Bad karma.

Remember this phenomenon--Americans proudly driving Hummers to show solidarity with US troops in Iraq? (Rick Schmidt of the International Hummer Owners Group, IHOG, described the fuel-inefficient armored toaster on wheels as "a symbol of what we all hold so dearly above all else, the fact we have the freedom of choice, the freedom of happiness, the freedom of adventure and discovery, and the ultimate freedom of expression... Those who deface a Hummer in words or deed, deface the American flag and what it stands for.") As it turns out, Hummers are getting our guys killed in Iraq. These vehicles are too lightweight, don't have room to allow machine gunners to return fire, and have body panels of aluminum and fiberglass--far too thin to protect against the improvised bombs being set along Iraq's roadways. Realizing this GIs have begun retrofitting Humvees with cardboard and metal reinforcement and sand bags.

Also:
An autocentric new ad, as described by the travel blog World Hum: Travel Dispatches from a Shrinking Planet:

I was jazzed to see what appeared to be a Southeast Asian village on my TV last night during a series of commercials. Images of a colorful foot procession down a narrow street and locals in ornate headdresses filled the screen. The pictures took me right back to my trip to the region a couple of years ago. At the center of the procession was a woman being carried on a pedestal, her face obscured behind silky curtains. But the woman and the villagers weren't the stars of the commercial. A shiny new Range Rover SUV suddenly appeared, rolling into the middle of the procession, then stopping in its tracks. The camera studied the locals, then the truck's plush leather interior. The natives, who undoubtedly wouldn't make enough money in an entire lifetime to buy one of the gas-guzzling trucks, stared at it in awe. Finally, the woman on the pedestal waved the car through with a roll of her fingers. The kicker? "Respect. Range Rover. Land Rover. The most well-traveled vehicles on earth." The entire commercial is featured here.

Who's this Wesley Clark fella?

With a left(ish)-leaning, one-time NATO Supreme Allied Commander throwing his hat into the presidential race, people are understandably excited by Gen. Wesley Clark's candidacy. I mean, he's got more military clout than Kerry (and, needless to say, Bush), a convincingly presidential demeanor, a Dean-ish populist bent, and on-the-record progressive policy stances. With the right runningmate--Howard? Hillary? Al?--he'd make a formidable ticket. Even Michael Moore's atwitter over the possibility; his open letter to Clark enthuses:

1. You oppose the Patriot Act and would fight the expansion of its powers.

2. You are firmly pro-choice.

3. You filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan's affirmative action case.

4. You would get rid of the Bush tax "cut" and make the rich pay their fair share.

5. You respect the views of our allies and want to work with them and with the rest of the international community.

6. And you oppose war. You have said that war should always be the "last resort" and that it is military men such as yourself who are the most for peace because it is YOU and your soldiers who have to do the dying. You find something unsettling about a commander-in-chief who dons a flight suit and pretends to be Top Gun, a stunt that dishonored those who have died in that flight suit in the service of their country.

Still, you've gotta cringe when in April he wrote of the "scent of victory" in Iraq, opining, "Can anything be more moving than the joyous throngs swarming the streets of Baghdad?" Or when he said that war with Iraq was the "right call." Is this really our anti-war candidate? And credible lefties like Wayne Madsen (who sees Clark's candidacy as part of a plot by neoconservative Democrats who really support Lieberman) and Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn (who, in 1999, called him a "vain, pompous brownnoser") have reservations about Clark in the Oval Office.

At the very least, it'll be interesting to see how Clark's candidacy affects Kerry and Dean and Kucinich--and to see the AWOL guardsman Bush shake in his boots a little.

Learn more:
Clark BBC bio
Official website

Miscellany

On a freeway overpass: "Dear America, Thanks for all the money. Sorry about your kids. --Hallliburton Oil"

What happens when TV is permitted in the world's last Buddhist theocracy? The Guardian on TV, Bhutan, and the erosion of culture.

Al Franken's comic, The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus.

Krugman on tax-cuts for the rich

Economist Paul Krugman, looking into today's rampant tax-cuts-for-the-rich ideology, writes an eye-opening history of the rise of Reagan-style supply-side economics and its more extreme proponents who currently advise the White House. Despite taxes that are lower than most developed countries, and income taxes half what they were for the highest bracket in the 1970s, today's rich and powerful think it's still too much. Their "starve-the-beast" mentality aims to reduce the size and influence of government. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, once said, ''I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.'' In another report he added, ''The goal is reducing the size and scope of government by draining its lifeblood." If Grover had his way, there'd be no Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Writes Krugman:

Here's how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There's a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don't pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these ''lucky duckies.'' (Yes, that's what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as The Journal said, to get their ''blood boiling with tax rage.''

--snip--

You might think that you could turn to the administration's own pronouncements to learn why it has been so determined to cut taxes. But even if you try to take the administration at its word, there's a problem: the public rationale for tax cuts has shifted repeatedly over the past three years.

During the 2000 campaign and the initial selling of the 2001 tax cut, the Bush team insisted that the federal government was running an excessive budget surplus, which should be returned to taxpayers. By the summer of 2001, as it became clear that the projected budget surpluses would not materialize, the administration shifted to touting the tax cuts as a form of demand-side economic stimulus: by putting more money in consumers' pockets, the tax cuts would stimulate spending and help pull the economy out of recession. By 2003, the rationale had changed again: the administration argued that reducing taxes on dividend income, the core of its plan, would improve incentives and hence long-run growth -- that is, it had turned to a supply-side argument.

These shifting rationales had one thing in common: none of them were credible. It was obvious to independent observers even in 2001 that the budget projections used to justify that year's tax cut exaggerated future revenues and understated future costs. It was similarly obvious that the 2001 tax cut was poorly designed as a demand stimulus. And we have already seen that the supply-side rationale for the 2003 tax cut was tested and found wanting by the Congressional Budget Office.

So what were the Bush tax cuts really about? The best answer seems to be that they were about securing a key part of the Republican base. Wealthy campaign contributors have a lot to gain from lower taxes, and since they aren't very likely to depend on Medicare, Social Security or Medicaid, they won't suffer if the beast gets starved. Equally important was the support of the party's intelligentsia, nurtured by policy centers like Heritage and professionally committed to the tax-cut crusade. The original Bush tax-cut proposal was devised in late 1999 not to win votes in the national election but to fend off a primary challenge from the supply-sider Steve Forbes, the presumptive favorite of that part of the base.

--snip--

The astonishing political success of the antitax crusade has, more or less deliberately, set the United States up for a fiscal crisis. How we respond to that crisis will determine what kind of country we become.

If Grover Norquist is right -- and he has been right about a lot -- the coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians -- in the name of fiscal necessity -- to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.

In Norquist's vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

But as Governor Riley of Alabama reminds us, that's a choice, not a necessity. The tax-cut crusade has created a situation in which something must give. But what gives -- whether we decide that the New Deal and the Great Society must go or that taxes aren't such a bad thing after all -- is up to us. The American people must decide what kind of a country we want to be.

Misleader.org

When George W. Bush was running for President, he said, "I believe everyone should be held responsible for their own personal behavior." Perhaps he's glad that MoveOn has launched a website to provide a little accountability. Visit Misleader.org and see where W's actions get derailed from his words:

ON TAX CUTS:
George Bush: "The tax relief is for everyone who pays income taxes...Americans will keep, this year, an average of almost $1,000 more of their own money."

The Truth: Nearly half of all taxpayers get less than $100. And 31% of all taxpayers get nothing at all.

ON JOBS:
George Bush: "Our first goal is...an economy that grows fast enough to employ every man and woman who seeks a job."

The Truth: Bush is the first President since Hoover to preside over an economy that has lost jobs, not created them - more than 2.9 million since 2001.

ON THE ENVIRONMENT:
George Bush: "[My] Clear Skies legislation...mandates a 70% cut in air pollution from power plants over the next 15 years."

The Truth: The Bush plan will allow more than 100,000 additional premature deaths by 2020 than alternative legislation developed by the Environmental Protection Agency. The plan does not regulate carbon emissions and allows far more sulfur and mercury emissions.

ON EDUCATION:
George Bush: "[W]e achieved historic education reform - which must now be carried out in every school and in every classroom."

The Truth: Bush cut $8 billion from the promised funds for education.

Quote

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the commen men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

--Primo Levi

What can $87 billion buy?

For starters, Bush's bill for undoing the mess in Iraq could cover the budget deficits in ALL the states. It could cover two years' worth of unemployment benefits for 1.1 million Americans who are out of work. $87 billion is: twice as much as the US spends on Homeland Security, nine times as much as it spends on special education, ten times what it spends on all environmental protection efforts, and on and on. Fiscal conservative, my ass.

Blue in the USA

Perhaps I love his use of "crypto-human land whales" to describe the overweight, but James Howard Kunstler can write a gripping lead:

Having just returned from a week in England where, among other things, walking more than ten yards a day is quite normal, I was once again startled by the crypto-human land whales waddling down the aisles of my local supermarket in search of Nabisco Snack-Wells, Wow chips, and other fraudulent inducements to "diet" by overindulgence in "low-fat" carbohydrate-laden treats. And they did not look happy.

His point is a serious one: Have any reporters noticed how we actually live here in America?

With very few exceptions, our cities are hollowed out ruins. Our towns have committed ritualized suicide in thrall to the WalMart God. Most Americans live in suburban habitats that are isolating, disaggregated, and neurologically punishing, and from which every last human quality unrelated to shopping convenience and personal hygiene has been expunged. We live in places where virtually no activity or service can be accessed without driving a car, and the (usually solo) journey past horrifying vistas of on-ramps and off-ramps offers no chance of a social encounter along the way. Our suburban environments have by definition destroyed the transition between the urban habitat and the rural hinterlands. In other words, we can't walk out of town into the countryside anywhere. Our "homes," as we have taken to calling mere mass-produced vinyl boxes at the prompting of the realtors, exist in settings leached of meaningful public space or connection to civic amenity, with all activity focused inward to the canned entertainments piped into giant receivers -- where the children especially sprawl in masturbatory trances, fondling joysticks and keyboards, engorged on cheez doodles and taco chips.

Bush bucks

Oh my:

ROANOKE RAPIDS, N.C. -- Police are searching for a man who paid for $150 in groceries at a Food Lion grocery store with a $200 bill. The man walked out of the store with his groceries and $50 in change before the fake bill was discovered Sept. 6.

The bogus bill -- the U.S. Mint does not print a $200 bill -- bore the image of President George W. Bush on the front and had the White House on the back. It also included signs on the front lawn of the front lawn of the White House with slogans such as "We like broccoli" and "USA deserves a tax cut," Roanoke Rapids police said. Instead of being labeled a Federal Reserve note, the fake bill was marked as a "Moral Reserve Note." The bill bore the signatures of Ronald Reagan, political mentor, and George H.W. Bush, campaign adviser and mentor. Officials at the local Food Lion had no comment. Food Lion officials at the company headquarters in Salisbury could only say their normal policy is not to accept bills over $100.

Meanwhile, police in Roanoke Rapids arrested a man Tuesday who attempted to spend a $200 bill at a convenience store in August. Authorities say Michael Harris was jailed Tuesday night under $2,500 bond. Investigators say Harris is not the same person who passed a similar fake bill at the Food Lion grocery store, but police believe the two cases are connected.

Via Tom Tomorrow.

Chaos in Cancun

With some 10,000 indigenous Mexicans streaming into Cancun, and witnesses from around the world gathered, the WTO conference there is off to a queasy start: prominent antiglobalization activists have been under surveillance by the Mexican government (including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Jose Bove), and others on the list, reports Leif Utne, "ran into a raft of logistical headaches in the weeks leading up to the WTO summit, including cancelled hotel reservations, new visa requirements, and delays processing their visas. Several were even blocked from entering the country, including Evo Morales, a Bolivian indigenous leader and recent presidential runner-up." In sad news, Kun Hai Lee, a South Korean farmer, committed ritual suicide during the WTO's opening day to protest the organization's agricultural policies. Standing in front of police lines, he said, "the WTO kills farmers," and then slashed himself to death with a blade.

Seen. Noted. Listed.

While Republicans in Congress would never stand for it, calls for Bush's impeachment are growing. The Santa Cruz, CA, city council just voted 6-1 to ask the House Judiciary Committee to consider impeachment proceedings against President Bush.

"Don't talk like a twit," urges Jonathan Rowe in an excellent piece in Yes! The Right embraces "a strong-father family. It values authority, discipline, individual enterprise, and personal responsibility. The Left, by contrast, favors the nurturing mother: support, assistance, care, cohesion, and the like." All fine, except that from time to time the Left would be well-served to "speak as though listeners matter, and that we attend to what listeners hear and not just what we want to say."

Often people are further along than we think; they just see the path in different ways. Christian conservatives, for example, have been involved in the fight to get commercial influences out of the schools—not because they hate corporations or capitalism, but because they oppose the way corporations are undermining parental authority. It’s a different way of getting to essentially the same place. There might be many such common places, if only we can speak in language that does not distance us from the people we need to reach.

Yes! also has a great interview with former Congressman and current General Secretary of the National Council of Churches Bob Edgar about the Win Without War coalition and the role of the faithful in progressive causes:

I think there are two ways to read the Bible. One is to read it with a focus on the parts that call for the Messiah to be the leader of a mighty military and separate the good from the evil. They see God as a God of judgment who will divide the good from the bad, and good people are going to survive and evil people are going to die.

The other way of reading the Scripture is to focus on the parts that teach love and justice, forgiveness and reconciliation. Even the early church had difficulty understanding Jesus when he talked about loving your neighbor, loving enemies, and caring about the least of these, the brothers and sisters on planet Earth. This other way of reading sees that nonviolent action, of the kind Martin Luther King Jr. practiced, is more powerful than violence.

More bad news for local news: Via Cursor, a disturbing story about the widespread use of video press releases or "canned news": with budget cuts and media consolidation, these preproduced sections are often passed off as local reporting when they have little to do with, and little value to, the local community. Is your local station using canned news?

One might laugh at New York's $166 million deal to let Snapple be its official beverage (the Big Snapple, get it?). But the deal also allows the juicemaker to immediately install vending machines in the city's 1,200 public schools. After January 1, machines will go into city-owned office buildings, police stations and other municipal sites.

And, to end with a little humor, the $87 billion figure Mr. Bush asked for in his address to the nation the other night is grossly underestimated--by about $55 billion.

Autodidacts, rejoice!

MIT has just begun putting their courses online, for free! Check it out at OpenCourseWare. By 2007, all of its courses should be online.

Continue fighting the FCC

The final showdown in the fight against media monopoly is here: it all comes down to how the Senate votes in the next two weeks. On the floor are initiatives that would roll back the FCC's June 2 media ownership rule changes that favor giant media megacorporations over the public interest.

If we can gather 100,000 signatures in conjunction with MoveOn.org by the end of the week, Senator Snowe (R-ME) and Senator Dorgan (D-ND) will host a crucial press event to submit this petition to their colleagues.
Because 2.3 million Americans — conservative and liberal — decried the FCC's lifting of media ownership caps, Big Media lobbyists are fighting back hard. We can't outspend Big Media, but if we can gather 100,000 signatures by the end of the week, we stand a good chance of winning on the Senate floor.

Sign the petition here, now.

The bogus terror-war

Former British MP Michael Meacher writes a chilling perspective on the "war on terrorism" and the neo-conservative agenda:

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination.

Read the full story.

A few more...

Groan: Some 70% of Americans believe it's possible Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9-11 terrorist attacks, according to a new poll. Seventy-one percent in a Time poll thought the US was doing a "good job" in Iraq since major fighting ended, and 52% of people still think George Bush is swell.

Despite that last statistic, there's hope to unseat Bush, according to a new CNN survey. They found that 41% of registered voters would "definitely" vote against Bush, regardless of the Democratic candidate.

Go Ted Go! Here's Nightline's Ted Koppel on the Patriot Act:

The men who drafted our constitution, who framed our civil rights and protected our various freedoms under the law would, I suspect, retch at some of the bone headed, self-serving, misinterpretations of their intentions that they so often use these days to undermine the very freedoms they pretend to safeguard. The miracle of American Law is not that it protects popular speech, or the privacy of the powerful, or the homes of the priviledged, but rather, that the least among us, those with the fewest defenses thoses suspected of the worst crimes -- the most despised in our midst, are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

That remains as revolutionary a concept now as it was in the 1780s. It makes protecting the country against terrorism excruciatingly difficult, but we cannot arbitrarily suspend the rights of one catagory of suspects without endangering all the others.

Dear Scrabble nerds: Scrabblog randomly generates seven tiles and squares each day; readers can post their highest-scoring combination. Whee. (Via A Welsh View.)

Art in war: New York artist Steve Mumford describes the cross-cultural difficulties of making art in Baghdad.

Drawing here takes a little getting used to. The Iraqis are intensely interested in most things western, so the presence of an American sitting on a stoop or at a cafe making a drawing always elicits an avid audience. Every brushstroke is watched, and people have many questions. The Iraqi sense of personal space is very different from a westerner's; here people crowd in so close they're touching me, and men feel free to stab at the paper to point out someone I've drawn whom they know.

Random bits.

Turns out an ultrafine, "nanoscale" powder of iron shavings can be used to help clean up contaminated water and soil.

Leif and a team from Utne will begin blogging from the World Trade Organization conference in Cancun on Sunday. Tune in here.

In politics, Estrada backs out, and the courts put the kibosh on the FCC's plan to relax media ownership rules. One account says Bush must be thrilled; the ruling will delay this hot-button issue til a non-election year.

Richard Reeves offers ten reasons why Bush can't win.

The Dalai Lama, in an exclusive Guardian interview, imagines a time when he might be able to end his exile and move back to Lhasa.

And, in closing, low-tech ninja ping-pong.

The Blind Prophet

Before the war, President Bush told us Iraq was a throbbing hub of terror. It wasn't, of course. But it is now.

(Under)dogged determination: Chand, Corbu and Chandigarh

I wrote the following for a magazine on the theme of "winners and losers," but they didn't end up using it. Since the themes of creative autonomy, persistence, reclamation, and "mastery" are so strong, I'd like to post it here.

In 1951, Nek Chand was hired as a roads inspector to help construct LeCorbusier’s master plan for the new capital city of Chandigarh in northern India. When not laboring in service of the great architect’s vision, Chand quietly carved out a secret legacy of his own in the jungle outside town—one that eventually trumped the great Corbu’s city of Chandigarh.

To give LeCorbusier a blank slate to design an entire 240-acre city, the shining symbol of a modernizing India, twenty villages had to be razed. Chand worked in a secluded clearing under cover of darkness for 18 years transforming scavenged materials from that rubble into mosaic-tile trees, monkeys, bears, men, women, walls, and waterfalls--all using the newest construction techniques he picked up during his day job. He created some 2,000 sculptures by the time his illegal Rock Garden--created without permission on government land--was discovered in 1972. Despite countless threats to destroy the garden--one in which a human wall prevented bulldozers from plowing a roadway through the park (when has "legitimate" art inspired this kind of passion?)—Chand’s work still stands, a symbol of his autonymous spirit.

John Maizels, editor of Raw Vision, a magazine dedicated to contemporary outsider art, wrote that Chand is "a self-taught genius whose use of spatial relationships on such a massive scale could compete with the greatest of architects." In fact, it can be argued that Chand not only competed with, but triumphed over Corbu. Criticized by Indians for its user-unfriendly designs, cold lines, and Western building materials ill-fit for India’s harsh elements, Chandigarh is considered Le Corbusier’s great failure. By contrast, Chand--whose kingdom was birthed from the discarded waste of LeCorbusier’s city--was relieved of his job as road inspector so he could work full time with pay on his dream city, a work now memorialized on one of India’s postage stamps.

In an "edict" summarizing his work in Chandigarh, LeCorbusier wrote: "The age of personal statues is gone. No personal statues shall be erected in the city or parks of Chandigarh. The city is planned to breathe the new sublimated spirit of art." Thankfully, it’s an edict Chand managed to ignore.

Quick musings

Civil war, world war. What are we doing in the Middle East? Certainly "stabilizing it" ain't the answer. The Taleban seems to be taking charge again in Afghanistan. With foreign fighters from Pakistan, Syria, Egypt and other countries streaming into Iraq and Afghanistan, we're apparently only succeeding in achieving a massive two-fer: we started a civil war in Iraq while simultaneously starting if not a world war, then a Middle East-wide conflict. Am I exaggerating? Maybe. But consider: with the bombing of a UN building in Baghdad two weeks back, it's clear even the UN isn't safe in Iraq. Then who is? Not Shiite Muslims who now find themselves warring against each other: Shiite supporters of the US-backed Iraqi government were the target of last week's mosque bombing, an act allegedly perpetrated by anti-US Shiites. The "Roadmap to Peace" is in shambles, with bloodshed continuing to occur in Gaza. On top of it, with the American economy floundering, we're pissing away almost $5 billion a month on a losing venture in the Middle East.

Get out the vote. Campaigns left and right--literally--will be spending untold fortunes on get-out-the-vote efforts. Looking to Howard Dean's grassroots methods of shoring up base support, Republicans, too, are trying to keep their traditional supporters in their sights. Thing is, too many people are pissed off: environmentalists, minorities, women, even American Muslims are working to make Congress hear their voices. I think there's great opportunity: the Muslim community, like Kucinich/Dean democrats, are making civil liberties a core issue--something Bush and the Republicans can never claim. Hopefully these progressive voter movements will gel across race and interest lines.

To get involved, check out William Upski Wimsatt's list of voter-rights groups from this month's issue of Yes:
NAACP National Voter Fund
Future 500
League of Women Voters
Youth Vote Coalition
Project Vote
Voces del Pueblo
Rock the Vote
and others.

Mindfucked:Kalle Lasn on toxic culture, mental environmentalism, and running shoes

When it debuted in 1989, Adbusters magazine was a small "Pacific Northwest rag that had a circulation of 7,000," according to its publisher Kalle Lasn. It was filled with subverted ads that presented an alternate truth to the slick appeals of McDonald’s and Nike, activist news, and how-to guides for "billboard liberation" and other culture-jamming tactics. Today, the Vancouver-based "journal of the mental environment" has a circulation of over 120,000 worldwide and a "culture jammers network" of some 80,000 people who submit content for the magazine, participate in its various campaigns, and send in photos of anti-consumerist pranks carried out around the world. I interviewed Lasn recently on the evolution of the mental environmental movement, the recent activism surrounding the Federal Communications Commission’s June 2 vote on media ownership rules, and Adbusters’ controversial new plan to go head-to-head with brand giant Nike.

Paul Schmelzer: No one expected such a huge outcry against the FCC’s ruling in June—despite a near blackout in the mainstream press, some 2 million Americans contacted the FCC or Congress urging them to overturn the ownership ruling. Is this merely a one-time case of consumer outrage, or is it part of the "mental environmental" movement?

Kalle Lasn: It’s definitely a part of it, but I can’t quite answer to what extent. I do know that, ever since the Battle in Seattle, whenever I talk to other jammers, the edgy issues seem to be less green issues and more blue issues--blue issues being politics of the mental environment and media democracy issues. I think that the real fire in the belly of many activists is this gnawing feeling that they grew up in a toxic culture and they’re not whole human beings anymore. That they’ve been--I keep using this word mindfucked, because that’s the term they use. They say, "I’ve been mindfucked."

The real fire in the belly of many activists is this gnawing feeling that they grew up in a toxic culture and they’re not whole human beings anymore. If you feel that the corporations or the mass media have taken away your soul, I think this is the sort of rage--what I call psycho-rage--that drives revolution.

They feel like they’ve been lied to and subverted all their lives as they grew up. And now at the age of 16 or 18 or 20, whatever they art, they just feel that something valuable has been taken away from them--in Situationist terms, this spontaneity, this authenticity, this feeling of really being alive. That somehow that’s been taken away and they’re forced into these branded, cynical lives that aren’t worth too much. And I think this feeling that they’ve been cheated--that they’ve been mentally cheated, that they’ve been psychically cheated--this is a very powerful force.

If you feel that the corporations or the mass media have taken away your soul like that, I think this is the sort of rage--what I call psycho-rage--that drives revolution. This is the rage that is driving this movement that some people call the media democracy movement and some people call the mental environmental movement and other people don’t even call it anything, they’re just fighting back because they know that something is wrong.

PS: You’ve used the term "Media Carta" for some time now...

This movement has the potential to change every damn nook and cranny of the way the world is run. Everything from the way television stations are run to the way parents look at the media diet of their kids to issues like what is going to be the human right of the communication age.

KL: That’s been our buzzword, but more and more lately, we’re using both. We’re using media carta as a campaign we’re trying to pull off. Now we’re openly talking about the mental environmental movement. And we’re basically saying that this movement will be driven by this psycho-rage, and that rage will be every bit as strong as the eco-rage that drove the physical environmental movement 20 or 30 years ago, and that this movement has the potential to change every damn nook and cranny of the way the world is run. Everything from the way television stations are run to the way parents look at the media diet of their kids to human rights issues like what is going to be the human right of the communication age—well, it’s going to be the right to communicate, the right that every human being on the planet should have to access the media. Not just to have freedom of opinion and freedom of speech, but actually have access: to be able to buy airtime on TV stations and to be able to have your own website (you can already do that). To have real access, so that if you have some opinions, you can make those opinions heard.

PS: Are all these movements gelling together? Mental environmentalism seems to be the umbrella that encompasses the work of Commercial Alert, Adbusters, Free Press, the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, etc.

KL: I think you’re definitely right. There’s a huge, crazy mix of things: the media literacy movement, on one hand, that’s percolating among high schools and some universities, and there’s pirate radio and pirate TV and there’s these people running around with their camcorders and making really nice short films they can stream on their websites. Then, of course, there’s that larger official media democracy movement that’s holding conferences like the media reform conference that’s happening soon, like the people behind the counter-summit at the information summit in Geneva. They’re actively pushing for this "media carta" kind of right to communicate. So, yeah, there’s a whole motley bunch of people who are all realizing that they well may be part of the same movement that’s gelling now.

PS: Changing subjects: I wasn’t aware that you were actually producing a shoe, the Black Spot Sneaker.

KL: Yeah, we’ve got this exciting thing—this kind of crazy thing—that’s guaranteed to piss a few people off, but we’re seeing where it can possibly lead. It’s at the very, very early stages at the moment, and I’m surprised actually that we’re getting this kind of publicity on it.

PS: My first response is: that’s weird. Now they’re going to run ads in Adbusters and run $500,000 campaigns on CNN? It reminds me, too, of "hip consumerism," the concept Thomas Frank wrote about in The Conquest of Cool: now I can purchase shoes that tell the world I’m anticorporate.

KL: Yeah, but there’s another way of looking at it. Sure we’re selling a shoe, but what we’re really selling is an idea. The idea that you can whine against Nike, you can bite at their heels, you can try to boycott them and all the rest of it, but it’s possible also to develop an anti-brand that uses their multibillion-dollar cool and subverts it in some way and actually reduces their market share--and then uses that money to fuel the sort of ideas and campaigns that we believe in. I know it’s a very controversial idea, but I like the idea. I like the idea of going head-to-head with Philly Boy [Nike CEO Phil Knight]. I’ve already got hundreds of people who preordered the shoe, just in the three days the website’s been up—it’s not even properly up yet.

You can whine against Nike, you can bite at their heels, you can try to boycott them and all the rest of it, but it’s possible also to develop an anti-brand that basically uses their multibillion-dollar cool and subverts it.

PS: Culture-jamming has that notion of jujitsu—using the weight of your enemy against him: this does seem like the manufacturing version of that. It’s a Trojan Horse: it’s an athletic shoe, but it embodies different values.

KL: You can see it as a product, as everybody does at the moment. I just did a radio interview based on that Globe and Mail article, and they tried to blast me out of the water because they just don’t like Adbusters talking that way. But I see that if you’re wearing that shoe of ours, you’re actually wearing more of an idea than you’re wearing a shoe. You’re basically an ad for a different kind of capitalism. The idea side of what we’re doing is way more important than the shoe itself. If we pull this off, I think a similar kind of precedent-setting thing can be pulled off in other industries as well. I don’t see any reason why we can’t develop some sort of anti-brand that has its own cool and its own incredible power.

For the past 10 years, Phil Knight’s been laughing at us. And he’s been playing games with us. And we haven't uncooled him hardly at all. He’s still flying high. This may worry him a bit more than another liberated billboard of his. Especially the way we’ll try to mock him in the New York Times and put up a billboard right next to his Beaverton headquarters and we’ll try to jam his Niketowns. I think we can have some fun with this.

PS: I tend to buy things—if it’s Fair Trade, I’ll buy it because it fits my values. I think people have a problem that it’s you guys doing it, not that you’re selling shoes that are from non-sweatshop factories and…

KL: Paul, I’ll sell you a pair of sneakers!

PS: Of course, I’m critical of it, but I’d like to get a pair too.

KL: That’s another interesting part. Another reason why I’m doing this—it’s a side reason—is I’ve been uncomfortable with this whole sweatshop phenomenon for a long time. I traveled around the poorest countries of the world for three years when I was young, and I know that some of these factories aren’t sweatshops, and some of them are the best factories in those countries. I know that we can find a factory that we can be absolutely proud of in Indonesia or in China or god knows wherever we decide to go. I don’t like the idea that every factory in China is dubbed a sweatshop. That’s not right. This is a big mistake the activist community has made. It’s more driven by the trade union people than it is by the activists. The activists are making a big mistake.

PS: It’s a good point. I’m a big label-reader, but I don’t know if everything in Thailand is produced in sweatshop conditions.

KL: There are some bad sweatshops in Thailand, but I can assure that there are some really good factories there, that are the best factories in the land, that pay more than any other factory, that have better working conditions--and the whole country really needs those factories.

PS: So will these shoes have that kind of transparency? Here’s where it was made, here are the conditions…

KL: I’m not quite sure yet. We’re still brainstorming on all this. Even within the office there are a lot of people who don’t really like what we’re doing. But down the road, I’m sure we’ll muddle through, and we may actually launch a huge debate and challenge the activist community on their half-baked ideas about sweatshops. That could be another side-benefit.

Duh-vernor.

Schwarzenegger makes Bush look erudite and Jesse Ventura seem, well, not quite so dumb. Here he's telling Sean Hannity that he believes gay marriage "is something that should be between a man and a woman." Plus, a lewd interview the family-values Republican did with porn magazine Oui in 1977. Topics: drugs, orgies, penis size.

Die Laughing

In a column that begins, "Here's a headline you don't see every day: 'War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals,'" the Moscow Times addresses the laughability of the Bush administration's latest plan in Iraq:

...Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out U.S. tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo -- perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad -- and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people -- even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" -- aren't exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam's goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they're certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also reopened Saddam's most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis -- men, women and children as young as 11 -- seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times of London reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave." Perhaps an Iraqi Anna Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day...

-----snip----

[T]he U.S. alliance with Saddam's killers -- yes, the very ones who inflicted all those human rights abuses which, we're now told, was the onliest reason the Dear Leader attacked and destroyed a sovereign nation in an unprovoked war of aggression -- was described demurely as "an unusual compromise." (As opposed to, say, "a moral outrage," or "a putrid stain on America's honor," or "a monstrous copulation of rapacious conquerors with bloodthirsty scum.") However, the Post hastens to assure us that the wise sahibs do recognize the "potential pitfalls" of hooking up with "an instrument renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment."

Catching up

Sorry folks, I've been swamped with other projects and unable to update Eyeteeth much. So here's a few quick links. I'll be back at it with, um, gusto soon:

Microsoft Worry: As a freelance writer e-mailing Microsoft Word files to editors hither and yon, this story was worrisome. If you send a Word file, you might also be sending personal data, information from other files open on your desktop while you're using the application, or any of the text you edited out.

Fast Food follies: Stay Free! has just digitized an old issue that features tales from fast-food's front lines, including my encounter with Burger King's acid vats. Mmmm, mmmm.

Blogger's delight: If, like me, you do lots of internet research, the New York Times' Lisa Guernsey offers research tips, special Google commands, and web resources you might not've stumbled on yourself. (I'd add to the list the blog search engines Technorati, Blogdex, and Daypop).

And don't forget the politics: The news these days is so disheartening I hesitate to dwell on it long enough to do an Eyeteeth post: estimates for costs of rebuilding infrastructure in Iraq have been steadily rising (now Bremer says it'll cost "several tens of billions of dollars" in the next year); meanwhile, Bechtel and Cheney's buds at Halliburton are getting an even sweeter deal for their work in Iraq (an additional $350 million of taxpayer cash); kids keep dying in Iraq (yet our fearless president hasn't found time--what, with his busy fundraising schedule and all--to attend a single funeral for fallen US GIs). (Check out Cursor for a daily recap of news you should know.)

Yes! Read it.

Quote du jour: "One problem I have with Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts" (Molly Ivins).

Greatest American Hero

As Siva Vaidhyanathan once said in this space, "Libraries are considered to be dangerous places and librarians are our heroes... A library is a temple to the notion that knowledge is not just for the elite and that access should be low cost if not free, that doors should be open." So forget the $39.99 George W. Bush action figure, here's a more fitting hero for John Ashcroft's America: The Librarian Action Figure! Modeled after real librarian Nancy Pearl, the figurine comes with "push-button shushing action"--and hopefully Patriot Act–defying nerves, paper-shredding motion, and record-purging powers as well. (Via Mother Jones.)

Click here for other action figures: Freud, Rosie the Riveter, Shakespeare, Einstein, Jesus, and the, um, Albino Bowler.

Choking on lies

Any lie the Bush administration tells is excused as required for national security. Even if it harms people (and, let's be honest, most of them do). Take the admission that the EPA had absolutely no evidence suggesting the air in New York City was safe to breathe following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Nonetheless BushCo pressured the EPA to release a false statement. The AP reports:

...The White House "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" by having the National Security Council control EPA communications in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, according to a report issued late Thursday by EPA Inspector General Nikki L. Tinsley.

"When EPA made a Sept. 18 announcement that the air was 'safe' to breathe, the agency did not have sufficient data and analyses to make the statement," the report says, adding that the EPA had yet to adequately monitor air quality for contaminants such as PCBs, soot and dioxin.

In all, the EPA issued five press releases within 10 days of the attacks and four more by the end of 2001 reassuring the public about air quality. But it wasn't until June 2002 that the EPA determined that air quality had returned to pre-Sept. 11 levels -- well after respiratory ailments and other problems began to surface in hundreds of workers cleaning dusty offices and apartments.

The day after the attacks, former EPA Deputy Administrator Linda Fisher's chief of staff e-mailed senior EPA officials to say that "all statements to the media should be cleared" first by the National Security Council, which is Bush's main forum for discussing national security and foreign policy matters with his senior aides and Cabinet, the inspector general's report says.

Read the full story. Via TruthOut.org.

Franken wins

As expected, Fox's trademark infringement lawsuit against Al Franken for using their trademarked language "Fair and Balanced" in his new book title, was laughed out of court. Literally. Deeming the work a legitimate form of expression--parody--the judge concluded, "Of course, it is ironic that a media company that should be fighting for the First Amendment is trying to undermine it."