Uncategorized Archives - Page 40 of 96

Latest News: Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

JOE LAURIA speaks to CHRIS HEDGES about the plight of Julian Assange on RT’s On Contact

Wednesday, November 28th, 2018

This Halloween, treat yourself to a ghoulish delight by the master of horror himself: ED WOOD

Wednesday, October 31st, 2018

DRACULA REVISITED

Time stood still! Fright kept the eyes behind drawn shades fastened over the windows. The wheels crunched into the ruts and the horses’ hooves beating rhythmically against the ground were never lost to the other sounds of the more powerful elements. Blackness and total despair took its toll of mind-bursting horrors.

Then the wild, terrifying ride into darkness was over. There had never been a sign of the vintage vehicle slowing nor was there a change of pace from the horses. The coach simply was speeding into infinity one moment and the next it had come to a complete stop. Then there was only complete and total silence. There was not even the sound of the thunder or the heavy breathing which should have been audible form the horses after their long run. It was as if one had entered completely into another world… a foreboding void where neither sound nor light existed. This is an experience only the deaf and blind could fully comprehend… or the dead!

The silence was not to last long. It was an eternity in one’s anxious mind, but only moments in reality. The first sound was the opening of the carriage door from the outside. And the remaining sense speedily returned into their proper place with the human sphere. It was a beastly cold wind which poured through the door… bitter, mountain cold and it was not soundless. There was an eerie quality which could only have accompanied the wind when it had crossed through the tombs and markers of some ancient, musty cemetery. It was the crying of lost and damned souls. The screams for release from their everlasting pits of hell.

………

And the hour of midnight silently overcame me. The coffin lid had a strange sound as it opened… a sound like the beating of my own heart back in the black carriage. It was all together yet separated… both were there… and the fingers came out of the slight opening.

The last of the twelfth minute enveloped me as I hynpotically held my gaze on the raising coffin lid.

The legend had been dispelled as a legend. The realness of reality had to leave my mind. There was no longer any reason for being. The dead arose from his coffin. His funeral suit was as it had always been described. His lips were red. His fangs were those of the wolf. His blue eyes were mirrors…

BLOOD SPLATTERS QUICKLY

The Collected Stories

Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Even if you think you don’t know him, you know him. Few in the Hollywood orbit have had greater influence; few have experienced more humiliating failure in their lifetime. Thanks in part to the biopic directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp and bearing his name, Ed Wood has become an icon of Americana. More

“He Was the Visual Voice of the Village Voice”: Dwight Garner on FRED W. McDARRAH

Tuesday, October 30th, 2018

McDarrah had an inflamed curiosity, great feelers and an ability to capture liquid moments. He was in the right place at the right time, for sure, and caught a subculture in situ. He also had hustle. “When the chance came for him to make the most” of his moment, the historian Sean Wilentz writes in his excellent introduction, “he didn’t blow it.”

Read the full profile at theNew York Times.

The Vatican announces the canonization of ARCHBISHOP ÓSCAR ROMERO: read an excerpt from WEAKNESS AND DECEIT concerning US complicity in the death squads that assassinated him

Monday, October 15th, 2018

Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was killed by a US-backed death squad in 1980, is canonized by Pope Francis

Raymond Bonner’s classic Weakness and Deceit chronicles Central America in the 1980s, a time when El Salvador was the centerpiece of the US’s disastrous “domino theory”-style foreign policy in the region. Here, amid news that the Vatican has this week canonized Archbishop Óscar Romero, Bonner recounts Roberto D’Aubuisson’s cozy relationship with the US up to and after the archbishop’s assassination by D’Aubuisson’s death squad.

From Weakness and Deceit:

[Archbishop Óscar] Romero was considered the enemy by the oligarchy and the military, a voice for the poor and repressed. El Salvador’s leading conservative newspaper called him “demagogic and violent,” and accused him of preaching “terrorism from his cathedral.” He had received many death threats, but it was his sermon the Sunday before he was assassinated that may have propelled [Roberto] D’Aubuisson and the right wing into an unspeakable crime. Addressing the country’s soldiers, Romero’s call from the pulpit rings through the ages:

“In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.”

(Those words, that plea, have played in my head over the years—as I looked at the skulls and skeletons lying in churches in Rwanda, the Tutsi victims of the genocide there; as I watched the exhumation from shallow dirt graves of the Kurdish victims of Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks; and as I interviewed survivors of the massacre in Srebrenica. In the name of God, stop the repression). Thirty-five years after Romero was assassinated, Pope Francis declared that he had died a martyr and would be beatified, the final step before sainthood.

We now know, from documents released in 1993, that Washington had evidence early on that D’Aubuisson was complicit in Romero’s assassination, and the question has to be asked whether the murder of the priests ten years later might have been prevented had Washington worked to rein in D’Aubuisson, treating him as a pariah instead of covering up for him and praising him.

Elliott Abrams, the head of the State Department’s policy planning bureau, said during congressional testimony in August 1982 that he did not consider D’Aubuisson an extremist, that D’Aubuisson would have to have “engaged in murder” before he would say that. At that time, the embassy in San Salvador had sent at least three cables containing exactly that evidence.

How the American government acquired the evidence of D’Aubuisson’s involvement in the assassination of Archbishop Romero is a story that hasn’t been told. It is a story of skulduggery and intrigue, the story of a young American diplomat with a moral conscience who cultivated an unlikely and unsavory source with a guilty conscience, a source who eventually also provided the embassy with critical evidence about the murder of the four American churchwomen in December 1980. It begins in November of 1980, eight months after the archbishop’s assassination, when the American military group commander, Colonel Eldon Cummings, asked a junior political officer, H. Carl Gettinger, to meet with a lieutenant in the Salvadoran National Guard. Cummings considered the 26-year old Gettinger a leftist sympathizer—after all, he had a beard and he believed in Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy—and wanted him to hear from the lieutenant about the depredations of the guerillas. Gettinger assured Cummings he was well aware of guerrilla atrocities, but agreed to meet with the officer. Gettinger was not prepared for what followed.

The lieutenant hated the left—his father and a brother had been killed by the guerrillas. But he seemed to have a lot that he wanted to get off his chest. He confessed to Gettinger that he had ordered the execution of three young men who had been captured, and whom he had initially considered releasing. He had also killed several other individuals whom he thought were a threat to his own life. How could he be sure. And if they weren’t, “I would have made a mistake,” the lieutenant replied. The embassy reported all this to Washington in highly-classified cables Gettinger gave him the sobriquet “Killer.”

The expletive-filled language, the “Killer” expressed equal loathing of the right. He was resentful that the oligarchy was using the military to do its dirty work. The death squads were not independent entities, he explained, but were made up of members of the security forces operating in civilian clothes. The lieutenant, whom Gettinger colorfully described as “a man with the flattened face of an unsuccessful boxer,” was possibly one of the best sources ever developed in El Salvador, including by the CIA, and the embassy was careful never to put his name in a cable. He was referred to only as “the source.”

The lieutenant had been a member of D’Aubuisson’s right-wing cabal, had carried out bombings as well as murders, but he had become disillusioned and disenchanted. D’Aubussion and his followers had degenerated into gun runners and smugglers, motivated by money and not political ideology, he told Gettinger.

“The source” proceeded to give the United States the first concrete evidence that D’Aubuisson was the mastermind behind the assassination of Archbishop Romero. The lieutenant described to Gettinger a meeting chaired by D’Aubuisson during which the soldiers had drawn lots for the right to kill the archbishop. A few months later, Gettinger met again with the lieutenant, and he provided more details about the planning and execution of Romero, including the names of the military officers who had been involved. In reporting this meeting to Washington, the charge d’affaires, Frederic Chapin, noted that the political officer (Gettinger is never named in the cables) “believes that his interlocutor reports accurately.” Chapin closed the three-page, nine paragraph cable with a chilling revealing Comment. “Though much of what the EMBOFF [embassy officer] was told may appear incredible to someone outside of El Salvador, the events described and the the alleged participants would raise few eyebrows here. Unfortunately, for fifty years the Salvadoran security services have engaged in kidnapping, murder, bombings, torture and assorted mayhem at the service of the wealthy families.” (These cables were heavily redacted when given to me, in response to a FOIA request, when I was writing this book. In 1993, they were released with few if any redactions.)

In 1984, at the request of Vice President Bush, the CIA prepared a four-page memorandum, “El Salvador: D’Aubuisson Terrorist Activities.” The evidence that D’Aubuisson had been complicit in the murder of Archbishop Romero, that there had been a meeting to draw straws, was “credible,” the agency said. “While any number of rightwing death squads could have planned and carried out what was a relatively simple execution… there probably were few so fanatical and daring as D’Aubuisson to do it.”

A year later, when D’Aubuisson applied for a visa, Gettinger was on the El Salvador desk at the State Department. Over lunch, he and two colleagues began to look for ways to deny the visa. They discovered that under the immigration law, a visa could be denied if there was a reason to believe that the applicant had engage in acts of terrorism. The murder of Archbishop Romero was certainly such an act. They began drafting a memo for Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The memo worked its way through State Department bureaucracy, slowly and quietly lest it come to the attention of Senator Jesse Helms, the arch-conservative and powerful chairman fo the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who considered D’Aubuisson a friend and good ally of the United States; he had successfully interceded on D’Aubuisson’s behalf to get a visa a year earlier. The American Ambassador in El Salvador was now Thomas Pickering, a diplomat’s diplomat, who held more ambassadorial posts in his career than anyone in history, and who had an unimpeachable reputation for honest reporting. He also recommended that the visa be denied. Based on the reporting from the American embassy, the Latin American bureau at State agreed. “We believe it is highly likely that Roberto D’Aubuisson was an active participant in and very possibly at the head of the meeting during which Archbishop Romero’s murder was planned,” Elliott Abrams, who had become head of the Latin American bureau, wrote in a memorandum to Michael Armacost, under secretary of state for political affairs. This was based on information from a source who had “demonstrated his reliability,” Abrams wrote. It was obviously the National Guard lieutenant.

Abrams and the State Department had come around, partially. In effect, they now accepted that D’Aubuisson was, as former Ambassador Robert White had said, a “pathological killer.” But the cables were stamped Secret; the views were privately held. No American official publicly condemned D’Aubuisson, and he continued to operate openly in El Salvador, eventually plotting the killing of the Jesuit priests as he had of Archbishop Romero. (D’Aubuisson died of throat cancer the year before the documents’ release, at the age of 48.)

WEAKNESS AND DECEIT

America and El Salvador’s Dirty War

Raymond Bonner

Now supplemented with a epilogue drawing on newly available, once-secret documents that detail the extent of America’s involvement in assassinations, Weakness and Deceit is a classic, riveting and ultimately tragic account of American foreign policy in El Salvador in the 1980s—gone terribly wrong. More

“The keynote guest, a “professor of neuroesthetics”, had his scientific theory shredded with exhilarating force by a speaker from the floor. That heckler was Riccardo Manzotti.” – THE SPREAD MIND in The Irish Times

Tuesday, July 31st, 2018

Parks, a successful author in fiction and nonfiction, is understandably drawn to the philosophers’ side. He describes an influential moment almost a decade ago when attending a conference on art and neuroscience at the university where he teaches in Milan. The keynote guest, a “professor of neuroesthetics”, had his scientific theory shredded with exhilarating force by a speaker from the floor. That heckler was Riccardo Manzotti, a specialist in robotics and psychology with “a rather wild look” and “the most intense blue eyes”, and Parks has since fallen under his spell.

Read the full article here.

“Always thought provoking… She makes connections and observations that are truly astounding.” Star Maker Machine on KAREN FINLEY

Wednesday, July 25th, 2018

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to see Karen Finley’s show, Grabbing Pussy (based on her new book, coincidentally published by a company partially owned by a friend). If you have never seen Karen, one of the most famous performance artists ever, you really should. Her shows, which focus on political and social issues, are always thought provoking. She makes connections and observations that are truly astounding. Watching her shows is like trying to drink from a fire hose–her words and ideas come at you in torrents, you can’t take it all in, but what you are able to digest is pretty incredible.

Read the full article here.

An Open Letter to the Protesters Outside the Planned Parenthood Near My Job: from WOMEN OF RESISTANCE

Tuesday, July 10th, 2018

An Open Letter to the Protesters Outside the Planned Parenthood Near My Job

By National Slam Champion, Beltway Grand Slam Champion, and a 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam representative Elizabeth Acevedo, from Women of Resistance.

An Open Letter to the Protesters Outside the Planned Parenthood Near My Job

who stuck a cross in my face and told me,
“abortions are the largest genocide of black people,
God won’t forgive you for having one”:

I’m not sure how I became the finger
to pull the trigger of your mouth.

That’s a lie. I know exactly what turned
my lunch break into a firing range

and why this clay pigeon of a body
attracted your aim—
Tell me more, how you care about
“this largest genocide of black people”

when I’ve never seen you and your signs
at a Black Lives Matter protest.

Tell me, did you mourn Tamir & Aiyana & Jordan,
as hard as you celebrated the shooting of a clinic in Colorado?

Do you know how often I’ve walked by
your markers, megaphones, and mantras?

Your pickets signs and prayers that you cock like pistols
as I clench half a millennium of horror between my teeth?
You don’t know my god.
You and mine ain’t on speaking terms.

My god understands the choices black women
have needed to make in the face of genocide.

My god understands how slave women plucked pearls
from between their legs rather than see them strung up by the neck.
My god doesn’t condemn us who when faced with taking claim of our bodies
do so with our chins unchained to the ground.

My god understands how for generations bodies like mine
were the choice for someone like you to make.
Do you know how many years, women like me
lived equally afraid of both hangings and hangers?
Yet we’re still here, everyday carrying ourselves.

“Mexico Says ¡Basta Ya!” A NEW HOPE FOR MEXICO in The Nation

Friday, July 6th, 2018

Questions abound as to what exactly Andrés Manuel López Obrador will do after last Sunday’s resounding electoral victory in Mexico. During the campaign, he had studiously avoided pledges that might have damaged his chances by triggering comparisons with the beleaguered South American left or by upsetting financial markets. Many sympathizers criticized AMLO, as the president-elect is commonly known, for fudging his policy commitments and for evading the key issues in debates on violence, economic development, and foreign policy. Others complained that his decision to apply “justice but not vengeance” to members of the corrupt presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto would perpetuate the culture of impunity that has eroded confidence in the law in Mexico. But one thing is certain: AMLO’s electoral formula worked like a dream. There are lessons here. And not just for Latin America.

Read the full article here.

“Your Complete Guide to Mexico’s 2018 Elections” A NEW HOPE FOR MEXICO in Time

Friday, June 29th, 2018

Mexico heads to the polls Sunday in national elections that will likely mark a sharp change in the political direction of Latin America’s second largest economy. It comes at a time of disillusionment for many: incumbent President Enrique Peña Nieto is deeply unpopular, as is his rightwing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for 77 of the last 90 years.

Read the full article here.

“Amlo: five things to know about Mexico’s new president”A NEW HOPE FOR MEXICO in The Guardian

Thursday, June 28th, 2018

Latin America’s second largest economy will go to the polls on Sunday to choose its next president and a new congress at a time of widespread disillusionment at unchecked corruption, poverty and violence that has claimed at least 200,000 lives since 2007.

Read the full article here.

Thursday.Ink reviews THE DREAM OF DOCTOR BANTAM

Wednesday, May 30th, 2018

I’m plugging away at two other books right now, and was going to save everything for an end-of-the-month newsletter, but I finished Jeanne Thornton’s novel The Dream of Doctor Bantam a few days ago and have been having a lot of FEELINGS. There’s a whole genre of book reviews that are really personal essays and can stand on their own as pieces of literature, but I don’t think I’m going to attempt something like that for this book.

Read the full review at Thursday.Ink.

Gina Haspel, the CIA, and THE TORTURE REPORT

Wednesday, May 9th, 2018

Black Sites, Lies, and Videotape

Gina Haspel, President’s nominee to lead the CIA, will testify in front of Congress today about her supervision of a black site in Thailand where detainees are known to have been tortured. Hers is a role the CIA—which at the time had no organizational background or experience running detention facilities—has deliberately obscured. Below, from Larry Siems’ 2011 book The Torture Report, is an account of the torture of a number of detainees in Thailand, as well as a look into the site’s administration around the time of Haspel’s tenure.

redacted document from the torture report

Inventory of 92 videotapes of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in the CIA black site in Thailand, available at http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/cia_release20100415_p10-18.pdf.

On November 20, 2002, a suspected Afghan military in his early thirties named Gul Rahman was doused with water, shackled naked to the floor, and left overnight in a frigid cell in a CIA black site known as “The Salt Pit” on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. He died of hypothermia. The supervisor of the facility, an agent with no experience as an interrogator or a jailer, ordered him buried in an unmarked grave.

As this was happening, the CIA was dispatching one of its lawyers to the black site in Thailand to review the videotapes of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation. For weeks the agency had been discussing destroying the tapes; a cable sent from the secret prison to headquarters in August, the month Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times, discussed “the security risks of videotape retention” and suggested “new procedures for videotape retention and disposal.” A September 6, 2002 email between CIA attorneys has as its subject “Destruction proposal on disposition of videotapes at fi eld,” and an email two months later “from a CIA officer to CIA officers and attorneys” dated November 6 follows up with the “proper procedures for destruction of the interrogation videotapes.”

But Langley had decided it wanted a “random independent review” of the tapes first, and so in late November, an attorney from the CIA General Counsel’s office was sent to verify that Abu Zubaydah’s torment had followed the approved script. With his assurances that it had, the discussion resumed: on November 27, a cable was sent from the black site “requesting approval for destruction of the interrogation tapes,” and on December 3, 2002, headquarters responded with a cable with the subject line “Closing of facility and destruction of classified information” and an email “outlining the destruction plan for the videotapes.”

In the midst of this exchange, back in Afghanistan, CIA agents delivered a young mullah named Habibulah into the hands of army interrogators at Bagram Collection Point, a converted hangar at the former Soviet airbase about fifty kilometers north of Kabul. Within a week, an Armed Services Medical Examiner reported, “the remains” were “presented for autopsy clothed in a disposable diaper. No additional clothing or personal effects accompan[ied] the body.”

Habibulah had been “found unresponsive, restrained in his cell”—handcuffed to the wire mesh ceiling of the plywood-walled isolation cell, that is—at 12:15 a.m. on December 4, 2002. The military first claimed he had died of natural causes. The Medical Examiner, however, concluded the cause of death was “pulmonary embolism due to blunt force injuries”; the Manner of Death, “homicide.”

The day Habibulah was killed, the CIA switched off the video cameras and closed down its black site in Thailand. In addition to the torture of Abu Zubaydah, they had for the previous two weeks been recording the interrogation of a second “high value detainee,” Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whose arrest the administration trumpeted on November 21, 2002. Th e alleged chief of Al Qaeda operations in the Persian Gulf and the suspected organizer of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, al-Nashiri was captured in Dubai in October and held for a time at the Salt Pit in Afghanistan before being flown to Thailand on November 15—where, as the CIA’s Inspector General observes blandly, “The interrogation proceeded after [redacted] the necessary authorization.”

“Psychologist/interrogators began Al-Nashiri’s interrogations using EITs immediately upon his arrival,” the Inspector General reported. A largely redacted documented headed “Summary,” “CTC’s interrogation efforts” [redacted] “with the interrogation of Al-Nashiri” dated November 20, 2002 records that “Al-Nashiri has undergone [redacted] interrogation with the HVT interrogators using [redacted]” and “Al-Nashiri is becoming more compliant and is providing actionable intelligence.” Even so, Mitchell’s team kept climbing the force continuum. The Inspector General found that although al-Nashiri “provided lead information on other terrorists during his first day of interrogation,” the use of EITs continued for eleven more days, and on the twelfth day, “psychologist/interrogators administered two applications of the waterboard to Al-Nashiri during two separate interrogation sessions.”

They didn’t stop there. Th e cameras were switched off on December 4th; that day, al-Nashiri and Zubaydah were bundled onto a CIA-leased jet and flown to Dubai and on to a new secret CIA detention facility located near the airport in Szymany, Poland. The plane, a leased twenty two-seat Gulfstream jet carrying the two detainees and the six-person CIA rendition team, landed in Poland on December 5th; al-Nashiri’s “enhanced interrogation” resumed immediately and continued for two more weeks, at which time his interrogators “assessed him to be ‘compliant.’”

The Torture Report

What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program

Larry Siems

“A chilling account of the use and justification of torture by the Bush Administration, made the more powerful by its dispassionate, forensic language.” —Salman Rushdie More

“A ghostly collaboration… a rewarding challenge.” The New York Times Book Review on SAMUEL BECKETT IS CLOSED by Michael Coffey

Friday, April 27th, 2018

A ghostly collaboration . . . a rewarding challenge. Coffey takes a colossal figure whose form-shattering masterpieces can seem hermetic and obscure, deliberately closed off, and opens him up in a way we haven’t seen.

Read the full review at the New York Times.

For Tax Day, a discussion of a progressive global tax on capital from POCKET PIKETTY

Tuesday, April 17th, 2018

It’s Tax Day. Inequality is greater than ever.

What would a progressive global tax actually look like? In his clear, accessible companion to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economist Jesper Roine explains.

Top one percent’s share of income over the twentieth century in France and the United States

from Pocket Piketty:

In the fourth and final part of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty attempts to draw lessons for the future based on the historical trends he observes. Given that the single greatest mechanism for leveling out income and wealth over the twentieth century was war and destruction of capital, rather than a natural tendency for inequality to go down as the economy develops, and given that inequality now appears to be rising, he asks what we can do about it. Can we imagine political institutions that might regulate today’s capitalism justly as well as efficiently? Or do we have to wait for the next crisis or, in the worst case, the next war?

The ideal policy according to Piketty would be to introduce a progressive global tax on capital. Such a tax would also have the benefit of generating more information and transparency about the size and distribution of wealth. In addition, Piketty believes it would promote the general interest over private interests while preserving economic openness and the forces of competition. The alternative, as he sees it, is a trend toward increased protectionism and a less dynamic economy. Piketty states that a global tax on capital is utopian, but cooperation between a limited number of countries could be an effective alternative.

In discussing the options, it is important to understand the role of the state in supporting fundamental social rights and to understand how taxation in society has evolved. The key points of Chapter 13 [of Capital in the Twenty-First Century] are that the size of the state in terms of the burden of taxation grew during the twentieth century and that the role of the state has remained more or less the same over the past few decades. The discussion of future reforms is thus not about changing the size of the state, in the first instance. As ever, there are considerable variations from country to country but, in broad terms, countries such as Sweden and the United States have more commonalities than differences. The state’s primary undertakings in areas such as health care and pensions, and, above all, the role of education in ensuring that everyone has equal opportunities, are based on principles of social justice, and there are no obvious arguments either for reducing or increasing these undertakings. There are, though, many good reasons for reforms in various directions, with different countries facing differing challenges. With respect to the long-run challenges in focus here, it is not the basic role of the state nor the size of the government that needs to change.

Chapter 14 discusses the structure of taxes and the specific idea of a progressive tax on both income and inheritances. Once again, Piketty looks to history and finds that the wars in the first half of the twentieth century played a central role in the creation and evolution of taxes. It is true that many countries introduced progressive income tax in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the levels were very low, and only rose dramatically with the advent of the First World War. He also notes that Britain and particularly the United States were much more progressive than many European countries in introducing high tax rates on high incomes and large inheritances. Many people in the United States were concerned about the huge wealth inequalities of the early twentieth century, and felt that the trend threatened the very foundations of American society. A heavy progressive inheritance tax was an obvious solution to stop a trend in which wealth inequality had become “undemocratic,” with the United States steadily becoming more like inheritance-dominated Europe, according to leading economist Irving Fisher, for example.

For decades, both during and after the war, the United States and Britain had the most progressive tax systems, with top rates of around eighty to ninety per cent on incomes, compared with levels of around fifty to sixty percent in France and Germany. Around 1980, however, there was a radical change. The top rates in Britain and the United States fell to thirty to forty percent, while the rates in France and Germany remained more or less the same. These changes in the top marginal tax rate show a close correlation with the income share of the top one percent. The countries with the greatest reductions in the top marginal tax rate have also seen the greatest increase in top salaries. Piketty sees no signs of this leading to increased productivity. He does, however, find it plausible that a top manager who only receives a small share of any wage increase above a certain level has much less incentive to hike up his or her salary than someone who retains the majority of any such increase. Piketty thus sees raising the top marginal tax rate as the most obvious solution to reign in the extreme executive salaries found primarily in the United States. He is, however, not particularly optimistic about the chances of such a change occurring. The egalitarian and pioneering ideal of American society has been lost and the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the
twenty-first century, as he puts it.

In Chapter 15 of Capital, Piketty discusses the proposal that he sees, at least in terms of principle, as the best way to check the spiral of increasing inequality we otherwise risk getting caught up in—a progressive global tax on capital. Despite it being utopian, he thinks it useful as a standard against which other, more realistic, alternatives can be measured. So, if we ignore the practicalities for a moment, what would the tax look like in principle? To start with, the tax would be applied to net wealth, which is the value of all assets (financial and nonfinancial) minus debt. The rate might be in the order of zero percent for net assets of less than one million euros, one percent for assets of one to five million and two percent above five million. It is important to note that such a tax would differ from the related taxes that are already applied in many countries. In contrast to property taxes, for example, the tax on capital takes account not only of real property but all assets, and it is also not based on the value of the asset, but on net assets. A person in debt should not pay the same amount as a person with no debt. When it comes to revenue from the tax (disregarding practical issues and potential evasion), it should never generate more than modest revenues, a few points of national income perhaps. The primary point of the tax is not to provide a source of revenue, but to rein in the spiral of inequality that otherwise risks occurring, and at the same time create a clear picture of wealth ownership in society. The latter point is important, since it is hard to discuss a number of leading issues when knowledge about the ownership of wealth is so difficult to obtain. It is also important to note that a tax on capital in many ways complements income taxes and inheritance taxes in what might be called the ideal tax system. To illustrate just one of many points: imagine that a wealthy person has a fortune of ten billion and that over the course of a year this increases in value by five percent (500 million). In economic terms this means that the person has received an income of 500 million, since economic income is defined as the amount a person can afford to spend during a given period, and be as well-off at the end of it as at its beginning. In practice and for tax purposes it is, however, more likely that the person in question will declare an income that is a fraction of this, say five million, and pay tax on that. This is not tax evasion, simply a reflection of the fact that without a complementary tax on capital, it is probable that extremely wealthy individuals will, in practice, only pay tax on a very small part of the economic income they receive.

Could such a tax be introduced, if not globally, then perhaps at European level? Thomas Piketty sees no reason why not. A system of the type outlined above, with a tax rate of 0.1 percent on net wealth below 200,000 euros, for instance, and 0.5 percent on wealth of between 200,000 and 1 million, would be able to replace property tax (where it exists), which is practically a wealth tax on the propertied middle class. A system that also then applied a tax rate of one percent on wealth of between one and five million euros, and two percent on anything above that, would generate revenues in the order of two percent of Europe’s GDP. Such a system would, of course, require changes to Europe’s political institutions, but it would be the best way to tackle the increasing concentration of wealth and its consequences.

Author STEPHEN GILPIN discusses TRUMP U. on the Dean Obeidallah show on Sirius XM

Wednesday, April 11th, 2018

“Told by the Doctor: The White Dog.” An excerpt from the 2018 ERBD Literature Prize-winning novel ISTANBUL ISTANBUL by BURHAN SÖNMEZ

Wednesday, April 11th, 2018

Burhan Sönmez wins the first European Bank Literature Prize for Istanbul Istanbul

“Istanbul Istanbul turns on the tension between the confines of a prison cell and the vastness of the imagination; between the vulnerable borders of the body and the unassailable depths of the mind. This is a harrowing, riveting novel, as unforgettable as it is inescapable” (Dale Peck). Read an excerpt of this award-winning novel below, and, for a limited time, take 40% off Istanbul Istanbul with coupon code EBRD.

“Uncle Küheylan, did you think this cell was Istanbul? Right now we’re underground, everywhere above us there are streets and buildings. The city stretches from one end of the horizon to the other, even the sky finds it hard to cover its totality. Underground, there’s no difference between east and west, but if you observe the wind above ground it meets the waters of the Bosphorus and you can gaze at the sapphire-colored waves from a hill. If your first view of Istanbul, which your father told you so much about, had been from a ship’s deck instead of inside this cell, you would understand, Uncle Küheylan, that this city does not consist of three walls and an iron door. When people arrive by ship from distance places, the first thing they see are the Princes’ Islands on the right, draped in a cloud of mist. You think those silhouettes are flocks of birds that have landed there to rest. The city walls on the left, which snake along the entire length of the coastline, eventually meet with a lighthouse. As the mist lifts, the colors multiply. You contemplate the domes and the elegant minarets as though you were admiring the wall rugs in your village. When you are engrossed in the picture on a wall rug you imagine a life that you know nothing about is weaving its course without you in another world; well, now a ship is transporting you to the heart of that life. A person consists of the breath he takes during a sigh. Life is not enough, you tell yourself. You think the expanding city, with its city walls on the horizon, its towers and its domes, is a new sky.

“On the deck, the wind snatches up a woman’s red shawl and carries it to the shore ahead of the ship. You dissolve into the crowd and wander through the cobbled streets, just like the shawl. When you arrive at Galata Square in the midst of the cries of street vendors you take a packet of tobacco out of your pocket and roll a cigarette. You watch an old woman advancing slowly along the road, holding a sheep by a lead. A young boy calls out to her, old woman, where are you going with that lead around that dog’s neck? The old woman turns and looks first at the sheep, then at the young boy. You blind boy, you think this sheep is a dog, she says. You walk behind the old woman. A youth walking the opposite direction says the same thing: Old Woman, are you taking your dog for a walk? The old woman turns and looks at her sheep again, grumbling, it’s not a dog, it’s a sheep, have you been drinking this early in the day? A little further ahead someone else calls out, why have you got a lead around that mangy dog’s neck? Then the street becomes deserted and the voices fall silent. When the hunchbacked old woman notices you she asks you, have I lost my mind, Old Man? Have I mistaken a dog for a sheep? Once my mind cleared, the whole world cleared too, all that’s left are you, me, and this poor animal. As the old woman talks you look at the animal on the end of the lead. Do you see a sheep or a dog? You’re afraid that your day in Istanbul that began with doubt will pledge you a lifetime of doubt.

“The old woman slowly walks away, tugging at her lead. You look not at her but at the things around you, at the things created by mankind. Men have built towers, statues, squares, walls that could never have sprouted out of the earth of their own accord. The sea and the earth existed before men, whereas the world of the city was created by men. You understand that the city was born of men, and that it is reliant on them, like water-dependent flowers. As with the beauty of nature, the beauty of cities lies in their existence. Irregular stones become a temple door, broken marble a dignified statue. You think this is why in the city you mustn&rsuqo;t be surprised by sheep being dogs.”

ISTANBUL ISTANBUL

A Novel

Burhan Sönmez

Below the ancient streets of Istanbul, four prisoners await their turn at the hands of their wardens. When they are not subject to unimaginable violence, the condemned tell one another stories about the city, shaded with love and humor, to pass the time. Istanbul Istanbul is a novel about creation, compassion, and the ultimate triumph of the imagination. More

Celebrating NATIONAL POETRY MONTH: selections from DANEZ SMITH and NATALIE DIAZ

Wednesday, April 4th, 2018

Can poetry express what it feels like to live in a divided nation?

In the introduction to Tales of Two Americas, John Freeman writes, “America is broken. You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this. You just need eyes and ears and stories.” Throughout National Poetry Month, we’ll be sharing work that speaks to that brokenness—and offers hope for its redemption. Below, selections from the anthology from Danez Smith and Natalie Diaz.

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Danez was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Their second poetry collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, was published by Graywolf Press in 2017.

i’m sick of pretending to give a shit about what whypeepo think

on the best days, i don’t remember their skin
the kingdom & doom of it, their coy relationship to sunlight

band-aids are the color of the ones who make the wound
& whats a band-aid to a bullet to the rent is sky high & we
gotta move?

i have no desire to desire what they apparently have
i want quiet & peace & enough weed to last through Saturday

so now that we’re done talking about them, do you think
its appropriate to call that nigga Obama a nigga in public?

i have accepted that they who is always they will always be
looking so what’s the use in holding back my black cackle

& juke? what’s the purpose in being black if you have to spend
it trying to prove all the ways your not? i’m done with race

hahahaha could you imagine if it was what easy? to just say
i’m done & all the scars turn into ravens

the trees forget their blood memory & the city
lose all it’s teeth? when people say they’re post race

i think they’re saying their done with black people
done with immigrants, officially believing America

began when the white people demanded their freedom
from the other white people i’m post America in that case

i’m so far in the future i’m on the beaches of Illinois
souther coast of a has been empire

telling my grandkids about the dust that use to rule us

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation residency, as well as being awarded a U.S. Artists Ford fellowship. Diaz teaches in the Arizona State University MFA program. She splits her time between the East Coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.

American Arithmetic

Native Americans make up less than
one percent of the population of America.
0.8 percent of 100 percent.

O, mine efficient country.

I do not remember the days before America—
I do not remember the days when we were all here.

Police kill Native Americans more
than any other race. Race is a funny word.
Race implies someone will win,
implies I have as good a chance of winning as—

We all know who wins a race that isn’t a race.

Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all
police killings, higher than any race,
and we exist at .8 percent of all Americans.

Sometimes race means run.

I’m not good at math—can you blame me?
I’ve had an American education.

We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent
of Americans. We do a better job of dying
by police than we do existing.

When we are dying, who should we call?
The police? Or our senator?

At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the U.S.
I am doing my best to not become a museum
of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.
I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.

In an American city of one hundred people,
I am Native American—less than one, less than
whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction
of a body, let’s say I am only a hand—

and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover,
I disappear completely.

Rebecca Wolff reviews ASSUMING BOYCOTT on H-Net

Monday, April 2nd, 2018

With calls for boycotts coming from all sides of the political spectrum, the publication of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production is a particularly timely publication. Given the late capitalist state of the global economy, many individuals feel as if boycotting is the most effective way to assert political power. Indeed, as editors Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich herald in the opening line of their introduction, “Boycott is a tool of our time, a political and cultural strategy that has rarely been more prominent than now” (p. 7). In the art world, cultural boycotts in particular have surged within the past few years to draw attention to exhibitions’ and institutions’ ties to oppressive governments, labor practices, and corporations. The contributors to Assuming Boycott turn a critical eye on this phenomenon, exploring the reasons behind cultural boycotts, their implementation, and their possible ramifications.

Read the full review at H-Net.

“Poeta, You Resist”: ROSEBUD BEN-ONI with a tribute to fellow WOMEN OF RESISTANCE contributors in The Kenyon Review

Tuesday, March 27th, 2018

Author’s Note: The following was read at the Women of Resistance book launch last night, March 13th, 2018, at Strand Bookstore in NYC. I wanted to write a piece that incorporated the words of my fellow contributors with whom I read that night– Denice Frohman, Mahogany L. Browne, Dorothea Lasky and Maureen McLane– and ended up writing this essay (be sure to click on the links and read their poems in full). They are all poets I’ve read and reread, and their poems have kept my heart beating in some really trying times. Special thanks to the amazing bookstore staff, to OR Books, and all the gratitude in the world to editors Danielle Barnhart and Iris Mahan whose dedication and generosity have made and are going to continue to make wonderful things happen in poetry and beyond. –Rosebud Ben-Oni

Read the full piece at The Kenyon Reivew.

SAFIA ELHILLO’s “after”: a selection from WOMEN OF RESISTANCE for Women’s History Month

Tuesday, March 20th, 2018

Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be celebrating the poets from Women of Resistance. Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C., Safia Elhillo is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation, and Crescendo Literary and The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator.

after

after Danez Smith, with a line by Ol’ Dirty Bastard

if you read this in red maybe i didn’t
survive     every day i go missing    one
eyelash at a time     or sometimes               all
at once               & in the heaven for
blackgirls gone away     we walk in
& out of rivers & wear    our good silks
our good brown velvet bodies    dripping
with sunlight     we sprout leaves & no one
decides for us to cut or keep them   we
bear fruit & self-sustain               we tread water we
pluck the moon for our hair & another grows
in its place       we are sistered or unsistered
but never again to a dead thing     somewhere
a rope turns & turns & our feet never       touch
the ground       somewhere a song playes
& plays & names us with each touch of a needle to our
round black surfaces
i’m hanging out               /partying/with girls/that never die

Celebrating Women’s History Month: words from RAJATHI SALMA, the celebrated author, human rights activist, and speaker

Friday, March 16th, 2018

“I want my work to register the extent to which the human condition as a whole has been debased”: the poetics of Rajathi Salma, celebrated author, human rights activist, and speaker

Acknowledging Women’s History throughout March and in every month: stories like Salma’s demonstrate the power of reading and writing to empower and uplift entire communities.

Salma on the roof of her house in the village.

In this book, documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto and poet Rajathi Salma collaborate to tell the story of Salma’s life as well as the challenges of creating a documentary film. Salma’s poems, one of which is published below, deal with a uniquely female experience of seclusion and privation.

MY LIFE. SALMA.

The language I acquired through voracious and eclectic reading helped me express what had happened to me. I do not believe in imposing any restrictions on my work. When a poem is born a mysterious knot within me gets untangled and frees itself. Through my writings I want to invite the reader into my world and into a profound experience of sharing. Once she has entered my writing, I aim to keep her in an endlessly engaged condition. I want the sound of the voice rising from my text to reverberate at all levels of her mind.

Besides trying to present the situation of women in society, and the problems and hardships they face, in an honest and original manner, I want my work to register the extent to which the human condition as a whole has been debased. I hope to convey what I see as the persistent absurdity of human life that flows from the sense of isolation that surrounds me and which persists today. Writing finds its proper direction in the quest for self and the pressure of suppressed emotions.

I try to understand the reason for my existence and establish my identity through my writing. In most of my work I have focused on the isolated condition of women, the lack of confidence this produces in them, and the unbridgeable but entirely fabricated gap in the relationships between men and women. The physical restrictions and denial of education faced by the women of my community have found their due place in my texts. Life has taught me a feminist way of thinking.

salma and longinotto with documentary crew

The film crew in Salma’s flat in Chennai. From left to right: Kim; Samyuktha PC; Salma; Sara Lima.

MY ANCESTRAL HOME – 1

Entirely bereft now
of its identity,
my ancestral house,
where I used to live,
has crumbled to ruin.

Although I do not
live there anymore,
it stays with me still,
along with my childhood.

I used to fly
over the jungle made up
of its mezzanine lofts.

Its pillars hid me
on moonlit nights
and on those
darkened by moonless skies.

Even the wall of the latrine,
witness to the terror
of my first bleeding,
has collapsed to the ground, along
with all its other secrets.

Many were the times
we had sought shelter there:
I, on one side of the wall,
and this neem tree on the other.

With its walls lost to ruin,
the house stands alone,
staring at the ground where it had
once cast its shadow.

Traces of my play hours
still remain, perhaps,
on the wall of an upstairs room.

salma and family - four generations of tamil women

In the village. From left to right: Amina, Salma’s grandmother; Fatima, Salma’s niece; Salma; Salma’s mother, Sharbunnisha.

CHAMELEO author ROBERT GUFFEY is interviewed on “Where Did the Road Go?”

Thursday, March 15th, 2018

Listen to the full interview at Where Did the Road Go?

“Poeta, you resist…”: A reading from the launch of WOMEN OF RESISTANCE published at Kenyon Review

Wednesday, March 14th, 2018

The following was read at the Women of Resistance book launch last night, March 13th, 2018, at Strand Bookstore in NYC. I wanted to write a piece that incorporated the words of my fellow contributors with whom I read that night– Denice Frohman, Mahogany L. Browne, Dorothea Lasky and Maureen McLane– and ended up writing this essay (be sure to click on the links and read their poems in full). They are all poets I’ve read and reread, and their poems have kept my heart beating in some really trying times. Special thanks to the amazing bookstore staff, to OR Books, and all the gratitude in the world to editors Danielle Barnhart and Iris Mahan whose dedication and generosity have made and are going to continue to make wonderful things happen in poetry and beyond.

Read the full essay here.

WHAT SHE THINKS AS SHE WAITS BY THE DOOR: a selection from WOMEN OF RESISTANCE by Patricia Smith

Monday, March 12th, 2018

Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be celebrating the poets from Women of Resistance. Patricia Smith is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, which won the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the winner of a 2018 NAACP Image Award, a four-time individual National Poetry Slam champion, the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and former fellow of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.

What She Thinks as She Waits by the Door

Alice Kramden of The Honeymooners

I was crafted, it would seem, to squeal demurely beneath
his shifting flab, to pucker my carnation lips on cue, to ladle
gobs of twice-boiled vegetables and stringy slabs of meat

into his grumbling yap. It would seem that way. After all,
the whole of my body is apron. I am always holding that
scorched pot, a bleached towel, a gray sopping sponge,

an iron, his huge hot folded trousers, a mop, a crusted dish,
a broom. I am always expertly positioned near the door
of this tenement hovel that’s not much more than this single

room, my eyes wide and feigning joy, poised to drip sugar
around his blustering evening entrance. The air is decorated
with the words control, control while chunks of water grow

stale in the belly of the icebox. I am 1950s faultless, my pert
strawberry crown primly ponied. Never wore a dress that wasn’t
a tribute to him. You don’t believe I stood still and perfectly

upright for my wedding vows. Drowning in mama’s wilting
taffeta, I was a bell: I do, I do, I do. And I did. With God and
a room of pouters as witness, I committed to a post-war, eerily

patient love. Beside me, splotched scarlet, he panted under
snug collar, a flowered tonic dripping from his curls. I could
have crashed his stunned smile with a finger. Someone said

God, then someone said wife, and I was so clarified as I sparkled,
I was my own headspring of light, I arced toward the domestic
promise wiggling in flaccid fingers. I did not hear the word

fist. I was anxious to build a romance, and I did. My lips found
the folds water couldn’t reach. I gave him the name of a wall.
The first morning we rose from our separate untumbled beds,

our night skins pimpled and flushed with the prospect of touch,
was the first time he hefted his fist, it has brushed past my unblinking
eye, my chin, my clamped jaw, while the moon, uninterested,

is the same blaring yellow kink in our sleep. Screeching his
blind intent, To the moon, Alice, to the moon!, his eyes google
the lifted fist quivers, the spittle of his day needles my cheeeks.

One of these days, Alice, one of these days! Bang! Zoom!
Without speaking, I show him who he truly is. I call stupid out
where stupid is. I’m mute while he spouts another craving wide
enough to fall through. Our tiled floor is littered with schemes,

his punctured zeal: I’m gonna get a better job. Got a new idea,
we’ll be swimming in dough. Gonna take you out jitterbugging,
baby, buy you a dress, gonna turn our noses up to the hoi polloi.

I’m a champ at suffering his relentless inventions, concoctions
of spit and wood utterly guaranteed to drown us in new money.
What he can’t say: Baby, there’s got to be something better

than that bus, the smolder, the street disappearing beneath me.
I know he aches to give the slip to the same stream of the same
folded-face New Yorkers, all snarling and stank with factory,
nodding him their dead howdy-dos and clutching just enough
change to move themselves forward. It’s the cage of the ride,
baby, every day like every week like every month like every year,

year like every and the wheels on the bus go round and round
and when he finally makes it home, to door, to this box, to wife,
he bursts in, sputtering some fresh grail, bound to clatter and rise,

and I am gingham and smelling of spray starch, my whole day
beneath my nails, I am twang and the wide-eye, Really, Ralph?
Really? I hold my breath, cramming his crave with stew meat

and ice water until it all comes exploding down, until he can’t
turn his bulk in any direction without reaching a corner, until he
realizes, yet again, that his best friend stinks of sewage and, for

reasons we pretend to have forgotten, I am never ever naked.
And yes, I know what my practiced smirk practically begs him
to do—Pow! Right in the kisser! But that sweaty mitt, hovering

high with such sad engine behind it, will never fall. See, every
woman is damned with a man to raise, a swaggering snarl of belly
and bicep, and every ounce of the one I’ve been given cracks dulcet

beneath my held tongue and primp. I let the world burn brash
through him, because when he resurrects, when he yanks loose my
apron ties and mutters Baby, you’re the greatest, it is still 1955, a time

of steam radiators and vows of stiff lyric, and he is everything a man
can be just then. I am wife. I am what the fist craves. And I am the fist.

“We never wanted to kill // only to stay alive ”: Read five poems from WOMEN OF RESISTANCE at Literary Hub

Monday, March 12th, 2018

This is a collection of essays that I would like every bookseller, book blogger, book reviewer, arts page editor, and minister for the arts to read. The Internet has revolutionised how we think, read, and write; for good or for ill, it’s a phenomenon to which readers and critics should be paying close attention. With consistently solid writing and argumentation, and a rich diversity of opinion and focus, The Digital Critic is illuminating at every turn.

Read five new poems from Women of Resistance:Poems for a New Feminism here.

Celebrate INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY with complimentary e-books from our great women writers: explore WOMEN OF RESISTANCE, EILEEN MYLES, LEAN OUT, MEDEA BENJAMIN, and many more

Thursday, March 8th, 2018

What does International Women’s Day mean in 2018?

In the days of #TimesUp, #MeToo, and #HereWeAre, centering the experiences and elevating the voices of women has never been a more urgent or vital task. To celebrate the diversity and complexity of women writers; to acknowledge the recent sea change in the long struggle against patriarchy; and to proliferate the contributions of women to our current cultural moment—from journalists working in conflict zones to avant-garde performers and poet-activists, from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to cultural critics—OR Books is offering a free download of any e-book from one of our many great women writers and editors using coupon code SMASHTHEPATRIARCHY. Simply enter the code on the last page of checkout.*

*Don’t delay: offer lasts 24 hours only. E-books currently in pre-order will be sent at the time of the book’s release. Full offer terms and conditions.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PROTESTERS OUTSIDE THE PLANNED PARENTHOOD NEAR MY JOB: we kick off Women’s History Month with a selection from WOMEN OF RESISTANCE by Elizabeth Acevedo

Monday, March 5th, 2018

Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be celebrating the poets from Women of Resistance. Here first is Elizabeth Acevedo, from New York City, the only daughter of Dominican immigrants. She is a National Slam Champion, Beltway Grand Slam Champion, and the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam representative for Washington, D.C., where she lives and works.