May 12 Update: Abu Ghraib-Style Israeli Torture; Datacenters Drain Virginia; The $9 Trillion Green Transition; Trump's Oil Barons; FBI Big Urges Warrantless Wiretaps
The leaves are turning deep green, the days are getting longer, and the generation that missed their high school graduations because of the COVID-19 pandemic are now getting shut out of their commencements, thanks to administrations fearful of negative press and (Zionist) donor backlash should any pro-Palestine demonstrations break out. Despite the moral panic driven by the media about these encampments, they have been overwhelmingly peaceful. Here's the data to back it up. But when you've lost Gary Lineker, you've definitively lost the narrative Meanwhile, we're blithely heading into one of the hottest summers on record, with huge wildfires already breaking out in the Canadian Northwest. Needless to say, the stakes of this fall's elections in and outside the United States will be existential, if we're listening to the five-star alarm being rung by climate scientists over the latest data.
At the prodding of my editors over at the Guardian, I took a run at parsing precisely who took part in the vicious counterprotests to UCLA's Gaza solidarity encampment in late April that culminated in the mayhem of April 30, with 30 people injured by a masked, organized pro-Israel mob. Longtime watchers of Southern California street protests picked out a number of far right agitators who've been central to an anti-LGBTQ movement that targeted regional school boards last year. There've also been other extremists spotted at UCLA and other campuses around the country, including Christian Zionists, January 6th participants, and the Jewish Defense League. The school year is all but done, but don't expect the street tensions to fade as we move through 2024.
I'll have a couple pieces this coming week, one West Coast centered, and a few more that have to do with the NYPD and the Far Right. Two of them will be paywalled here, so sign up if you haven't already and are able.
Let's get to it.
BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM
-In some of the clearest evidence of crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli military, CNN published an exhaustive report this week documenting nightmarish conditions for Palestinian detainees that put Abu Ghraib to shame. Prisoners were blindfolded, immobilized in beds with arm and leg shackles, and naked except for diapers. Limbs were amputated because of severe damage from constant shackling, dogs were set on the inmates nightly, and torture was widespread. There truly is no bottom.
Tamara Qiblawi
-As my friend Ingrid Burrington has said for more than a decade, the internet is a place. Or series of places. I'm butchering her words, but Grist's report on the metastasizing growth of data centers in Virginia drills home the very tangible cost of the digitization of everyday life. The massive facilities, which were well documented in Alec MacGillis' book-length account of Big Tech's ascendancy, Fulfillment (2021), are now hoovering up vast amounts of Virginia's water, no mean feat in a state blessed with the Tidewater riverine system and healthy annual rainfall.
Sachi Kitajima Mulkey
-For all matters financial, there's only one newspaper that does it right. The FT's coverage of the clean energy transition is essential, and they put some of their best reporters on a forward-looking piece documenting the colossal task of paying for the cost of moving humanity's energy system off fossil fuels at pace. You'll regularly see pieces like this crop up in American newspapers 3-4 weeks later - stay ahead of the curve with their coverage.
-For longtime readers, you'll know that I loathe Beltway journalism. There are exceptions to the rule, but by and large D.C. reporting revolves around access and horse-trading. However, on occasion that does pay off as in the case of the Washington Post's scoop this week about Donald Trump's secret meeting with oil company executives to solicit $1 billion in campaign donations. In exchange, the embattled former president vowed to gut President Biden's green energy programs and effectively kill off the electric car (again). Hard to see how that would be possible given the massive inroads made by EVs throughout the U.S., particularly out West, but that's the plan.
-Feds love wiretaps, especially when they don't have to go to a judge to get em. Wired dug up a telling email from deputy director Paul Abbate that instructs FBI agents to lean on the warrantless wiretap provision authorized by Congress in 2008 (including then-Senator Barrack Obama) to legalize an unlawful domestic mass surveillance program begun by the National Security Agency under President George W. Bush - and kept under wraps by the New York Times until January 2005 in order to not dampen Dubya's re-election prospects. A necessary reminder of the huge civil liberties rollback after September 11th.
BOOK OF THE WEEK - Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (2003), is the definitive account of the involvement of Western intelligence services in the global narcotics trade, from French & American protection of Southeast Asia's heroin trade and use of its narco-dollars to fund covert operations to similar endeavors by the US in Afghanistan, Central America and Colombia in the final quarter of the Twentieth Century.
First published in 1972 as The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, McCoy's book included his own firsthand fieldwork in the uplands of Vietnam and Laos, which leveled explosive accusations against the South Vietnamese government, elements of the American mob and the Central Intelligence Agency in cultivating the heroin trade that was then ravaging American cities and fueling an addiction epidemic among U.S. soldiers. The Central Intelligence Agency made a naked attempt to suppress the book as a threat to national security and demanded pre-publication review, which was only thwarted by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh unmasking the CIA's censorship attempt on page one of the New York Times. The 2003 edition expands on America's post-Vietnam dirty wars, and is fundamental to comprehend the direction of our foreign policy.
The book is strangely out of print, but for for those of you who can stomach reading a 750+ page book on screen, here is a complete PDF copy on archive.org.
FILM - Last week, I gave a shout to Alan Pakula's The Parallax View (1974), so why the hell not give this post-Watergate classic of paranoia, government subterfuge and corporate malfeasance its due. Paula Prentiss stars as a TV reporter who witnesses the assassination of an American senator at Seattle's Space Needle (what a setting) by a waiter who is chased to his death. The following investigation is a whitewash, and Prentiss' character is murdered after telling her ex-boyfriend, a newspaper reporter played by Warren Beatty, that six witnesses to the senator's murder have since been killed.
The film then takes Beatty's character through a web of corrupt law enforcement and corporate influence - a shadowy security firm called the Parallax Organization lies at the heart of the senator's killing and a plot to control the American political system. Dark, extremely well acted and thoroughly paranoid, The Parallax View would struggle to get made today but foreshadowed the rise of national security scandals like Iran-Contra and the ascendance of private security contractors as key hubs of the military-industrial complex. It crops up here and there on streaming services, but you're better off (as always) having your own copy.
Nathan Heller
MUSIC - The Wired piece on warrantless wiretaps - plus all these mass arrests of young people marching to stop the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and the enjoining establishment panic about civil disobedience - sent me down memory lane back into my early twenties and the darkness of Dubya's second term. New York City crust-punk stalwarts Leftover Crack wrote my soundtrack for that era with 2004's blistering, still-relevant Fuck World Trade. Some albums define a decade. This is one of em.