Author: alannahpriestley

Who Goes to Jail? BP CEO or Shrimper

by Dennis Bernstein

On June 17, after watching BP’s oil blowout pollute the Gulf of Mexico for nearly two months, environmental campaigner and fourth-generation Texas shrimp boat captain, Diane Wilson, had had more than enough.

So Wilson seized the only opportunity she may ever have to confront BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, eye to eye, about his “criminal activities” as top dog at the oil giant.

That day, Hayward happened to be giving testimony before the Senate Energy Committee hearings. Wilson, who works with CodePink now, had been on the road and was heading home to Seadrift, Texas, when she heard Hayward would be testifying at the Capitol.

“I was coming back to Texas and I found out the CEO of BP was going to be in D.C,” said Wilson, in a telephone interview. “I felt compelled to come. I had to see Hayward. I had to. And I did.”

But Wilson was not merely planning to be a passive observer, sitting in awe in one of the great deliberative bodies of U.S. democracy.

“I got in and I snuck in some black paint,” she said, “and I sat there and waited ‘til he started testifying and then I smeared that paint all over myself, poured it on my hands, and I stood up and told him he should be jailed. He should be jailed, I told him.”

“BP is a criminal company that has ignored safety regulations at the health of our oceans and even its own workers,” Wilson called out to Hayward and the members of the committee,” before she was pounced on by security and hustled out of the hearing room.

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It’s all about the lobby: Finkelstein on the Bibi-Obama lovefest

Obama’s pandering was all about concern over losing campaign contributions from wealthy Jewish donors in the upcoming elections, says Finkelstein.

Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, suffering on the global front after a string of setbacks, is meeting with US President Barack Obama in Washington to discuss a range of thorny issues. Norman Finkelstein, author of “A Farewell to Israel: The coming break-up of American Zionism”, shares his view on US-Israeli ‘unbreakable’ bond.

Gaza farmers risk being shot

And the world continues to tolerate all this…

As a Libyan backed aid ship sails for the Gaza Strip, another group of international activists has been defying the blockade, but this time on the land. Foreigners acting as human shields have been helping farmers in Gaza harvest their crops. About 30 per cent of Gaza’s arable land is on the border with Israel and the area has been declared a buffer zone by the Israeli army. Palestinian farmers risk being shot with live fire for working their fields.

Nicole Johnston reports from Bani Salah.

The New Anti-Semitism

A Jewish student at the George Washington University caught painting Swastikas on her own door then claiming that she was the target of an anti-Semitic attack. (via Norman Finkelstein)

Schizophrenia and Race

From C. S. Soong’s excellent Against the Grain.


The diagnosis of mental illness has always been colored by social biases, but a striking shift occurred during the turmoil of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Jonathan Metzl describes how African American men became disproportionately diagnosed with schizophrenia, which was reclassified as a disease of the violent, and how that skewed diagnosis continues to this day.

Jonathan Metzl is the author of The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Beacon, 2009).

A net loss of freedom

by David Miller

When the anger of a prominent young thinktanker causes one of the world’s largest web-hosting companies to shut down a site that monitors lobbying and transparency, it is time to start asking questions about online free speech and censorship.

Last week, as Hugh Muir reported in the Guardian diary, the website SpinProfiles was taken down by the domain name registrar, 1 & 1 Internet, following a complaint from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son of journalist Christopher.

SpinProfiles, run by sister organisation Spinwatch, aims to stitch together publicly available information to provide a detailed picture of who’s who in the shadowy world of lobbying. It features close to ten thousand profiles of think tanks, lobbying organisations and those associated with them.

The profile of Meleagrou-Hitchens, a 26-year old thinktanker and blogger, detailed his work for American and British rightwing and neoconservative thinktanks, blogs and magazines, and his particular interest in Islam. He is or has been associated with the UK-based neoconservative Henry Jackson Society Project for Democratic Geopolitics and with the two leading UK-based conservative thinktanks, Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion.

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The Ghetto in the Ghetto

by Michal Schwartz

The past year has witnessed two cases of discrimination in the religious schools [in Israel]: ultraorthodox Jews of West European descent (Ashkenazis) discriminating against ultraorthodox Jews of darker hues. In August 2009, private religious schools in Petach Tikva refused to admit Ethiopian Jews. In response, the Education Ministry threatened to withdraw financial support for these schools and even to shut them down. In this way it compelled them to admit a hundred pupils.

The second, more recent instance occurred at the ultraorthodox West Bank settlement of Immanuel, where a Hasidic group known as the Slonim is dominant. In September 2008 the Slonim separated their daughters from the Mizrahi girls in the settlement’s school. (Mizrahis, also known as Sephardim, derive from North Africa and Arab lands.) The Slonim built a plaster wall the length of the school and put a fence through its yard, covering it with canvas so that their daughters wouldn’t see the Mizrahis. They changed the hours of the breaks and forbade association between the groups.

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Journey into Memory

Al Jazeera – Witness – Three writers journey across Syria to an infamous jail by the ruins at Palmyra, recalling the spirit that helped them survive torture and abuse.

UN: Ditch the Buck!

A new United Nations report released on June 29 calls for abandoning the U.S. dollar as the main global reserve currency, saying it has been unable to safeguard value. According to some, the demise of dollar is a matter of mere months.

A report by the United Nations says the American dollar should be ditched as the main global reserve currency. It said that the global financial meltdown has exposed systematic weaknesses, one of which is the reliance on the greenback. It also found that developing countries have been hit by the dollar’s loss of value in recent years. A number of states, including Russia and China, have repeatedly called for a new reserve currency system. The UN has now suggested using a basket of currencies for this purpose. London-based markets strategist Nick Parsons believes it’s only a matter of months before the dollar will start to go down.