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Democracy Now! Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
Today's Headlines Iran Accuses Detained Americans of Espionage CBS: Obama to Send Up to 40,000 Troops to Afghanistan 40 Democrats Threaten to Reject Healthcare Bill over Abortion Restrictions Fort Hood Shooter to Be Tried in Military Court Survey Highlights Global Concerns over Free Market Capitalism Palestinians Knock Down Part of West Bank Wall Again EPA Attempts to Silence Agency Critics of Cap and Trade Maldives President Urges Developing Nations to Become Carbon Neutral Whistleblower: Peak Oil Closer than IEA Forecasts Show China Executes Nine over Xinjiang Riots Watchdog: New York State Regulation of Natural Gas Wells Has Been "Woefully Insufficient for Decades." The New York-based Toxics Targeting went through the Department of Environmental Conservation’s own database of hazardous substances spills over the past thirty years. They found 270 cases documenting fires, explosions, wastewater spills, well contamination and ecological damage related to gas drilling. Many of the cases remain unresolved. The findings are contrary to repeated government assurances that existing natural gas well regulations are sufficient to safeguard the environment and public health. The state is considering allowing for gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale watershed, the source of drinking water for 15 million people, including nine million New Yorkers. Filmmaker Philippe Diaz on "The End of Poverty?" Earlier this year, the IMF and the World Bank warned that the financial crisis posed a serious challenge to reducing poverty. The World Bank predicted that the economic crisis could push another 53 million people in the global South into poverty. Well, according to the latest numbers from the United Nations, we’re now up to 2.7 billion people around the world who survive on less than two dollars a day, one billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day. Given the dire statistics and the widening gap between the rich and the poor, how can we see the eradication of poverty? That’s the central question of a new documentary called The End of Poverty? Hoodwinked: Former Economic Hit Man John Perkins Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded -- and How to Remake Them John Perkins calls himself a former economic hit man. He has seen the signs of today’s financial meltdown before. The subprime mortgage fiasco, the collapse of the banking industry, the rising unemployment rate—these are all familiar to him. Perkins was on the front lines of monitoring and helping create these very events that were once just confined to the Third World. From 1971 to 1981, he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main, where he was a self-described “economic hit man.” He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Confessions of An Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire.
Seeders: 28
Leeches: 48

PBS Frontline - Obama's War (October 13 2009)

Category: Documentary
Description:
PBS Frontline - Obama's War (October 13 2009) Tens of thousands of fresh American troops are now on the move in Afghanistan, led by a new commander and armed with a counterinsurgency plan that builds on the lessons of Iraq. But can U.S. forces succeed in a land long known as the "graveyard of empires"? And can the U.S. stop the Taliban in neighboring Pakistan, where U.S. troops are not allowed and the government is weak? In Obama's War, veteran correspondent Martin Smith travels across Afghanistan and Pakistan to see first-hand how the president's new strategy is taking shape, delivering vivid, on-the-ground reporting from this eight-year-old war's many fronts. Through interviews with top generals, diplomats and government officials, Smith also reports the internal debates over President Obama's grand attempt to combat terrorism at its roots. "What we found on the ground was a huge exercise in nation building," says Smith. "The concept's become a bit of a dirty word, but that's what this is. We started with the goal of eliminating Al Qaeda, and now we've wound up with the immense task of re-engineering two nations." The brunt of the work is falling on rank-and-file soldiers, and nowhere is it more difficult than in the dusty, unforgiving landscape of Helmand province, the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, where FRONTLINE embedded with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. Since the Marines' arrival in July, Helmand has become the most lethal battlefield in Afghanistan. But FRONTLINE found the Marines trying to act as armed diplomats, attempting to build the necessary trust for badly needed economic development. "It's trying to change the culture of the organization," Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, tells FRONTLINE of the administration's plan. "At the end of the day, our best counterinsurgents are going to be young sergeants who just have an ability to deal with people. We've got to give them the flexibility to make decisions." Even as American soldiers struggle to make progress in Afghanistan village by village, equally vexing challenges remain across the border in Pakistan. "In Afghanistan we know what to do; we just don't know if we have the resources or the time available to do it," David Kilcullen, a leading counterinsurgency expert, tells FRONTLINE. "The problem in Pakistan is we're not really sure what to do." When FRONTLINE confronts the Pakistani army about its reluctance to take out key Taliban leaders, the military's chief spokesman, Gen. Athar Abbas, argues that the accusations are misplaced. There is no truth, he claims, that insurgents stage attacks on American forces from the Pakistani side of the border. "They operate from Afghanistan. If somebody claims that everything is happening from this side of the border, I am sorry, this is misplaced, and we refute it." Barred from sending troops across the border, the United States is left with few good options. No quick fix will solve Pakistan. "If we have a strategy in Pakistan," says George Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, "it's to build up the civilian government to the point where it can be a kind of counterbalance to the military and begin to reorient their own sense of their destiny. Is that even thinkable for a foreign power to do? Even as I say it, I think, why do we think we could even begin to accomplish that?"
Seeders: 74
Leeches: 12

Democracy NOW Tuesday the 6th of October 2009

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
* White House: No Plans to Withdraw from Afghanistan * 61 Antiwar Protesters Arrested at White House * Abbas Faces Calls to Resign over Goldstone Report * Coup Gov’t Lifts Emergency Decree in Honduras * Taliban Claims Responsibility for World Food Program Bombing * DynCorp’s Role in Pakistan Scrutinized * Suspect in 1994 Rwandan Genocide Arrested * 3,000 Protest Outside Climate Talks in Bangkok * Obama to Speak Before Leading Gay Rights Organization * Ohio Postpones Four Executions * Flooding in India Kills 250; Leaves 2.5 Million Homeless * Anti-Vietnam War Mom Peg Mullen, 92, Dies Twitter Crackdown: NYC Activist Arrested for Using Social Networking Site during G-20 Protest in Pittsburgh Elliot Madison was arrested last month during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh when police raided his hotel room. Police say Madison and a co-defendant used computers and a radio scanner to track police movements and then passed on that information to protesters using cell phones and the social networking site Twitter. Madison is being charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime. Exactly one week later, Madison’s New York home was raided by FBI agents, who conducted a sixteen-hour search. We speak to Elliot Madison and his attorney, Martin Stolar. [includes rush transcript] # Wallst-web A Hidden $34 Billion Bank Subsidy? Study Exposes How Taxpayers Are Subsidizing Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Other Large Banks One of the key terms to come out of the nation’s economic meltdown has been “too big to fail.” The government has funneled billions of dollars to large financial firms by arguing that their collapse would deal an irreparable blow to economic recovery. A new study has calculated the tab of the “too big to fail” approach, and it amounts to a far larger taxpayer-funded subsidy than previously thought. The Center for Economic and Policy Research says the bailout has allowed “too big to fail” banks to pay significantly lower interest rates than those paid by smaller banks. According to one estimate, that’s meant a subsidy for the nation’s eighteen largest bank holding companies of $34.1 billion a year. That amount represents nearly half these companies’ combined annual profits. We speak to the study’s author, Dean Baker. [includes rush transcript] # Nyc-water-web Environmental Battle Brews in New York over Natural Gas Drilling Last week, government regulators opened the door to natural gas drilling inside the Marcellus Shale watershed, which supplies drinking water to some 15 million people, including nine million New Yorkers. Stretching from New York to Kentucky, the shale is believed to hold some of the world’s largest deposits of natural gas. Proponents say the drilling will boost the nation’s economic recovery and reduce dependence on foreign oil. But environmentalists are warning the drilling could contaminate New York’s water supply as it has in other states. The proposed regulations are now open for public comment until the end of the next month, followed by a final decision early next year. [includes rush transcript]
Seeders: 102
Leeches: 18

Still We Ride (2005) - Critical Mass Documentary

Category: Documentary
Description:
On Friday August 27, 2004 just days before the start of the Republican National Convention, a massive police operation was underway. By the end of the night 264 people were arrested. It marked one of the largest mass arrests in New York City's history - and the arrested had done nothing illegal. For many New Yorkers, August was the first time they heard of what has become a monthly ritual for New York City's bike community; a free-forming ride called Critical Mass. Still We Ride is a documentary that captures the joyous atmosphere of this August ride before the arrests began and the chaos that followed. It recounts how this ride first started in San Francisco over 10 years ago and chronicles the police crackdown and resulting court battles in New York over the last twelve months. The movie takes on issues of civil liberties, surveillance, the power of mainstream media, and the benefits of alternative means of transportation. For more info go to: http://www.stillweridethemovie.com/
Seeders: 4
Leeches: 0

Still We Ride (2005)

Network (Lumet, 1976)[+Extras]-aNaRCHo

Category: Misc
Description:
THIS IS MY PERSONAL FAVOURITE FILM, AND IN MY OPINION THE BEST FILM EVER MADE! SIDNEY LUMET'S MASTERPIECE...FROM THE 2-DISC SPECIAL EDITION... Network (Lumet, 1976)[+Extras]-aNaRCHo (FILM IS IN ENGLISH, ENGLISH AND FRENCH SUBTITLES INCLUDED) Essay by Greg Ng from Senses of Cinema The 1970s in Hollywood were a fertile time. The emergence of the director, as a legitimate artist in his or her own right, shifted focus from the studios, which by the '60s had grown formulaic and unadventurous in their output, to a new generation of writers and directors, whose concerns and experience were markedly different from the conservative voice of the movie industry at that point. Due in part to falling profits and the rise of television, a vacuum arose in the industry that opened the door for fresh ideas. Hollywood was redirected and, as a result, American cinema entered a new age – an age when box-office success did not necessarily preclude sophisticated content in a movie, an age when political discourse was not relegated to non-existence or tokenism, or a niche-market. The period between 1969 and the beginning of the 1980s saw American cinema, inspired as it was by international filmmaking (such as the French New Wave), offering critical, ambiguous and highly artful movies. At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, by enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratising filmmaking, putting it in the hands of anyone with talent and determination. However, as the decade passed, the promise of real change receded; the status quo prevailed. As Peter Biskind puts it, in his book Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'N' Drugs 'N' Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, although the decade of the 70s contains shining monuments to its great directors, the cultural revolution of that decade, like the political revolution of the 60s, ultimately failed. Robin Wood, in Hollywood: from Vietnam to Reagan, argues that the Vietnam War, among other things, focussed Western society's dissenting voices, simultaneously discrediting 'the system' and emboldening the dissenters. However, like Biskind, Wood acknowledges “this generalized crisis in ideological confidence never issued in revolution. No coherent social/economic program emerged.” Commercial imperatives once more came to play their part in shaping the output of the industry, as previously fêted directors suffered box office losses and investment money turned to more secure propositions. Thus, a central tenet of political economy – i.e., the inherent censorship of the mass market – prevailed. Ironically, one of the films that stands as a testament to '70s Hollywood's freedom and ambition, Sidney Lumet's Network (1976), depicts precisely this phenomenon. Network is an example of a hugely successful and critically acclaimed feature film that offers a critique of television, ideology, radical chic and the consequences of American-led post-war capitalism, whilst being funny – no mean feat, and something only barely achieved in the current day by the likes of Michael Moore, et al. Lumet's direction and Paddy Chayefsky's script lambaste the ills of the modern world (couched within the fast-paced soliloquies delivered by the stellar cast of Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and William Holden) and are oft times prescient, predicting the rise of 'reality television', and the subsequent decline of both production and social values. One of the central themes of Network – the decay of society and of love, concurrent with a plunge in standards and morality of the audience, which represents the world (in keeping with the mindset of both the film and its characters) – proves salutary in explaining what happened to Hollywood after the '70s. Just as the collapse of the old studio system in the '60s was precipitated by a change in demography and values, so too has a drift toward social conservatism and the continuing project of marketising everything affected our age. When Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the ageing news anchor for Union Broadcasting System, is fired due to poor ratings, he announces to his friend and network executive Max Schumacher (William Holden) that he intends to “blow my brains out, right on the air, right in the middle of the 7 o'clock news”. Schumacher replies, “You'll get a hell of a rating. I'll guarantee you that. 50 share, easy.” He facetiously begins to run with the idea: “We could make a series out of it. 'Suicide of the Week.' Oh, hell, why limit ourselves: 'Execution of the week.'” Beale joins in, “Terrorist of the Week”, and Max's eyes get distant; he temporarily becomes the visionary commercial television producer: I love it. Suicides. Assassinations. Mad bombers. Mafia hit men. Automobile smash ups. The death hour. Great Sunday night show for the whole family to see. It'd knock fucking Disney right off the air. The joke, these days, has poignancy. Chayefsky's blistering script seems aimed fairly and squarely at commercial television, and its producers. Network is presented as a voracious predator that consumes everything in sight for the sake of audience share. Nothing is sacred – not least of all love, as is demonstrated amply by the soulless programming executive, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway). “The only reality she knows comes at her over the television.” Network portrays a dark vision of an industry that has largely come to be. The dumbing-down of the news, from informative to entertaining (“television is showbiz”, says Christensen to Schumacher) is prescient of the rise, in the late 20th century and early 21st, of infotainment. The UBS news is transformed into a near-variety show, with a soothsayer, a psychic detective and the star, the “Mad prophet of the airwaves”, Howard Beale. The disturbing thing about this, for Chayefsky, runs along the lines of neo-Marxist criticism of the day. To quote Stuart Hall: the cultural industries do have the power constantly to rework and reshape what they represent; and, by repetition and selection, impose and implant such definitions of ourselves as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred culture. That is what the concentration of cultural power – the means of culture-making in the heads of the few – actually means. Television's ruthlessness and its lack of discernment in its search for ratings, as joked about by Schumacher and his 'death hour' idea, has fulfilled his prophecy. 'Reality television' abounds, with its low production costs and supposed interactivity – its invitation for audiences to spectate at someone's demise, and even play a part in it. Network satirises 'the revolutionary underground', and the script dextrously portrays the ease with which the likes of Christensen incorporate such movements into a commercial framework, in order to make them a marketable commodity. Says Diana, to her staff, as she pitches the idea of what we would now call a reality television show, Look, you've got a bunch of hob-goblin radicals, calling themselves the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks! Maybe they'll take movies of themselves kidnapping heiresses, um, hijacking 747s, bombing bridges, assassinating ambassadors! She goes on to tell them, “I want angry shows. I don't want conventional programming on this network. I want counter-culture. I want anti-establishment.” Christensen, television incarnate, has, as such, the mind of the market. She slots, programmes and categorises everything, reducing totalities to glib, trite, preclusive stereotypes (or soundbites). At her meeting in Los Angeles, with the aforementioned hob-goblin radicals, she introduces herself: “Hi. I'm Diana Christensen – a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.” “And I'm Lorraine Hobbs – a bad-ass Commie nigger”, comes the reply. Her idea is staggering and speaks of the sheer hubris of unfettered, market capitalism – as immanent in television itself. Without a moral concern in her body, Christensen pitches: “Each week, we open, with an authentic act of political terrorism.” The concept, in 1976, may have been preposterous. But in 2005 it is quite literally inconceivable. There's a war going on – let's not forget – a war on terrorism. And in wartime, as they say, the first casualty is the truth. The adage here is admittedly stretched, but the degree of self-censorship that began, and has prevailed, across the world's media since 2001 is evident. Hollywood seems nowhere near touching subjects like this, much less laughing at it. It's not just the subject matter; it's the way it is delivered. Lorraine Hobbs answers back to Diana's pitch with uncertainty: The Ecumenical Liberation Army is an ultra-left sect, creating political confusion with wildcat violence and pseudo-insurrectionary acts, which the Communist Party does not endorse. The American people are not yet ready for open revolt. We would not want to produce a television show that celebrates historically deviational terrorism. Chayefsky's script is simply much more ambitious, and verbose, than anything Hollywood offers up for contention these days. Network's assumption that audiences could respond positively to what is essentially a dense, wordy screenplay, set amongst current events and asking uncomfortable questions, was vindicated. It won three Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay. Hollywood's 'best and brightest' have rarely offered much in the way of criticism since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. One cannot help but think of Christensen's pitch here; might we assume that '911' would have gotten the Network nod, as entertainment? In fact, the years that followed saw Hollywood directors, such as Ridley Scott, supplicate themselves to the Pentagon message, with films that glorified American actions around the world and supported the US government's view of history. With the release of 1969's Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper), American cinema came of age. The late 60s had seen a crisis in the studio-dominated film industry: attendances were down and the old men who ran [the studios] were increasingly out of touch with the vast baby boom audience that was coming of age in the '60s, an audience that was rapidly becoming radicalised and disaffected from its elders. The influence of the French New Wave, among others, provided inspiration for aspiring auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet and Terrence Malick, to name but a few. The late 1960s saw a break from the old, studio-dominated conventions of film making, and for the first time placed the director in lights, over and above the studio, and producer. By the time of the late 70s, after the critical (and sometimes commercial) successes of films like Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), et al, the 'voice' of the new directors was sounding more confidently. Network is nothing if not a collection of polemics. As New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael said, “Chayefsky isn't writing a farce: he's telling us a thing or two.” Howard Beale's “latter day prophet, denouncing the hypocrisies of our time” takes to the air with paternalistic sermons: Because less than three percent of you read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get from over this tube. Right now there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. Kael savages Chayefsky's preachiness here and decries the tendency of the time towards “vindictive, moralizing condescension”, citing “Beale's denunciations of the illiterate public (Chayefsky apparently thinks that not reading is proof of soullessness).” She continues to assert that television has not rendered people soulless, just as cinema did not, or the theatre. The film treats us to the high farce of the nominally 'revolutionary' Ecumenical Liberation Army in contractual negotiations with their lawyers and UBS's – an extremely comical (if dark) satire of the fickle nature of the expedient marriage of the political and the commercial. When Beale uses his nightly tirade to denounce the fact that “the Arabs control 60 billion dollars of this country”, and rants an extensive list of Arab interests in US capital, including “com[ing] back at us with our own dollars to buy General Motors, IBM”, et al, he blows the deal for Frank Hackett, the corporate head of UBS (played perfectly by Robert Duvall), the show and his own career. Michael Moore's Palme d'Or winning 'documentary', Fahrenheit 911, essentially spoke to the same phenomenon – that is, the coincidence of US and Saudi corporate interests, and its enmeshment with foreign policy, and the challenge to the notion of national sovereignty this presents . However, Moore's treatment is characteristically shallow, and not given any sense of historical context. Without an acknowledgement of the history of the US-Saudi relationship or of the role America has played in promoting the very system that allows for the situation he bemoans, Moore himself turns into the populist evangelical that Peter Finch portrays with finesse in Network. Network's ultimate concern – the negative impact of corporate culture and the mass market on society, and the processes by which it affects this – is essentially a mirror for what happened in Hollywood after the 1970s. By the end of what was a dazzling period of innovation and artfulness – delivering films such as Easy Rider, M*A*S*H* (Altman, 1970), Badlands (Malick, 1973), The Conversation (Coppola, 1974), Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973) and Network, Hollywood succumbed to commercial pressures – eschewing unhappy endings and highly political content and commentary in its films for 'the blockbuster' – usually dated to the release of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, in 1980. Film narratives switched back to happy endings, resolution and dominant societal paradigms reasserted themselves. One only need look at the young George Lucas' spectacular rise to fame with Star Wars (1977), an overly simplified fairy tale of 'good vs. evil'. (11) Gone was the subtlety and sophistication of Taxi Driver or Badlands, with their confused and often violent protagonists, and their near-nihilistic challenges to bourgeois morality, and back were the classical 'heroes' of the big screen, whose essential goodness was never in doubt and who always triumphed over the 'bad guys'. As Biskind suggests, the flowering of American cinema, only too brief, had ended – and Spielberg had 'won'. Because the fact of the matter is that although individual revolutionaries succeeded, the revolution failed. [...] As Coppola later recognized, the market selected and shaped these directors, snuffing out the careers of those whose films were not commercial, and boosting and molding the careers of those that were. It seems only right to close with one of Chayefsky's more incisive soliloquies, delivered by the owner of UBS, Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty): You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it. Is that clear? You think you merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken millions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man, who thinks in terms of nations, and peoples. There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no Third Worlds; there is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, Rubles, Pounds and Sheckles. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic, and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone. You get up on your little 21 inch screen, and howl about “America”, and “democracy.” There is no America, there is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T. And Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. EXTRAS INCLUDE: - Director's Commentary as second audio track - The Making of Network (L. Bouzereau, 2006) 1hr 25min documentary - Vintage Paddy Chayefsky Interview On Dinah! - Private Screenings With Sidney Lumet - TCM Host Robert Osborne Interviews Director Lumet - Original Theatrical Trailer PLEASE SEED AND ENJOY!!!
Seeders: 7
Leeches: 2

Audiobook: The Isreal Lobby And U.S. Foreign Policy

Category: eBooks, Magazines, Audio Books
Description:
The Israel Lobby,” by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Originally published in theLondon Review of Books in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. Now in a work of major importance, Mearsheimer and Walt deepen and expand their argument and confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran. They describe the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Mearsheimer and Walt provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East—in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Michael Massing declared, “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.” The publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is certain to widen the debate and to be one of the most talked-about books of the year. “Controversial.” —Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR “It could not be more timely.” —David Bromwich, The Huffington Post “The strategic questions they raise now, particularly about Israel’s privileged relationship with the United States, are worth debating.” —David Remnick. The New Yorker “Ruthlessly realistic.” —William Grimes, The New York Times “The argument they present is towering and clear and about time.” —Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss.com “Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Walt, on the faculty at Harvard, set off a political firestorm.” —Jay Solomon, The Wall Street Journal.com “Promises controversy on a scale not seen since Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations sought to reframe a new world order.” —Stefan Halper, National Interest.com “Deals with Middle East policymaking at a time when America’s problems in that region surpass our problems anywhere else . . . People are definitely arguing about it. It’s also the kind of book you do not have to agree with on every count (I certainly don’t) to benefit from reading.” —MJ Rosenberg, Israel Policy Forum Newsletter About the Author(s) John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. He has published several books, including The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Stephen M. Walt is the Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and was academic dean of the Kennedy School from 2002 to 2006. He is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy, among other books.
Seeders: 31
Leeches: 11

Democracy Now! Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
Today's Headlines Senate Dems Block Funds for Gitmo Closure Senate Approves Credit Card Bill Admin Mulls New Regulatory Body for Financial Products Obama Unveils Vehicle Mileage, Emissions Standards US-Russia Panel Says Missile Shield Wouldn’t Work Sri Lanka Blocks Aid Workers from Reaching Displaced Palestinian Authority Installs New Cabinet 2 Americans Killed in Afghan Attack Pentagon: Blackwater Contractors Weren’t Allowed to Carry Weapons Spanish Lawmakers Vote to Restrict Foreign Probes Uruguyan Writer Mario Benedetti Dies at 88 New Yorker Correspondent Jane Mayer and British Attorney Philippe Sands on Bush Administration Torture and How Obama Should Address It We spend the hour on the latest news around the US torture of foreign prisoners with two guests who have helped expose many of its facets: New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, and British attorney Philippe Sands, author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. Mayer and Sands discuss the Obama administration’s recent decisions to block the release of photographs showing the abuse of prisoners at overseas CIA and military jails and revive the military tribunal system; the scrutiny of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s role in attending torture briefings; Spanish efforts to investigate torture allegations at Guantanamo Bay; Democratic-led resistance to funding the Obama administration’s plan to close Guantanamo; and more. [includes rush transcript]
Seeders: 104
Leeches: 9

L'Armée Des Ombres (aka Army Of The Shadows) (Melville, 1969)[+Extras]-aNaRCHo

Category: Misc
Description:
L'Armée Des Ombres (aka Army Of The Shadows) (Melville, 1969)[+Extras]-aNaRCHo CRITERION RIP WITH COMMENTARY AND SECOND AUDIO TRACK INCLUDED!!! The tightest thriller in town. Jean-Pierre Melville is widely worshipped for his gangster sagas, such as “Le Samouraï” and “Le Cercle Rouge,” but this tale of the French Resistance, though no less stylish (hats and dark suits still abound), has an added pulse of the heartfelt. It stars Lino Ventura as a stalwart of the underground movement, who slips the shackles of the occupying Germans and rejoins his small band of fellow-heroes. Not that their heroism is remotely flamboyant; what concerns Melville is the courage of the stoical, the phlegmatic, and the formidably organized. His direction honors that efficiency with a series of set pieces (one in a barber shop, another at Gestapo headquarters, a third in the face of a firing squad) in which the suspense grows almost intolerable. The movie, though made in 1969, has never been released here before. To miss it now would be a gross dereliction of duty. With an unflappable Simone Signoret. The arrival of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Army of Shadows” is not a rerelease but a début. The film, though it hails from 1969, has never been distributed here. The title, which refers to the French Resistance, will mean nothing to most people, but for Melville-watchers it has acquired the weight of legend. If they, however, are the only ones who see it now, that will be a waste, since any moviegoers with a weakness for dry heroism, dark-toned humor, and storytelling of pantherish pace and grace—in short, lovers of cinema—should reach for their fedoras, turn up the collars of their coats, and sneak to this picture through a mist of rain. ;; The scene is instantly set. A column of German troops marches beside the Arc de Triomphe; there is something immediately terrifying in the way that Melville pauses the troops in freeze-frame—as if the cameraman had been interrupted (or killed) in mid-shot, or as if the whole scene were a slice of smuggled newsreel from last week. Up come the words “20 October 1942,” and we see a long, low, black car being driven through a sunless countryside. Welcome to Melvilleland. ;; Inside the car is Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), a prisoner of the German forces, who is being ferried to a small camp of fellow-undesirables. He stands before the commanding officer, who reads an official description of the new inmate: “Distant and ironic attitude. Suspected of Gaullist ideas.” Two things are crucial here. First, nothing has been proved; suspicion is more potent than hard evidence in the twilit limbo patrolled by Melville’s creatures. Second, the officer does not read out the words; he murmurs them to himself, the first of several characters to retreat into voice-over, and this sense of men as sequestered spirits deepens throughout the film—as does our treasuring of those who, against all odds, insist on brotherly love. ;; What follows is as inexorable as the beating of a pulse. How Melville renders that fatalism not as a grind but as a source of tremulous suspense is a miracle that I find difficult to explain. Gerbier is transferred to Paris, where he awaits interrogation. Seizing the moment, he escapes and returns to the Resistance network in which he has quietly toiled. There he encounters stalwarts like Jean-François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel), as dapper as a flying ace in his leather jacket, and Le Bison (Christian Barbier), a sort of human menhir. Then, there is Mathilde (Simone Signoret), the bravest of them all. She is middle-aged and drably clothed, with a certainty of will that would not be out of place in a mother superior. Mathilde has one weakness: she carries a photograph of her daughter—a source of possible blackmail—in her handbag. “Don’t keep it with you,” Gerbier says, but she does. So much of “Army of Shadows” is concerned with slips in judgment or curt, momentous gestures of faith. The resisters, with their code of monkish austerity, could almost be members of a closed order. Nobody sabotages a railway line or blows up a munitions dump; all their energy is directed to their own survival, or, occasionally, to the necessary execution of a traitor. (There is a strangulation scene of which Hitchcock would be proud.) Not that “Army of Shadows” truncates, let alone mocks, the myth of the Resistance; Melville himself served in its ranks, and his work is reverent toward its leaders—and toward de Gaulle, who invests one of them, on a fleeting trip to London, with the Croix de Guerre. But your lingering impression is that the underground movement had a symbolic, near-sacred purpose that outweighed the practical, and in that imbalance the movie cuts to the heart of the argument about France’s collective, endlessly troubled memory of the war. ;; You need not be schooled in that debate to relish the virtues of the tale. All that’s required is a liking for Lino Ventura, who, with his boxer’s nose and his hard-won smile, is the true heir to the humane solidity of Jean Gabin. You must accept that, when Melville clothes the heroes like those of his own gangster movies, such as “Le Samourai,” he is not imposing a style so much as honoring a strain of melancholy toughness—not a bad defense mechanism under such conditions. Above all, you have to feel the plucking of your nerves as Gerbier flees his captors along empty nighttime streets, slows to a walk, and slips into the only shop where the lights still burn. It happens to be a barber’s, so he sits and has a shave, still panting from his exertions, and not knowing whether the man with the razor will help him out or slit his throat. There is no backchat, no music: nothing but the scraping of the blade. For the first, and maybe the only, time this year, you are in the hands of a master, and you follow every cut.--Anthony Lane, New Yorker ;; PLEASE SEED AND ENJOY!!!
Seeders: 7
Leeches: 3

Still We Ride - DVD (2005)

Category: Documentary
Description:
Still We Ride http://www.stillweridethemovie.com/ On Friday August 27, 2004 just days before the start of the Republican National Convention, a massive police operation was underway. By the end of the night 264 people were arrested. It marked one of the largest mass arrests in New York City's history - and the arrested had done nothing illegal. For many New Yorkers, August was the first time they heard of what has become a monthly ritual for New York City's bike community; a free-forming ride called Critical Mass. Still We Ride is a documentary that captures the joyous atmosphere of this August ride before the arrests began and the chaos that followed. It recounts how this ride first started in San Francisco over 10 years ago and chronicles the police crackdown and resulting court battles in New York over the last twelve months. The movie takes on issues of civil liberties, surveillance, the power of mainstream media, and the benefits of alternative means of transportation.
Seeders: 17
Leeches: 0