Abracadabra: CISPA!

There is a steady pressure, piston-like, that is slowly eroding privacy, simply because those exerting it think that they can.  The risks, according to one person are:  ”They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”  B. Franklin

Now, with CISPA, the clampdown on Internet freedom comes in the guise of a bill aimed at cyber terrorism that should give Internet entrepreneurs – and all business leaders – nightmares.

Naomi Wolfe,  Published: Tuesday 1 May 2012

Almost no one had read the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act(CISPA) before it was rushed through the United States House of Representatives in late April and sent to the Senate. CISPA is the successor to SOPA, the “anti-piracy” bill that was recently defeated after an outcry from citizens and Internet companies. SOPA, framed by its proponents in terms of protecting America’s entertainment industry from theft, would have shackled content providers and users, and spawned copycat legislation around the world, from Canada and the United Kingdom to Israel and Australia.

Now, with CISPA, the clampdown on Internet freedom comes in the guise of a bill aimed at cyber terrorism that should give Internet entrepreneurs – and all business leaders – nightmares. And yet, this time, major Internet, and technology companies, including Facebook and Microsoft, supported the bill, on the grounds that it would create a clear procedure for handling government requests for information. Microsoft, at least, belatedly dropped its support after recognizing that the law would allow the US government to force any Internet business to hand over information about its users’ online activities.

Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more fromNaomi Wolf, click here.

But the bill is far more alarming than that. For example, “the head of a department or agency of the Federal Government receiving cyber threat information…shall provide such cyber threat information to the National Cyber security and Communications Integration Center of the Department of Homeland Security.” No actual threat need be made. And what counts as “threat information” is defined so broadly that it can mean anything. “Notwithstanding any other provision of law,” the government may rely on “cyber security systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information.”

The vague concept of “cyber threat information” does not just let DHS investigate anyone. By including information pertaining to “a vulnerability of a system or network of a government or private entity,” and the “theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information,” the bill appears to target whistleblowers and leakers, and threatens investigative journalism.

The respected Internet technology site Techdirt has called the bill “insanity”: “CISPA can no longer be called a cyber security bill at all. The government would be able to search information…for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as [it] can claim someone committed a ‘cyber security crime.’”

Indeed, the DHS may look through data transmitted online without restraint, regardless of what it ultimately finds. And, in this respect, business leaders who believe that this bill is aimed at terrorists – or “at most” at the domestic activists and documentarians who can make it harder for them to operate – should be careful about what they wish for.Indeed, because the definition of cyber terrorism is so broad and subjective, US business leaders who are pushing for CISPA risk exposing themselves to the DHS’s power to scrutinize their personal lives, subpoena their bank records, and disrupt their electronic communications. And the law would give the DHS similar control over the personal and financial lives of anyone who does business in the US or with American companies – a power that the US government has already tried to assert by issuing a subpoena for Icelandic legislator Birgitta Jonsdottir’s personal bank records.

Everyone has secrets: love affairs, substance-abuse problems, mental-health diagnoses, heterodox sexual preferences, or questionable discussions with accountants. In a strong civil society, these personal matters properly remain private. In a surveillance society, they become leverage.

I am fearful of the effects of unrestrained domestic surveillance for specific reasons: I worked in two US presidential campaigns, and saw firsthand the standard tactics – nonviolent but still mafia-inflected – of high-level politics. There was no shortage of privately contracted surveillance and wiretapping. Campaigns routinely planted spies – interns, household staff, or even lovers – in the opposing camp, and devoted vast numbers of man-hours to combing through private records in opposition research. The results were then regularly used behind the scenes to bully, intimidate, and coerce targets.

Most of these “scandals” never saw the light of day – the goal was pressure, not disclosure. CISPA would give the same power to the DHS. America’s business leaders may think that they are immune, but the bill’s definition of “a threat” is so vague – with no distinction between a “threat” to the Internet and any random, even metaphorical “threat” on the Internet – that the DHS may keep tabs on anyone who says something that irks someone in a cubicle.

If CISPA enters into US law, alongside the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act – which gives the government the power to detain any American for anything forever – fundamental civil liberties will be threatened in a way that no democracy can tolerate. And because so much of the freedom of the Internet around the world derives from the freedom of expression that until recently characterized the US, enactment of CISPA poses a similar threat around the world.

The good news is that President Barack Obama has vowed to veto CISPA. The bad news is that he made – and then broke – a similar vow on the NDAA.

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American Democracy: The Illusion and the Truth

Money, democracy, and Oligarchy.

the hidden hand of power

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2011/10/2011102683719370179.html

The Origin of Marriage (And the Evolution of Divorce)

While observing a course at a community college, the professor assigned some preparatory survey questions to students on their attitudes toward marriage, divorce, fidelity and their expectations for the future.  

The purpose of the discussion, seemingly innocent, served to illuminate the difference between the perceptions of (mostly) unmarried students to the realities of a 50% divorce rate, idealized perceptions of marriage, and the practical challenges to be expected when creating a family.  

Most of the responses were naive, reflecting idealized romantic notions prevalent in popular culture.  I’m not sure what the educational outcomes were from this exercise (an icebreaker preparatory to later coursework), but in the context of the group, it was a necessary seed, even the husk of which provided a framework for future decision making. – Carlos

 An Historical Perspective on Love, Romance, and Marriage

Marina Adshade on April 28, 2012, 8:00 AMExtreme Biology

A couple of weeks ago a Dollars and Sex commenter wrote that the “origin of marriage was to create a legal contract by which a man could acquire a female slave.” Interesting point. Is there an economic story that explains the origin of this most-debated-of-all-institutions?

The first humans, those who lived between 5 and 1.8 million years ago, had very little use for marriage. Using the behavior of bonobos as the basis for how early humans would have behaved, it is presumed that early males and females had sex with many partners. Food sharing was principally in exchange for sexual favors, including sexual favors between same-gender pairs. Because females could collect food (fruits, nuts and insects) while still carrying and protecting their babies, males were not needed as protectors or providers. That meant that in this period neither partner gained from being in a committed pair.

As the climate warmed and the forests receded, humans began to move out into the savannah where their diet consisted of gathered vegetation, scavenged meat left behind by predators and, eventually, meat killed by hunters using tools. A more meat-based diet meant that babies were born earlier requiring more care from their mothers.

In this period (between 1.8 million and 23,000 years ago), the males and females whose offspring were the most likely to survive were those that formed the very first marriages.

These may not have been marriages in the way that we think of marriages today, but couples in this period would probably have stayed together for about three or four years before one, or the other, would wander off to start another family.

(Perhaps not coincidentally, this is exactly the length of time (3 or 4 years) at which divorce rates peak in modern day marriages.)

About 23,000 years ago, humans started to grow their own food, revolutionizing human relations. The invention of the plough over 4,000 years ago meant that the most productive household arrangements were ones in which men and women divided their tasks. Men were stronger and less physically tied to children and so they went out and worked on the land. Women stayed closer to the home and cared for children and engaged in a myriad of other chores.

This is the era in which marriage became the union between two people that was recognized by their community. Agriculture tied people to their land, meaning that at the end of the four-year period neither men nor women had any inclination to wander off to find a new family. And so they stayed together and worked as a unit to feed and care for the children they produced.

The creation of marriage as a legal contract between men and women came into being over time as communities settled on what was a “normal” way for them to organize a family and then codified that normalcy into law.

For example, if it was the norm within the group that men and women were responsible for feeding and caring for their own children. Then laws were created that gave men some assurance that the children they were raising were their own and women some assurance that their husband would not leave them all destitute.

So, the origin of marriage was not to create a legal contract that made it possible for men to acquire female slaves. I am not saying that men and women were never treated that way in marriage contracts, but the real origin of marriage came from the biological desire of both men and women to see their children survive – it was the evolutionarily dominate strategy.

Marriage is no longer needed for children to survive, so do we still need marriage?

Perhaps that is an issue we should address another day.

http://tinyurl.com/Origin-Marriage

Ashaninka: A People in Transition Adapting to the Internet

There are many stories documenting the sad story of the indigenous people of Brazil and Peru moving into a soft focus of the past as the economics and culture of the 21st century renders them redundant. 

This is not such a story.  Although the bell of change and time cannot be unrung, the people can use their agency to help direct the course of their future.  They are enabled by sever far seeing philanthropists, governmental agencies both in Brazil and Peru to use the internet to provide an early warning systems of loggers who cut and burn and disappear.  Brazilian authorities can be emailed alerts of outsiders building airstrips, logging, or other illegal actions in indigenous lands.  -  Carlos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwHe6ArzL7c&feature=share

-=O=-

The Ashaninka Resistance Movement meets the future

September 20 – 24, 2004 – Brasilia, Brazil

by Juliana Birnbaum

(Half of any revenue gained from this article will be donated to the Ashaninka-Apiwtxa community initiatives)

Deep in the interior of Brazilian Amazon, a logger crosses the border from Peru and invades Ashaninka tribal land, felling another ancient mahogany and dragging it toward the river to be floated down to a truck and headed for international markets. “This week is one of the most crucial in Ashaninka history,” observed curator Celso Carelli Mendes, speaking from his 15 years of experience living and working in the Amazon with various tribes. “This week may decide the future of the way that indigenous people work with the Brazilian nation-state, the future of the forest itself.”

We were eating a midnight snack at a café in the center of the capital city of Brasilia, after driving tribal leader Benki Piyanko to his hotel after a paparazzi-filled evening at Cine Brasilia. The evening was the official opening of Semana Ashaninka-Apiwtxa, five days of meetings, cultural events, round-table discussions and films revolving around the Ashaninka tribe. The Semana brought together some of the Brazilian government’s top decision-makers, including Minister of the Environment Marina Silva and the presidents of FUNAI and IBAMA, the two major government agencies dealing with indigenous people.

The opening event was a glamorous public spectacle, including performances by the Ashaninka and other Brazilian musicians, official speeches, TV coverage, a photography exhibit and the debut of a documentary film. Ultimately, however, most seemed to agree that despite the flash and sparkle of the night, it was ultimately superficial, a show. On the way back in the car, Benki and Celso spoke about the division between pretty words and real action, the eternal split between theory and practice.

“People were coming up to me tonight and telling me that I was demonstrating the future of Brazil, a future in which indigenous people work in alliance with the government to preserve the Amazon,” Benki said. “But I think that the future is already here, the way is clear-we just need people who are going to act, who are going to do what needs to be done for the forest, who are going to work. That’s what is lacking.”

When I arrived that evening at Cine Brasilia, the twelve members of the Ashaninka tribe who had traveled thousands of miles from the outer reaches of the Amazon for Semana Ashaninka-Apiwtxa were assembled in front of the flashbulbs, microphones and TV cameras. They were dressed in their traditional hand-woven robes and feather-topped crowns, faces painted with intricate red and black patterns, draped in countless strings of colored seeds.

The Brazilian Ashaninka (there exists an even larger number of Peruvian tribal members) live on a reservation of 85,700 ha (1 hectare = 2.5 acres), in the state of Acre, near the border with Peru. Apiwtxa refers to a specific community that might be called the capital of the Brazilian Ashaninka nation, where the leaders of the tribe live. The remote location of the tribe has played a part in its sporadic contact with devastating forces of colonization, and the land to this day is only accessible by air or by a journey of several days by canoe from the nearest road.

Compared to their ancestral territory, this reserve represents a rather small piece of land, which the Ashaninka people have managed to hold on to after hundreds of years of struggle and resistance. The preserve was recognized as their nation’s territory in 1992, 250 years after the first major uprising of the Ashaninka expelled the Spanish soldiers and Franciscan missionaries who had arrived with the wave of colonization.

After warding off invasion for over a century, many of them were enslaved in the brutal regime of coffee and rubber plantations. It is estimated that a staggering 80 percent of the tribe was decimated from disease and extreme exploitation during the rubber boom of 1839- 1913. In the face of this incomprehensible loss, the Ashaninka have battled to maintain their cultural identity, protect their forest home, and preserve their language and livelihood. According to the event program, the Semana Ashaninka had two objectives: to expose the “advances and victories of the tribe in relation to natural resources and sustainable production” and to “seek solutions to difficulties and problems in the Brazil-Peru border region.”

After the opening event, the Ashaninka took part in a series of meetings with government officials and public mesas-rodondas, “round-table” discussions. The major issue discussed was the illegal entry of loggers across the remote border, who are felling mahogany and other valuable trees in Ashaninka territory at a growing rate.

“A major preoccupation used to be the demarcation of the territory,” said Escrawen Sompre of the Model Program for Indigenous People. “Next is the protection of the territory once marked… Without a cultural force, it will be difficult to achieve. Right now, we have few resources.”

The second two days of round-table discussions focused on the border issue and on the integration of political strategy between Peru and Brazil. Several participants spoke about border security and plans to create checkpoints. Besides the pressing concern of the illegal logging, the talks addressed the issue of river pollution. Corporate interests are exploring the region for oil in the area upriver of the reserve, and the Ashaninka are concerned about water pollution and other environmental effects of petroleum exploitation.

“For us, if the forest doesn’t exist, if the jungle doesn’t exist, then culture doesn’t exist,” said Moises Piyanko Ashaninka. “We realize that we can’t take care of the forest and protect it without help from the outside world, because the invasions are coming from outside.”The tribe gained some amount of media attention in the past decade, owing in part to the charisma, strength and initiative of their young pajé, Benki. Thirty years old and the son of the “chief,” or cacique, Benki’s intense shamanic training included a year of spiritual practices in isolation in the jungle as an adolescent. He is a healer, working with a variety of powerful Amazonian plant medicines including ayahuasca, the entheogenic tea detailed by anthropologist Jeremy Narby in his bestselling book The Cosmic Serpent. Benki was among the leaders of a project to bring the Internet to the Ashaninka, using small village kiosks to facilitate communications between remote areas and create a website to publicize news about the tribe.

“Some people ask, ‘why are Indians messing with the Internet?’” Benki remarked.. “But I think it is really important that we have this net of communication, to let the world know what is going on with us.”

The Ashaninka presented their initiatives towards sustainable development through documentary films that demonstrate some of the work. One aspect is a program of reforestation, replanting land destroyed since the invasion of brancos, or white men. Benki reported that the tribe has replanted 25 percent of the deforested land, and that the small fruit plantations have been bearing products that the tribe has sold to benefit schools. They have also implemented projects to raise fish and turtles for food, with excellent results. Much of the work was done by children as a form of experiential learning, and training for the future.

“I asked myself, what did my grandparents and great-grandparents do to protect the forest?” Benki said. “Our people want to work with Brazil to create an alternative development, to show the world an example of sustainability…. Eight years after we started this project, we were able to feed people, and hope to continue forever.”

“The Ashaninka story is different in that they are showing us the way,” commented Romulo Mello, Director of Hunting and Fishing Resources at native affairs organization IBAMA. “They don’t just talk, they do, and they are inviting us to participate with them, to share lessons from indigenous culture.”

Alexandra Reschkle, the Secretary of National Heritage, drew a parallel between the indigenous culture of the Amazon and the culture of Tibet, both threatened by the forces of colonization and globalization. From the devastation, the seeds of a culture manage to spread throughout the world and grow.”

“The Dalai Lama has spoken about the invasion of Tibet as a means for its culture to expand and educate,” she said. “The situation in Acre is giving us the privilege of meeting and knowing the Ashaninka, and learning from them.”

Benki and I are winding our way through the bustle of the enormous Conjunto Nacional, the shopping mall at the center of Brasilia. We are heading for the music store with philanthropist Ali Zeitoun, who has worked to fund projects and record music with the tribes of Acre for more than 10 years, to buy Benki a new guitar. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt today, but on his head rests the traditional woven-reed crown topped with three dancing feathers. Feeling a little overwhelmed at the crowds, noise and lights myself, I wonder at the culture shock that Benki must feel at times. He tells me that the first time he left the village was around age 13, speaking minimal Portuguese.

A few years before that time, Benki’s name had become nationally recognized as a result of a popular song written by musician Milton Nascimento. The song was named after the ten-year-old after they met during the star’s visit to the tribe, and Nascimento had actually been scheduled to appear and play “Benki” at the opening event of Semana Ashaninka, but had cancelled for health reasons. Remarkably, the lyrics to the song seem to foretell the moment at hand, a moment where the people of the forest go out into the world to struggle for change.

One of the main images is that of the beija-flor, literally “flower-kisser” or hummingbird, a symbol of the mysterious and magical power of the forest: The hummingbird sends me away/To work and open people’s eyes.  On the way back from the opening event that night, we were laughing. I was telling Benki a story that I found somewhat amazing in its synchronicity. About two weeks earlier, when I had first met Benki, we were playing guitar together. Among the songs I knew in Portuguese was one which I found particularly beautiful, about the beija-flor, and so I played it, singing about the forces of renewal in the jungle, a full moon rising. It was only later that I learned the title of the song, and its connection with Benki. At the time, he just listened, nodded, and smiled.

Juliana Birnbaum is a freelance writer, anthropologist and musician based in San Francisco, California. She has completed a Masters in Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she focused on shamanism and native people in Brazil.

Photo: Stephen Lyons – Opening night of Semana Ashaninka.

www.terramistica.com.br

Preserving the Mayan Languages and Culture

Guatemala: The Maya

In Guatemala, a country ravaged by civil war for most of the past 50 years, the Mayans make up around half of the population. But the fields of education, politics and the media all belong exclusively to the Spanish language, while smiling white faces and messages in Spanish look down on the Guatemalan people from billboards across the country.

Many Mayans complain of feeling like foreigners in their own land – a sentiment compounded by the dominance of Spanish.

Notice the “eye” symbol: it is the symbol for zero.  This mathematical quantity was developed by the Maya independently from the Arabs.  The Romans had I, II, III.  This discovery allowed advanced mathematical computations in astronomy and mathematics.  

As significant was their written language and the development of a calendar more advanced than that used in Western countries today.  As you watch the excellent video below you will learn how the the bishop, Landa, burned almost all of the books written by the Mayan scribes over centuries.

The indigenous Maya are recovering their languages and culture after centuries of repression and genocide.

Tikal Rising from the Jungle

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/livingthelanguage/2012/04/20124161358285740.html

Can Society Endure the New Indentured Servitude of Student Debt?

Ok, I’m not seriously in college anymore.  I haven’t smoked any weed in ages, I can barely remember the last time I woke up and wondered how the person next to me in bed and naked, got there.  My last connection to psychedelics was an homage to Augustus Stanley Owsley, III at his death.

… I do not hope to turn again
… I do not hope
… I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope   (Ash Wednesday, Eliot)

But, I do care about the availability of education to those who want to learn.  I think the propagation of knowledge is the very core of our humanity and culture: it is an international patrimony.  

There are others who view learning in more practical terms.  Many see education as an element in a parts list for the manufacture of a widget.

Widget Parts List

Item      Qty            Descr                     Level                     Education

1.0          10,000 Widgets                   Prime                      -

1.1           1            Engineer                 Design (beta)         BS Mech Eng

1.2          2            Engineer                 Mfg     (gamma)     AS Indust Eng

1.3          3            Assemblers             Read/write (delta) HS (or equiv)

1.4          1            Sales                        Speak/r/w  (beta)   As necessary

1.5          0           Historian                 ?              (alpha)      Are you kidding?

The above fictitious parts list only serves to illustrate the myopic view of some who see human endeavor in simplistic terms.  In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” a critical assessment of a future society, people were likewise artificially limited in their intellectual ability to maintain peace and harmony.  

Education is different from training.  Both should be freely available:   Education because it is fundamental to the future and training because it is fundamental to the economy.  Both are infrastructure without which life as we know it will grind to a monotonous ending…a return to the state of nature known to our antecessor, homo erectus. 

I believe that intellect is a “gift of the creator” and that education, a natural right within the natural capabilities of all and not limited by the ability to “buy” education.  The effect of charging for education is to create a class of indentured servitude where the energy of ambitious and creative youth is siphoned off to pay that from which society all will benefit and to silence the bond servants from expressing a general will of the people. – Carlos

We Can’t Afford to Be Quiet About the Rising Cost of College

Demonstrators at Oakland City Hall, in California, last month during a national day of protest against cuts in higher-education budgets

Justin Sullivan, Getty Images,

By Tom Hayden,March 28, 2010

“There are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including, tragically, the universities, is not the way of life for us. …”

That heartfelt plea for university reform, issued in 1969, is striking because it was voiced by Hillary Rodham, a student at Wellesley College. Are there any lessons or comparisons to be drawn from those turbulent times for the students and faculty members who are today demonstrating against the rising cost of higher education? As a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in those days and an itinerant sociologist at Scripps College now, I believe we can look to the past as legacy but not as blueprint.

The current generation of young people deserves admiration for the contributions they already have made: creating hip-hop culture, winning sweatshop-free purchasing agreements, leading online advocacy groups like MoveOn.org, and for being the backbone of Barack Obama’s unprecedented volunteer campaign. They will be the cradle of social activism for the next 20 years. But the challenges they face on their campuses are far different from those of my generation, and perhaps more profound. Tuition at Michigan in 1960 cost less than $150 per semester. So I could obtain my degree, edit the student newspaper, go south to work in the civil-rights movement for two years, return and enter graduate school, and never feel that I was falling behind in the competitive economic rat race that young Hillary spoke out against.

Students today, however—even those who hold two part-time jobs—fall tens of thousands of dollars into debt, a burden that limits their career choices. Dropping out for social activism brings competitive disadvantage. The speedup of academic pressures dries up discretionary time that used to go to dreaming and exploring. Campuses are crowded with scrambling multitaskers for the most part too busy to protest the pace. Meanwhile, increases in the cost of college exceed inflation every year, intensifying the squeeze.

We had different grievances. The curriculum was often irrelevant to the social crisis we perceived ourselves inheriting; it needed reform. Students were powerless under the paternal doctrine of in loco parentis; we wanted rights. Students were disenfranchised, even though men could be drafted; we needed the vote and alternatives to the draft. Structurally excluded, we went to the streets, to the outside, demanding change on the inside. It’s an exaggeration, but only after strikes, rioting, and taking over buildings did colleges offer the mainstream menu of women’s studies; black, Latino and Asian studies; queer studies; and environmental programs that they do today. Now most students read Howard Zinn in history classes; back then Zinn was fired from Spelman College for marching with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In those days, university administrators were personified by the impersonal managerial elites depicted by C. Wright Mills, our sociologist hero. In recent decades, the multiversity has been succeeded by a privatized hybrid institution enmeshed in Wall Street machinations, a development epitomized by the former Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers. Excessive financial risk-taking has resulted in depleted portfolios everywhere. No longer independent, higher education has succumbed to the political pressures of regents and trustees who all too often are tied to banks and corporations. For an example of this inbred conservatism, consider a recent survey that showed the public favoring the use of federal stimulus money to keep tuition down, even if that meant leaving less money for operations. In response, a spokesman for the American Council on Education said, “The public is not always right.”

The question for today’s students is not whether they can read Noam Chomsky, Anaïs Nin, or Zinn, but whether they can afford to. The recent outbreak of protests on hundreds of campuses is a promising sign that economic populism will be a central dynamic in any student movement of the future. Since many of the most active protesters today are students of color, there is greater potential for a coalition that includes inner-city taxpaying communities than there was when so many of the militants were from affluent suburbs. Making college less affordable just as a large number of qualified aspirants are emerging from disadvantaged minority communities is an explosive issue. The numbers of women in college are larger than in the past, which might also widen the coalition.

The value of the past lies in remembering how recently higher education was affordable, even cheap. It’s not inevitable that a college education today costs so much. Undergraduate education is virtually free at the Sorbonne or the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a year at Oxford costs no more than community colleges charge here. The choices we have made as a country—to relentlessly privatize our public institutions; to eventually spend three trillion dollars, by some estimates, on the war in Iraq instead of on our public universities; to bail out billionaires on Wall Street while hitting students and their families with repeated tuition increases—are choices with consequences that we have to rethink or accept.

As recently as 1982, when I entered the California State Assembly, my first battle as a naïve new legislator was against fee increases at community colleges, which then were proudly free and accessible. Under President Ronald Reagan and Gov. George Deukmejian, the (Republican) lobbyists for the colleges supported first-time fee increases to avoid budget cuts. Their motivation was not merely budgetary but also a matter of ideological principle. Nothing, they said, should be free in life, which meant that investment in public colleges and universities should be replaced by a consumer-marketplace approach. Most of the Democrats went along when they were promised that the fees would be temporary. When the recession of that period ended, those fees became permanent, and they have escalated ever since. A similar pattern has been true of tuition increases at California State University and the University of California.

Were I still in politics, I would run for office on a promise to keep the magical possibilities of higher education affordable for today’s American families, and for the next generation seeking new opportunities for their children. I wonder why the silence from politicians is so deafening. Is it that colleges and universities are easier targets at budget time than corporate-tax loopholes are? Is it that students and faculty members are marginal players in the great game of campaign contributions? Or that college constituencies are too fragmented, divided, and transitory to unify as an effective force for change?

The recent discontent on campuses is a healthy challenge to America’s priorities. I hope that Hillary Clinton hears an echo of herself before she and her colleagues become the politicians she warned us against.

Tom Hayden is a visiting professor of sociology at Scripps College, in Claremont, Calif. His most recent book is The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm, 2009). http://chronicle.com/article/Rising-Cost-of-College-We/64813/

Question: Is Free Will Free?

I’ve read Scientific American for over xx years.  Long enough to remember when it was a hard read for a 13 year old.  SciAm has become a lot more accessible over the years and so it should.  I also remember when the news was news  - and not an entertainment profit center.  

Back on topic: What is free will and do you ever use it?  Are you Christian because you were raised that way?  Are you Jewish because you just thought it was a good idea?  Did Loyola have a point when he said ”Give me the boy until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” Or Sam Harris:  Sam Harris on “Free Will”?  Let this rattle around your mind for a while, then search around for what others have had to say about “free” will.

How Advertisements Manipulate Behavior[Preview]

Can subliminal advertisements influence our behavior? New research says yes—but only under certain circumstances

By Wolfgang Stroebe  | April 20, 2012 |

The birth of subliminal advertising reads almost like a script from a television show. In this real-life story, the spotlight falls on James M. Vicary, an independent marketing researcher.

On September 12, 1957, Vicary called a press conference to announce the results of an unusual experiment. Over the course of six weeks during the preceding summer, he had arranged to have slogans—specifically, “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola”—flashed for three milliseconds, every five seconds, onto a movie screen in Fort Lee, N.J., while patrons watched Picnic. Vicary argued that these messages were too fast for filmgoers to read but salient enough for the audience to register their meaning subconsciously. As proof, he presented data indicating that the messages had increased soda sales at the theater by 18 percent and popcorn sales by 58 percent.  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-subtle-power-of-hidden-messages&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_MB_20120425

What are the Foundations of the Occupy Movement?

The Occupy movement now exists worldwide as a diaphanous web of people who have been united in their pain and seek change.  The issues vary from country to country but at the base is economic collapse and the tyranny of the few that separates the 99% from the 1%.  

Governance by multinational corporate entities is neither democratic nor just.  We know that democracy is more complicated than “one man, one vote” in many cases, but a plutocracy is intolerable.

Ultimately, an intellectual underpinning for this expression of the general will must emerge.  This voice has resonance and is a good beginning.

Noam Chomsky on America’s Declining Empire, Occupy and the Arab Spring

According to Chomsky, America’s declining power is self-inflicted.

April 24, 2012  |

Editor’s note: AlterNet is proud to offer readers an opportunity to purchase Noam Chomsky’s new book, Occupy, available here.

Last year, the Occupy Movement rose up spontaneously in cities and towns across the country, radically shifted the discourse and rattled the economic elite with its defiant populism. It was, according to Noam Chomsky, “the first major public response to thirty years of class war.” In his new book, Occupy, Chomsky looks at the central issues, questions and demands that are driving ordinary people to protest. How did we get to this point? How are the wealthiest 1 percent influencing the lives of the other 99 percent? How can we separate money from politics? What would a genuinely democratic election look like?

Chomsky appeared on this week’s AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a transcript that’s been lightly edited for clarity. (You can listen to the whole show here.)

Joshua Holland: I want to just ask you first about a few trends shaping our political discourse. I’ve read many of your books, and the one that I probably found influential was Manufacturing Consent. You co-authored that in the late 1980s and since then we’ve seen some big changes. The mainstream media has become far more consolidated, and at the same time we’ve seen a proliferation of other forms of media. We have the alternative media outlets — online outlets like AlterNet — various social media. Looking at these trends, I wonder if you think that the range of what’s considered to be acceptable discourse has widened or narrowed further?

Noam Chomsky: Actually Ed Herman and I had a second edition to that about 10 years ago with a new, long introduction. At that time we didn’t really think much had changed, but if we were to do one now we would certainly want to bring in what you’ve just mentioned. Remember we were talking about the mainstream media. With regard to them I think pretty much the same analysis holds, although my own feeling is that, say since the 1960s, there has been some broadening and opening through the mainstream — the effect of the activism of the ’60s, which changed perceptions, attitudes, and civilized the country in many ways. Topics that are freely talked about today were invisible, and, if visible, then unmentionable 50 years ago.

Furthermore, a lot of the journalists themselves are people whose formation was in the ’60s activism and its aftermath. These are changes that have been going on for a long time. With regards to the alternative media, they certainly provide a wide range of options that weren’t there before — that includes access to foreign media. On the other hand, the Internet is kind of like walking into the Library of Congress in a sense. Everything is there, but you have to know what you’re looking for. If you don’t know what you’re looking for you might as well not have the library. Like you can’t decide you want to become a biologist — it’s not enough to walk into Harvard’s biology library. You have to have a framework of understanding, a conception of what’s important and what isn’t important; what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. Not a rigid one that never gets modified, but at least some kind of framework.

Unfortunately that’s pretty rare. In the absence of activist movements that draw in a very substantial part of the population for interaction. Interchange — the kinds of things that went on in the Occupy community for example — in the absence of that most people are kind of at sea when they face the internet. So yes, they can find things of value and significance, but you have to know to look for them and you have to have a framework of analysis and perception that allows you to weed that out from a lot of the junk that surrounds it.

(To continue this multi-page article, follow this link: http://tinyurl.com/7vd8q7u )

Trayvon Martin's Death and What it Says About Race, Privilege, and Homicide

Reblogged from CrimeDime:

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Trayvon Martin’s death is inextricably bound up in his age, his hoodie, and his race. An older white woman, even in a hoodie, would not have been a likely target for George Zimmerman. But Trayvon, in his youth, his masculinity, and his racial identity as an African-American, fulfilled the stereotype of the unknown criminal offender.

While we most often think of white privilege – that unearned assumption of benign intent and general positive regard – as a function of 

Read more… 256 more words

Pot Smoking in America: 1960s

Long Ago and Far Away

I recall the method to smuggle pot back East in the mid 60′s was to find a preppy-looking couple, some clothes (Ivy league), a set of matching luggage, a pound of baby powder, and put them on a plane from LAX to NY, Philly, or Boston. (Pot was $10/lid [oz] in 1969 http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/CU59.html.)

I never had the nerve or demeanor for such high level activities, personally, but I recall seeing an 8′x12′ wall of green and red cellophane wrapped kilos of pot ready to be packed into suitcases and driven to LAX.    

Pot was a felony then, but there was no homeland security or dope sniffing dogs. It was an innocent time. Nixon’s war on drugs changed all that and gave us today’s cartels, first in Colombia and Peru.  Later, after the “WAR” closed route after route, and Paraquat fertilized farmer’s fields, other locations and routes spread like ripples in a pond throughout South, Central, and North America.   

See any parents you know?

Another war, in Viet Nam, had an effect from a different hemisphere:  our disaffected troops entertained themselves with Asian pot and China white.  Closer to home, still fighting communism but in Central America, the CIA  found cocaine a good way to fund the Contras in Central America off the books during the Reagan administration.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US)   

Lately, we hear that some, only some, of our troops in Afghanistan may, possibly be accepting Afghan heroin to ease the surreal horror of IEDs and the even more surreal survival rate from wounds that would have killed those of earlier wars.  “So it goes,” Billy Pilgrim says in Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” a tale of surrealist veracity.   I don’t even know if this book is required reading anymore.  After all, each new generation must be innocent of history so that they can believe that today’s war is just and that glory can be had in war.

Considering today’s climate of almost universal surveillance today, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four) to the innocence of yesteryear, yesteryear was a lot less dangerous and we were spending a lot less money on interdiction.  The “war on [your choice]” sure has changed things.  Today, after 50 years of war, an ounce is about $200 and you can get it by prescription.  Nineteen eighty four has arrived, just 25 years late.  - Carlos

The Golden Age of Getting High in America:

How 2 Young Hippie Girls Became Major Players in the Drug Trade

The true tale of two 20-year-old hippies in the early ’70s who became major players in the marijuana trade.

April 17, 2012  |

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If you can believe it, drug trafficking wasn’t always the grim, billion-dollar hemispheric battle that it is today.

Once upon a time, running drugs from Mexico was a surprisingly innocent affair, undertaken by industrious hippy kids who trekked across the border in the late ’60s and early ’70s. There were no machete–wielding psychopaths, dangling corpses, or vicious human traffickers. The Nogales-Phoenix corridor described recently as a ”killing fields” was once a far more peaceful place.

This tale of drugs and death begins and ends far from Nogales—in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, probably the last place you’d expect to find a former drug smuggler. The small park is ringed by high-rise apartment and condo complexes filled with old-money blue hairs, baby-boomer corporate execs and U. Penn kids whose rich parents happily shell out for luxury off-campus housing. Nestled among the city’s elite is a woman with a secret past that includes having moved almost a half-ton of weed from Mexico to the East Coast.

Rita (her executive-level career position makes her skittish about using her real name) met Sally in Philly in 1971; they were two 20-year-old rebellious hippy chicks with age-appropriate ache for adventure. Sally, the wild child, happened to know a Mexican drug kingpin named—no shit—Poncho Loco who would sell them as much weed as they wanted. Sally needed a sidekick, someone to roll her joints and chop her lines while she drove. Rita, the waif, was fresh off a stint bumming around London where she rubbed elbows with rock stars at the notorious Speakeasy nightclub, flopped in “cracked houses” full of squatting dopers and now needed the next thrill. They rented a blue 1970 Chevy Impala and struck out for Tucson, where Sally had a house to use as a way station.

“We were driving machines,” Rita recalls. “We made Tucson in three days.” They drove through a haze of pot smoke, blasting the Allman Brothers and tooting lines of coke.

They rolled into Tucson packing two Browning .45 pistols and $30,000 in cash. They ate some Quaaludes to get to sleep and then struck out for the border the next morning,

How did two 20-year-old hippy chicks pull off scoring huge bushels of weed from Mexican drug traffickers? The deal went down like this.

First they stuffed bundles of $100 bills in their oversized cowgirl boots. Rita was a knock-kneed skinny thing who barely fit in her boots to begin with so she carried most of the money.

“I called Sally ‘Annie Oakley,’” Rita says over coffee in her apartment with views of Rittenhouse Square. Her onetime waist-length hippy locks are now trimmed to a smart-looking bob that, along with a set of modish wire-frame glasses, complement her contemporary-arts professional persona. “We were really playing the cowgirl role to the hilt.”

They drove to Nogales and ditched the car, walking across the border into Mexico where one of Poncho Loco’s banditos was waiting to pick them up. They drove up into the hills where Poncho Loco’s ostentatious pink ranch house stood out among the shacks of the surrounding slums.

It turned out that being two swaggering, fearless young American girls strolling into the kingpin’s house kicking dust off their boots and ready to party worked in their favor.

“The Mexicans were absolutely in awe of Sally, they were blown away by her confidence, taken in by her sense of humor,” Rita says. “Poncho Loco treated us with complete respect. He cut us lines of coke and poured us shots of Mescal Tequila. Poncho’s wife cooked us dinner but we couldn’t eat much, we were so tooted.” She laughs with not a little irony. In present-day Mexico, where street killings, beheading and bombings, even massacres are current features of the War on Drugs, it would be a death wish for two young girls to saunter into El Narco’s lair and throw back shooter with his henchman.

They paid for the dope and then went shopping in the local markets for rugs and other touristy-looking bullshit to use as camouflage with the border guards. Once back in Tucson they holed up, getting high and waiting for Poncho’s call.

Back in Mexico, Poncho paid off the federales so he could move his shipments into the States without problems. He sent a car packed with 300 pound’s worth of weed to Tucson and then called the girls to come get it. They drove back to Sally’s house where they moved the goods from Poncho’s car to the Impala in the privacy of its two-car garage. They returned Poncho’s car and then hightailed it back east.

“Never drive through New Mexico—that was Sally’s only hard rule,” Rita says sternly. “The police there were always looking out for kids like us. Drive north through the Four Corners and Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado, then it’s a straight shot home on I-80.”

Back east, Sally paid Rita $1,000 for her troubles and then stashed the weed in her house in the Poconos, where she distributed it to dealers who distributed it up and down the coast.

Over the next few years they made maybe nine more trips, moving almost a half-ton of weed. As time went on, Sally’s operation expanded. She hired other drivers and was moving major weight.

“We thought pot was cool, it was innocent. We weren’t hurting anyone,” Rita says with a wry smile. “It was the ’70s, everyone we knew was a dealer. Honestly, we thought we were doing a sort of public service.”

Rita knows that the details of her story verge on the unbelievable, so she hauls out photo albums to provide the proof. The 40-year-old pictures are sepia tinted. In one, Rita’s wearing a white tank top, her skinny legs swimming in an oversized pair of blue denim bell bottoms, her hair long, bangs framing her face; in the background are tall cacti and a rugged mountain ridge. “That was taken near the house in Tucson,” she says.

There’s a high school yearbook photo of Sally, a gorgeous girl in a checked cowgirl’s shirt and brown leather vest, a long black silk sash tied around her neck. On the back of the photo is Sally’s smudged handwriting with a message for Rita: “May the rainbow’s end always fall on your shoulder.”

Another picture is of Poncho’s beautiful wife, her dark and mysterious face rimmed by close cropped black hair brilliantly backlit by the bright Mexico sun.

Toward the end of the ‘70s, Sally’s story began to take, like many an old-time druggie tale, a dark turn. She got deeper into coke, started freebasing. She pitched Rita with her next big idea: South America. A taste for cocaine was growing fast among the newly identified urban yuppie, and Sally figured to get in on the ground level and start moving keys.

“I knew that was a bad idea,” Rita says. “I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

This was a common transition at the time; many hippy pot smugglers were enticed by the bigger money cocaine brought in, never mind that bigger money came with bigger risks. Director Billy Corben’s 2006 documentary, Cocaine Cowboys, tells the story about Miami’s big coke traffickers in the drug’s ’80s heyday. The hippy pilots of the small prop plane who eventually went to work for Colombian cartels started out bringing in bricks of weed during the ’60s and ’70s just for shits and giggles. What started as fun among friends became an entanglement with murderous mobs; the Summer of Love turned intoScarface.

The advent of coke split up the dynamic duo of Rita and Sally. Rita went straight, got back into school, built a very successful career. She went to AA and got sober, putting in 12 years with the fellowship before eventually drifting away from it. She still has friends in the rooms, though she admits to drinking and popping an occasional pill.

Sally managed to complete a couple runs to South America before getting busted. After that, she dialed her dealing back to nickels and dimes just to keep her coke habit up. But being a full-blown basehead took a toll on her health, and her beloved cocaine killed her nearly a decade ago.

“Most of the people I knew back then are dead,” Rita says. “I felt sad for Sally, the lifestyle got the best of her. She would tell me, ‘You’re so successful—I’m so proud of you.’ The last time I saw her, she was on oxygen; the drugs had ruined her lungs.”

Rita laments how times have changed since the Golden Age of Getting High in America. Eventually freebase became crack, and the Quaalude and Tuinal pills gave way to needles of heroin. Guns were no longer props for a couple of pretend cowgirls on a wild ride through the Southwest.

“Back then it was about peace and love and having fun. It seems like now it’s all about gangs and guns and violence,” Rita says. “Back then it was a big party, now it’s just about addiction.” It’s all a distant memory, regardless. “Now I’m just another worker bee. My life is pretty boring. And, honestly, boring is pretty good.”

Jeff Deeney is a Philadelphia social worker and a writer who is in recovery. His column, “Street Beat,” runs biweekly in the The Fix. He is also a contributing writer for The Daily Beast.

Jeff Deeney is a Philadelphia social worker and a writer who is in recovery. He is a weekly columnist for the The Fix.