Republican Attack Machine FAIL

The RNC tried to get out in front of Obama's speech today by dredging up an old quote Obama made about the Constitution being "flawed." Right, um, guys, he was talking about slavery.

FACT: Obama Explains The Constitution's "Fundamental Flaw" Was Slavery. The out of context video the RNC links to contains audio from a September 6, 2001 program called "Slavery and the Constitution" on WBEZ Chicago. On the show, Obama explained that the "fundamental flaw" was "Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the framers." In addition, the framers did not "see...it as a moral problem involving persons of moral worth." [WBEZ Radio, accessed 5/21/09]

And Republicans in the House today will seek to investigate Nancy Pelosi for what she knew about torture while defending the torture she allegedly knew about. And now, even the former CIA Director, Porter Goss, refuses to say whether he was told about torture techniques, essentially refusing to contradict Pelosi's allegation.

The sickest part here is that the Democrats run scared from this nonsense.

Their Ideal World

Michelle Bernard is one of the new entries to the cable news jabberfest, an African-American woman whose ideology is rarely if ever identified. But she is the President and CEO of the Independent Women's Forum, which tries to embed feminist rhetoric ("All issues are women's issues") behind a far-right conservative ideology. Humorously, the featured story at their website's first paragraph is "You know things are getting bad for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid trillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act when regulars on MSNBC, the liberal counterpoint to Fox, start to stomp on the bill." Which of course looks past the fact that Michelle Bernard is on MSNBC every other hour.

But if you truly want to know the desired ends of the Independent Women's Forum, look no further than this letter to the editor from one of their senior fellows about the book The Case for Big Government by Jeff Madrick (h/t Yglesias):

Conservatives read The Times to motivate them against the paper’s principles. Yet the review of “The Case for Big Government,” by Senator Edward Kennedy’s adviser Jeff Madrick (Jan. 18), gushed even by your standards. The review’s title and subtitle — “Renewed Deal: The need for federal spending is apparent even to conservatives, as a time of recovery requires investment in the country’s future” — is completely misleading. Conservatives believe spending is out of hand and never use “investment” as a synonym for tax and spend.

Madrick’s statement, quoted by the reviewer, that “there really is no example of small government among rich nations,” is unsupported nonsense. Think Dubai, free and rich.

Put aside for a moment the fact that Dubai is an oil-extracting hereditary dictatorship, which isn't even a nation but a province. Dubai is about as close as you get in this world to a modern slave state. There are 240,000 citizens and 1.2 imported workers from South Asia, who live in miserable conditions of servitude.

An hour's drive into an area of Dubai that is about as far off the tourist map as it is possible to get brings us to Sonapur, an unhappy place in so many ways. Even its name cruelly teases its residents. The name of Dubai's largest labour camp means "city of gold" in Hindi, and it also sounds very similar to the local slang word for a female orgasm, as Khaled, my translator, seems to rejoice in telling me.

I doubt that most of the 150,000 male workers who live here (some claim it is as many as 500,000, but there is little official headcounting going on), smile at the irony of living in a place so empty of wealth and women.

As we pass the large cemetery on the road into Sonapur, a long convoy of buses heads in the opposite direction towards the hundreds of building sites across Dubai. Curtains screening the workers from the sun flap violently in the open windows as drivers move up through the gears, spewing a dirty diesel puff at every shift. On entering the huge settlement - "town" doesn't seem the right term as there's no sign of cinemas, libraries, restaurants, or even any landscaping - we pass block upon block of concrete walls, some topped with barbed wire and all fronted by large metal gates. Inside, Khaled says, are housing units, some of which are home for up to 500 workers, owned by the dozens of contractors that feed Dubai's construction boom.

The contractors take their worker's passports and force them to pay back usurious loans taken out for the cost of them being brought to Dubai. Some are forced into sexual slavery and the ruler has even been accused of enslaving children as young as 2 to be jockeys in camel races. The Bush-era State Department acknowledged that the country is not free in any real sense, nor does it have a healthy respect for human rights.

Every so often the shriekers on the right will cite these incidents as proof that all Muslims are evil and cruel or something. But the Independent Women's Forum - and, I would imagine, serious conservative economists - see it as a capitalist paradise, a paragon of small government. Similarly, right-wing privatization practices and ideological nation-building in Iraq inevitably led to the US Embassy being built by slave labor, subcontracted and once removed.

Why, it's almost as if conservative economic theory places a value on shrinking labor costs so much that the ultimate society is one where the workers are owned.

In the antebellum South, slavery provided the economic foundation that supported the dominant planter ruling class. Under slavery the structure of white supremacy was hierarchical and patriarchal, resting on male privilege and masculinist honor, entrenched economic power, and raw force. Black people necessarily developed their sense of identity, family relations, communal values, religion, and to an impressive extent their cultural autonomy by exploiting contradictions and opportunities within a complex fabric of paternalistic give-and-take. The working relationships and sometimes tacit expectations and obligations between slave and slave holder made possible a functional, and in some cases highly profitable, economic system.

Will this come up on the next Michelle Bernard appearance on MSNBC, or will the talk be confined only to the "Obama/Pelosi/Reid recession" and when it will ever end?

Feel The American Pride, Pt. II

Conservative dogma states that private enterprise and contractors accomplish basic services more efficiently and professionally than nasty ol' big government. This happens through crackerjack tactics like holding workers like slaves in windowless warehouses.

Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor to KBR, an engineering, construction and services company, hired the men, who're from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On Tuesday, they staged a march outside their compound to protest their living conditions.

"It's really dirty," a Sri Lankan man told McClatchy, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he still wants to work for Najlaa. "For all of us, there are about 12 toilets and about 10 bathrooms. The food — it's three half-liter (one pint) bottles of water a day. Bread, cheese and jam for breakfast. Lunch is a small piece of meat, potato and rice. Dinner is rice and dal, but it's not dal," he said, referring to the Indian lentil dish.

After McClatchy began asking questions about the men on Tuesday, the Kuwaiti contractor announced that it would return them to their home countries and pay them back salaries. Najlaa officials contended that they've cared for the men's basic needs while the company has tried to find them jobs in Iraq.

Now sure, you could say that slavery is just the price we pay for efficiency and the best in service and quality. And you would be right. Because without keeping costs down by enslaving workers, contractors wouldn't be able to provide ice with human remains in it to the troops so quickly and crisply.

The lawsuit also accuses KBR of shipping ice in mortuary trucks that “still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces.”

Eller also accuses KBR of failing to maintain a medical incinerator at Joint Base Balad, which has been confirmed by two surgeons in interviews with Military Times about the Balad burn pit. Instead, according to the lawsuit and the physicians, medical waste, such as needles, amputated body parts and bloody bandages were burned in the open-air pit.

“Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains,” the lawsuit states. “The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.”

I suppose you could provide bodily-fluid free ice to US forces, if you wanted to increase the size of government to outrageous degrees. Or you could believe in the shining glory that is private enterprise and the free market.

Here endeth the lesson.

Setting Up A Community Clean-Up Day Is Slavery

I normally wouldn't bother with Jonah Goldberg, whose best-selling book Liberal Fascism: There Are Funyuns Stuck To My Typewriter! is enough evidence to give him a lifetime of shame and self-loathing. But today he prints a very strange op-ed in the LA Times that suggests calling for a goal of voluntary service is akin to keeping public school students of all ages down on the plantation.

"There's a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.
For those who don't remember, the 13th Amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime ... shall exist within the United States."

I guess in Obama's mind it must be a crime to be born or to go to college.

In his speech on national service Wednesday at the University of Colorado, Obama promised that as president he would "set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year."

He would see that these goals are met by, among other things, attaching strings to federal education dollars. If you don't make the kids report for duty, he's essentially telling schools and college kids, you'll lose money you can't afford to lose. In short, he'll make service compulsory by merely compelling schools to make it compulsory."

First of all, Goldberg's meal ticket and the founder of National Review Bill Buckley called for the exact same kind of program. Second, as hilzoy notes, public school itself is compulsory. That's why they have truant officers. I don't expect Goldberg to remember as far back as that to a time when he was graded poorly for his reading comprehension skills, but they actually make you take tests in schools. And gym!

Attaching community service to education dollars is no different than, say, attaching mandatory school prayer to education dollars. Which Goldberg would doubtless find some hoop to jump through and justify as entirely non-fascist. I could add that, what's more, community service actually has an effect, but I wouldn't want to be sacreligious.

CO-SEN: Bob Schaffer's Excellent Adventure

A few days ago, wingnut Senate candidate Bob Schaffer suggested that a sensible guest-worker program could be modeled along the lines of the Marianas Islands.

He did not appear to be kidding. Apparently the words "Jack Abramoff," "slavery" and "forced abortions" have escaped him.

Or maybe this 1999 fact-finding trip just slipped his mind.

Just before boarding a plane to the Mariana Islands in 1999, then-Congressman Bob Schaffer announced he was embarking on a fact-finding mission to get to the bottom of repeated allegations of labor abuse in the American protectorate.

"I plan to walk right into those factories and living quarters to see for myself what conditions exist," Schaffer said in a news release in August of that year.

What he didn't say was that the trip was partly arranged by the firm of now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who represented textile factory owners fighting congressional efforts to reform labor and immigration laws on the islands and who was being handsomely paid to keep the islands' cherished exemptions.

Schaffer and his wife stayed for free at a palm-studded beach resort and, besides factories, also toured historical sites and met with clients of Preston-

Gates, Abramoff's firm, according to a copy of the trip's agenda archived in Schaffer's congressional papers.

He left believing that allegations of widespread abuse were largely unfounded -- blaming them on Big Labor's efforts to shut down a booming textile industry allowed to use the "Made in USA" label but dependent on tens of thousands of imported workers.

There's an extremely unfortunate photo of Schaffer parasailing while turning a blind eye to the abhorrent conditions in the factories on the island.



It was already going to be tough for Schaffer against Rep. Mark Udall. This is going to be the symbol of the campaign.

And to add insult to injury, today the Senate passed a bill to reform the immigration laws on the Marianas Islands that Schaffer said were so wonderful. It passed 91-4.

Talk about out of touch.

He Must Have Thought They Were One Of Those Non-Slaveowning Southern Plantations

You know, the fact that John McCain's ancestors owned slaves isn't all that damnable considering that it was so commonplace in the South at the time. The fact that he is playing the "I didn't know" game is an insult to our intelligence.

The family's storied military history stretches back to Carroll County, Miss., where McCain's great-great grandfather William Alexander McCain owned a plantation, and later died during the Civil War as a soldier for the Mississippi cavalry.

But what McCain didn't know about his family until Tuesday was that William Alexander McCain had owned 52 slaves. The senator seemed surprised after Salon reporters showed him documents gathered from Carroll County Courthouse, the Carrollton Merrill Museum, the Mississippi State Archives and the Greenwood, Miss., Public Library.

"I didn't know that," McCain said in measured tones wearing a stoic expression during a midday interview, as he looked at the documents before Tuesday night's debate. "I knew they had sharecroppers. I did not know that." [...]

"I knew we fought in the Civil War," McCain went on. "But no, I had no idea. I guess thinking about it, I guess when you really think about it logically, it shouldn't be a surprise. They had a plantation and they fought in the Civil War so I guess that it makes sense."

"It's very impactful," he said of learning the news. "When you think about it, they owned a plantation, why didn't I think about that before? Obviously, I'm going to have to do a little more research."

Ya think?

Actually, what's fascinating here is that McCain views himself as quite literally a child of the military; he even says that very thing in this story ("I just hadn't thought about it, to tell you the truth, because I really feel that my heritage is the military"). His military pedigree literally defines him so completely that it colors all his thoughts; thus he's mentally written out SLAVERY from a Confederate solider and plantation owner in the Civil War.

This is what's behind his opening bio spot with the tag line "The American American America has been American for. America."



Aside from the subtle smear job, which I think is about painting Democrats in general as un-American rather than any particular candidate, this shows a man just completely wrapped up in his own biography, to a far greater extent than John Kerry. I remember the media blaming Kerry for "bringing up" his military record, basing his campaign on it, and thusly making it fair game for criticism. Somehow magical McCain doesn't face such a problem. And I think basing a campaign completely on abstract concepts like "honor" and a record of military service reveals a bias toward militarism as a tool for global problem-solving, honestly.

Ode To A Simpler Time

George W. Bush thinks we're still living in an era where your womenfolk almost fetch as much as your best cow:

Q: Tell us about your future son-in-law, Henry Hager. Did he do right and ask for Jenna’s hand?

The President: “He kind of sidled up to me and said, ‘Can I come and see you?’ We were sitting outside the presidential cabin here, and he professed his love for Jenna and said, would I mind if he married her? And I said, ‘Got a deal.’ [Laughter] And I’m of the school, once you make the sale, move on. But he had some other points he wanted [to make]. He wanted to talk about how he would be financially responsible.”

This is part of that whole homespun man from Kennebunkport mystique, but the implication is most certainly about selling his daughter. Because, you know, the daughters can't inherit the property, so how else can he pass on those huge... tracts of land.

By the way, Henry Hager talking to W. about how he would be financially responsible must have sent him running to the dictionary to look up what "financially responsible" means.

Sex And Slavery In Iraq

A war zone is a terrible brreding ground for desperation, where survival means doing whatever is necessary. Usually that means leaving, but what if left for the refugees to sustain themselves? The sex trade, of course. This is shocking but it's all too typical an example of how refugees survive:

Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.

But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba’s elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.

Desperate, Umm Hiba followed the advice of an Iraqi acquaintance and took her daughter to work at a nightclub along a highway known for prostitution. “We Iraqis used to be a proud people,” she said over the frantic blare of the club’s speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.

As Umm Hiba watched, a middle-aged man climbed onto the platform and began to dance jerkily, arms flailing, among the girls.

“During the war we lost everything,” she said. “We even lost our honor.” She insisted on being identified by only part of her name — Umm Hiba means mother of Hiba.

The sex trade has always been an outlet of last resort for poor women, alone and stranded in foreign countries. And in the war zone itself, there is such horror and confusion that deviance appears to rise to the surface, as if the only way to make sense of madness is through more of it:

A U.S. contractor who worked at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was sentenced to more than three years in prison Friday for possessing child pornography that he obtained using the prison's computer network.

Ahmed Hasan Khan, 31, of Woodbridge, had been working at Abu Ghraib for contractor L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. in November 2005 when a network administrator at the prison saw that Khan had been visiting suspicious sites. A search of Khan's laptop computer later found hundreds of child pornography images, including children as young as 4, officials said.

I'm not defending a purveyor of child pornography, just saying that up is down in a war zone, where human life appears to mean a little less, and so the ugliest thoughts are given sanction. These are the stories of war that are shielded from a sheltered nation. Here's another one:

In the months following September 2005, complaints began coming in to the US State Department that all was not well with its most ambitious project ever: a sprawling new embassy project on the banks of the ancient Tigris River. The largest, most heavily-fortified embassy in the world with over 20 buildings, it spans 104 acres-- comparable in size to the Vatican.

Soon after the State Department awarded a $592-million building contract to First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting in July 2005, thousands of low-paid migrant workers recruited from South Asia, the Philippines and other nations poured into Baghdad, beginning work to build the gargantuan complex within two years time. But sources involved in the embassy project tell Slogger that during First Kuwaiti’s rush to the finish the project by this summer on schedule, American managers and specialists involved with the project began protesting about the living and working conditions of lower-paid workers sequestered and largely unseen behind security walls bordering the embassy project inside the US-controlled Green Zone....

The Americans protested that construction crews lived in crowded quarters; ate sub-standard food; and had little medical care. When drinking water was scarce in the blistering heat, coolers were filled on the banks of the Tigris, a river rife with waterborne disease, sewage and sometimes floating bodies, they said. Others questioned why First Kuwaiti held the passports of workers. Was it to keep them from escaping? Some laborers had turned up “missing” with little investigation. Another American said laborers told him they were been misled in their job location. When recruited, they were unaware they were heading for war-torn Iraq.

Forced labor of this nature is common in Iraq, I wrote about this exact circumstance in October 2005.

So the desperately poor in Bangladesh, Nepal and elsewhere are brought into Iraq to scrub toilets and such. Never mind that unemployment in Iraq is skyrocketing, these migrants come much cheaper to KBR and the like. The system for transporting them from their countries to Baghdad is no different than the system for sending girls from Malaysia and Eastern Europe into the international sex trade. Workers get paid pennies in Iraq, and must pay that money back to their job placement agencies at predatory lending rates. Once they get there, they are not benefited by any labor protections. Should they die in insurgent attacks (and at least 200 of them have so far), their surviving next of kin are not likely to receive the death benefit that all families of federal contractors deserve by law. In a place as dangerous as Iraq, that's arguably the greatest motivating factor for subcontractors to use migrants.

This is called indentured servitude, and in a country where supreme effort is required just for it not to explode, this kind of dehumanization is the last thing that gets rectified. Obviously so, this has been known as a problem for two years. Taxpayers, you and I, are funding a 21st-century indentured servitude in the form of no-bid Congressional contracts funneled to the companies engaging in this practice.

I think what this all underscores is that wars should never be entered into frivolously or through deception, because they are so disruptive to society that it can break down at the edges. These stories of sexual slavery and deviancy and forced labor are now commonplace in Iraq; they weren't before. And it makes a mockery of this so-called "mission to spread democracy."

In other news, water is wet

So Strom Thurmond's people owned Al Sharpton's people. It's certainly an interesting coincidence, but people are shocked by this why? A family of plantation owners in South Carolina had slaves that were freed and moved north. Welcome to the Department of No Surprise at All. And is anyone shocked that Strom Thurmond's ancestors would have slaves? The man was an avowed segeregationist, it's not like he was a civil rights leader in his lifetime. It reminds me of that whole Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings brouhaha, remember that a few years ago, when the descendents wanted to run DNA tests on Thomas Jefferson? And everyone was so shocked that our Founding Fathers could exhibit such behavior. “Oh my God, they had sex with slaves!” How about the fact that they had slaves? Isn’t that enough of a black mark? They sold humans like chattel, how’s that for an imperfection?