AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

13 Great New Political Movies You Should Watch For

As the major festival circuit begins, the big political doc titles emerge. Here are some of our favorites.

December 8, 2011 |

Gay pride 1987, still from David France's "How to Survive a Plague"

Photo Credit: http://www.facebook.com/howtosurviveaplague

While the Oscars are often praised for bringing greater attention to political documentaries like Inside Job and Gasland, the Sundance Film Festival is where it begins. Something of a feeder fest, it plucks smaller features (and shorts!) and sets them on the path to more mainstream, commercial audiences, which benefits both filmmakers and the causes they seek to illuminate. In the mid-2000s, it was certainly lambasted for leaning too Hollywood — and fostering a Cannes-like celebrity atmosphere that distracted from its initial goal of helping independent films — but in recent years, festival directors have tried to rectify that, adding different programs, such as “Focus on Film,” that mean to bring it back to earth. Last year, Gasland, Restrepo, and Waiting for Superman all hit Sundance before they were nominated for Oscars (Restrepo won).

The entries for next year’s Sundance were just announced, and typically there are a lot of great-sounding films on the roster. But more than in recent memory, the documentary selections are incredibly politically relevant — particularly in the economic area — with several focusing on topics that came to light this year, including the Fukushima nuclear plant and Occupy Wall Street. (Many of them, it should be noted, are directed by women.) This year’s roster got Indie Wire thinking ahead, wondering, “Will Sundance 2012 Docs Influence the Debate on Poverty, Hunger, Economic Equality?” It’s not a lofty projection — we saw how last year’s big docs brought important topics like short-shrifted education and oil greed to the forefront. Here’s a list of those documentaries, both American and international, that could shift this year’s thinking, and the ones we most want to see get awesome distribution deals.

1. We’re Not Broke (dir. Karin Hayes, Victoria Bruce)
And, we have our first Occupy Wall Street–related film. The directors have collaborated together before on a few award-winning pieces, including The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt, which detailed the harrowing experience of the title subject, a Colombian presidential candidate who was held hostage by FARC for over six years. This one brings it closer to home, looking at the effects of corporations’ immoral overseas tax havens as average Americans struggle for their homes and lives. It’s not out officially until 2012, so there aren’t too many details beyond that bit of information and a few stills featuring OWS protesters, though it will allegedly feature US Uncut and focus on corporate tax evasion.

2. Detropia (dir. Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady)
Calling Detroit “the canary in the coal mine,” the filmmakers focus on the city’s loss of both manufacturing jobs (50 percent) and population (25 percent), and how its denizens are struggling to stay in a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Through it, they posit that Detroit is only the beginning, and that other major cities will follow as the “American dream” becomes a nightmare. Ewing and Grady, who were nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for Jesus Camp, follow the fates of several Detroiters who are holding on for dear life while trying to imagine some future of urban renewal. This film will debut at Sundance, but with Detroit’s mayor currently struggling to keep the city from the clutches of the state's nefarious emergency takeover laws, expect this topic and the city to stay in the news for 2012.

3. Finding North (dir. Kristi Jacobson, Lori Silverbush)
This piece about who goes hungry in America and why looks like it might be a game changer in the style of Waiting for Superman: having gotten a hearty cosign by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Finding North seems to posit a “return to policies of the 1970s” in order to remove the burden, and it also focuses on those hit hardest by the lack of access to affordable, healthy food: one in four children. Following three individuals affected, including a second-grader in Colorado and a third-grader in Mississippi, the film tries to shed light both on the impact of hunger for America’s future and why it’s even happening at all. Music fan bonus: The original soundtrack is performed by T-Bone Burnett and the Civil Wars.

4. The Queen of Versailles (dir. Lauren Greenfield)
Alluding to the obscenely opulent French monarch whose head was eventually lopped, Greenfield’s doc focuses on a very real, almost too perfect story of excess and economy. A billionaire family of real-estate magnates aspires to build the biggest house in America — a 90,000-square-foot abode modeled after Versailles — when the very boom and bubble that funded their project pops and stymies their dreams. Foreclosure is the guillotine in this tragedy. Filmed by an award-winning documentary photographer, the stills are compelling and the tale more so.

5. Payback (dir. Jennifer Baichwal)
Margaret Atwood’s best-selling book of the same name was the inspiration for this Canadian documentary, which focuses on the historical, cultural, and social impact of debt through the ages, and how it is, in her words, an “innate part of the human experience.” Of course, global economic meltdown is the locus of the film, which means expect plenty of Atwood’s “shadow side of wealth,” emphasis on the shadow. The film will premiere at Sundance, but to get a jump-start, listen to Atwood’s Massey lectures here, which provided the foundation for the book and, in turn, the doc.

6. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare (dir. Matthew Heineman, Susan Froemke)
Most of the films on this list are so new they don’t even have trailers, but the one with the most self-explanatory title does. The film features the dramatic exchange between President Obama and a hostile Republican Congress in the administration’s efforts to get Americans health care, of course, but goes deeper into the lobbyists and corporate powers whose pockets thrive on keeping people sick. Big pharma’s a target — and the burdened American is the victim. Escape Fire’s not finished yet and needs a big boost of funds to have it ready for Sundance. To help, donate on their Kickstarter account.

7. How to Survive a Plague (dir. David France)
The director, an award-winning journalist and chronicler of AIDS activism, pieced together never-before-seen archival footage of AIDS activists in the ’80s and ’90s, including ACT UP and the Lavender Hill Mob, to show how HIV went from a certain death sentence to what’s considered a manageable chronic disease by actually infiltrating government and pharmaceutical agencies. Rogue lifesavers! Not only that, he shows how these activists, many of them HIV-positive, broke down the social stigmas that followed the infection. Heartbreaking tagline: “They saved millions of lives — including many, though not all, of their own.” Naturally, the doc also looks at the fact that HIV infection is on the rise, most prominently, tragically, among young gay men.

8. The House I Live In (dir. Eugene Jarecki)
An examination of how the War on Drugs has decimated America’s impoverished communities and become the chief feeder into the prison industrial complex — while drugs flourish. Information beyond that is sparse, but Jarecki’s an accomplished and acclaimed director, responsible for Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, and Freakonomics.

9. The Invisible War (dir. Kirby Dick)
Female soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to be raped by fellow soldiers than to be killed by enemy fire. Director Kirby Dick, whose 2005 documentary Twist of Faith focused on a man’s sexual abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest, delves into the social and political implications of this travesty, and the fact that it’s often covered up. The trailer features women who’ve been assaulted speaking about their experiences and shows what promises to be a tight, gripping investigation.

10. 1½ Revolution (dir. Omar Shargawi, Karim El Hakim)
As Tahrir Square erupted in revolution, the directors of this film were serendipitously in Cairo on another assignment. They ended up capturing footage that evaded most of the mainstream news media, intermingling with the military, taking the psychological gauge from street level — and were eventually arrested and beaten by the secret police. As one of this year’s most extraordinary world developments — and the zygote of the Arab Spring — the film’s view from the ground appears to be some of the best, and most real, footage to date.

11. 5 Broken Cameras (dir. Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi)
A Palestininan villager — codirector Emad Burnat — chronicles the change in his community after his son is born, depicting an ever-encroaching barrier being erected by the Israeli military. “I had never thought of making films,” says Burnat in the trailer, “but when I started filming, I thought maybe there is a way to change the situation in which I live.” It’s a document of five years — a new camera per year — of settlements, and violence, in a once-peaceful enclave.

12. The Atomic States of America (dir. Don Argott, Sheena M. Joyce)
Before Fukushima was rocked by the massive Japan earthquake of early 2011 — before they started finding radiation in baby food — the United States approved the construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant in 32 years. This film explores communities located near plants, looks at the subsequent debate, and wonders whether it’s too risky. It premieres at Sundance, but early screenshots depict a stunning and terrifying American landscape marred by nuclear power plants situated dangerously close to where Americans live and work.

13. Chasing Ice (dir. Jeff Orlowski)
Climate change deniers will have no recourse against this one, which features time-lapse photography by National Geographic’s James Balog, documenting the receding of ancient Arctic glaciers over mere years. It also chronicles Balog’s own shift from a climate change skeptic to a passionate voice for the proof of its existence. He risks his life to place his special time-lapse cameras all over the Arctic, with a singular mind to provide evidence that global warming is all too real. (Feeling skeptical? Here’s Balog’s TED Talk.) Of note: This film’s writer, Mark Monroe, was also responsible for the devastating dolphin conservation documentary The Cove. With the recent debate over Discovery Channel’s now-rescinded censorship over airing the terrifying, climate change–related finale of Frozen Planet, it’s clear that even the environmental community needs convincing, particularly since the rate of acceleration makes this something like Al Gore 5.0.

Sundance begins Jan. 19 in Park City, Utah. These films are generally made available shortly after screening, and most entrants usually get picked up for distro deals. Keep your eyes peeled.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, the New York Times and various other magazines and websites.

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

10 Pop Monstrosities That Almost Destroyed Our Culture in 2011

Here are the worst TV shows, movies, and songs of 2011.

December 30, 2011 |

Every year, things go down in pop culture that seem to signal the coming armageddon -- like offensive and popular reality shows, for instance -- and we wonder, could it possibly get worse? And every year, it does. We could list 2011 terrible things in American culture this year and not even come close to completing the list, so for brevity’s sake, here are the top 10 worst things that happened in pop culture this year. May 2012 have fewer of them.

1. Movie: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1

Even if this movie wasn’t predicated on dismal Rand-worship and probably the most tedious/annoying book of her career, it’s bad based on sheer artistry. Set in the dystopian near-future of 2016, it bumps up against every dramatic action film cliche imaginable, a Tea Party fingerpainting of corporate greed. That said, this movie is AMAZING in its hilarity, possibly the best unintentionally humorous American film since National Treasure, with all the requisite deep melodrama and overacting that is somehow also stiff. It’s terrible but a pleasure to watch, particularly when you consider that with all the rich libertarians in the world, no one could pool their money for better talent! Haha.

2. Documentary: The Undefeated

If Sarah Palin’s fawning, lionizing documentary weren’t crafted for the sole purpose of revising her career and casting her in a noble light, the tale of how it came to be might have been funny: gleaming fanboy Stephen K. Bannon piles compliments on his feckless heroine, his love blinding him to her mishaps. It almost deserves a Mel Brooks script—only it’s real, and the Palin faithful brought in around $75k the first week in only 10 theaters. The Palin hustle has quieted down a bit, but expect this to be trotted out as evidence of her wondrousness closer to the election (and as absurd GOP candidates mention her as a potential running mate). It’s just depressing that it requires actual political propaganda to get her there.

3. TV Miniseries: "The Kennedys"

What was up with propagandist revisionism this year? The intensely reviled recasting of the Camelot era was so full of historical inaccuracies that Brave New Films launched a successful effort to keep the History Channel from airing it. With Greg Kinnear as JFK and Katie Holmes as Jackie, the whole piece was criticized as wholesale character assassination, hand in hand with the strange conservative impulse to cast JFK as somehow evil. And they didn’t even use theincriminating Jackie tapes!

4. Reality Show: “Toddlers and Tiaras"

Hitfix called it “a clarion call for a Social Services intervention,” and was it ever. Eager and often deluded moms entering their mostly reluctant tiny, tiny daughters into beauty pageants and stage-momming them into internalizing the princess premium before they can really utter words with three syllables. If the ghost of JonBenet Ramsey doesn’t loom over this show for you in a disturbing way, perhaps some of the choice things moms say to their children will, such as one mom telling her eight-year-old to shake her butt around, but not too much “like a stripper.” Ugh.

5. Novel: Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris

It’s unfortunate that an author with the imagination of Charlaine Harris can apparently only make her work more interesting by adding an endless stream of fantastical characters, rather than making said characters do more interesting things. The creator of Sookie Stackhouse, upon which HBO’s popular “True Blood” is based, Harris is up to book 11 in the series, and it might be time to pack it in (or at least create a spin-off). Add this to tossed-off and confusing plot elements that mess around with continunity and logic (many longtime fans have accused Harris of not actually reading the books in her own series), and you have a beach read that’s more frustrating and convoluted than light and fun.

6. Song (and video!): Bruno Mars, “The Lazy Song”

Stumbling over himself to be viewed as America’s least threatening nice guy, Bruno Mars reached the point of pure banality with “The Lazy Song,” which sounds delivered straight from a can. An accomplishment, at least, in that he became the most innocuous person of the year, but even the tempo was boring with “The Lazy Song.” Add a cutesy and inexplicable band of monkeys wearing Wayfarers in the video and it’s like a pipe bomb that, upon explosion, politely delivers a full-scale affront to the senses.

7. Musical Group: Lady Antebellum

Aside from the obvious—that the group’s name fetishizes an era in which black people were enslaved—this year the Nashville trio released Own the Night, an album that was completely offensive in its non-offensiveness. Ciphoning any semblance of personality until it was an opaque wisp of music, it thrived on cliche lyrics, boring harmonies, terrible interludes and completely generic everything. The musical equivalent of being inside a shopping mall, the place that varies only slightly no matter where you are in the world, Own the Night is an attempt to whitewash its own world into empty vertigo. Horrifying.

8. Twilight Movie: Breaking Dawn, Part 1

Going into the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s ridiculously popular vampire love stories, we knew they were highly Christian, but Breaking Dawn is too much: an entire (pretty long!) treatise that basically says sex is 1) only for married people; and 2) for the sole purpose of procreation and abortion is never, ever an option, even if it means the mother is going to die. Pro-life to the point of squeamishness, and even the gorgeous visage of Rob Pattinson couldn’t take away the sting.

9. Non-Reality Television Show: "Last Man Standing" (ABC)

There was a lot of competition for this category in 2011: The short-lived, regressive Playboy Club; the incredibly racist and blogger-cutesy 2 Broke Girls; the ridiculous bro-show Man Up, which reached the infantilized nadir of the Peter Pan syndrome comedy wrought by Judd Apatow and his ilk. But nothing was more offensive, less funny, and more harmful to every gender and sexual orientation than Last Man Standing, the Tim Allen vehicle based on the premise that traditional masculinity is being bled out by independent women and femme-y men, whose proliferation is ripping apart the fabric of tradition and ruining a world where manly (white) men rule.

When he’s not trying to decipher the arcane and impenetrable language of women, he’s ascribing his masculinity to things that are frankly unisex (such as sports) and mocking as somehow emasculated men who prefer, for instance, Mel Gibson’s romantic movies over his violent ones. Aside from the feeling that the misogynists writing this show are of the he-man, woman-haters club variety, they also seem not funny at all.

10. Dramatic Moment of Outrage from Right-Wingers: Parents Television Council on Janet Jackson Nipplegate

The Parents Television Council is a source of endless, paranoid hilarity of handwringing over relatively minor infractions on TV, but one point was the funniest this year: when it responded in outrage over the accidental exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast on the 2004 Superbowl halftime. In November, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a fine was not necessary for the incident, which as anyone who’s seen it knows, was clearly an accident (unless Jackson and Justin Timberlake are such exceptional actors they can register pure horror before an entire stadium midway through a strenuous performance). But of course, the PTC called it a “striptease” (which is repulsive, sexualized and racialized) and called for an appeal to the appeal. Let’s hope 2012 brings less of this stuff.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and websites.

AlterNet.org

On the Commons / By David Morris

The Giving Season: Why the 99% Are Actually More Philanthropic Than the 1%

The 99% is more generous, and gives primarily to the church, while the 1% is more connected to cultural institutions that offer some payoff in social status.

December 23, 2011 |

This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December.

Those are the bare facts. But this year, when the stark divide between the 1% and the 99% has begun to inform our thinking and our approach, it might be instructive to examine the world of giving through that lens.

How The 1% Differs

Unsurprisingly, the 99% are much more generous than the 1%. Households earning less than $25,000 give away twice as much as richer households as a fraction of their income. The disparity is even greater given that many if not most of the 99% do not itemize their tax returns and therefore do not take a tax deduction for charitable contributions.

To discover what motivates giving Paul K, Piff, a PhD candidate in social psychology at University of California carried out a series of experiments. He discovered that people earning $15,000 or less are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than those earning more than $150,000.

The 99% tend to give primarily to their church. Giving by the 1%, on the other hand, according to Judith Warner writing in the New York Times “was mostly directed to other causes—cultural institutions, for example, or their alma maters—which often came with the not-inconsequential payoff of enhancing the donor’s status among his or her peers.”

Indeed, empathy and compassion seem in short supply among the 1%. Piff comments, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others”. Which, as Warner notes, affirms economist Frank Levy’s observation in his 1999 book about the new inequality--The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change. “The welfare state rests on enlightened self-interest in which people can look at beneficiaries and reasonable say, ‘There for the grace of God…’ As income differences widen, this statement rings less true.”

We should bear in mind that what is reported as charitable giving by the 1% significantly overstates the actual private sacrifice, as economist Uwe E. Reinhardt points out. If the wealthy donate $10,000 to charity and are in the combined 50% federal, state and local tax bracket then their effective sacrifice is $5,000 and society as a whole, without its advice and consent, subsidizes the rest.

Foundations and the Public Good

Much of the giving by the very wealthy is done through foundations. Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. "At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent," opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. "We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities."

While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite. This movement may have begun in the early 1980s when William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford and principal in leveraged buyout and private equity firms and the President of the Olin Foundation joined with others to start the Philanthropy Roundtable.

In his 1978 book, A Time for Truth, Simon declared, "Most private funds … flow ceaselessly to the very institutions which are philosophically committed to the destruction of capitalism. … [T]he great corporations of America sustain the major universities, with no regard for the content of their teachings [and sustain] the major foundations, which nurture the most destructive egalitarian trends."

The Philanthropy Roundtable was established to channel the contributions of the 1% in more self-serving directions.

In 2011 the Roundtable awarded the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership to Charles G. Koch. In 2008 Koch, or rather the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation entered into an agreement with Florida State University to provide millions for the school’s economics department. The catch, according to the St. Petersburg Times was that Koch would have the authority to approve who ultimately filled the positions. Moreover, the professors it approves must be hired with tenure and FSU must continue to support them for at least four years past the period in which Koch had promised funding

Just to be clear here. The public is subsidizing possibly to the tune of 50 percent charitable contributions to a public university that give control to a private person to hire professors who will teach what may be a required course that will educate the students about the evils of government.

In the last few years a growing number of billionaires have established their own private foundations. They receive an immediate tax deduction for the full value of their contribution even though the foundation is only required to give away 5% of that endowment each year. Which means that for every $1 million contributed, which can mean a $500,000 loss to the public sector, the foundation must give away only $50,000.

Moreover, the billionaire has the right to decide where that money is spent.

The Gates Foundation and Public Education

The most dramatic example to date may be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates endowed the Foundation, avoiding billions of dollars in taxes and now heads the Foundation and decides how it spends its money.

The Gates Foundation originally gave its money to school districts to encourage smaller schools that have a better track record at improving student performance. But, says Allan C. Golston, President of the Foundation’s U.S. program, “We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes. The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer”. In 2009 the Foundation gave almost $80 million for advocacy to influence the $600 billion various levels of government spend annually on education. In partnership with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walmart Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation has become the dominant player in writing the rules for the future of public education.

The New York Times has reported on how astonishingly comprehensive and influential these Foundations’ campaigns have been.

The 2009 stimulus package included $6 billion to help the public education system. The Gates Foundation and its partners swung into action to make sure it was spent “correctly”. They were helped by the fact that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff and Assistant Deputy Secretary came from the Gates Foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving door policy limiting involvement with former employers.

Gates financed the New Teacher Project to issue and influential report detailing the flaws in existing evaluation systems. The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers developed the standards and Achieve, Inc. a non-profit organization coordinated the writing of tests aligned with the standards, each with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. The Alliance for Excellent Education received half a million “to grow support for the common core standards initiative”. The Fordham Institute received a million to “review common core materials and develop supportive materials”.

And when the rules were issued and the competition began, the Gates Foundation offered $250,000 to help each state apply so long as the state agreed with the Foundations’ market oriented approach.

And to educate the general public, the Foundation spent $2 million on a campaign focused on the film Waiting for Superman that demonized teachers’ unions.

Most charter schools, the preferred solution for Gates, Broad and the Walmart family, are non-profits. But they see no reason why they need to remain non-profits. A 2009 guide book by the Philanthropy Roundtable noted, “many education reformers believe that EMOs (profit oriented management companies) hold real potential for revolutionizing public education. If investors in EMOs are able to deliver consistent student achievement and create a profitable investment vehicle, they will have discovered a highly attractive and sustainable model for charter schools specifically and public education generally.”

Today more than 700 public k-12 schools around the country are managed by for profit companies. In May, Ohio adopted legislation allowing for-profit-businesses to open their own taxpayer-financed charter schools, which led Bill Sims, head of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools to express his concern that this could “take the public out of public charter schools.”

In 2011 the Gates Foundation seems to have deepened its anti-government efforts, giving almost $400,000 to the conservatives’ legislative privatization network ALEC.

Warren Buffett is a major investor in the Gates Foundation. In 2011 he gave another $1.5 billion to the Foundation bringing the total to almost $10 billion so far.

Buffett is well known for writing and speaking about the unfairness of the tax system. He has signed on to an effort to force the 1% to pay a higher, not a lower tax rate than the 99%.

To date Buffett hasn’t been willing to give millions to underwrite a comprehensive campaign to convince legislators and the country to raise taxes on the rich. And the Gates Foundation hasn’t to my knowledge entertained the idea that it might spend $80 million on a campaign to increase the resources devoted to public education.

Eliminate the Charitable Giving Tax Deduction

In June 2010 Gates and Buffett launched The Giving Pledge, asking their wealthy compatriots to give away half or more of their wealth. Several dozen billionaires reportedly have signed on. Many will set up their own foundations and reap substantial tax benefits while retaining the right to decide where the money is invested. CPA Robert A. Green has estimated that this could result in $250 billion or more being diverted from the treasuries of state and federal governments.

We should eliminate the tax deduction for charities. The impact on giving will be modest while the savings to the public sector will be substantial.

A 2006 survey by the Bank of America found that over half of high-net-worth donors said their giving would stay the same, or even increase, if the tax deduction for charitable gifts fell to zero. The American Enterprise Institute notes “research shows that virtually no one is motivated meaningfully to give only because of our tax system.” Jack Shakely who ran the California Community Foundation for 25 years recently penned an Op Ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he noted that while the top tax bracket for individuals has plummeted from 70% in 1980 to 35% in 2003 (and according to the IRS the very rich are today taxed at an effective rate of 17 percent) charitable donations have remained almost constant, hovering between 1.7% and 1.95% of personal income per year.

This year governments may lose $50 billion or more because of tax deductions taken overwhelmingly by the rich for charitable givings intended primarily to enhance their status with their brethren or to attack the public sector. We can’t stop the rich from using their money for their own purposes (although we should certainly enact laws to stop them from unduly influencing legislation and elections). But we should not add insult to injury by giving them huge amounts of public sums to attack the public sector.

David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minn., and director of its New Rules project.

Small Towns, Small Minds: Democracy Only Money Can Buy

Small Towns, Small Minds

excerpted from the book

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

by Greg Palast

p298
To understand what I mean, let's begin with this. The United States is ugly. A conspiracy of travel writers have sold the image of America the Beautiful: Georgia O'Keeffe sunsets over New Mexico's plateau, the wide-open vistas of the Grand Canyon. But to get there, you must drive through a numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald's up to and . leaning over the Canyon wall.

From New Orleans jambalaya, to Harlem ham hocks, to New England crab boil, whatever is unique to an American region or town has been hunted down and herded into a few tourist preserves. The oppressive ubiquity of contrived American monoculture has ingested and eliminated any threat of character. The words of McDonald's late CEO Ray Kroc, ''We cannot trust some people who are nonconformists," have become our national anthem.

p299
The world's three hundred richest people are worth more than the world's poorest three billion.

p299
Dr. Edward Wolff, director of the Income Studies Project at the Jerome Levy Institute, New York, tells me that between 1983 and 1997, 85.5 percent of the vaunted increase in America's wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent. In that time, overall U.S. income rocketed-of which 80 percent of America's families received zero percent. The market's up, but who is the market? According to Wolff, the Gilded One Percent own $2.9 trillion of the nation's stocks and bonds out of a total $3.5 trillion.

Not coincidentally, the rise in the riches of the rich matches quite well with the wealth lost by production workers through the shrinking of their share of the production pie. U.S. workers are producing more per hour (up 17 percent since 1983) while keeping less of it (real wages are down 3.1 percent). So there you have it: The market did not rise on a bubble of fictions but on the rock-hard foundation of the spoils of the class war.

What's going on here? Let's start with computers. Forget Robert Reich's sweet notion that computers can make work more meaningful and worthwhile. The purpose of every industrial revolution, from the steam-powered loom to the assembly line, is to make craft and skills obsolete, and thereby make people interchangeable and cheap. And now, computerization is speeding the industrialization of service work.

p312
The United Kingdom has an Official Secrets Act, libel laws l that effectively privatize censorship of journalism, privacy laws protecting politicians-as do all nations in some form or other, except America. You may be surprised to learn that the mother of our Democracy has no legal freedom of the press, no First Amendment-no Bill of Rights. (Maybe they can borrow ours- we're not using it. And we may have no Official Secrets Act- yet-but we are on the cutting edge of creating an unofficial corporate secrets act.)

And that's why I'm so ornery about fighting for the First Amendment-which our president and bobbing heads in Congress would snatch from us in the name of "security." Just try working in a nation without the right to a free press, and worse, without the will to fight for it. I have. An unholy number of British journalists seem to have fallen in love with their shackles.

p313
Lacking a First Amendment, Britain has become the libel-suit capital of the world. Stories accepted elsewhere draw steep judgments in London. The Guardian papers receive notice of legal action about three times a day-that's one thousand libel notices a year... The Guardian papers operate on a small budget from a not-for-profit foundation.

p314
Truth alone is not a defense in English courts.

p331
[The USA], where nothing can be censored - but where nothing printed is worth censoring.

---

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

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Knox appeal highlights egregious flaws in American justice

The Lawless Lawyer

OCTOBER 4, 2011 11:32AM

Knox appeal highlights egregious flaws in American justice

As the sensationalist trials of Amanda Knox come to a dramatic end in Italy, commentators are beginning to highlight the striking differences between the American and Italian legal systems. These differences meant that Knox's appeal played out as a fully new trial rather than an American-style bench review restricted largely to procedural challenges, allowing her to present new evidence of faulty DNA testing to a jury of fresh eyes. The Italian system also ensured that Knox received a sentence of 26 years for the sexual asault and murder of her roommate, a slap on the wrist by American standards. As other commentators have pointed out on Salon and in the New York Times, had Knox been falsely convicted in the United States, she could well have shared the fate of Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia two weeks ago after a conviction based solely on the testimony of witnesses who have since recanted.

But now that Knox's trial is over, and American legal commentators are largely in agreement that a wrong has been righted, the focus should turn to the glaring failures of the American system that are exposed by what went right in Knox's case. First, we should look at the failures of our appellate system, which are undeniable in light of a case like Knox's (or any case where a defendant is found guilty in spite of a dearth of evidence.) Knox's fate hinged on her ability to show a new, unbiased jury that the DNA evidence upon which she and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito had been convicted was so flawed that it was thoroughly incredible. In contrast, a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts embeds in the American legal system the notion that defendants have no constitutional right to even test new DNA evidence that surfaces or becomes technologically available after a conviction. In fact, Justice Antonin Scalia dissented when the Supreme Court stepped in to order new DNA testing in the Troy Davis case, arguing that "[T]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent." (As noted above, Davis was eventually executed anyway; there is no scientific test to determine the credibility of eyewitness testimony.)

In addition to scrutinizing our appellate system, which at least one Supreme Court justice believes does not guarantee the right of an innocent person to escape execution, Americans must have a conversation about the disproportionately long sentences meted out by our judicial system. The sentence lengths for almost all crimes, from drugs to murder, are unfathomable to most of the developed world. The United States incarcerates the highest percentage of its population of any country, and does so for such lengthy periods of time that states are beginning to open geriatric prisons focused on the health needs of the growing elderly prison population. But Knox's case is an excellent jumping off point in particular to highlight the sentences given to young people, even children. In Florida, prosecutors are attempting to charge 12-year-old Christian Fernandez as an adult for the murder of his 2-year-old brother, in spite of numerous factors in his case pointing to the need for leniency: the mother waited over six hours to bring her younger son to the hospital, and Christian's numerous behavior problems - including aggression toward his brother - did not stop his mother from leaving him alone with the younger boy . If convicted and sentenced to life, Christian could conceivably spend an astounding 90 years of his life behind bars. In 2010, the Supreme Court stepped in to bar states from handing out life sentences to juveniles for crimes other than murder; three justices, including Justice Scalia, dissented in full, and Chief Justice Roberts dissented in part. As a result of this ruling, over 100 children around the country were resentenced to shorter terms.

As Amanda Knox's appeal drew to a close, her alleged victim Meredith Kercher's family begged the media not to forget her. While there is no way to bring Kercher back to life, her memory can be honored by any justice done as a result of the steps - and grave missteps - taken to bring her killer to justice. The media should look beyond the Italian system, and beyond Amanda Knox herself, to put pressure on all legal systems to save innocent defendants and grieving families from the pain of a broken justice system. Regardless of differences of opinions regarding Knox's particular case, we can start by demanding justice right here at home.

Author tags:

crime, juvenile justice, italy, supreme court, justice, legal system, law, amanda knox

We Used to Be a Country; Now We’re a Staging Area

by David Macaray / October 1st, 2011

If any of us were wondering where the United States ranks, relative to the rest of the world, in the general category of “worker protection,” there is now a precise answer available—one supplied by Professor Kenneth Thomas of the University of Missouri (St. Louis), who based his findings on statistics supplied by OECD members.

The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) is a group of 34 comparatively “rich” industrialized nations that was founded in 1961 and whose stated purpose, more or less, is to meet semi-regularly to discuss ways of increasing economic progress through world trade. It might help to think of the OECD as an international version of the Chamber of Commerce. Its headquarters are in Paris, France.

The following countries are members of the OECD: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

So what did Professor Thomas learn from his survey? Where does the proud and accomplished United States rank? Shockingly, the U.S. not only finishes dead last overall, but in many of the specific categories (maternity leaves, medical leaves, education, etc.) we’re not even within shouting distance of the rest of the pack.

Now a sharp-eyed realist might attempt to mitigate these findings by arguing that getting beaten in these categories by Denmark, Sweden and Norway is no disgrace and certainly no surprise. After all, Scandinavia is/was known as a veritable “workers paradise.” But Estonia and Mexico? Chile and Slovenia? Surely, someone is joking.

But it’s no joke. Thomas shows that the U.S. not only lags well behind its fellow OECD members in worker protection, it even trails the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries in many areas. Among the categories considered in the OECD study: being fired unfairly, not receiving severance pay, not getting enough notice on mass layoffs, and the use of non-vested, non-permanent employees.

Arguably, the U.S. is undergoing a shift in self-identity. Instead of seeing ourselves, collectively, as a “country”—a society, a culture, a national community—we now see ourselves as nothing more than an economic arena—a gladiatorial arena where it’s every man for himself, where there are only winners and losers. And while no one knows how all of this will ultimately play out, it’s safe to say it will end badly for the majority (formerly known as “citizens”; now referred to as “losers”).

There are two (and only two) sources of worker protection: federal and state labor laws, and union contracts. In the absence of these two safeguards, it’s economic free-fall. As for our laws, they’re being tested and challenged every day by predatory corporations looking for shortcuts and loopholes. Making it worse, the courts and media reflexively defend these corporations. Meanwhile, the Democrats—labor’s putative “friends”—are terrified of doing anything that will make them look pro-labor.

Which leaves only the unions to provide a modicum of worker protection and dignity. And, as everyone knows, union membership now hovers at a mere 12.4%, down from a high of nearly 35% back in the glory days of the 1950s, when the middle-class was thriving and prosperous. Who would’ve thought it possible? Who would’ve dreamed the day would come when the American worker looked to Estonia for inspiration?

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author (It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor), was a former union rep. He can be reached at: dmacaray@earthlink.net. Read other articles by David.

This article was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2011 at 8:02am and is filed under Labor, Unions.

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control

Editor: Steve Kornacki

Updated: Today

Topic:

2012 Elections

Tuesday, Sep 27, 2011 08:01 ET

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control

Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated

By Brad Friedman

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iStockphoto/dcdp

It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.

Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

"We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines," said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team "We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine."

The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab's scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor

Previous lab demonstrations of e-voting system hacks, such as Princeton's demonstration of a viral cyber attack on a Diebold touch-screen system -- as I wrote for Salon back in 2006 -- relied on cyber attacks to change the results of elections. Such attacks, according to the team at Argonne, require more coding skills and knowledge of the voting system software than is needed for the attack on the Diebold system.

Indeed, the Argonne team's attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine's proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive "alien electronics" into the machine.

The Argonne team's demonstration of the attack on a Diebold Accuvote machine is seen in a short new video shared exclusively with the Brad Blog [posted below]. The team successfully demonstrated a similar attack on a touch-screen system made by Sequoia Voting Systems in 2009.

The new findings of the Vulnerability Assessment Team echo long-ignored concerns about e-voting vulnerabilities issued by other computer scientists and security experts, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (an arm of the Department of Homeland Security), and even a long-ignored presentation by a CIA official given to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

"This is a national security issue," says Johnston. "It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security."

The use of touch-screen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems of the type Argonne demonstrated to be vulnerable to manipulation has declined in recent years due to security concerns, and the high cost of programming and maintenance. Nonetheless, the same type of DRE systems, or ones very similar, will once again be used by a significant part of the electorate on Election Day in 2012. According to Sean Flaherty, a policy analyst for VerifiedVoting.org, a nonpartisan e-voting watchdog group, "About one-third of registered voters live where the only way to vote on Election Day is to use a DRE."

Almost all voters in states like Georgia, Maryland, Utah and Nevada, and the majority of voters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas, will vote on DREs on Election Day in 2012, says Flaherty. Voters in major municipalities such as Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh will also line up in next year's election to use DREs of the type hacked by the Argonne National Lab.

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results. But critics like California Secretary of State Debra Bowen have pointed out that attempts at "security by obscurity" largely ignore the most immediate threat, which comes from election insiders who have regular access to the e-voting systems, as well as those who may gain physical access to machines that were not designed with security safeguards in mind.

"This is a fundamentally very powerful attack and we believe that voting officials should become aware of this and stop focusing strictly on cyber [attacks]," says Vulnerability Assessment Team member John Warner. "There's a very large physical protection component of the voting machine that needs to be addressed."

The team's video demonstrates how inserting the inexpensive electronic device into the voting machine can offer a "bad guy" virtually complete control over the machine. A cheap remote control unit can enable access to the voting machine from up to half a mile away.

"The cost of the attack that you're going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities," explains Warner in the video. "If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that's another $15. So the total cost would be $26."

The video shows three different types of attack, each demonstrating how the intrusion developed by the team allows them to take complete control of the Diebold touch-screen voting machine. They were able to demonstrate a similar attack on a DRE system made by Sequoia Voting Systems as well.

In what Warner describes as "probably the most relevant attack for vote tampering," the intruder would allow the voter to make his or her selections. But when the voter actually attempts to push the Vote Now button, which records the voter's final selections to the system's memory card, he says, "we will simply intercept that attempt ... change a few of the votes," and the changed votes would then be registered in the machine.

"In order to do this," Warner explains, "we blank the screen temporarily so that the voter doesn't see that there's some revoting going on prior to the final registration of the votes."

This type of attack is particularly troubling because the manipulation would occur after the voter has approved as "correct" the on-screen summaries of his or her intended selections. Team leader Johnson says that while such an attack could be mounted on Election Day, there would be "a high probability of being detected." But he explained that the machines could also be tampered with during so-called voting machine "sleepovers" when e-voting systems are kept by poll workers at their houses, often days and weeks prior to the election or at other times when the systems are unguarded.

"The more realistic way to insert these alien electronics is to do it while the voting machines are waiting in the polling place a week or two prior to the election," Johnston said. "Often the polling places are in elementary schools or a church basement or some place that doesn't really have a great deal of security. Or the voting machines can be tampered while they're in transit to the polling place. Or while they're in storage in the warehouse between elections," says Johnston. He notes that the Argonne team had no owner's manual or circuit diagrams for either the Diebold or Sequoia voting systems they were able to access in these attacks.

The team members are critical of election security procedures, which rarely, if ever, include physical inspection of the machines, especially their internal electronics. Even if such inspections were carried out, however, the Argonne scientists say the type of attack they've developed leaves behind no physical or programming evidence, if properly executed.

"The really nice thing about this attack, the man-in-the-middle, is that there's no soldering or destruction of the circuit board of any kind," Warner says. "You can remove this attack and leave no forensic evidence that we've been there."

Gaining access to the inside of the Diebold touch-screen is as simple as picking the rudimentary lock, or using a standard hotel minibar key, as all of the machines use the same easily copied key, available at most office supply stores.

"I think our main message is, let's not get overly transfixed on the cyber," team leader Johnston says. Since he believes they "can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine," he recommends a number of improvements for future e-voting systems.

"The machines themselves need to be designed better, with the idea that people may be trying to get into them," he says. " If you're just thinking about the fact that someone can try to get in, you can design the seals better, for example."

"Don't do things like use a standard blank key for every machine," he warns. "Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock. You don't have to have state of the art security, but you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in."

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The video demonstration and explanation of the Diebold "Man-in-the-Middle" attack, as developed by Argonne National Lab's Vulnerability Assessment Team, follows below. Their related attack on a Sequoia voting system can be viewed here.