Obama's human rights abuses

Reasonable Americans everywhere gave a collective sigh of relief last night upon the determination that Willard "Mitt" Romney's influence on national affairs will be constrained to counting his Benjamins and punditing on Fox. It was like when you're in a group of friends and a Mormon missionary comes walking up toward you and everyone sort of looks away and hopes he'll go away and then, at the last moment, he'll start talking to some other sorry mark and everyone unconsciously says, "Whew!"

So the real-world analog to Mr. Burns/Lucille Bluth/HAL will not, repeat NOT, be lining the Oval Office with his etchings. I applaud, Mr. Obama! You saved us all from great embarrassment (and maybe a couple wars).

That said, there are still some serious problems with the Obama presidency. I'm not talking about the economy: it's a fantasy to think that recovering from the 2008 financial crash could have occurred quickly or easily (if, indeed, we are truly recovering and not just headed for a more serious crash). Obama's economic strategy has been prudent, practical, and Keynesian. He was able to deliver real results because he aimed for solutions, not miracles. No, the problems with Obama are essentially civil-libertarian problems, created in the context of the 'War On Terror.' Borrowing from the ACLU's candidate report on the president, I've listed some below. (Bizarrely, drone bombings are not mentioned on the ACLU list.)

1. Obama created an indefinite-detention system for those sad saps at Gitmo and elsewhere who are neither civilians nor POWs. They exist in a gray nether-space of legal non-status. Obama initially promised to close Guantanamo, but after Congress foiled his efforts, he appears to have embraced the Bush administration's strategy of ignoring habeus corpus for alleged terrorists.

2. Obama apparently stopped or at least cut back torture at secret prisons like Guantanamo, but did not try to prosecute or otherwise pursue those who'd committed it under the Bush administration. The ACLU reports that there have been "No reports of extraordinary rendition to torture or other cruelty under his administration," though Scott Horton disputes this (here and here). ('Extraordinary rendition' refers to the practice of switching prisoners around between governments without oversight; the US has used it to basically outsource torture to foreign governments.) So while treatment of prisoners has improved, our military (and police and intelligence forces, presumably) are still a ways from being consistently humane (under a conventional legal understanding of that term; I'm not even going to talk about the ways in which e.g. the police are inhumane in ways that aren't explicitly recognized by e.g. international law).

3. Obama embraces the PATRIOT Act just as much as his predecessor, which act e.g. allows the FBI to subpoena library records without prior court approval and place a gag-order on the persons subpoenaed (see here and here).

4. While he's made good on his promise to draw-down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama's also expanded the use of drone bombings. These remote-controlled bombers are especially prevalent in Pakistan, where they sometimes blow up someone US intelligence believes to be a threat and sometimes blow up civilians (actually, the ratio is one alleged terrorist to 49 civilian deaths). (See here, here, here, and here.)

I speculate that Obama doesn't relish the chance to decimate international human rights, domestic civil rights, or blow up poor brown people. And regardless of his tastes, it's just a fact that these four areas of abuse occur within a constrained set of options. Both morally and politically, Obama's actions are calculated responses to incentives, such as the imperative to effectively prevent terrorist attacks against Americans. Plus let's not forget that there's not overwhelming outcry against these abuses: most Americans, for example support drone bombing. I can report from a meeting with my own father (who's pretty middle-of-the-road, politically) that giving police and military the authority to torture, detain, etc. when they've got 'good reasons' for doing so is a fair price to pay for the safety of his family. In short, it's not like Obama went out of his way to commit these abuses. He commits them because, basically, we want him to ('we' being both the American public and the de facto power structure of American politics).

Yet abuses they are. And as an American citizen, I'm responsible for them: they're committed by my government (which I implicitly legitimized when I voted on Tuesday), in my name, using my tax dollars. I am responsible for the people who are kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned in the name of American safety. I am responsible for the expanding police-state in my country. And I am responsible for the Pakistani families who continue to die from drone bombings.

Patrick Henry famously said, "Give me liberty, or give me death." I wish he'd said "dignity" instead of "liberty": just as there was never anything dignified or decent about enslaving other human beings, there's nothing redeeming or excusable about the violence and coercion employed by my government in its attempts to protect American life and happiness. And maybe this will sound hokey or fake, but for my part, I'd rather die in a terrorist attack than have even one person kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned without trial. My safety is not that valuable.

So: four more years. We have four more years to push Obama toward behaving like the humanitarian he presents himself as.

2000 bookshops have been closed since 2005... :(

via http://www.sheppardsconfidential.com/

Library closures challenged in court

Campaigners are seeking a ruling that decisions to close six libraries in the London borough of Brent are legally flawed.
The Brent case is expected to be followed in the near future by similar challenges to library cuts proposed by Gloucestershire and Somerset county councils, and on the Isle of Wight.
Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, the Pet Shop Boys and Goldfrapp are among those who have contributed to campaign legal costs.
Playwright Alan Bennett launched a scathing attack when he spoke at a church benefit to raise legal funds to save Kensal Rise library, one of the six under threat in Brent. He compared the loss to ''child abuse''.
Brent campaign lawyers yesterday applied for judicial review, arguing council officers unlawfully failed to assess local needs and the likely impact of closing half the borough's libraries.

This is a map of library closures in the U.K.

Anarchy Info-Boxes in Olympia

"All materials are free. Feel free to take, borrow and leave print information. Enjoy."

The story of the anarchy infobox

The idea for an anarchy infobox came when people wanted to learn about
anarchy 24 hours a day in Olympia.
Keeping the local zine library open all night seemed impractical. People also
don't have access to the internet at all times and can't access websites like
zinelibrary.net. Having an old newspaper box in the backyard helped put this
idea into action.

People painted the old newspaper box and installed a new plexiglass
window. A new shelf was made for the zines to sit on inside the infobox. People
also put zine subject dividers and book holders to make the info in the infobox
more accessible.

The zine infobox made its debut at 4th and Washington
streets in downtown Olympia in
front of a coffee shop, across the corner from the Industrial Worker (the paper
of the IWW) newspaper box...

Then things, of course, went sour. Read More at Zinelibrary.net...

This was just down the street from our bookstore for a spell last spring and summer, I hope it returns, as it seems to be a relatively cool idea. Oh, and keeping the Olympia Zine Library open 24 hours a day would require armed guards and/or a sizeable tax-free donation to Last Word Books, L.L.C. Neither of which are particularly out of the question. Please speak to our C.E.O., One Basil C.

The Brautigan Library in Burlington, Vermont

Awesome! Gonna make my friend V-Ron take me there someday!

Unusual library may get new chapter

By Kevin O'Kelly, Globe Correspondent | September 27, 2004

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- The 325 works in the Brautigan Library are diverse, to say the least, ranging from the short-story collection "Sterling Silver Cockroaches" to the economic treatise "Three Essays Advocating the Abolition of Money" to the poetry collection "A Shoebox to Hold the Unknown." But they all have one thing in common: They've never been published. From 1990 to 1996, the Brautigan Library accepted manuscripts from all over the world, as long as the authors paid binding costs. Housed in the Fletcher Free Library in downtown Burlington, the collection exists as a memorial to the work of counterculture author and '60s icon Richard Brautigan, whose novel "The Abortion" takes place largely in a library that collects only unpublished works. Brautigan's novels have devoted fans, and so does the library he inspired.

"It still amazes me how many people I'll find here," says Fletcher codirector Amber Collins. "People are fascinated by the idea that books shouldn't be regulated by the fact that you have to have a publisher."

Visitors peruse the collection, look at the Brautigan memorabilia, or just savor the offbeat nature of the place. In accordance with the library's bylaws, none of the chairs match. Instead of using the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal systems, the Brautigan's trustees opted to organize the collection according to the "Mayonnaise System," in homage to Brautigan's novel "Trout Fishing in America," which ends with the word "mayonnaise." The Mayonnaise System is quite simple: Books are organized in categories such as "Love," "the Future," "Adventure," and "All the Rest."