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Buddy Roemer and the Lone Liberal Rumble

2011-12-09T02:00:00Z

Republican Presidential candidate Buddy Roemer gives his insight on the current state of the American economy and ideas for restructuring the national tax rate, healthcare system and state legislation. Later in the...

Spain’s brain drain: Young talent flees crisis

2011-12-08T05:52:32Z

To get a firm grip on Europe's debt, member states have imposed strict austerity measures, with southerners suffering most. As millions of unemployed people in Spain fight over what few jobs there are, the young and...

Occupy DC strikes at heart of lobbyists’ hub

2011-12-08T06:31:00Z

Up to 70 arrests have been made in Washington DC after the police dispersed a mass demonstration only walking distance away from the White House. “Occupiers” blocked downtown streets to protest against high unemployment...

‘Bailouts kill those who could save world economy’

2011-12-08T06:49:00Z

Pumping ever larger sums of cash into the global economy will produce correspondingly smaller results. What’s worse, the move will harm emerging economies which have the best chance of pulling the world out of its...

Sheriff Arpaio Showdown: Resignation Demands Grow Amid Child Sex Crimes Debacle

2011-12-07T22:36:31Z

A groundswell of demands for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s resignation continued to spread across local, county and state levels in Arizona today, as questions over his Maricopa County department’s failed leadership and bungling of hundreds of reported sex crimes, including child rape and molestation, remained unanswered.

“Victims who get the courage to report sexual abuse to authorities have every right to expect law enforcement to take their report seriously and to investigate it,” said state Rep. Katie Hobbs, a social worker and expert on domestic abuse who represents a district in Maricopa County. “These cases have been referred to as ‘botched investigations’, but really, this situation is a gross miscarriage of justice. Irreparable damage has been done to these victims and their families. Ultimately Sheriff Arpaio didn’t get the job done, and it’s time for him to recognize it.”

After offering a questionable apology on Monday, “if there were any victims,” as Arpaio quipped, the increasingly erratic and out-of-touch 79-year-old sheriff found time to ride in his beloved U.S. Army tank in the Phoenix Light Parade on Tuesday, and then tweeted about a supermarket tabloid’s feature on his posse to verify President Obama’s birth certificate:

A self-proclaimed hardliner who relishes the media attention for his anti-immigrant sweeps, his pink-underwear-wearing Tent City inmates and reality TV exploits, Arpaio is no stranger to controversy. Last spring, local and national groups called for his resignation, after allegations emerged over the misuse of $100 million.

But the growing controversy over his department’s extraordinary mishandling of the sex crime investigations, however, has reached a tipping point of criticism and new calls for a showdown over Arpaio’s future.

Among the 432 ignored reports of rape, child molestations and sex crimes, as Arizona Republiccolumnist Laurie Roberts noted, was “a 2-year-old taken to the hospital with vaginal pain and bruising after a stint with a babysitter.”

Earlier today at the Arizona State Capitol, Hobbs was joined by state Rep. Ruben Gallego, a ranking member of the Military Affairs & Public Safety committee, who declared Arpaio had dedicated his time to “investigating his own political enemies, avoiding internal investigations on the officers who botched the cases, misspending $100 million, and ignoring 40,000 outstanding felony arrest warrants for violent criminals,” among other diversions.

“Sheriff Arpaio can make as many excuses as he wants, but when someone in the United States reports abuse to law enforcement, we investigate it,” Gallego said. “We don’t live in a third world country and Sheriff Arpaio shouldn’t be acting like we do. Our county sheriff’s office should be working to keep all of our children safe.”

In Tucson, state Rep. Daniel Patterson added: “I stand in strong support of the hundreds of victims, many children, who were wronged by Arpaio’s negligence and I join my colleagues in calling for his resignation now. Time to go, Joe!”

Pablo Alvarado, of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, called for federal intervention:

We are pleased attention has properly returned to Sheriff Arpaio and we agree he should resign. However, the White House role in Maricopa’s crisis deserves greater scrutiny and requires immediate action. Sheriff Arpaio’s mishandling of crime cases is the direct result his out-of-control and discriminatory focus on immigration; focus he’s able to implement through federal contracts.

Tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 8th, with the support of the powerful Citizens for a Better Arizona, which recently organized the recall of Arpaio-backed state Sen. President Russell Pearce, the Town of Guadalupe Council Meeting will consider a special resolution calling for Arpaio’s resignation. In a statement today, State Rep. Catherine Miranda offered her support for the resolution:

I am pleased and very supportive with The Town of Guadalupe making a public statement regarding Sheriff Arpaio. Investigation and prosecution of sexual crimes should be the highest priority in Sheriff Arpaio’s office. Victims of sexual crimes must be willing to overcome fear and intimidation to be willing to report these crimes when they are committed. If the victims of sex crimes do not feel that the Sheriff’s office will deport them then we will have criminals free to commit crimes without fear of prosecution. It’s time that we move to a new era of public collaboration and confidence in our Maricopa County Sheriff’s office. We need change and we need it before one more person is victimized by both the person committing the assault and the Sheriff’s office who does not meet their elected responsibilities. I commend the Town of Guadalupe for taking the lead.

The Guadalupe resolution is here:

Former US governor sentenced to prison

2011-12-08T09:16:29Z

Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell senate seat vacated by Barack Obama, has been ordered to serve 14 years behind bars.

Pitchfork: Columns: Why We Fight #15

2011-06-29T16:47:47Z

Fifteen years ago, the main problem a lover of music-- or film, or television, or other varieties of pop culture-- would experience was scarcity. It took money to get hold of the stuff, and if you liked anything weird, it took effort, too. As a result, the default mode was to like what you could. In fact, the best way to demonstrate to others that you cared and were discerning about music was to like things-- to have enjoyed exploring all these realms that took some effort to get to.

Over the past decade and a half, this situation seems to have reversed. The problem people talk about now is not scarcity but glut: a glut of music available to consume, a glut of media to tell you about it, a glut of things that desperately want your attention. Somewhere along the way, the default mode has taken a hard shift in the direction of showing your discernment by not liking things-- by seeing through the hype and feeling superior to whatever you're being told about in a given week. Give it the attention it wants, but in the negative.

The Five Smartest Congressional Bills You've Never Heard Of | The Nation

2011-06-15T00:08:14Z

There are some seriously progressive initiatives underway in the 112th Congress, and they deserve more attention than they're getting.

Giving Loving Day Its Due

2011-06-11T21:12:58Z

By Marcia Alesan Dawkins

While celebrating this important civil rights milestone, we should remember that increased visibility of interracial couples and offspring does not promise increased racial harmony.

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Cheap food: Not what’s for dinner anymore?

2011-06-11T00:22:44Z

by Tom Philpott.

Cross-posted from Mother Jones.

Remember when gas was a dollar a gallon? The era of the fast-food "dollar menu" may be going the same way.

Cheap food has been with us for a while. After World War II, global grain prices fell steadily for decades. U.S. and European farms scaled up, resorted to synthetic and mined fertilizers and pesticides, invested in massive planting and harvesting machines as well as novel seed varieties. All of this pushed crop yields into the stratosphere -- and crop prices into the dirt. The era of cheap food was upon us, giving rise to things like corn-sweetened Big Gulps and the dumping of boatloads of U.S. corn on foreign markets. But now things are changing fast.

From Justin Gillis' big front-pager in last Sunday's New York Times:

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

And here's the formidable Lester Brown, writing in Foreign Policy:

Unfortunately, today's [crop] price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population, crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry.

Both the Times and the Brown analyses are worth reading. They accurately portray the big-picture situation: The globe is consuming staple crops faster than farmers can churn them out, and climate change, population growth, high energy prices, and increased meat consumption all threaten to make things worse. The Times' Gillis shatters the stubborn claim that climate change will be good for agriculture, at least in the global north, because all of that excess carbon in the air will make plants grow faster. Turns out that other factors, like extreme weather events and excess heat, will likely more than offset that effect.

Brown is especially good on the "land grab" problem: the trend of cash-rich, land-poor countries like Saudi Arabia buying up prime farm territory in low-income countries, mostly in Africa:

By the end of 2009, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated, some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2010 World Bank analysis of these "land grabs" reported that a total of nearly 140 million acres were involved -- an area that exceeds the cropland devoted to corn and wheat combined in the United States. Such acquisitions also typically involve water rights, meaning that land grabs potentially affect all downstream countries as well. Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to irrigate crops in Ethiopia or Sudan, for instance, will now not reach Egypt, upending the delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries with which Egypt must negotiate.

In other words, rich countries are essentially colonizing farmland in places where millions of people face chronic hunger -- often in secret deals with domestic elites that ice out local farmers whose families have occupied the land for generations, Brown reports. He adds a detail I hadn't heard before: Two-thirds of these land grabs involve crops grown for non-food purposes, mainly biofuels. The industrial world is essentially turning the global south's prime farmland into another source for car fuel.

For all its analytical power, Brown's article is scant on solutions. "The time to act is now," he concludes, "before the food crisis of 2011 becomes the new normal." But he doesn't specify what he'd like to see happen. Gillis, meanwhile, fixates on technology -- though to his credit, he doesn't parrot the agrichemical industry's marketing line that without heavy doses of its products, global famine is inevitable. According to industry dogma, only patent-protected GMO seeds will fit the bill. Yet most of the examples Gillis points to are seeds "improved" by conventional breeding, not genetic modification.

But both analyses neglect a burgeoning consensus among some development specialists and ag experts that the solution to the "global food crisis" doesn't come from technology at all -- at least not the kind that comes in a bag. Just last month, a team of researchers led by the eminent Washington State University soil scientist John P. Reganold published a paper [PDF] in Science arguing that conventional U.S. agriculture research has become too "narrowly focused on productivity and efficiency" at the expense of public health and resilience to the pressures of climate change. Rather than promote techno-fixes, the researchers called for "organic farming, alternative livestock production (e.g., grass-fed), mixed crop and livestock systems, and perennial grains."

By rejecting agribusiness as usual, Reganold and crew find themselves in good company. Their recommendations dovetail with those Olivier De Schutter, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on food; the U.N. Environment Program; and the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development, a three-year project that engaged 400 scientists from around the globe under the aegis of the World Bank and the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.

As such ideas flourish in high-level development circles, they tend to wither in media discussions. From recent reports in The Economist and the public-radio show Marketplace, you would assume experts agree that giant agribusiness firms hold the key to "feeding the world," and that their only critics are frivolous hippies. That's just not true. The looming food crisis is all too real; it's time for a real public debate on how to address it.

Related Links:

It’s the McEconomy, stupid

World Wildlife Fund gets in bed with McDonald’s, gives birth to darling sustainability program

As in U.S., European food giants use shenanigans to continue marketing junk to children

Pete Rock Tells All: The Stories Behind His Classic Records | Complex

2011-06-11T20:40:13Z

The #1 Soul Brother talks about working with Nas, Common, A Tribe Called Quest, and many others. Complex.com: The original buyer's guide for men.

Tyranny in NYC: The NYPD's Wasteful, Ineffective, Illegal, and Unjust Targeting of Blacks and Latinos

2011-06-09T22:00:01Z

Mayor Bloomberg's critics are silent as the NYPD breaks the law to attack blacks and Latinos with harmful, low-level arrests for marijuana.

June 9, 2011 |

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been the focus of much public criticism in recent months. Elected officials and editorial writers have expressed concern and outrage over matters ranging from the city’s response to snow storms to the appointment of Cathie Black as the city’s Education Chancellor to the payroll scandal at the city’s Department of Employment. A policy area where the mayor has mainly escaped criticism and where it is long overdue is a truly objectionable practice of the Police Department, namely our city’s wasteful, ineffective, unjust, illegal and starkly racially biased arrest methods.

Wasteful

The vast majority of arrests in New York City are for low-level offenses, such as misdemeanors like possessing a small amount of marijuana or violations like selling umbrellas or flowers on the street without a license. By any criteria, almost none of these activities could be considered dangerous or predatory. At worst, most city residents would view them as public nuisances.

Police officers and other criminal justice personnel -- judges, court officers, district attorneys, public defenders and correction officers -- spend hours every day, if not their whole workday, processing these cases. And these law enforcement officials are preoccupied with these seemingly insignificant cases day after day, week after week, month after month and so on.

According to the Drug Policy Alliance, just one category of arrests -- for possessing, not selling, small amounts of marijuana -- costs New York City $75 million per year.

Ineffective

The aggressive arrest-driven policing applied in New York City aimed at minor offenses has effectively caught up hundreds of thousands, perhaps actually millions, of individuals in the criminal justice net in recent years. Last year, for example, the city’s police made over 370,000 arrests. Most of these arrests occurred in New York’s low-income communities of color -- for example, although the majority of people who use marijuana are white, 86 percent of the individuals arrested for marijuana possession last year were black or Latino.

Common sense tells us, as does more and more social science research into the perceptions of “procedural justice,” that the extent to which arrested people see and experience the criminal justice process as fair, respectful, consistent and impartial will determine their willingness in the future to respect the police and to comply with the rule of law. Unfortunately, the way New York City’s justice system processes cases involving minor offenses from arrest to conviction bears few if any of the hallmarks essential to people’s positive perception of procedural fairness.

In other words, most people caught up in this system will emerge from the court room at least somewhat embittered and angered by their treatment and with less regard for law enforcement personnel and procedures and with reduced willingness to comply with authority. Aggressive arrest-driven policing, while aimed at enhancing community safety and well being, actually contributes to the undermining of respect for social norms that is the building block for creating a stable and crime-free community.

Illegal

Many individuals subjected to aggressive arrest-driven police practices and subsequently charged with marijuana possession are coming forward with testimony that their arresting officers engaged in illegal search and seizure methods. According to these accounts heard over and over from people in different communities and who do not know each other, police often stop individuals, usually young black or brown men, for no apparent reason -- the persons involved are not engaged in what could be considered furtive or suspicious activity; they may have been walking to or from their school or workplace or been on a personal errand.

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The Rap Songs Of The Arab Spring : The Record : NPR

2011-06-11T13:58:04Z

Musical responses to the protests in the Arab world have been flowing out of countries like Egypt and Tunisia, and much of the music is hip-hop.

American Banks 'High' On Drug Money: How a Whistleblower Blew the Lid Off Wachovia-Drug Cartel Money Laundering Scheme

2011-06-10T22:00:01Z

A fraud investigator helped expose the shocking world of multi-billion dollar drug laundering by American banks and the surprising lack of oversight by the Feds.

June 10, 2011 |

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Martin Woods, an Englishman in his mid-40s, is blessed with a Sherlock Holmes instinct and demeanor. Woods is an expert at sniffing out "dirty" money passing through International Banking Systems.

A police officer for 18 years and later a detective with London Metro Police Agency, Woods capitalized on his unique expertise as a fraud expert by joining Wachovia's London-based Bank in March 2005 as an anti-money laundering officer.

It wasn't long after taking the job that he discovered that his own employer, one of America's leading banks, was a major player in aiding the "bloodthirsty" Mexico drug cartels to launder billions of dollars in drug money through Wachovia banks. Woods traced and identified a "number of suspicious transactions" related to Mexico-based Casa de Cambios (CDC).

Casa de Cambios are currency-exchange operations set up along the U.S. Mexico-border to assist cross border transfers of money to remit labor paychecks. And on the illegal side the Casa de Cambios are also known as the superhighway for narcotic proceeds into the U.S. and overseas financial markets.

When Woods zeroed in on deposited traveler's checks with sequential numbers sent by the CDC he discovered that large amounts of funds were exceedingly more than a typical person would need. The questionable CDC checks either lacked adequate identifying information or had none at all, including no legible signatures affixed on the funds.

Following this discovery investigator Woods issued a "suspicious activity report" (SAR) on a series of the CDCs' financial transfers and deposits. Then he requested the CDC checks to be temporarily blocked from transaction pending further investigation.

Not long after, an exchange of heated words occurred. A senior Miami-based manager called Woods' SAR reports "defensive and unwarranted."

Feeling jaded, Woods, as he recalls, "came under fire from the bank staff to change tactics and develop a better understanding of Mexico."

Wachovia officials ordered Woods to cease inquiries about Mexican CDCs and to also stop blocking other Eastern Europe and Moscow accounts. The British investigator, snapped, "I don't need to read up on Mexico. My interest are drug trafficking and money laundering."

His instincts proved correct. On April 10, 2006, during early morning hours, a DC-9 airplane landed onto the tarmac at the International Airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, located east of Mexico City. Once the engine turned off, military soldiers trained by U.S. FBI agents immediately grew suspicious and surrounded the aircraft. Armed with high-powered weapons, the soldiers searched the luxury plane and discovered five-plus tons of pure cocaine packed in suitcases.

The cocaine was valued at $120 million, and the Feds working with Mexico later determined the drugs were headed for the United States from Venezuela. A stash of paperwork found on the plane eventually identified discreet connections between an American bank and Mexico-based currency operation Casa de Cambios Puebla. A subsequent investigation would prove that Wachovia Bank washed billions of illegal drug money into the U.S. financial system on behalf of the Mexico-based Casa Cambios.

With U.S. Federal law enforcement backing him up, Martin Woods investigation assisted the Feds to build an airtight case against Wachovia. Starting off, the Feds discovered that $13 billion dollars in drug money was transferred by the CDC into correspondent bank accounts at Wachovia to purchase airplanes for the use of trafficking drugs from Colombia to Mexico and then the drugs were shipped to the U.S.

This high-profile investigation ultimately revealed that from 2004-2007, a staggering amount of illegal drug proceeds totaling $378.4 billion dollars were transferred into Wachovia by the Mexico-based Casa Cambios that violated U.S. government anti-money laundering compliance.

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Hammer Meet Nail

2011-06-10T15:00:00Z

Eric Holder was asking for it...

"I want to speak directly to [Co-creator Ed] Burns and Mr. Simon: Do another season of The Wire," said as the audience laughed and applauded."That's actually at a minimum. ... If you don't do a season, do a movie. We've done HBO movies, this is a series that deserves a movie. I want another season or I want a movie. I have a lot of power Mr. Burns and Mr. Simon."

...and David Simon gave it to him:

The Attorney-General's kind remarks are noted and appreciated. I've spoken to Ed Burns and we are prepared to go to work on season six of The Wire if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition.

Of Heisenbergs and Beethovens

2011-06-10T11:00:17Z

The 16-year-old student has an idea, but she doesn’t have the maths to support it. She does, however, have a drawing. She submits it to her tutor. He examines it, then delivers his verdict.

“This is not science,” he says. “This is story-telling.”

The scene is from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, currently in revival on Broadway through June 19. The setting is an English country house in 1812. The student has been wondering why a steam engine can not re-energize itself forever, and she believes she has arrived at the answer: heat loss. And, yes, she understands the implications of a physics whose arrow of time goes in only one direction.

“So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold,” her tutor says. By “Newtonian universe” he means not just the cosmos but the whole clockwork kit and caboodle. Classical physics. Cause and effect. Determinism. Certainty. “Dear me,” he adds, dryly.

The pupil has, in effect, discovered entropy. Or rather, “discovered.” She won’t get the credit for it, in part because her drawing will disappear for nearly a couple of centuries—half the play takes place in the present day, in the same house, as scholars puzzle over the drawing and other documents—and in part because all she has to show for her insight are her artwork and some inadequate equations.

But what if she had made the discovery? Would it matter that it was she who made it? Why would it, if the discovery were out there, waiting to be made? Was the discovery out there, waiting to be made?

The nature of scientific discovery, of course, has been a subject of debate at least since Plato wrote a parable about shadows on a wall. The Nature of Scientific Discovery is also the title of a volume of transcripts from an April 1973 Smithsonian Institution symposium commemorating the 500th anniversary of Copernicus’s birth. A few months ago, even before seeing Arcadia, I found myself pulling The Nature of Scientific Discovery off my bookshelf and returning to a favorite passage. In a discussion of “Discovery in Art and Science,” the moderator, John U. Nef, at the time a University of Chicago emeritus professor of history, recounts an anecdote:

“I am told that Heisenberg is a very good player on the piano, by the way. He was in residence at Cambridge not too long ago and they asked him if he would play.

“He sat down at the piano and played from beginning to end Opus 111, the last sonata of Beethoven, which is an absolutely unique work. All the dons were more and more overwhelmed by this music, and there wasn’t a sound when he finished.

“Heisenberg is reported in this connection to have discussed the difference between science and art. ‘If I had never lived, someone else would probably have formulated the principle of determinacy. If Beethoven had never lived, no one would have written Opus 111.’”

The implication is that scientific discovery is deterministic. That Plato was right: The forms are out there, waiting to be discovered. That even if what you’re discovering is the principle of uncertainty, the discovery is certain. That there is something inherently Newtonian about scientific discovery, even when the discovery is the demise of Newton’s universe.

But what of artistic creation? What of story-telling? In Arcadia, the tutor offers a distinctly minority opinion when he cautions his student not to expend too much grief on the burning of the library at Alexandria: “The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.” But this discussion comes early in the play, before the death of determinism. As one of the scholars from the present day says, “We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now.” The presence of too many variables renders an outcome unpredictable—and what could have more variables than the artistic mind at work?

Or so the argument goes. Maybe if the tutor had lived long enough to hear about chaos theory, he would have revised his interpretation of artistic creativity as deterministic. Then again, maybe not, if only because sometimes, as we all know, even chaos needs a curator.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting the editor of the aforemen- tioned The Nature of Scientific Discovery, the great Harvard historian of science Owen Gingerich. I mentioned that I had recently re-read the passage about Heisenberg’s reflections on his own work versus Beethoven’s Opus 111; thirty-six years after the publication of the book, Gingerich recalled the passage instantly.

Presumably it stuck in his memory because he had tried to fact-check it with Heisenberg himself. Heisenberg, Gingerich said, wrote back that he couldn’t remember if Opus 111 was what he had played on that occasion. This reply was music (if you will) to a historian’s ears: Heisenberg accepted the occasion itself as a given. The anecdote was true!

But was it factual? In addition to what music he had played, Heisenberg went on to question what scientist he had cited. In his letter to Gingerich, he wrote that he probably wouldn’t have mentioned his own work; he suggested he might have used the example of Einstein instead. For Gingerich, however, that possibility carried unpleasant complications. In Nazi Germany, saying that if Einstein had never lived someone else would have discovered relativity was anti-Semitic code. What had begun as a charming anecdote about art and science was threatening to devolve into the chaos of memory and ideology.

“So,” Gingerich concluded, “I decided to leave the quotation as Nef had said it.”

Now that’s story-telling.

* * *

Top: the equation for Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; middle: Beethoven’s Opus 111.

Doctors Prescribe Cure for "Epidemic of Mass Incarceration"

2011-06-09T15:46:08Z

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered California to significantly reduce the number of inmates in its state prisons, where conditions are so horrendous that the violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In an article just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, physician researchers from the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, run by Brown University and Providence's Miriam Hospital and Brown University suggest a straightforward cure for what they call the "epidemic of mass incarceration" that has swept the country in recent decades: Stop using prisons and jails as holding facilities for people with mental illness and drug addiction—who account for a full half of today's prison population—and get them proper treatment instead.

Some 2.3 million Americans—1 in 100 adults—is now in prison at any given time, with an estimated 10 million cycling in and out of prisons and jails each year. The numbers have increased more than 600 percent in the past 40 years. According to the article:

Much of the increase in the prisoner census is a result of the "War on Drugs" and our country's failure to treat addiction and mental illness as medical conditions. The natural history of these diseases often leads to behaviors that result in incarceration. The medical profession has the chance both to advocate for changes in the criminal justice system to reduce the number of people behind bars who would be better served in community-based treatment and to capitalize on the tremendous public health opportunities for diagnosing and treating disease and for linking patients to care after release.

Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill over the past 50 years and severe punishment for drug users starting in the 1970s have shifted the burden of care for addiction and mental illness to jails and prisons. The largest facilities housing psychiatric patients in the United States are not hospitals but jails. More than half of inmates have symptoms of a psychiatric disorder as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), and major depression and psychotic disorders are four to eight times as prevalent among inmates as in the general population — yet only 22% of state prisoners and 7% of jail inmates receive mental health treatment while incarcerated.

Instead, prisoners are subject to conditions—including solitary confinement—that exacerbate, rather than address, their mental health problems. This is because "correctional facilities are fundamentally designed to confine and punish, not to treat disease," the article continues. "The harsh and socially isolating conditions in jail or prison often exacerbate mental illness, especially when inmates are placed under solitary confinement, as is common in the 'super maximum' facilities that have proliferated extensively in recent years."

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You Left Out the Part About ... - NYTimes.com

2011-06-09T17:25:45Z

The new “X-Men” film is more than a summer flick. It’s historical fiction.

Whose History Do Monuments Tell?

2011-06-07T11:08:01Z

Last week we featured a guest post by Stephen Bridenstine about the invisibility of Native American reservations on Google Maps, and how this affects our awareness of geographic and social realities. The flip side of ignoring some information about our country is what we do choose to draw attention to. Over a year ago, Charlotte C. sent in a photo of a sign she noticed in downtown Fall City, Washington, about 25 miles east of Seattle. The sign includes several milestones for the area. The first significant event worthy of note is the first time a White person laid eyes on nearby Snoqualmie Falls:

This reminded me of a photo I took of a monument near the Black Hills in South Dakota. The monument is for Anna (or Annie) Tallent, a woman who was a teacher and superintendent of schools for Pennington County. While the monument mentions she was a “teacher and author,” her major claim to fame appears to be that she was the “first White woman to enter the Black Hills”:

Text:

In Memory of Anna Donna Tallent

Teacher and Author

Born in New York State, April 12, 1827. Died in Sturgis, S. Dakota, February 13, 1901.

The first White woman to enter the Black Hills, arriving in Custer City in December 1874.

This monument is erected by the Society of Black Hills Pioneers and many admirers.

“The world is better because she lived and served in it.”

The monument to her achievements fails to note that in 1874, when she entered the Black Hills, the region was part of the Great Sioux Reservation and were not legally available to Whites for settlement. The U.S. Cavalry removed her entire party for setting up an illegal gold mining encampment on land that was clearly owned by the Sioux, according to an 1868 treaty with the U.S. government…a treaty the government quit honoring soon after Whites found out there was gold in the Black Hills, which the the federal government confiscated in 1877. Tallent discussed the illegal land invasions (including her expedition’s efforts to avoid detection by government officials) in her 1899 book The Black Hills, Or, The Last Hunting Ground of the Dakotahs, in which she laments the “mournful” state of the Sioux nation but rhetorically asks whether it’s appropriate to honor treaties that “arrest the advance of civilization” (p. 3) and, generally, presents a racist, condescending depiction of Native Americans as pathetic, sad “savages” whose displacement in the name of progress and civilization was inevitable.

So what story about our nation do these two monuments tell? The only information contained on the two-sided Fall City monument refers to the activities of Whites; the Native residents were important only when they lost land. For all intents and purposes, the history of the area started only once a White man had set eyes on it. Similarly, Tallent’s arrival in the Black Hills is memorable largely because she was a White woman, whose presence is by definition worthy of note and celebration — imagine, a vulnerable White woman braving the wildness of the Dakota territory! The fact that she was an illegal prospector camping on land she didn’t own while in the pursuit of quick wealth is neither worth mentioning nor a cause to question whether she’s a laudable figure deserving of a monument. Thus, the effect of both of these monuments is to normalize colonization and illegal settlement, and present the arrival of Whites as the beginning of meaningful history.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Can Positive Thinking Be Negative?

2011-06-07T19:00:00Z

“Accentuate the positive,” the 1944 song by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen cheerfully implored us. From Benjamin Franklin’s 1750 Poor Richard’s Almanack (which advised readers that “sorrow is good for nothing but sin”) to today’s parade of motivational speakers, Americans have long embraced an optimistic, “can-do” attitude toward life. Plug “positive thinking” into Amazon.com, and you will find a never-ending supply of products designed to help us see life through rose-colored lenses, including a “Power of Positive Thinking” wall calendar and an “Overcoming Adversity with Encouragement and Affirmation” poster series.

In fact, however, positivity is not all it is cracked up to be. Although having an upbeat attitude undoubtedly has its benefits, gains such as better health and wealth from high spirits remain largely undemonstrated. What is more, research suggests that optimism can be detrimental under certain circumstances.

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