Eerie premonition: as we runners were leaving the finish area in Vienna Sunday afternoon, we hit a bottleneck (consequence of poor design) and first thought - of stampedes at Hindu festivals - was quickly replaced by "Oh, my God, one of these days there will be a bomb at one of these events." After a minute of anguish - thinking of the capacity for damage - I settled into the question of "Why would someone pick a marathon as a target?" and answered "Well…it represents one of the more extreme cases of gratuitous Western decadence in that while much of the world starves, these 25000 runners indulge in the apex of wastefulness: using productive energy for self-glory. Yeah…I could see one of these races being a target." 

Given the nature of the explosives (home-made vs ultra-sophisticated) and the date (Patriots Day/ day before income taxes) I'm leaning toward American origin (or maybe even disgruntled runner.) But the end result is indisputable: America will move yet another irreversible step into the police state it already is. Sad sad day - especially because that beautiful event won't ever have its innocence again.

A relevant frame of reference? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aEvzuA4f0c. While first clues seem to suggest a domestic origin, I post this as a way of drawing attention to the *scale* of the event and how we, as Americans, are pretty well-insulated to the consequences of damages we've inflicted on others elsewhere...and that the consequent empathy we've gained from the terrible event in our own backyard might inform/change our actions elsewhere. In advance, my apologies to anyone offended by the posting of this linkage, and please understand this doesn't diminish in any way the grief I feel for those who suffered in Boston - especially since I've crossed the finish line in more than 25 marathons.

1982. 2002. The next time I plan on running there will be in 2022. I wonder what the complexion of the Boston Marathon will be then... Background checks? Strip searches? Dogs everywhere? Bird-sized drones flitting about above the crowds and runners? No spectators allowed?

After 911 there was much discussion about the power of symbolism (via striking at symbols of American military and financial power) and that other targets of high symbolic value might include places of commerce in the heartland - e.g. Mall of America. Now it's happened at another "heartland" target. More than 500,000 runners in the US complete a marathon each year in the US in over 500 marathons. Suddenly the pre-dominant thought in the minds of these runners changes from the race to risk.

We fared badly in the war on terror - especially in terms of the jettisoning of civil liberties in the attempt "to secure a more secure future." An attack of the type at Boston Monday is virtually impossible to defend against. I wonder where the debate and responses will head.

_____

Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American

"White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican."

30 images in 30 days

2/14 the Studio Is Ready
We got the keys November 23, started construction December 2, and now that the house project is done I've got 30 days to knock out 5 pieces.

2/15 Flying in Dreams:
glass-board-glass w/ ceramic tile, lenses and pulleys exploring fascination with/25 years of various techniques used in flying. Initially this began with flapping of arms, then running and leaping then taking off; the with a jump forward and falling forward into flying; and the last few years flying with fingertip control and will. Early on I was embarrassed to be seen; later i would swoop through cityscapes and around buildings, sort of showing off. I often fly inside of buildings. By far the most amazing of these dreams was the time swooping over a landscape of rolling green hills and flying between the dozen or so tornadoes flitting around...

2/16 Exploding Tempered Glass:

One of the pieces of glass shown in the photo above exploded when it bumped the table as I was measuring out the positioning where the drilled holes will be. Lesson learned: don't use tempered glass; explore the best techniques for drilling glass.

2/17 Iterations:

The steam from a bath (meant to sooth the back injury I got from falling down the stairs Thursday) taken at our old apartment on Bloemgracht left a writing surface on the window.

2/18 Muybridge: 
At 2am it - the answer to the question of how to depict the various flying techniques used over the years - finally came!! : Muybridge's study of motion!

2/19 Putting it to Work: 
i had Olga shoot 3 series of me "flying" and here is one of them - dropped into the grid:

2/20 Version 2: 
As the dreaming advanced the technique became more fluid.

2/21 The Physical Substrate 

I'm starting to feel strung out and stringy from too many nights until 2am and not enough sleep (or sleep punctuated by frequent wake-ups as some other detail of one piece or another gets crunched and processed (last night it had to do with the method of display text for the disease/Dirty piece. And from falling down the stairs last Tuesday - everything feels out of whack. So I ran down to Amsterdamse Bos today...and back. 7 miles or so. It hurt. It felt great.

2/22 The Tornado Scene 

Here's the composite landscape.

2/23 All Over the City

A trip to Java Island to a place that Elisa Keir or Dave McManus would have felt at home in what with the special effects materials - fake foam, fake blood, rubber, rubber moulds - all about; then over to Westerpark to return the casting resin (the heat will crack the glass...better to use either transparent rubber or epoxy. A customer tries out the goods. The place kind of has the feel of The Art Coop (Champaign, IL).

2/24 Dirty

After tossing all 24 syringes onto the curved glass bowl they're soon to be embedded in and unthinkingly moving them about i become disturbed by the possibility of a cap of one of them coming off and pricking my finger. How do i know they haven't been used? What if they were used by an IV drug user, somebody with diseases? What if they are dirty? 

2/25 Un-Dirty

Prepping the syringes for their immersion experience.

2/26 The Announcement

Finally...

2/27 Components

The guy at Glashandel Actief - a family operation - says the glass-with-drilled-holes will be ready at 1. It ends up being 1 - the next day. Gradually I adjust expectations. Today - the 6th trip there - was only 5 hours after the 5th trip: he'd cut the oval mirror in record time.

2/28 "It's just Photoshopped"

It's certainly the practice of lucid dreaming that made it possible to take the wildly exciting and unexpected first flying dream back into waking then to begin to channel and shape it through the 30 years that have followed. Aside from the sheer delight of the experience itself is its evolution: early attempts at flight were rudimentary at best - awkward, almost embarrassing - as I flapped and floundered, feeling ponderous and weighted down. One of the stages incorporated running with longer-and-ridiculously-longer leaping strides until a feeling of giddy weightlessness would take over then I would fall forward and - with more expertise - use minimal flapping to gain height and soar. Early on I would steer away from crowds - still feeling kind of embarrassed by the whole thing - but then came to love watching the faces of kids especially, though I have yet to be joined in flight. I came to like soaring above/through trees and, later, through open windows into cavernous interiors or buildings under construction. Now the flying still takes place horizontally with slight fingertip movements to steer, just wanting to move and it happens with arms stretched. Wondering where this leads to next - flying while sleeping on the airplane? Leaving Earth orbit? Flying without clothing? (the feeling is clothing - if at all - is minimal (as shown here, see Figs. 1-3) 
Instructions; pull gently downward on the two silver weights to lift the blue panel and lower the green «tornado dream» panel into view

Background fontography for "Flying in Dreams"

3/1 The Flipside

A composite of all the images used for Figure 1 and Figure 2. Just fucking disturbing, if you ask me - and I know the person well.

3/2 A Finished Piece: "Flying in Dreams"

100-or-so hours later...

The moving parts were a little bit of a nightmare

3/3 Detail from "Dirty"

3/4 Triptic
Left: Holy parts not yet together
Middle: running self-portrait
Right: A marionette sits in a last rites box next to Drowning In A Sea of Bliss (possible 7th piece)

3/5 The Lost Child

 A visit to the 17th c cemetery behind the house on the Schinkel Gracht. This lost child's  image that will be used within the water in Drowning in a Sea of Melacholy, explaining it. 

 Henry Buttons Big Game Cat. Outside. Spring.

3/6 Concept for Holy

3/6 Polder (Mentality)
A polder is a low-lying tract of land enclosed by embankments (barriers) known as dikes that forms an artificial hydrological entity, meaning it has no connection with outside water other than through manually operated devices.
Like Dirty, Drowning in a Sea of Melancholy and Holy both will use a transparent rubber/epoxy for creating a matrix in which to embed objects, text, images and artifacts but - unlike them - they won't be filled completely. So today - drawing on 3 years of living below sea level - I built 2 dikes to restrain the rubbery sea: for the former piece there will end up being 2 polders allowing a clear view to the medical illustrations at the bottom; for the latter a dyke was built to separate upper (where the bereft, childless couple's torsos are visible) from lower (where their bodies are submerged in water).

3/6 Let's keep the church out of this
This piece is taking a look at the gradations of images between medical illustration, on one end, pornography on the other and various shades of eroticism in between. Originally the idea incorporated "sacred" vs "profane" (see the sketch from 3/6), with pornography (in this instance) meant to show the sacred (pleasure) and religious imagery (in this instance) meant to show the profane (punishment, self loathing of the body)...

Until Sezneva stepped in with "That's kind of 80's," and even though I'm really grouchy today from too many nights until 4 or 5am, I realized she had a point. When we sat on the canal yesterday evening near Vondelpark something far more interesting came out of my red-wined mouth: what if the pornography occupies the perimeter and you move into the center through eroticism (vintage porn, historical porn, erotic photos, advertisements, drawings) until you wind up at medical art in the center...but the vertical sides of the shaft leading down to the medical images get plastered with hardcore porn (so you see a gradation....kind of confusing in its transitions from one thing to another...on the horizontal plane, but a sharp contrast in the vertical. Ha!

On Fire

On April 7 an Iranian man self-immolated in Dam Square, Amsterdam in front of horrified onlookers  after his third request for political asylum was refused. A spokesman for the Minister of Immigration and Asylum, Gerd Leers, pointed out that the procedures have been executed properly and that the man had all the remedies at his disposal.

With embarrassment I recall making use of the term self-immolation in a piece of high school protest writing to designate the insufferable state of my cohort  - who, I pointed out, were old enough to be drafted to war, yet incapable of being trusted to leave high school grounds during lunch hour. I'd appropriated the term from that she-devil authoress, Ayn Rand, I was hopelessly under the spell of. With embarrassment comes from such trivialized use of a term denoting an act of such import. And, of course, because I didn't know the fucking definition.

The practice of self-immolation is not new but has re-emerged - by virtue of its impact as a political tool, most notably in bringing about the first instance of regime change in North Africa, in Tunisia. Above is Thich Quang Duc, one of a number of Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in protest of the discriminatory treatment endured by Buddhists under the Roman Catholic administration of President Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam.

On December 17, 2010, a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself afire after an episode in which his wares were confiscated, a female official humiliated him, her aides beat him, and the governor's office refused to hear his case. He died after an agonizing 18 days. He is pictured below - though not at the height of his agony.

In his video, Self-Immolation as a Political Tool, Rodger Baker remarks on the difficulties faced by those in power to counter such an action. Because the action is one in which violence is directed against self - rather than others or infra-structure - the retribution levied against the likes of, say, suicide bombers (who take many people with them) are inapplicable. What's more, public sympathy is clearly on the side of the victim: we all know, to one degree or another, the agony of a burn injury...yet the sympathy for a burn victim pales in comparison to both the courage entailed in subjecting oneself to both the pain of the action and the possibility of surviving it; and the hopelessness of the situation that drives one to this extreme. A suicide bomber may garner considerations of the latter, but because their violence is directed outward, the act is perceived very differently.

In places ranging from Afghanistan to India, the motivations and impacts can be on a much more personal level: many cases of self-immolation involve domestic violence, specifically beatings by husbands and the families of husbands. India is renowned for removal of the self - i.e. the woman is removed, but not by her own hand.

The Palimpsest Book Project

Viki Semou presents her Palimpsest Book project Thursday at the Unbound Book conference. A sort of Fluxus-inspired work, it "is an individual game and each one of the players ‘reads’ the story that the objects in the book-box tell and s/he continues ‘writing’ the story by adding one more object. The book-box, after that, has to be gifted to someone else who wishes to play the game." When she passed by one day in late February to talk about building a website to accompany it, the box contained these items:

Here's the story I more-or-less came up with - more or less since the original included the sock and the yoyo.
The rattlesnake that bit mah woman was as thick as my arm in its middle, though that may have been on account of a rat or a cat or a prairie dog it had swallowed the day before. In any case Esma was dead before she hit the ground. Her lucky chestnut - "lucky" i reckon, but in the worst sense of the word - will get buried with her, along with the silver spoon she was fed out of as a child, though anyone who knew her or her kin would snicker at the thought of any of them "being fed with a silver spoon." I  made my way up the dry riverbed here, with her body parked up top of the mule, who will be the only one of the three of us alive when the sun goes down behind the hills that line Slaughter Gulch this evening. This has always been one of my favorite spots…you see i was one always on the side of the Indians, what with all the butchery they was subjected to by us White Peoples, and here was where a small band of their fiercest women put to rest 87 settlers one February morning about four score years ago. I've got my tin of meat for my Last Supper, my pack of smokes (which is where you found this note, if you're readin' it) and my lighter. I hope I don't make too much of a mess of myself, as i wouldn't want to see a man with a hole blown into his chest by a 12-gauge shotgun, no-how and no-way - which is why I hope the contraption i rigged up dumps all the dirt on top of me after I fall back into the hole next to my beloved. I guess that's about it, and about twice as much as I've ever written in the last 10 years. Keep the pack of cigarettes with the piece of that motherfuckin' rattlesnake skin, be careful with the lighter, and enjoy what each day brings your way, hear? Sam August 12, 1921

The pit from my subconscious this emanated from is tied to a rattlesnake memory: while working my way up the steep incline of Hell's Canyon, near Riggins, Idaho, in 1993, I met a rattlesnake at eye level. If it had struck then, I probably wouldn't be writing this, since (1) it was big, (2) it would have injected venom into my face or neck, and (3) I had 20 minutes of climbing before reaching the car, and another hour after that to the nearest medical center. Before I knew what was happening I smashed it with a rock. After my heart began beating normally I began to wonder what to do to alleviate the guilt over this act of stupidity (I was in ts habitat, after all). At the tail end of my medical illustration career, I dutifully skinned and dissected it, kept the rattles and fangs, and had dinner. Yes, it tasted like chicken. A piece of it made its way into Viki's Box...which reminds me of a Throwing Muses song.

She's passing out 15 or so of these at the conference, so visit the project website for creative wordsmithing.

Nano Hummingbird

This bird flew into the window of my apartment and probably died of brain injuries. If I'd been more conscientious, the use of decals could have averted this accident - but with a housecat, Henry Buttons, who would often eat several birds/day, perhaps this was a quicker, easier death.

If it escaped the cat and the window, it might have to deal with one of the side-effects of one of the beloved components of green technology: getting chopped by a blade of a wind turbine. Its cohort may soon join the passenger pigeon - estimated to have numbered in the billions on the North American continent (and, therefore possibly one of the most numerous on the planet) - in the Extinction House one of these days, along with the 70-80 species the Hawaiian Islands have lost since humans dropped in nearly two millennia ago. Mass Extinction Events - the 5th (and first caused by humans) of which we are in the midst of - do, after all, happen one individual at a time.

Not to worry: as Nature's creations get munched in the maws of man, man replaces the missing with something better. Onto history's stage - and off the pages of science fiction literature - flits the Nano Hummingbird. The same beloved research entity, DARPA, that brought us the gift of self-hopping, self-healing landmines, gave about $4 million to AeroVironment to develop the prototype for this flying spying machine. Equipped with a camera and communications system, its operator can keep it from doing something stupid like flying into a window. Instead it can be maneuvered to land on your windowsill.



At age 17 I picked up a sci fi novel (whose name I can't recall) describing something akin to a flying ball bearing, a terror-inducing/crowd-controlling technology given that it could be guided by a remote operator to zoom into the face of anyone considered subversive. Then explode.

If you're a well-behaved person, though, why worry about the subversive intentions of the human guiding the device that comes to rest on your windowsill? Maybe it just needs a place to sit while it shits, and it's the workings of my paranoid mind to imagine an ill intent on the part of its makers...other than their desire to get the upper hand in whatever endless war is being waged against the Bad Guy. Easy! Just don't become one of the Bad Guys.

True to form, Wired describes this new avian gadget as "Awesome." M-W defines awe as "en emotion variously combining dread, veneration and wonder that i inspired by authority, or by the sacred or sublime."  Like shock and awe "a military doctrine based on the use of overwhelming power, dominant battlefield awareness, dominant maneuvers, and spectacular displays of force to paralyze an adversary's perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight." Whatever we can conjure up can eventually be made. If history is any measure, this new bird species will be doing things worse than shitting on your wndowsill.

Citing Security Concerns, Israelis Launch Pre-emptive Nuclear Attack on Cairo

Just in case you were lying down on the job of alertness, this headline was designed to startle you into wakefulness. Like the photograph. My Significant Other reacted with alarm when I read it to her, and this got me wondering about why such a sentence is so shocking. And I came to the conclusion that it is shocking because it's one of those things that tap into knowledge we keep buried under the surface and don't really like looking at too closely; and because it's not too distantly far from the truth.*

The international press paints a fairly consistent picture of both Israel and the U.S. in a state of distress over the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, whose nearly 30-year reign as near-dictator has been nearly as ugly as the event that brought him into power: he was one of several dozen officials wounded in the machine gun-assassination of his predecessor, Anwar El Sadat, in October, 1981. Torture. Secret Police. Disappearances. Surveillance. Suppression.

Mubarak is a perfect symbol of a foreign policy quandary that's haunted the United States for decades: what American capitalism wants is the security offered by autocracies like that of Mubarak, wherein trade agreements favorable to U.S. corporations are implemented and enforced; and the aspirations of labor, political and environmental movements - which run contrary to the corporate drive to maximize short term profits - are ruthlessly suppressed. Labor unrest? Kill them. Pollution controls? Strike them down. Political unrest? Stomp it out quickly.

Yet the promotion of what America trumpets as its first love - democracy - to the rest of the world has a tractor-trailer head-on collision with this desire for security. In this respect, America's foreign policy hypocrisy dovetails nicely with the hypocrisy of Israel's internal politics - the suppression of both its Arab and Leftist Jewish population.

To paraphrase a famous American terrorist** - They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. Both America and Israel have sacrificed many essential liberties in the name of security...and without any real gain in security. We've been lying down asleep on the train platform where that ole Democracy Train was moored, and the Democracy Train has left us behind.

We aren't welcome on this Democracy Train because we drove a different one up the ass of Iraq (specifically) and the Middle East (in general). The Neo-Cons - e.g. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, Cheney, etc - implemented the "Bush Doctrine" which included forceful regime change with the stated intent of bringing democracy to the huddled masses of the Mideast.

Needless to say, this policy didn't work out very well. In fact when one measures it by the metric of "hearts and minds" it seems the whole misadventure truly backfired: in state after state throughout the Middle East, fledgling Democratic movements were crushed as the U.S. rushed to support autocratic regimes it deemed crucial to national security, inspired fundamentalists in Iran to crush dissent as we labeled them as part of the "Axis of Evil," and took the breath away from the young and hopeful as they watched the farce play out through the last decade.

Perhaps the only way in which we can claim a positive role in the unfolding uprisings of the region is through inspiration of despair: things have to become truly hopeless for someone to risk life, limb and family as they take to the streets to face rocks to the head, charging horses or torture and imprisonment. And now that the cat is out of the bag, a movement is underway which owes nothing to the U.S. - other than, perhaps, a sense of allegiance to a period in American history when more than just lip service was paid to democracy. Revolution is an exciting first step: the hard part comes in filling the vacuum that's left behind. In the heady coming months in Egypt, the hope for democracy is tenuous because the very institutions who could help guide the process from within have been so thoroughly suppressed over 3 decades.

*The "nuclear attack" scenario is a mash-up of 2 headline threads that captures the very real fear American and Israeli policy makers must be reeling under now that the status quo is no more: (1) Israel is terrified of Iran's growing nuclear capability - even though it has been granted exception from international conventions regarding its own nuclear capabilities - and has threatened repeatedly to attack Iran's facilities. This could entail nuclear retaliation by Israel on Tehran if it counter-attacked
*Benjamin Franklin. From the vantage point of the British, the leaders of the American Revolution would fall neatly into the definition of the word. (2) Without a strong man in power, the political landscape in Egypt could easily transmogrify into one dominated by sectarian rivalries and culminate in an Iranian-like theocracy - unsympathetic to U.S. or Israeli interests.

Cheney Has No Detectable Pulse. The U.S. May Not Be Far Behind

WASHINGTON - Though most have suspected for some time, the world was shocked to discover that former Vice-President Cheney no longer has any detectable pulse. The man with the famous sideways grin, remarkable resemblance to Dr. Strangelove and ruthless approach to engaging in colossal acts of national sabotage suffered the first of his 5 heart attacks in 1978,* and has fought a losing battle against heart disease ever since. Critics have been quick to point out the likelihood that the debilitating effects of the disease may explain not only his apparent heartlessness toward the rest of humanity, but also an oxygen deprivation to that portion of the brain that keeps the urge to engage in pathological lies in check...it is, however, not in the purview of a non-medical expert such as this writer to either confirm or deny this hypothesis.

In related news the newly-elected House Speaker John Boehner began the 102nd session of Congress with a promise to cut $100 billion from domestic spending. This is from the party that wants to repeal the recently-enacted health care legislation and which considers Homeland Security and Defense spending off-limits to any reduction. To place this into perspective, bear in mind that for fiscal year 2011, total defense-related expenditures are estimated between $1.060–$1.449 trillion¹ - or about 30% of the total budget.² The cuts proposed by the Republicans just might be the lethal heart attack for those programs - education, health and infrastructure - already emaciated from lean years brought on by Wall Street's party days and the Bush-Cheney Wars. Perhaps they might take a cue from Cheney's recent weight loss and go after the fat - defense-related spending - rather than the heart.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_federal_budget

*precisely matching in count the 5 draft deferments he applied for and received - thus avoiding any of the pesky dangers of combat duty he has directed so many others toward, first as Secretary of Defense under the elder Bush with the invasion of Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East; then as the muscle behind the ill-fated Afghanistan and Iraqi Invasions/Wars

Just How Much Is $9 Trillion?

"On December 1, the Fed was forced to release details of 21,000 funding transactions it made during the financial crisis...The Fed has thus far reported, without even disclosing specifics of its lending from its discount window, which it continues to draw a dark curtain around, that it supplied, in total, more than $9 trillion to Wall Street firms, commercial banks, foreign banks, corporations and some highly questionable off balance sheet entities.

The data starkly show a comatose Wall Street being resuscitated with whatever financial might the Federal Reserve could pump into its tangled web of funding vehicles. It also points to how the Fed was dispersing sums which dwarfed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout program while allowing the TARP to take the media heat for obscene funding of Wall Street."

Read the full story by Pam Martens: The Tax-Payers' Tab: a Cool $9 Trillion and Then Some

Hmmmm...maybe this is a more appropriate image?

Credits:
Photomontage and background image: mark swindle | design-ia
stack of money: http://www.worldofstock.com/closeups/BCO2576.php
his Trump-ness: http://suburbarazzi.lohudblogs.com/category/donald-trump/
moonrise: http://vjac.free.fr/skyshows/raysshadows/moonrises/2009jan10_moonrise/2009jan10_moonrise_2.jpg
leaning forward: http://utopianvision.co.uk/pictures/diya-mirza/2644/
If you stack one million one dollar bills on top of each other how tall would it be?: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/964254

Cheney Dodges the Bullet Again

All 16 charges filed by the Nigerian government against Dick Cheney were dropped yesterday after Halliburton agreed to pay an out-of-court settlement of $250 million. Last year one of Halliburton's units, KBR, reached a settlement of $579 million in US courts on charges of paying $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials during the years Cheney headed Halliburton.¹

To put this into perspective: if you or I get charged with a speeding ticket, we can do something that amounts to the same thing. You give the court $50 or $100 and you can get the violation cleansed from your record. In effect it's saying "Yes, I'm guilty, but take some of my money and let's pretend this whole sordid business never happened."²

Corporations do the same sort of thing: in exchange for avoiding the long, costly and embarrassing testimony of a trial, they can reach an out-of-court settlement. In this case a quarter-of-a-billion dollars.

This made me wonder…

Why would the Nigerian government agree to such a settlement?
As with almost every other Third World country whose resources are sought after by the Americans, Russians, Europeans or Chinese, the use of bribes to buy out administrative officials within the target country is nothing new; once bought they do what they can to facilitate resource extraction - including suppression of labor, health and environmental concerns and parties. Perhaps some of these same officials were part of the group that reached the agreement. Long story short: don't want to bite the hand that feeds you. Just slap it.

Also consider this: even if there had been a criminal conviction, because of a lack of effective mechanisms to enforce a conviction across international boundaries - especially when you're talking about the likes of the United States or, say, Israel - Nigeria's acceptance of the settlement offer was probably just a common sense decision: although the US is willing to bend over backwards to get its mitts on Julian Assange (and allows rendition of terror suspects to countries known to torture) you'd better believe it won't let one of its own be given up to the likes of Nigeria - or the ICC for that matter.


Why would Halliburton pay such a huge sum to avoid the trial of its former president  - and former Vice-President of the United States?
Between 1994 and 2004, Halliburton is charged with paying $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to secure $6 billion in contracts for the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas facility. Hell…that's only $1 in bribes for every $33 of contract, shaving a mere 3% of the profit margin. ³

It may have helped that former President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker III interceded on Cheney's behalf. Why, you may wonder, would a former President and Secretary of State step forward to stop the prosecution (and, one would hope, the imprisonment) of the former corporate executive and Vice-President of the United States? Perhaps they are gay lovers and don't like the idea of Dick getting sodomized by a prison full of angry Nigerian Black men? Nawwww…it's probably nothing quite this personal and has a lot more to do with Nigeria's rank as the world's 11th largest oil producer. America would be like a whiny junkie if its oil supply was to be disrupted.⁴

What does such a settlement represent?
An out-of-court settlement isn't necessarily an admission of guilt, true: often the corporate defendant will crunch the cost-benefit numbers and offer a settlement even in the case of innocence. With an endless barrage of litigation targeted at the company, Halliburton may simply have wanted to avoid a further tarnishing of its image...though if you were already accused of assisting in the gang rape of a continent, pissing oil in the oceans, and ripping off taxpayers in one colossal con after another, what the hell would you care about further cementing your image in the Halls of Infamy? Maybe a better explanation is that to Halliburton the settlement amount is a paltry sum, and that a conviction here would have opened the door to convictions elsewhere. They can't kill all the witnesses to their crimes - not that I'm accusing them of murder, especially since it would be much easier to have paid-off officials do the dirtywork.

Of much greater concern is the lack of accountability on the environmental wreckage of the Niger River Delta by the oil and gas companies. During the months following the Deepwater Horizon blowout, Nigerians were perplexed at the severity of reaction against BP, since its Delta "has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates."⁵ Hence this represents once again the absence of justice in one of the most severe environmental catastrophes on the African continent.

Business as usual, it seems. Corporations (and their helmsmen) consistently get off the hook, no matter how egregious their crimes. As Dr. Sezneva remarked "In an era of increasing multi-national corporate control, we can expect more and more of this in years to come."


1 Nigeria to drop Dick Cheney charges after plea bargain

2 Sweden appeals UK granting bail for Julian Assange: This Very Bad Man's bail bond was set at a paltry $316,000!

3 Halliburton: Wikipedia reports, however, that the Halliburton subsidiary paid only a paltry $2.4 million - or a rate of return of $2500 for every $1 of bribes. Wikipedia

4 Oil Reserves in Nigeria: "Although Libya has more reserves,  there were 36.2 billion barrels (5.76×10^9 m3) of proven oil reserves in Nigeria as of 2007,  ranking the country as the largest oil producer in Africa and the 11th largest in the world,  averaging 2.28 million barrels per day (362×10^3 m3/d) in 2006. At current rates this would be 43 years of supply if no new oil was found." Wikipedia

5 Far From Gulf,  a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old, June 16, 2010 the New York Times

Photos:
Photo montage and Bakersfield oil field photo: Mark Swindle | design-ia

Cheney photo: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/cheney-spokesperson-bp.php

Bush Sr photo: http://americanhistory.about.com/od/uspresidents/ig/Images-of-US-Presidents/George-H-W-Bush.htm

Bush Jr photo: http://connect.in.com/george-bush-jokes/photos-1-1-1-1256e192787a1693e8171e8bf300d845.html

James Baker photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JamesBaker.jpeg

Niger oil spill: Austin Ekeinde/Reuters http://brightnepenthe.blogspot.com/2010/06/scoping-problem-and-petroleum-industry.html

The Toppling of the Statue

CHICAGO - Bankrupted by The Endless Wars...

IRAQ WAR:

AfGHANISTAN WAR:

WAR ON DRUGS:


...citizens performed an enraged Americanized version of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein of April 9, 2003, using commandeered construction equipment and explosives on the Sears Tower (aka the "Willis Tower"), the famous Chicago landmark. Spearheaded by the ad hoc Citizens for Economic, Political and Social Justice (CEPSJ), the effort capped weeks of street protests venting pent-up frustration over the failed wars, the appropriation of funds from education, health and infrastructure; and a deeply-rooted multi-generational hatred of corporate behavior. "We thought the bad guys were over there...you know Sodom Hussein, Obama sin Lad-de-da or whatever his name was...where the hell did he go, anyway?..." remarked the unemployed construction worker who wired the detonating caps at the southwest corner, "...but it sure seems the real Bad Men are in the boardroom."

Miriam Falltower, laid off 2 years ago from her CPS teaching position and selected to press the button due to her most-appropriate last name concurred: "First the class size went up and the benefits down. Then the job disappeared altogether. The final straw was the tax cuts passed last week the President had to dish up to the Republicans in exchange for unemployment benefits extension. A tax cut for the richest? That's it! I'm fed up with the Iraqi War and the Afghan War and War on Drugs and the war on this and the war and that...it's time for a goddamned class war!" she yelled to the cheers of the crowd around here.

"I always kind of thought this building was an eyesore," remarked Daniel Rightangle - an architecture grad whose tuition costs will saddle him with over $100,000 of debt, "though I'm not the kind who advocates destruction just out of aesthetic distaste. This thing was a symbol. I'm sure we'll all end up labeled as terrorists...but, you know, I'm fed up with anyone not agreeing with the status quo being called a "terrorist!"

In a modern-day application of swords-into-plowshares, the building materials will go into the construction of schools, neighborhood medical facilities and continuing education/re-training centers, while the vacated site will house a think tank dedicated to peaceful problem-solving, international cooperation and a rethinking of failed US policies.