977-78, and left shortly before the election of the Thatcher government, which apparently consolidated the high-handed top-down approach. Thatcher gets a nod here, however, for wielding her “relatively untrammeled power” to initiate “free-market reforms that rejuvenated Britain’s economy.” The Labour governments that followed, however, apparently haven’t used this power so well.

Especially since Tony Blair led Labor to power in 1997, cabinet government has given way to informal cabals of favored ministers and trusted aides, in what British tabloids have called “sofa government.” The independence of civil servants has been undermined, especially at 10 Downing Street, by political favoritism and the proliferation of American-style “special advisers” on the public payroll, who act as the prime minister’s acolytes.

Now a corruption scandal “involving at most £30 million to £50 million in dodgy claims over the past five years,” apparently threatens to bring the current system of arrangements to its knees.

The watershed, historically, may prove to have been Britain’s decision to join the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, at a time when antiwar protests were drawing hundreds of thousands into London’s streets.

It certainly bothered me, watching from “over the pond,” how a Labour government managed to align itself with the U.S. Bush-Cheney regime and force a concocted war upon the people in Britain.

The reformers’ wish list reads like a primer from American experience. It includes fewer members of Parliament — Britain, with a population of 60 million, has 200 more members in its lower house than there are in the United States House of Representatives, which represents more than 300 million people. The list also includes parliamentary committees with real powers of oversight and investigation, in place of tame, government-controlled bodies; primary elections to select parliamentary candidates, superseding the closed, party-run selection system that operates now; and a return to the old traditions of cabinet government, ministerial accountability and civil service independence.

Well, we shall see how things progress in Britain, in this great social experiment called “democracy.”

Torture Memos: Waterboarding
by Jonathan Mann

The detainee
is lying on a gurney
that is inclined at an angle
10 to 15 degrees.
A cloth is placed
over the detainee’s face,
cold water is poured on the cloth.
The wet cloth creates
a barrier through which
it is difficult
or in some cases
not possible
for the detainee to breathe.

If the detainee
makes an effort to defeat
the technique
by twisting his head
to the side
and breathing out the
corner of his mouth,
the interrogator
may cup his hands around
the detainee’s nose and mouth
in which case it would not be possible
for the detainee to breathe.
(Oh, to breathe!)

But as we explained
in the section 2340A
Memorandum,
“pain and
suffering”
is best understood
as a single concept
not distinct concepts
of “pain”
as distinguished from “suffering”.
(Oh, suffering!)

The waterboard
which inflicts no pain
or actual
harm whatsoever,
does not in our view
inflict “severe pain
or suffering”.
Even if one were
to parse the statute
more finely
to treat suffering
as a distinct concept
the waterboard could not
be said to inflict
severe suffering.

The waterboard is simply (Ohhh suffering!)
a controlled acute episode
lacking the connotation (Severe suffering!)
of a protracted period of time
generally given to suffering. (Severe suffering!)

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow grills former Secretary of State Colin Powell on torture. He was one of the top officials at “principles meetings” where Bush administration policies and procedures were considered and (sometimes tacitly?) approved.

A transcript is posted at MSNBC.

You can see what an excellent diplomat Powell is (and not always in the best sense of the word).

MADDOW: On the issue of intelligence tainted evidence and those things, were you ever present at meetings at which the interrogation of prisoners like Abu Zubaida and other prisoners in those early days where the interrogation was directed, where* specific interrogation techniques were approved? It has been reported on a couple of different sources that there were principles meetings, which you would have typically been there where those interrogations were almost play by play discussed.

POWELL: They were not play by play discussed, but there were conversations at a senior level as to what could be done with these types of interrogation. I cannot go further because I don‘t have knowledge of all the meetings that took place or what was discussed at each of those meetings, and I think it‘s going to have to be in the written record of those meetings what will determine whether anything improper took place.

[* - Transcribed as “were.”]

Colin Powell suggests that he’d have to be at all the meetings in order to answer a simple Yes-or-No question about whether he was ever at any of those meetings.

Maddow presses him further, and Powell falls back on quibbling with the word “torture” — a defense the Bush administration has used for the past several years.

MADDOW: I guess have to ask that — a broader question about whether or not you have regrets not about what the Bush administration did broadly in the years that you were secretary of state but the decisions that you participated in about interrogation, about torture, about the other things that are now so much [… Powell interrupts].

POWELL: There was no meeting on torture. It‘s constantly said that the meetings — I had an issue with this — we had meetings on what torture to administer. What I recall, the meetings I was in, [yes???] and I was not in all the meetings and I was not an author of many of the memos that have been written and some have come out and some have not come out.

The only meetings I recall was where we talked about what is it we can do with respect to trying to get information from individuals who were in our custody. And I will — I will just have to wait until the full written record is available and has been examined.

Notice how he gets to the edge of talking about specific meetings, but then stumbles away with one throw-away phrase after another, and finally punts the question to a time when “the full written record is available.”

Commenting on the interview, Rachel Maddow reflects:

MADDOW: That complete record, he says, will in due course come out.

And the question, of course, is — will it?

General Powell says he expects a written record was made of those discussions in the Situation Room and that record would show whether anything improper happened when senior White House officials discussed how to get information from individuals in our custody, as he said. He says he awaits whatever investigation that the government or the Congress intends to pursue with this in order to say if what happened in that Situation Room was a crime.

He‘s awaiting that investigation. Will that investigation happen? That‘s not up to the people who came up with these policies in the Bush administration. Now, it is up to Congress and to President Obama.

And it seems officials in the Obama administration are blocking the release of even the basic memoes.

Thank you, Rachel Maddow! And a hat-tip, if Quakers tipped hats, to Andrew Sullivan for both the original links.

Tom Engelhardt writes a sobering essay on what lies ahead for us, on this day when it would seem the earth stood still.

He starts by taking seriously an offhand account George Bush gave recently, of what his economic advisors have actually been telling him.

George Bush:

The question facing a President is not when the problem started, but what did you do about it when you recognized the problem. And I readily concede I chunked aside some of my free market principles when I was told by [my] chief economic advisors that the situation we were facing could be worse than the Great Depression.

Englehardt goes on to ask if the apparatus of U.S. government is really in shape to handle the sorts of programs that Obama campaigned on and reiterated in his speech today.

Tom Engelhardt:

But what if the federal government slated to organize, channel, and oversee that spending is itself thoroughly demoralized and broken? What then? […] Who knows what condition the eviscerated Environmental Protection Agency is in, or the Housing Department, or the Interior Department, or the Treasury Department, or the Energy Department after these years of thoroughgoing politicization in which all those crony capitalist pals of the Bush administration and all those industry lobbyist foxes were let loose among the federal chickens meant to oversee them?

Good questions.

Meanwhile the hawks and wolves are already circling, and adding their hatred to the mix — e.g., in comments on the otherwise quite benign FiveThirtyEight.com site. (No slur intended on actual hawks and wolves, of course.)

The press release giving the content of Bush’s last press conference, by the way, is no longer available at the spiffy new whitehouse.gov.

“No se Registró Novedad Digna de Mencionar” /
      Nothing happened worthy of mention.

En diciembre de 1974, el Departamento de Investigaciones registra a Benjamín Ramírez Villalba, Amílcar Maria Oviedo y Carlos José Mancuello que fueron capturados junto a Rodolfo Ramírez Villalba. A mediados de 1976, los cuatro desaparecerían de la prisión policial.

In December of 1974, the Department of Investigations registers Benjamín Ramírez Villalba, Amílcar Maria Oviedo and Carlos José Mancuello who were arrested along with Rodolfo Ramírez Villalba. In the middle of 1976, the four would disappear from the police prison.

Visiting the National Security Archive site (mentioned in my last post), I find a report published just a few days ago on four ‘desaparecidos’ in Paraguay. (Here’s a rough translation of the cover page, provided by Babblefish.)

These young men were my contemporaries. I graduated from high school in 1974. In 1976 I joined Friends World College. During those years and later in the ’70s while I was living in Europe, at demonstrations sometimes I was handed leaflets appealing for attention to the ongoing dirty war in South America. My heart went out for the people mentioned, but I never did anything about it. Still, their condition has always been for me part of the texture of those times.

The NSA report uses original source documents to chart their passage through the system of police terror in Paraguay, until their disappearance almost two years later. They were officially listed as having “escaped.” The authorities stuck to this story ever since, until now when it has finally been demolished.

Sin embargo, las declaraciones del acusado Lucilo Benitez son contundentes y demoledoras pues “admite por primera vez circunstancias y hechos que eran decididamente negadas por los otros coprocesados.”

Las declaraciones de Benítez calzan perfectamente con los vacios y contradicciones de la historia oficial. El día 21 de Septiembre de 1976, dice Benítez, “…aproximadamente a las 21:30 el Señor Pastor Coronel, se retiró de su despacho, al retirarse me ordenó que me quedara en la Oficina de Guardia para proceder en compañía del Oficial [Celso] Cantero a la entrega de dichos detenidos… siendo aproximadamente las 22:30 de ese día llega una camioneta Kombi, color rojo hasta la oficina de Guardia del Departamento de Investigaciones, del cual desciende el Comisario Ramón Saldivar, [Julián] Ruiz Paredes y Salvador Mendoza.”

Benítez continúa “…fuimos hasta el calabozo No 1… de a uno los sacamos del calabozo… los esposamos y yo los conduje hasta la oficina de guardia donde les entregue al Comisario General Saldivar y sus acompañantes, quienes los alzaron en la camioneta mencionada. Terminado los tres Comisarios mencionados abordaron dicho vehículo y se desplazaron por [la calle] Presidente Franco doblando hacia [la calle] Chile, hacia el Paraguayo Independiente, desconociendo el destino y la suerte corrida por estos detenidos…”

The cover-up began the next morning.

El superior de los Oficiales de Guardia Celso Cantero y Jorge Pane, el Comisario Inspector Eliodoro Sánchez escribe a Pastor Coronel una nota extremadamente breve a las siete de la mañana del día 22:

“Comunico a esa Superioridad que durante mi servicio de Oficial de Ronda de la Unidad, establecida desde las 19 horas del dia de ayer a las 7 horas del dia de hoy NO SE REGISTRO NOVEDAD DIGNA DE MENCIONAR.” [Las mayúsculas son del original]

I won’t attempt a full translation of the above paragraphs, but leave it to readers with a bit of Spanish and/or the patience to work through the Babblefish translation. (Babblefish gives the title of this post.)

In gist, the day after the four prisoners were “disappeared,” a prison official carefully (and with his own capital letters) reported that “between 7PM last night and 7AM today, NOTHING HAPPENED WORTHY OF MENTION” — thus negating the future claim that the four had “escaped” with a first attempt to blot out what actually happened to these four young men.

Nothing to see here. Keep moving, keep moving.

Hay una mujer desaparecida:

One wonders for how long we’ll be picking apart the lies about what has happened in the last seven years.

WASHINGTON — It was April 1972, and American B-52 bombers were pummeling North Vietnam. President Richard M. Nixon got on the phone with his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, for an update on the air assault on the port city of Haiphong. The men struggled to persuade each other that the war might still be won.

“They dropped a million pounds of bombs,” Mr. Kissinger said.

Nixon was pleased. “Goddamn, that must have been a good strike!” he said.

Then the president had a moment of doubt, recalling the dismal experience of his immediate predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson: “Johnson bombed them for years, and it didn’t do any good.”

Mr. Kissinger reassured his boss, saying: “But, Mr. President, Johnson never had a strategy. He was sort of picking away at them. He would go in with 50 planes, 20 planes. I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month.”

— New York Times article on the National Security Archive’s online edition of Kissinger telephone transcripts.

“That shock treatment [is] cracking them,” Nixon declared. “I tell you the thing to do is pour it in there every place we can … just bomb the hell out of them.” [April 15, 1972, quoted on the cover page for the transcripts, from the transcript.]

Has anyone else received the following email? I wonder how they’re picking out Friends to solicit…

From: “Casting Wife Swap” <castingwifeswap@gmail.com>
Date: December 9, 2008 5:00:58 PM EST
Subject: Opportunity for Quakers

Hi, my name is Jodi Friedman and I am the casting producer for ABC’s reality show Wife Swap. I apologize if you have received this email more than once. I am currently seeking for Quakers for season 5 and I’m hoping you will consider sharing this opportunity with Friends of your organization and meetings.

In case you are unfamiliar with the show, the premise of Wife Swap is to take two different families and have the moms from each household swap places for one week to experience how another family lives and also teach their own way of life.

I have attached a flyer to this email and it contains further information. Please call me with any questions and I hope to hear from you soon.

More information is available at
http://abc.go.com/primetime/wifeswap

~ Jodi

–
Jodi Friedman
Casting Producer
Wife Swap / ABC TV / RDF Media

From the flyer:

ABC TV SEARCH FOR QUAKERS!

ABC TV’s hit reality show Wife Swap is seeking families for the 5th season.

I’m hoping you will consider sharing this opportunity with any families that you know who are proud of their lifestyle, outgoing, and ready for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure!

All families featured on the show receive a $20,000 honorarium.

Potential families can live anywhere in the continental United States and should consist of two parents who have at least one child, age 6 or older, living at home.

Referrals for families are welcome. The show offers a $1,000 finder’s fee to individuals recommending families who are then featured on the show.

The premise of Wife Swap is the moms from each household swap places for one week to experience how another family lives and teach their own way of life. Half of the week, mom lives the life of the family she is staying with. The other half, she introduces a “rule change” where she implements rules and activities that her family has. It’s a positive experience for people to not only learn but teach about other families and other ways of life. The New York Post says, “It should be called ‘Life Swap’ because it’s not just the wives who learn something here. It’s the families.”

To apply, email CastingWifeSwap@gmail.com or Families@rdfusa.com ASAP with a family description, photo and phone number.

I’ve heard that the reality of Reality TV is that it’s a lot cheaper to produce than other sorts of television.

Has anyone seen this show? Are they working their way down a list of religions? What other stereotypical families have they done?

And does anyone see this as an opportunity to promote Quakerism to a whole new audience? The mind boggles to think of someone imposing Quaker “rules and activities” on a family — a family minus their wife/mom — for a primetime audience, Fridays 8/7c.

I always thought it was a joke … selling below cost, and expecting to make up the losses by selling more of them.

“You’re looking at discounts of 50 to 70 percent off,” said Matthew Katz, managing director in the retail practice of Alix Partners, an advisory and restructuring firm. “You have to sell two to three times as much to break even.”

– quoted by Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Deep Discounts Draw Shoppers, but Not Profits.“

Maybe he was just pulling her leg?

I’ve just started reading a book. I wanted to finish it before writing a full review, but it speaks so clearly to my condition that I want to mention it now. We’ll be coming back to it here from time to time.

From an email I sent a few Friends a few days ago:

Here’s the book I mentioned. I think it’s quite relevant to the concerns we were mulling last night. It may serve as a reference for Friends who are trying to work out how best to move forward during this generational and epochal transition.

Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Oct-2008.

The link is to an Amazon.com page for the book - blurbs, reviews, etc.

As I tried to say last night, in the first chapter Maggie Jackson touches a lot of the same points that came up in our conversation. I think the book will resonate with Quaker experience and testimonies, and I’m interested to see what Friends make of it.

“The Coming Dark Age” sounds sort of bizarre, I know. The author makes a case for it, and it helps her to explain the enormity of the changes. She shows how it developed and gained momentum from the late 1800s on, so it’s not exactly like a precipice ahead of us that we’re approaching. But with respect to the younger generations, she shows how dramatically things have changed in the last 1-2 decades.

The thesis of the book is controversial, as it may apply to modern Quaker faith and practice. Crudely stated, a deep cultural-technological shift has sabotaged our ability to take and carry responsibilities. In one oft-cited example, it’s harder and harder to find younger Friends who can participate fully in the life of our meetings, because the youngers are more heavily affected than their elders.

Okay, that’s pretty crude. It doesn’t apply evenly across the board, and certainly it’s not meant as a way to “blame the victim” (in classic sociological terminology) — but it certainly does have that connotation. There are other factors too, and obviously we can’t simply rewind the clock two or three centuries in order to deal with this problem.

For me, it offers a starting point that can help us to 1) identify the problem, 2) locate ways that Friends in past generations recognized the same problem, 3) re-evaluate Quaker testimonies that may have helped in the past, and 4) reshape our corporate faith and practice in order to meet this insidious challenge.

It’s fun to look at specific words, and two words in the title offer an opening toward a deeper understanding of the issues. Remember, “attention” uses the same root as in “attending meeting for worship” and “attending to a matter” (or a responsibility). And if the word “dark” has any specific meaning aside from reference to various “dark ages” in history, then the Quaker fetish for analogies relating to “light” may be useful.

As I say at the top, this book “speaks to my condition.” In that sense, anyone can read it as a personal exercise, and use it as a Quaker-type query to reflect on our own personal habits of mind. I know for sure that I’m easily distracted, so it’s not something I cast upon others from my own glass house.

Especially in recent weeks, our meeting has had more than a handful of out-of-town visitors who were part of the grassroots Obama campaign. (We’re in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state.) That’s perhaps the best evidence I can offer to support the notion that organized Quakerdom is somehow congruent with the movement that took shape around the recent election.

Maybe other folks traveling with the Obama campaign visited other congregations, but at least some were traveling Friends. And others, by choosing to worship with us in their off-hours, showed an affinity with Quakers even if they haven’t been recorded as ‘members’ at any particular meeting.

In the months and years ahead, we’re probably going to see more of this overlap.

Here’s a heads-up:

This video is posted in the context of an emerging discussion about how well the Obama administration will tolerate independent progressive grassroots politics. During the campaign they kept their hands on the reins as best they could, running a very tight political organization. Which runs against the grain of the style of organizing they adopted.

The DNC 50-State Strategy and MyBarackObama.com are two places to watch to see how this contest goes. (I’m probably not explaining it very well. Check out the video and the two articles.)

In any case, Friends in many parts of the country may have a front-row seat for what happens next. Just a thought.

By the way, in the video, someone mentions in passing one of the roots of Obama’s organizing strategy — the Cesar Chavez house-meetings model! I remember that, and the Friends I knew then (in the early ’70s) were pretty closely involved in that campaign too.

Later: As it happens, while I was writing the above, the Obama campaign sent out an email to supporters commending the DNC’s 50-state strategy. This may be their contribution, for now, to the discussion:

The Democratic National Committee poured all of its resources into building our successful 50-state field program. And they played a crucial role in helping Barack win in unlikely states like North Carolina and Indiana. We even picked up an electoral vote in Nebraska.

The DNC took on considerable debt to make this happen.

The DNC began building a 50-state organization in 2005.

The infrastructure they put in place over the last four years opened up a new batch of battleground states where a Democratic nominee hadn’t been competitive for a generation.

In the final few months, the DNC went above and beyond to expand our ground efforts and ensure victory.

We couldn’t have won this election without their support.

As we start laying the groundwork for real change, we need to help the DNC recover the resources it took to win. Please make a donation today and get your 2008 Victory T-shirt:

This movement for change is just getting started, and we look forward to working with you to bring the change this country needs.