Robert S. Becker : The Environmental Rabble-Rousing of Diane Wilson

Environmental activist Diane Wilson in a still from the PBS documentary, Texas Gold.
Eco-Outlaw Diane Wilson:
The environmental rabble-rousing
of an unreasonable woman

By Robert S. Becker / OpEd News / June 21, 2011

Environmental activist and author Diane Wilson will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 24, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on Austin's community radio station, KOOP-91.7 FM, and streamed live on the internet. [UPDATE: Listen to the podcast of Thorne Dreyer's interview with Diane Wilson on Rag Radio, here.]

Diane will also speak about her book, Diary of an Eco-Outlaw, at Book People, 603 N. Lamar in Austin, Thursday, June 23, at 7 p.m. and will appear at the Texas Louisiana Gulf Coast Shindig & Soiree at Pine Street Station, 1101 E. 5th Street, Austin, from 4-7 p.m., Saturday, June 25.

Legendary Texas journalist Molly Ivins once joked about rebel-rouser-activist Jim Hightower: "If Will Rogers and Mother Jones had a baby, Jim Hightower would be that child -- mad as hell, with a sense of humor."

Well, Hightower has a protest soul sister, the inventive, congenial, yet fierce "eco-outlaw" named Diane Wilson. Unlike armchair activists and witty journalists, this champion takes risks, gets bloodied and arrested, and endures jail -- then turns her adventures into good-hearted, epic tales reminiscent of Mark Twain.

And what progressive battles need, more than ever, are inspiring protest leaders -- and crowds in the street. Otherwise, we fail to learn from the insipid, conspiracy-ridden, if effective escapades of the Tea Party. One hard-won lesson I take from this hell-raising muckraker from Seadrift, Texa, is that petitions, donations, columns, and news interviews are nice but don't save lives, jobs, America, or Mother Earth.

Diane was featured in a terrific PBS documentary called Texas Gold, voiced by Peter Coyote, and, with Coyote, produced a hilarious satirical commercial for the film -- about bottled Gulf water you get to drink once. Wilso was interviewed on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, and performs daring CodePink disruptions. [Wilson was, in fact, a founding member of CodePink, the theatrical direct-action peace group.]

Diane has also penned two inspiring protest memoirs -- real-life, laugh-out-loud, unflinching stories reliving what happens when a terrific activist puts her liberty on the line. This woman walks the line, until she gets forcibly removed. Her two full titles alone justify the price of admission:

• An Unreasonable Woman, the True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas
• Diary of an Eco-Outlaw, An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth

Her tactics are "unreasonable," of course, only to cancer-inducing, worker-killing resource predators (well-shielded by official protection) whom she ambushes with inventive schemes. Eco-activism here is downright fun, mostly, like anti-war '60's agitation (though absent the crowds). She invites all of us to do local agitation.

Where she's best known as Corporate Criminal Enemy No. 1 is Calhoun County, Texas, which -- alas, B.D. (Before Diane) -- was a remote, Gulf coast pushover ripe for chemical dumpers, and by 1989 had won the EPA's dubious prize as America's most polluted place. That shocker woke Diane up, and she's been confronting polluters (and now related war-mongers) ever since.


Teaching by bold example

I found out about Diane because my wife is writing a young adult novel and needed to check background about the Gulf, shrimping, and endangered sea turtles. So, who better to learn from than the liveliest, most notorious, ex-professional Gulf shrimper living between Galveston and Corpus Christi?

Naturally we jumped in the van and drove eight hours when hearing Diane was to keynote a women's literary celebration in Santa Barbara. Her simple if hard to execute message: trust your heart, assess the damage, disregard most well-intentioned warnings and, above all, don't sweat outcomes impossible to know in advance.

Progressives are forever talking and talking about direct protests, so time to learn from Diane's fearless bravery, lit up by over 50 arrests. Would be 100 were she less even-tempered, her outrage tempered by quiet irony and southern courtesy, even to abusers.

She never hides, however, the fact that maximizing bad publicity against huge public menaces means getting roughed up, inconvenienced, and punished. The system discourages disruption and, judging by her harsh prison depictions, many here would pipe up, "Is there a Plan B?"


Climbing the protest tower

When not delivering subversive keynotes or satiric writing, being restrained in jail, or sidestepping Texas Rangers, Diane has initiated five hunger strikes (some surprisingly effective), performed inventive media protests and political theater (including nudity), done mock citizen arrests -- and pulled off one truly notorious stunt -- protesting 22,000 deaths in India by single-handedly climbing a 75-foot tower.

Here's that tale, begun when "nobody particular" -- right! -- donned a hardhat, hitched a ride into the Dow Chemical plant, thus breaching its vaunted security, and unfurled this heinous banner: "Dow Responsible for Bhopal." After which ensued 10 hours of Keystone Cops commotion, during which time our chained (thus hard-to-move) heroine was bloodied by a sadistic SWAT team, straitjacketed, whisked to the hoosegow, and eventually found guilty of criminal trespassing.

Protesting starts with intimidation on both sides. Apparently, in Calhoun County, Texas, educating folks about inhumane, criminal behavior is itself criminal -- whereas officials dumping tax incentives to encourage the unregulated poisoning of the community's most valuable resource, once lovely bay waters -- no problema. Live jobs trump dead dolphins or toxic shrimp.

Diane then doubled her outlaw-rebel trademark by refusing to show up for prison. Talk about direct, predatory protest drones to offset all the fancy PR industry "goodwill" (payoffs like police cars, computers, and the like). What's four-months prison time for "nobody particular" versus paltry wrist slaps to the Union Carbide CEO whose plant leaked so much lethal gas it wiped out a good-sized city while poisoning 500,000 others.

This episode encapsulates the plucky Wilson Way -- brash, non-violent, dramatic, low-cost -- and with a rippling unpredictability that unnerves testy execs. What makes Diane crazy like a fox, a match for the planet's most shameless polluters (Dow, Alcoa, BP, Dupont and Formosa Plastics), is an uncompromising refusal to sweat outcomes.

Diane Wilson is arrested after pouring oil over herself during an appeareance by BP CEO Tony Hayward before a Congressional hearing in 2010. Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images.
Commit all the way

Diane elevated the "Just do it" notion before the shoe brand. Why limit unknowable results, she implies, with Obama-like, risk-averse "pragmatism," or entrenched group cautiousness, when you've got Wilson's full-throated impulsiveness, inspiration, and fearless nonchalance on your side? From Diary of an Eco-Outlaw:

I can truthfully say that I've never planned a single action that I was in charge of. I've never thought of the outcome or the ending. My actions were not outcome driven. That's not what propelled me. It was the urgency of the moment affecting my heart. I didn't care if there was no hope. I didn't care if no one was with me. I didn't care if what I did would end there that day. I could be on the losing side. I could go to jail.

Wilson amplifies John Lennon's quip, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans," for she disowns planning, beyond scheduling the next cunning expose of corporate wickedness. And by any standards, Diane's career achievement is impressive, awarding her highest honors in the nation's demanding, shit-disturbing sweepstakes.

She shows how much one, non-ideological woman can do without initial fame, private angels or fortune, fancy friends in high office, or big alliances with well-heeled NGOs.

Just do it.

Her blend -- sacrifice, risk-taking, trusting herself, and widening horizons (now anti-war) -- identifies a true western maverick, literally an "unbranded calf." In fact, the term "maverick" celebrates the independent, progressive Texas family of that name. There's nothing right-wing or authoritarian about mavericks; au contraire, they boldly battle both the status quo and status holders.

True political mavericks like Diane insist those hell-bent on making money must not then negligently unmake the earth: thus, no industry is above federal clean air and water laws, or has the right to inflict cancer along with its paycheck, or devastation on treasured community resources.

Is this logic too hard for chemical companies -- and public officials -- or what?

[Robert S. Becker was educated at Rutgers College (BA) and UC Berkeley (Ph.D, English). Becker left university teaching (Northwestern, U. Chicago) for business, founding and heading SOTA Industries, a high-end audio company, from '80 to '92. From '92-02 he did marketing, consulting, and writing; since 2002, he has been scribbling on politics and culture, looking for the wit in the shadows. This article was originally published at -- and was distributed by -- OpEd News.]

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Robert Sheer : Hogwash, Mr. President

State of the Union: Platitudinous hogwash? Photo by Miller / New York Daily News.
State of the Union:
Hogwash, Mr. President

The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment, and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole.

By Robert Sheer / Truthdig / January 26, 2011

What is the state of the union? You certainly couldn’t tell from that platitudinous hogwash that the president dished out Tuesday evening. I had expected Barack Obama to be his eloquent self, appealing to our better nature, but instead he was mealy-mouthed in avoiding the tough choices that a leader should delineate in a time of trouble.

He embraced clean air and a faster Internet while ignoring the depth of our economic pain and the Wall Street scoundrels who were responsible -- understandably so, since they so prominently populate the highest reaches of his administration. He had the effrontery to condemn “a parade of lobbyists” for rigging government after he appointed the top Washington representative of JPMorgan Chase to be his new chief of staff.

The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment, and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole. Instead the president conveyed the insular optimism of his fat-cat associates: “We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.”

How convenient to ignore the fact that this bubble of prosperity, which has failed the tens of millions losing their homes and jobs, was floated by enormous government indebtedness now forcing deep cuts in social services including state financial aid for those better-educated students the president claims to be so concerned about.

His references to education provided a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the economy, rather than to blame the actions of the Wall Street hustlers to whom Obama is now sucking up. Yes, it is an obvious good to have better-educated students to compete with other economies, but that is hardly the issue of the moment when all of the world’s economies are suffering grievous harm resulting from the irresponsible behavior of the best and the brightest here at home.

It wasn’t the students struggling at community colleges who came up with the financial gimmicks that produced the Great Recession, but rather the super-whiz-kid graduates of the top business and law schools.

What nonsense to insist that low public school test scores hobbled our economy when it was the highest-achieving graduates of our elite colleges who designed and sold the financial gimmicks that created this crisis. Indeed, some of the folks who once designed the phony mathematical formulas underwriting subprime mortgage-based derivatives won Nobel prizes for their effort. A pioneer in the securitization of mortgage debt, as well as exporting jobs abroad, was one Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, whom Obama recently appointed to head his new job creation panel.

That the financial meltdown at the heart of our economic crisis was “avoidable” and not the result of long-run economic problems related to education and foreign competition is detailed in a sweeping report by the Democratic majority on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to be released as a 576-page book on Thursday. In a preview reported in The New York Times, the commission concluded: “The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen again.”

Just the warning that Obama has ignored by continually appointing the very people who engineered this crisis, mostly Clinton alums, to reverse its ongoing dire consequences. As the Times reports: “The decision in 2000 to shield the exotic financial instruments known as over-the-counter derivatives from regulation, made during the last year of President Bill Clinton’s term, is called ‘a key turning point in the march toward the financial crisis.’ ”

Obama appointed as his top economic adviser Lawrence Summers, who as Clinton’s treasury secretary was the key architect of that “turning point,” and Summers protégé Timothy Geithner as his own treasury secretary. The unanimous finding of the 10 Democrats on the commission is that Geithner, who had been president of the New York Fed before Obama appointed him, “could have clamped down” on excesses by Citigroup, the subprime mortgage leader that Geithner and the Fed bailed out along with other unworthy banking supplicants.

Profligate behavior that has hobbled the economy while running up an enormous debt that Obama now uses as an excuse for a five-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending cuts, that small part of the budget that might actually help ordinary people. Speaking of our legacy of deficit spending, Obama stated, “...in the wake of the financial crisis, some of that was necessary to keep credit flowing, save jobs, and put money in people’s pockets. But now that the worst of the recession is over, we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in.”

Why now? It is an absurd demarcation to freeze spending when so many remain unemployed just because corporate profits, and therefore stock market valuations, seem firm. Ours is a union divided between those who agree with Obama that “the worst of the recession is over” and the far larger number in deep pain that this president is bent on ignoring.

[Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. Sheer, who conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart, was editor of Ramparts and national corespondent for the Los Angeles Times. Sheer, who has written nine books, is clinical professor of communications at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.]

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BOOKS / Danny Schechter : Villains Galore! A Bankster Dozen

Bankster graphic from ANU News.
Villains galore!
Good holiday reads about
the great economic crisis

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / December 4, 2010

Back in 2007, just as the markets began their meltdown, I started writing a book I called Plunder to investigate the then emerging economic calamity. I had a well-known agent representing me, and, at that time, had published 10 books. My agent warned me that I was ahead of the curve but agreed that the subject couldn’t be timelier.

Before we were through, the manuscript went to and was returned by 30 publishers. I was told that there is only one person that a book like mine had to pass muster with, not an economist, not a book editor -- but the book buyer who handles business books for Barnes and Noble. If she/she didn’t like it, forget it. (This was before the bottom dropped out of that company that was later nearly sold.)

So much for their business savvy. I guess Plunder was too much of an anti-business book for them then.

At that point, they were looking for “How to Get Rich” books and volumes with investment advice. Since I was not offering either, my warnings of the collapse ahead were off-message. No sale. Finally, a small press, Cosimo Books put it out. Sadly, with no real advertising budget or retail support, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. It was on the money in one sense -- published just before Lehman Brothers went down.

Since then, as the crisis was acknowledged and legitimated, the subject was finally validated for the publishing world, perhaps as millions of people began asking, "What the F…? What the hell happened?"

To answer that question, a mighty stream of crisis books was commissioned and soon poured forth. Every publisher wanted one. Some authors blamed psychological factors. Others were technical to a fault and unreadable. Still, others trashed borrowers who bought homes they couldn’t afford. Many framed the problem in terms of Wall Street mistakes and miscalculations, and occasionally greed.

Wrote Satyajit Das, author of Traders, Guns & Money: “The number of books on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has reached pandemic proportions -- the World Health Organization (WHO) is investigating. With the decorum of vultures at a carcass, publishers are cashing in on the transitory interest of the masses (normally obsessed with war, scandal or reality TV shows) in the arcane minutiae of financial matters.”

Few indicted the system; fewer still focused on intentionality -- crime in the suites, the subject I explore in my film Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time and the more detailed companion book The Crime of Our Time (Disinfo).

In the meantime, I tried to keep up with the hype and a flow that is still flowing.

Here are 12 books worth reading:

1. The Pecora Investigation: Stock Exchange Practices and The Causes of the 1929 Stock Market Crash. This is the just reissued actual text of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency in the days before the Congress was bought and sold. Pecora had said “Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies.”
   
   So far, in today’s crisis, there has been only ONE real Senate hearing, by Senator Levin questioning ONE deal by Goldman Sachs who denied everything until the bank reached a $550 MILLION settlement without admitting any wrongdoing. Clearly we still need a new Pecora-like investigation, not a tepid Congressional inquiry commission


2. Matt Taibbi: Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con that is Breaking America (Spiegel & Grau). As Rolling Stone readers know, Matt is a bold reporter and brilliant stylist turning his rage into brilliant prose and giving no mercy to the Goldman Sachs gang.


3. Nomi Prims: It Takes A Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street. An elegant writer, Nomi knows the financial world up close because she’s "been there and done that" with high paying stints at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs. You can see her brilliance in my film, Plunder. Her book goes much deeper.


4. Les Leopold: The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity -- and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green). Les is a passionate and compelling writer, teacher and activist. He has been steeped in union politics and knows how to fuse analysis and agitation


5. Joseph E. Stiglitz: Free Fall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the Global Economy (Norton). Siglitz is the economist’s economist, a Nobel Prize Winner, an insider turned fierce critic of our economic crisis. He has the credentials and THE critique and a much needed global perspective.


6. Howard Davies: The Financial Crisis: Who is to Blame? (Polity). I picked this book up at my alma mater, the London School of Economics, which Davies now directs. This is straight down the middle without dismissing more radical insights. He even references my critique of media complicity.


7. Randall Lane: The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane. A colorful personal account by a gonzo editor who covered the madness for Wall Street pubs. Sample: “Historically, Wall Street has been like one giant extended High School (A boy’s High School). The jocks become trader -- large, aggressive men who succeed in the pits based on heft and testosterone. The nerds went into banking, crunching numbers and pumping out spread sheets to determine the efficacy of deals.”



8. Yves Smith: ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy, and Corrupted Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan). Yves is a rock star in the business of critical economics. A financial industry professional, she defected to the “light side” and founded the must read website, NakedCapitalism.com. This book skewers government policy, the economics “profession” and Wall Street fraudsters.


9. Steig Larsson: The Millennium Trilogy. The late Swedish journalist, turned popular writer, has produced three volumes of best-selling action thrillers with intelligent plots. I cite his work here because he and the character he created, Mikael Blomkvist, were investigative reporters in the financial realm.
   
   Larsson describes Blomkvist’s contempt for his fellow financial journalists based on morality: “His contempt for his fellow financial journalists was based on something that in his opinion was as plain as morality. The equation was simple. A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time.
   
   “The job of the financial journalist was to examine the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors, to scrutinise company boards with the same merciless zeal with which political reporters pursue the tiniest steps out of line of ministers and members of Parliament.”
   
   His books are more than storytelling. They are also a cry for more truth in media.


10. And, since I try to practice the investigative protocols of journalism in this sphere, may I call your attention to the republication of one of the greatest American classics of taking on corporate power?
    
    Ida M. Tarbell may be gone but her work is not forgotten, especially her classic, two volume blistering The History of the Standard Oil Company. I was privileged to write the introduction for the Cosimo edition. She wrote this muckraking blockbuster in 1904 and remains relevant, and an example of the best of us.


11. For a left critique, try Michael Chossudovsky and Andrew Gayin Marshall, Editors: The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century (Global Research) from the Canadian-based global web site I contribute to.


12. Barry James Dyke: The Pirates of Manhattan: Systematically Plundering The American Consumer and How To protect Yourself Against It. The one financial book I saw “blurbed” by Jay Leno (Self-published).

So, this is my “cheaper by the dozen” for 2010. I am sure I have overlooked some great work so it is hardly the “end-all” and “be-all.” Many of the new financial books out there are written by journalists for leading newspapers and magazines, as well as mainstream economists, many of whom missed the crisis when they might have warned us about it.

And, while many of us wait for the promised Wikileaks take down of a major bank, many authors and journalists still fail to tackle the really essential issues.

Hopefully, some of the books I am recommending will fill some gaps in your knowledge.

["News Dissector" Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, Emmy award winning television producer, and independent filmmaker. Schechter directed Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, and a companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail. Contact him at dissector@mediachannel.org.]

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Sept. 28 interview with journalist and filmmaker Danny Schechter on Rag Radio here. To find all shows on the Rag Radio archives, go here.

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Danny Schechter : Time to Jail the Banksters

Parade of the banksters. Cartoon by Jim Conte.
Time to act:
A campaign to jail the financial fraudsters

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2010

“I’ll have the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild from 1982,” a Wall Street investment banker recently told his waiter at the latest and greatest shi-shi restaurant in Greenwich Village.

“Yes sir, but I want you to know, the cost is $3,950.”

“No Problem.”

(As reported in The New York Times.)

And so it goes at The Lion, where no extravagance is too costly for today’s banksters and Lion Kings.

The men they call the "big swinging dicks" are back. In the words of The New York Times, Wall Street is getting its “groove back,” as the banksters anticipate their latest round of bonuses while gloating about how their strategic and undisclosed campaign donations assured that the overdue regulations they fear will be put on hold.

For them, buying the 2010 election was a small price to pay. Read economist James Galbraith’s column about how they did it.

Oh, happy day.

Meanwhile the rest of us cling to our “jobless recovery” while the prospect of inflation engineered by the Federal Reserve Bank threatens what purchasing power we have.

Increasingly, economists in the know are saying that unless financial fraud is prosecuted, there can be no recovery, as Washington’s Blog reports:

As economists such as William Black and James Galbraith have repeatedly said, we cannot solve the economic crisis unless we throw the criminals who committed fraud in jail.

And Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals -- and instead bailing them out -- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just agreed. As Stiglitz told Daily Finance on October 20th:

"The legal system is supposed to be the codification of our norms and beliefs, things that we need to make our system work. If the legal system is seen as exploitative, then confidence in our whole system starts eroding. And that's really the problem that's going on."

OUR RESPONSE: We don’t need more bailouts. We need a jailout.

Support the JAILOUT Economic Justice Campaign by signing the petition at New Dissector.

We need laws enforced, not winked at with financial settlements that allow those who enriched themselves at our expense, and destroyed the lives of so many, to get off scot-free, often with obscene bonuses and promotions.

Now, it is time for all of us to speak out and demand that something is done to stop foreclosures and create jobs.

We can start with a petition to the President, Attorney General, and political, labor, and youth leaders, not in the bag to Wall Street. We can call on the media to do more to cover this story instead of blaming the victims for the crime.

We are saying: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

1. Investigate fraudsters and financial criminals.
2. Indict those responsible.
3. Prosecute using RICO laws that target criminal enterprises spawned by three industries working together: finance, insurance and real estate.
4. Incarcerate the guilty.

All of this has been done before. More than 1,500 bankers went to jail after the S&L crisis.

Why not today?

We demand a criminal investigation.

We demand to see the guilty parties indicted. Their illegal gains should be seized and distributed to their victims.

We demand the federal and state governments prosecute these crimes, using RICO laws when possible, not cut deals that allow these crooks to walk free.

We want a national moratorium on foreclosures until all the shady legal issues are sorted out — and not just by the banks

We want our government to be on our side, to stand up for Main Street, not Wall Street.

If you committed these crimes, you would be doing time.

So should they!

Go here to learn more about this effort and to sign the petition.

["News Dissector" Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, Emmy award winning television producer, and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs, and speaks about media issues. Schechter directed Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, and a companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail. Contact him at dissector@mediachannel.org.]

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Sept. 28 interview with journalist and filmmaker Danny Schechter on Rag Radio here. To find all shows on the Rag Radio archives, go here.

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David P. Hamilton : 'Citizens United' and the Corruption of American Politics

Political cartoon by Adam Zyglis / The Buffalo News / Daryl Cagle.
The 'Citizens United' decision
and the terminal corruption of
American electoral politics

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / October 28, 2010

This article by The Rag Blog's David P. Hamilton is an extremely timely and relevant assessment of the state of politics in this country following the Supreme Court's game-changing decision opening the floodgates to even greater corporate dominance of the electoral system -- and after the many failures of the Obama administration in bringing about meaningful progressive change. We hope it will stimulate discussion in the progressive community.

However, to the extent that David is suggesting the left should boycott the electoral system, we strongly disagree -- especially at this point in history -- and that should not be taken to be The Rag Blog's editorial position. We believe that -- lacking a coherent strategy on the left that offers a clear and well-articulated alternative course of action to participation in electoral politics -- it would be a self-defeating choice.

We believe, in fact, that everything possible must be done to stop the mushrooming anti-intellectual neo-nativist far right surge, and strongly urge all of our readers to vote this Tuesday, November 2.

But our participation in electoral politics should be done with our eyes open and without unrealistic expectations. And we must always remember that voting is not enough. That our primary responsibility as progressives is to organize and educate outside the political system if we are ever to bring about meaningful basic social change.

-- Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog

The primary political story of this year’s midterm election flows from the Supreme Court’s recent “Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission” decision. This 5-4 decision held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment.

The already apparent result has been that millions of corporate dollars are flowing into the campaigns nationwide attacking Democrats. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics predicts "$3.7 billion will be spent on this midterm election," up 30% from the last midterm election. Spending on political ads has increased 75% compared to the 2008 presidential election year.

This flood of ungoverned cash is only just beginning. Increasingly, these contributions are being made anonymously with impunity. Karl Rove now controls a campaign fund 10 times larger than that of the Republican National Committee, 95% of it from three militantly right-wing billionaires. The Chamber of Commerce, with 300,000 members, has raised a huge political fund and spent $28 million, largely from just 45 members, $7 million from "Swiftboat" Bob Perry of Houston.

Money coming from outside the country is also involved, but that fact is marginal to the larger issue. Amounts being spent by these political action committees to defeat Democrats are unprecedented. More than ever, elections are a commodity for sale and the price is being driven up so that only the very rich can afford them.

The consensus prediction of the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections is the widespread defeat of Democrats, losing control of the House and possibly the Senate too. This result will be determined primarily by the sad state of the economy and the failure of Obama’s leadership.

However, as a result of Citizens United the process has fundamentally changed. The playing field has never been level, but the advantages now enjoyed by the capitalist class in the electoral system have reached a qualitatively new high. The primary advantage of the right has been unleashed. Under the new rules governing political campaign financing, the capital class hegemony over the upper strata of U.S. government has been institutionalized.

Leftists have always argued that there is a U.S. capitalist ruling class with its power based in its control of the major corporations and that capitalist class money corrupts elections. Because of the lack of public funding and the high costs associated with running for office, big private sector money has long been necessary to be a serious player.

However, in the past there were legal limitations on corporate contributions that allowed non-corporate elements to compete, albeit at a financial disadvantage, usually losing to the better financed candidates. The restrictions that remain are quickly becoming irrelevant and no new ones can be reasonably expected from a government increasingly beholden to corporate capitalist interests.

NPR recently reported that one Republican-supporting political action fund, among many, was spending over $100,000 for negative advertising at just one small market newspaper in one closely contested congressional race. That’s the new norm. Millions in these funds are currently being spent to defeat progressives like Alan Grayson of Florida. The possibility of public funding of elections coming from politicians in the service of big capitalist interests is slight indeed.

The capitalist ruling class has globalized. They are no longer the U.S. ruling class so much as the largest national sector of an increasingly integrated international ruling class. Capital knows no borders. You can buy any publicly held stock in the world in dozens of stock markets worldwide 24/7. The heretofore essential countervailing sector, labor, has no chance to exert close to an equivalent influence while operating in a national context.

What has changed is the depth and reach of capitalist ruling class control. Like their wealth, their power has grown exponentially; they have increased their range of operation and become internationally integrated in recent years. In the U.S., their control has now become enshrined in the basic law of the land.

In this stagnant democracy where, outside of presidential elections, large majorities don’t participate, the Republicans have correctly adopted the Rovian strategy emphasizing base mobilization rather than appealing to the largely mythical center. Thus, their motivating ideology has become more radically rightist. Disguising their racism as concern for immigration, crime, busing, private education, etc, is their specialty.

As a silver lining to this dark cloud, it is logical to assume that more people will see the validity of the assertion that democracy in America has been corrupted by corporate money. The socialist left should grow in the context of imperial decline and political polarization. Never has serious reform looked more improbable and never have the culprits looked so conspicuous.

If elections have become a fraud perpetrated upon the public, is participation in them unprincipled in that it lends credence to this fraud? Should we encourage people to vote for liberal Democrats or Greens or anyone when we know the game is rigged? Must we accept competition on an unlevel playing field on our opponent’s home turf with them providing the referees?

Or should we instead be encouraging the refusal to participate in corrupt elections? Is authentic democracy impossible under the current system? Should a primary goal of the left in the future be to delegitimize this corrupt electoral system? Is that impossible if you participate?

This hypothesis concerning the reach and power of capitalist class control has been substantiated by Obama. Given a unique opportunity to lead toward real change, he has instead proven himself to be just another politician who protects the interests of the capitalist class first and foremost.

During the 2008 presidential campaign while standing in front of an Austin audience, he repeatedly called himself a “progressive." That was pure pandering. Instead, his administration has expanded American militarism with more money and more U.S. troops fighting in more countries than ever; has produced a health care “reform” that in no fundamental way reforms health care, that mandates you buy a faulty product in the private sector, and that was written largely by health industry lobbyists; and has passed financial “reform” written by lobbyists for the financial sector and their past executives now working within the Obama administration after first forking over hundreds of billions of your tax dollars to “stimulate” them instead of us.

Obama's administration has failed to curb corporate compensation; has failed to close Guantanamo and has expanded CIA assassination programs that include the targeting of American citizens (later defending the practice in court as a “state secret”); has raided the homes and offices of antiwar leaders and confiscated their records; has failed to help millions faced with foreclosure after promising to do so and has announced it will appeal any court ban on future foreclosures while continuing to bail out investment banks who leveraged up the housing bubble.

The administration has shown itself unwilling to pressure Israel to make peace with the Palestinians; has done next to nothing to end the Drug War; has allowed environmental disaster in the Gulf through incompetence and a failure of regulatory oversight and then quickly lifted the ban on deep water drilling, etc, ad nauseum.

Now the Obama Justice Department has successfully appealed the federal judge’s ruling that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is unconstitutional. Before a national audience this ex-professor of constitutional law achieved his nadir of veracity by arguing that protecting gays from continued oppression by the military was best accomplished by a legislative branch that had only recently refused to do so and where his majority is about to shrink if not disappear.

This was soon followed by news that Obama’s “Justice” Department will defend Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, against legitimate charges that after 9/11 he ordered Muslim Americans to be held without charges, denied them access to lawyers, and had them carried off to secret prisons and tortured.

Obama’s record is only progressive in comparison to reactionary Republicans and its lack of progressivism is the principal reason for the “enthusiasm gap." Next week, the Republicans will get no more votes nationwide than they got when they were soundly defeated in 2008. However, the Democrats will receive many fewer than 2008. Most of those who have abandoned Barack Obama are to his left. Meanwhile, most Democrats continue to pursue the outmoded strategy of appealing to moderates.

Of course, merely not voting is an insufficient response. Denouncing the process would be not only truthful but very likely a productive strategic innovation for the left in the future -- to picket polling places, to urge people to deface ballots, to publicly destroy registration cards like Vietnam-era draft cards and to proselytize around the analysis that the electoral system and the politicians it produces are inherently corrupt.

Fundamental reforms that reverse Citizens United, ban corporate money from political campaigns altogether, and establish publicly-funded elections are reasonable and popular but unachievable goals in the present political context and, hence, revolutionary. This irreconcilable conflict of fundamental interests will promote political instability that will increase as this corruption becomes more glaring, entrenched and widespread.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper.]

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Danny Schechter : The 'Fraudclosure' Backstory

Illustration by Matt Mahurin / The Washington Independent.
U.S. workers in need of rescue:
Report from the epicenter of 'fraudclosures'

It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine...

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / October 25, 2010

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida -- In all of the economic issues we are dealing with, there is always a “back story, a deeper context” that is usually missing,“disappeared” like those Allende supporters in Chile in the l970’s who wanted to empower workers, not just rescue them, when they get buried in a deep hole.

Most deeper issues go uncovered. Luis Campos, Director of the School of Anthropology at Chile’s Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, points out, “more buried than the miners themselves, the demands and the rights of the indigenous population continue to be flouted and unrecognized in our country.”

Many unsafe mines worldwide are still at risk from China to Zambia.

Who woulda thunk -- certainly not the 1300 “journalists” on the scene -- that this mine disaster had its origins in the era when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger helped snuff out an emerging popular democracy in the name of protecting what West Palm Beach-based writer and former economic “hit man,” John Perkins, calls the corporatocracy?

Historian Juan Cole poses these questions:

Are copper and gold mine owners stronger in relation to workers and have they escaped government regulation because the U.S. engineered a coup in 1973 to destroy the Chilean Left?

Was the San Estaban mining company’s ability to marginalize the union and to disregard input from the workers rooted in American-imposed corporate privilege? In other words, was the trapping of these workers in the first place Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s fault?

The deep hole in that Chile mine was caused in part by a gold rush there -- triggered, in turn by, a global financial crisis MADE IN THE USA. It had its counterparts in the U.S., and not just among those 29 miners who perished in the big main mine in West Virginia, last April, a disaster that was supposed to lead to new safety rules that the Republicans have been insidiously blocking.

There is another hole we need to focus on. Millions of us are trapped in our own mines, "underwater” in homes that have lost value with bills we cannot afford, trapped in unemployment, in jobs that are gone and not coming back. Poverty is up and the noxious Newt Gingrich wants to end the food stamps that so many now depend on.

There is no rescue in sight, and the human plight of most of the millions affected takes part outside of media sight.

The gaggle of reporters that covered the mine rescue as a human-interest story -- not a political issue -- missed the backstory there, just as they miss our own here.

Far fewer reporters are covering this crisis.

Here in Florida, one epicenter of the housing catastrophe, homeowners were shell-shocked by the latest fraudclosure crime wave. Denise Richardson writes in the Sun Sentinel,

Last I knew, knowingly signing documents fraudulently and using them in a court of law is frowned on, right? It's criminal, isn't it? Or is it only criminal if you are a homeowner and not a bank? Seems we've gone to great lengths to create and then accept a double standard here.

Perhaps these financial crimes -- yes, that’s what they are, crimes -- continue to happen because we never addressed the real problems to begin with. You can’t fix a problem you don't acknowledge. Does anyone believe that was done to help protect the rights of homeowners? Let’s call it what it is: fraud.

An attorney in Deerfield Beach, Florida, representing 3,000 foreclosure victims, has taken hundreds of depositions from bank employees who admit they knew nothing about the details of the evictions they signed off on. Many are now being put down as “Burger King Kids,” yet they know more about real whoppers than this lot knows about real estate. RealtyTrac reports that foreclosure and REO homes accounted for 24 percent of all residential sales during the second quarter? That is huge!

Here in relatively affluent Palm Beach County, homeowners are number one in the state for the average number of loans in foreclosure that are delinquent. It has the fourth highest number of foreclosures, 45,829, with an average delinquency of 623 days. You will recall that Bernie Madoff once turned Palm Beach into a hunting ground for his ponzi scheme.

This situation is worse than we realize, and not just for the people most directly affected. No one knows how much the banks will lose in the class action suits, fines, and legal actions to come. Some think it could be tens of billions, suggesting another bailout may be in the offing, probably by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Paul Krugman questions whether the banks had the right to seize many of these homes, arguing, “The mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement -- in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.”

Buried in the Business section, on page B-8 of The New York Times, way down in an article saying the banks may be on the hook for billions, was this very revealing paragraph speaking to a problem that I have been raising for years, making clear the fraud problem is not just with foreclosures.

Inside the investment houses, several traders said nerves were frazzled further by worries that banks could face much bigger mortgage related losses, not from foreclosures, but because of questions about how the money was lent in the first place. If it turns out that mortgages were bundled together and sold improperly, more holders could sue the banks and force them to buy back tens of billions in mortgage-backed securities.

Frazzled nerves so far seem the worst punishment the banksters have tasted. They have just decided to reward themselves with a new round of raises and bonuses worth $144 billion with few criticisms. The Government has meanwhile just “settled” for $73 million with Countrywide, the leading predatory lender. That means that a prosecution of its top executives, the poster boys for mortgage criminality, will be dropped. Notes the website Housing Doom:

Even having to pay $77.5 million, Mozilo still nets $61.5 million, just between November 2006 and October 2007. Maybe “crime doesn’t pay,” but one of the lessons of the housing bust is that fraud does.

What should be done? Webster Tarpley speaks for many in calling for a national moratorium on foreclosures, a course of action rejected by the White House.

The current chaos in home foreclosures is once again the direct responsibility of the zombie bankers themselves, who have neglected all traditional legal and accounting standards concerning the necessary paper trails in their frenzied desire to securitize mortgage loans and make them into toxic derivatives in the form of asset-backed securities and mortgage backed securities. The zombie bankers, already the recipients of $24 trillion of public largess in the form of the various bailouts, have turned out to be incompetent even in the technical aspects of their own thieving racket.

But the chaos in the bankers’ filing systems is nothing compared to the chaos created by the millions of foreclosures they have engineered, based on adjustable-rate mortgages and similar misleading contracts which never should have been legal in the first place. For some time, it has been evident that the defense of the American middle class requires a blanket, orderly, federal freeze (or moratorium) on all foreclosures on primary residences, similar to the New Deal protections offered to family farms by the landmark Frazier-Lemke Act of 1935-1949 during the previous depression.

Ellen Brown, author of Web of Debt, goes further in Yes Magazine, asking if it is “Time to Break Up the Too-Big-to-Fail Banks?”

Popular financial analysts, crippling bank losses from foreclosure flaws appear to be imminent and unavoidable. The defects prompting the “RoboSigning Scandal” are not mere technicalities but are inherent to the securitization process. They cannot be cured. This deep-seated fraud is already explicitly outlined in publicly available lawsuits

There is, however, no need to panic, no need for TARP II, and no need for legislation to further conceal the fraud and push the inevitable failure of the too-big-to-fail banks into the future.

The faux populists of the Tea Party right have been silent on the issue. Glenn Beck dropped all populist pretensions by calling on followers to give money to the Chamber of Commerce so they can better pursue a corporate agenda. One Republican here assured me that Barney Frank caused the whole financial crisis and that he will be tossed out of office in the midterm election. (He didn’t just blame him -- he hates him!) At the same time, one right wing website did publish a detailed denunciation of housing fraud.

As depressing as the lack of any real ongoing mass-based populist movement of the left or the right is another reality that The Washington Post finally spills even as millions of Americans buy into the illusion that new politicians can save us while angry voters here in Florida prepare to vote the Tea Party into office.

Let us tell you an Ugly Truth about the economy, a truth that no one in power or who aspires to power wants to share with you, at least until after the midterm elections are over. It's this: There is nothing that the U.S. government or the Federal Reserve or tax cutters can do to make our economic pain vanish overnight.

So what will it be? More money for the banks to bring them under control, more illegal foreclosures, or some type of justice for homeowners? Will this crisis lead us to demand action to break up these financial behemoths or will we just sit by and watch a new crisis sweep us deeper into our own mines of despair?

["News Dissector" Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, Emmy award winning television producer, and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs, and speaks about media issues. Schechter directed Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, and a companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail. Contact him at dissector@mediachannel.org.]

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Sept. 28 interview with journalist and filmmaker Danny Schechter on Rag Radio here. To find all shows on the Rag Radio archives, go here.

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FILM / Danny Schechter : Stone's 'Wall Street' Sequel Goes Soft

Journalist, author, Emmy winning television producer, and independent filmmaker Danny Schechter will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin, Tuesday, September 28, 2-3 p.m. (CST). To stream Rag Radio live, go here. To listen to this show after the broadcast, or to listen to earlier shows on Rag Radio, go here.

'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'
Oliver Stone's sequel misses the mark

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2010

Lack of focus on corruption mars Stone's new Wall Street movie. It's heavy on atmosphere, light on anger.

The lead headline in The New York Times is “Extensive Fraud Appears to Mar Afghan Election." The line below is "A Blow to Credibility," as if anyone who follows Afghanistan, a country known for blatant and notorious corruption, would be at all surprised by this latest “blow.” This “blow” followed an earlier “blow” a few weeks back with the disclosure of the crash of the Kabul Bank with $300 billion still unaccounted for.

In America, another fraud: CNN reported the next morning that the pathetic blonde beauty-celebrity Lindsay Lohan put up $300,000 to get out of jail. That’s the kind of story American media considers worthy of constant “Breaking News” attention.

When will we see the headlines like "Extensive Fraud Appears to Mar Economic Recovery" or "Extensive Fraud Led to Financial Collapse"?

I ask this question, sort of knowing the answer, after two recent back-to-back film experiences.

Last Thursday I spoke at a packed screening of my film Plunder: The Crime of our Time that indicts financial crimes and corruption behind the financial crisis. The audience seemed overwhelmingly positive except for one Wall Streeter in the house who insisted that while there may have been “ethical lapses,” no crimes were committed, an expression of a conventional wisdom that most of the media has reinforced without investigating any evidence.

At a reception after the film in Suburban Long Island’s Cinema Arts Center, several people told me that one impact the crisis has had on them is sleeplessness because of anxiety over whether they can pay their bills and avoid joblessness and foreclosure.

Ironically, film director Oliver Stone also had sleep on his mind, as "Money Never Sleeps” is the subtitle of his remake of the movie Wall Street. To my surprise, the theater was not packed for a film distributed ironically by the money of mad mogul Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox company.

After watching the movie, I realized why the right-wing Rupert Murdoch could be comfortable enough releasing the latest from the nominally left-wing Oliver Stone.

The movie built an “explainer” around a love story that in the end was as much about child-parent conflicts and pretentious philosophizing as the background of the collapse of Wall Street -- which is treated, ultimately, from a “we are all to blame” viewpoint. In many ways the movie celebrates the brash culture of greed and excess of our era while we watch Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Gekko, known in earlier times for the slogan “Greed Is Good.”

Now, greed is everywhere, and there ain’t much we can do about it.

Oh Oliver, really.

Personally, I saw many of the stories I reported in my film turn up in his -- with even the same lines -- leading me to unprovable suspicions after having given my film personally to Stone with a request for his help months earlier.

How naive of me. We are in different leagues, clearly, and maybe on different sides.

In an interview on CNN, Stone seemed to argue that free speech is more of an issue than the insolvency of the banks. He became totally obsessed with the rumors that brought down Bear Stearns, an issue I explore in depth. Stone told CNN:

What I found out, what shocked me back in 2009, was that Goldman Sachs and those type of banks were really going long and short at the same time and were actually selling out on their clients. I thought that was shocking information to me, as well as the power of rumor, which, amazing. We show the power of that and how it can destroy a company...

I'm not so sure that's good for the system, although it's more transparent. But it does lead to circles of viciousness and rumor and hype and a stock, as you know, drops. I mean, look at what happened a few months ago, right? The market just crashed. So what's going to happen?

It does scare me, and I think it's the nature of the modern world, I suppose.

The following comment was on the website Ml-implode.com, where the intervew was excerpted:

There you go, "rumor,” mentioned as a causative factor 4 or 5 times; insolvency/leverage? Zero. Those poor, poor Wall Street banks -- they're victims, you know.

The movie dances on all sides of the issues, actually featuring an on camera cameo by Stone, of course and, Grayon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, who I quote in my film and book, The Crime of our Time, because he labeled the crisis “the greatest non-violent crime in history” Stone feigns to that view but ultimately rejects it.

Hedge Fund investor Jim Chanos, who I also quote, and who has called for the prosecution of wrongdoers, was even an advisor. It seems like he was wanted for his insight more on the atmospherics of the scene, not his demand for more perp walks.

Wall Street 2 features a father-son subtext as the young banker played by Shia LaBeouf watches as his mentor -- at a firm made to resemble Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers -- commits suicide after the company is brought down by rumors and dirty tricks. In the end he marries and has a son with Gekko’s daughter who, natch, runs a left wing website.

The kid is named Louie after the banker who died. Undisclosed is that Stone’s dad who worked on Wall Street was also a Lou. Clearly this movie was as much about the personal psychodrama of Stone’s life as many of his earlier films were about the ghosts of Vietnam. His movies about Nixon and W also featured father-son conflicts. The banker who died by jumping into the subway, Frank Langella, recently played Nixon in the movie about David Frost’s interview.

More disturbing was the film’s failure to call for any action. It starts with Gekko getting out of jail and getting back in the industry. So jail, in the end means nothing.

Many Wall Streeters interviewed about the film seemed confused about its message and meandering plot points. Most (including myself) liked the luscious cinematography of New York that even profiled Bernie Madoff’s former office, as well as David Byrne’s great music. Said former banker Nomi Prins who is in Plunder, “ I liked it until halfway through, and then it was a hodge-podge bunch of events.”

The pro-free market Daily Bell wrote:

Always, Oliver Stone seems a propagandist and apologist... One so successful and perspicacious as Oliver Stone must know generally where the truth lies. Would it be any news to him that the United States is over-extended from a monetary and military standpoint? Or that Fed money printing was the proximate cause of the economic crash. It should not be too hard to figure this out. The Internet is full of such analyses.

Critic Roger Ebert liked the film but added, "I wish it had been angrier. I wish it had been outraged. Maybe Stone's instincts are correct, and American audiences aren't ready for that. They haven't had enough of Greed."

Did those “instincts” lead to the pandering, or was it just the logic of the market or Murdoch’s neutering its critical edge with an insistence to “just tell us a story, Oliver, if you want this to be big.”

In my experience, audiences I met were furious about what’s happened to them and the country. Late last week Paul Volker warned that the financial system is still broken. Others fear another crash is only just a matter of time. This reality is not evident on Oliver Stone’s radar screen.

After my screening, a man named Milton told me he is active in the Democratic Party, but that the Dems will not really act against Wall Street. “They don’t have the guts,” he said. Can the same be said about Oliver Stone, who loves the Hugo Chavez’s of the world South Of The Border, but echoes CNBC here at home?

["News Dissector" Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, Emmy award winning television producer, and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs, and speaks about media issues. Schechter directed Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, and a companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail. Contact him at dissector@mediachannel.org.]

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Dahr Jamail : Strong Evidence BP Is Spraying Toxic Dispersants

Dispersant remnant, June 26, 2010. Photo by Shirley Tillman / Truthout.
Evidence mounts:
BP spraying toxic dispersants

The Tillmans and thousands of other fishermen and residents along the Gulf of Mexico are deeply concerned about local, state, and federal government complicity in what they see as a massive cover-up of the oil disaster by using toxic dispersants to sink any and all oil that is located.

By Dahr Jamail / September 15, 2010

See gallery of photos, Below.

[The following dispatch from journalist Dahr Jamail, whose work has frequently appeared on The Rag Blog, was distributed by Truthout.]

Shirley and Don Tillman, residents of Pass Christian, Mississippi, have owned shrimp boats, an oyster boat and many pleasure boats. They spent much time on the Gulf of Mexico before working in BP's Vessels Of Opportunity (VOO) program looking for and trying to clean up oil.

Don decided to work in the VOO program in order to assist his brother, who was unable to do so due to health problems. Thus, Don worked on the boat and Shirley decided to join him as a deckhand most of the days.

"We love the Gulf, our life is here and so when this oil disaster happened, we wanted to do what we could to help clean it up," Shirley explained to Truthout.

However, not long after they began working in BP's response effort in June, what they saw disturbed them. "It didn't take long for us to understand that something was very, very wrong about this whole thing," Shirley told Truthout. "So that's when I started keeping a diary of what we experienced and began taking a lot of pictures. We had to speak up about what we know is being done to our Gulf."

Shirley logged what they saw and took hundreds of photos. The Tillmans confirm, both with what they logged in writing as well as in photos, what Truthout has reported before: BP has hired out-of-state contractors to use unregistered boats, usually of the Carolina Skiff variety, to spray toxic Corexit dispersants on oil located by VOO workers.

Shirley provided Truthout with key excerpts from the diary she kept of her experiences out on the water with her husband while they worked in the VOO program before they, like most of the other VOO workers in Mississippi, were laid off because the state of Mississippi, along with the U.S. Coast Guard, has declared there is no more "recoverable oil" in their area.

"The first day I went, I noticed a lot of foam on the water," reads her entry from June 26. "My husband said he had been seeing a lot of it. At that time, we were just looking for 'Oil.' We would go out in groups of normally, five boats. The Coast Guard was over the VOO operation. There was always a Coast Guard on at least one of the boats. They would tell us when to leave the harbor, where to go and how fast to go. They had flags on each of the VOO boats and also a transponder. Sometimes we would have one or more National Guardsmen in our group too, as well as an occasional safety man to monitor the air quality and procedures on the boat. If we found anything, the Coast Guard in our group would call it in to 'Seahorse' and they would determine what action would be taken."

Along with giving a clear description of how the Coast Guard was thus always aware of the findings of the VOO workers, her diary provides, at times, heart-wrenching descriptions of what is happening to the marine life and wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico.

"Before we went to work, I went down by the beach," reads her entry from July 4. "There were dead jellyfish everywhere. Some of them were surrounded by foam. A seagull was by the waters edge, as the foamy stuff continued to wash up. There was also a crane that appeared to be sick. It didn't look like it had any oil on it, but it just stood there, no matter how close I got."

On the morning of August 5, Shirley describes spotting a dead young dolphin floating in the water. "As we waited for the VOO Wildlife boat to come pick it up, we noticed a pod of dolphins close by," she writes. "Even with all the boats around, they did not leave until the dead one was removed from the water. It was very emotional, for all of us."

The next day, August 6, found her logging more death. "Last night on the news, they reported a fish kill. Before we went to work, I went to the beach by the harbor. The seagulls were everywhere. As for the dead fish, the only ones on the beach, were ones that the tide had left when it went back out. The rest of the 'Fish Kill,' was laying underwater, on the bottom. It was mainly flounder and crab. We only spotted two dead flounder floating that day. I can only imagine how many were on the bottom... I went back to the beach after work. The tide had gone out and the seagulls were eating all the dead fish that had been exposed. You could still see dead fish underwater, still on the bottom. Dead fish don't float anymore?"

The Tillmans' primary concern is the rampant use of toxic dispersants by what they described as private contractors working in unregistered boats, that regularly were going out into the Gulf as they and other VOO teams were coming in from their days' work. There was, oftentimes, so much dispersant on top of the water, their boat left a trail.

"The first thing I noticed, was the 'trail' the boat was leaving in the water," her log from July 10 reads. "You could see exactly where we had been, as far back as you could see. Around 11:00, we were in oil sheen and brownish clumps. We were North of Cat and Ship Island when the Coast Guard told us to drop the boom over. When you pick the boom up, you have to wear 'protective gear.'"

Her log from August 1 describes, in detail, an incident of the Coast Guard not allowing them to collect oil and his proceeding to deny what they found was even oil:

Around 2:00 p.m., we started noticing a lot of oil sheen. We were North of the East end of Cat Island, but South of the Inter Coastal channel. There was, as usual, a Coast Guard on one of the boats in our team. He called in to report it, but we were told not to drop the boom, it was just "Fish Oil." In the beginning of the clean-up operation, if something was floating on the water and it looked like oil, it was oil or oil sheen. Later they would sometimes say it was just "Fish Oil." Also, if it was heavy foam with a brown or rust color, originally it was "Oil Mousse." Later it was called "Algae." We were then told to head Northwest. The further we went, the worse the "Fish Oil" got. Then, the foam was mixed in with the oil. It was at least the size of a football field, around our boat alone. My husband got on the radio and asked if they could put the boom over.

The Coast Guard, again, told them no.

We were then headed West, back towards Pass Christian. A pleasure boat flagged one of the boats in our group down and told him that there was oil all over. The Coast Guard said to tell him that they were aware of the situation... On the way back to the Pass Harbor, I asked my husband, "Just exactly what are we even doing out here?" He told me that he was beginning to think that it was all just for show. I can only imagine what the people on the pleasure boat had to say when they got back home that day. Probably, that they had seen a lot of oil on the water and the VOO boats were out there just riding around in it and not doing anything to clean it up. That is exactly what happened. We decided then to start documenting as much as we could. I believe it was the very next day, Thad Allen was on TV saying that they were scaling operations back due to the fact that, "No oil has been seen in the Gulf in almost two weeks." Now, if we had pulled boom on Sunday and unloaded a bunch of dirty boom in the Pass harbor, it might have been a problem for him later.

On August 5, she describes a rare instance of their being allowed to drop boom in order to collect oil. "We had a Coast Guard and two Safety Men on our boat. We went to the West of the Pass Harbor. The water looked black in places. Lots of bubbles, not foam, just bubbles. Around 8:30, we were in oil sheen and mousse and were told to drop the boom. The more we pulled the boom, it appeared the more was coming up. The Pass [Christian] Harbor was closed because the oil was coming in so bad. We pulled boom back and forth the rest of the afternoon."

By early August, the total number of VOO boats operating out of Pass Christian Harbor, where Shirley and Don worked, was down to 26.

On August 8, Shirley wrote,

Talk at the harbor was that airplanes were spraying dispersants on the water at night, out by the islands. There was also talk of skiffs, from Louisiana, with white tanks on them, that were spraying [dispersants] too. We had seen the skiffs before. They would pass us up in the mornings and head towards the Bay St. Louis Bridge. We were told that they were working out of an area at Henderson Point. Henderson Point has a county-owned area with a boat launch & piers. It was closed to the public after the oil spill and a BP sub-contractor staging area was set up. It always appeared that these boats were finishing up their work day, just as we were going to start ours. Most of these skiffs were Carolina Skiffs.

Later that same morning, Shirley and her husband headed out of the harbor with a member of the National Guard on their boat, heading west, while a member of the Coast Guard and another member of the National Guard were on another boat in their VOO team. After boating for an hour, they turned back to the east, at which point Don spotted five of the Carolina Skiffs.

"I got my camera and started taking pictures of them," Shirley writes.

As I was zooming in as close as I could, I saw one of them spraying something onto the water. I did not get a picture of it, I was too busy telling my husband to tell the Coast Guard on the other boat. The skiffs had turned North and were scattered out, zigzagging South of the train bridge. The Coast Guard called the incident in and sent one of our boats to follow the skiffs. The skiffs immediately left. When I saw the boat spraying, it was upwind from our boat. Within a few minutes, my nose started drying out. Later my throat and eyes did the same thing. A Coast Guard helicopter was dispatched along with a Coast Guard boat. We saw the helicopter about twenty minutes later, but I never saw the Coast Guard boat.

Back at Pass Christian Harbor, her team reported the Carolina Skiffs actively spraying dispersants. She was told by the contracting company, Parson's, that managed their VOO team, to bring in her photographs.

Her entry from the next day, August 9, reads:

I took the pictures, 8x10's to Parson's. A short time later, my husband called and said the Coast Guard wanted me to make a disc of the pictures. I took the disc and turned it over to the Coast Guard. I was told, in the presence of others, that the incident had been investigated and the boats in question had been located at the Henderson Point site. He said that these boats were in the VOO program as skimmer boats, but it had not yet been verified. He said that he had questioned them about spraying something on the water. They told him that if I had seen them spraying anything, they were probably just rinsing out their tanks. He also asked me, "Don't you think if they were spraying dispersants, they would be wearing respirators?" I told him, "You would think so, but nothing surprises me around here anymore." We basically left after that. I knew all they had really wanted was to see exactly what I had gotten pictures of. There is of course the question, "Why would a skimmer boat need to rinse out his tanks?" If he had been skimming oil, why dump it back over? If he hadn't been skimming oil, what was he rinsing out? I know what I saw and I know how I felt afterwards. I also know that in one of the pictures I took, you can see a helicopter over those boats. BP has spotters looking for oil. Could it be he was telling them where to "Touch Up" before they called it a day? One thing I did learn from Coast Guard guy that day, evidently these so-called skimmer boats, also have the ability to spray!

The Tillman's curiosity drove them to investigate further, given the inconsistencies they were seeing in the Coast Guard's actions regarding the dispersant being sprayed from contractors in the Carolina Skiffs.

"My husband came home and said that they had seen the 'Skiffs' again today," reads Shirley's entry from August 10.

He took pictures of them and a jack-up-rig. The rig moves around in the sound and is suppose to be a de-contamination station. However, some Captains have said when they went there, they were told it wasn't in operation at the time. After thinking about the tank skiffs and the Coast Guard for two days, I could not make any sense of this whole situation. The Coast Guard is supposedly over the VOO Program, but it knows nothing about the skiffs at the site, so close to the Pass Harbor. They not only tell us every move to make, but they are always with us when we make the moves. Our boats are flagged and have transponders on them. Those boats have no flags, we have not seen a transponder, nor a Coast Guard member on one of them telling them what to do.

That afternoon, the Tillmans visited the Henderson Point staging area. Though it was guarded, what they found shocked them: "There were probably more boats there than in the entire Pass [Christian] VOO program at the time," reads her entry.

There were only a couple of regular skimmer boats. All appeared to have Louisiana registrations. Almost all of the skiffs had the white tanks on them. A few of the tanks looked like they could have had something in them at one time, but nothing like the oily, sticky mess we had been dealing with. If we got something on our boat, it was almost impossible to get it off. I don't see how they could have gotten it out of the tanks and still looked like they did. Also, there was a Harrison County Sheriffs Department car, right by the boats and some large, plastic, white containers with yellow bases.

On August 13, the VOO boat that Shirley and Don were running was deactivated. Still very concerned, the next day they visited the BP staging area in Hancock County.

"They had evacuated this site," she writes. "Same setup though, a guard and a Sheriff's car. We then went to a site in Gulfport. Evidently, this is a main BP storage site. There were all kinds of boats, including the tank skiffs. The Sheriffs Department was there also and so was those large, plastic tanks with the yellow bases."

Other reports, of a very similar nature, have been reported about other BP staging areas along the Gulf of Mexico. The tanks are clearly used to store and transport Corexit dispersant. The Carolina Skiffs are clearly used to spray it atop oil.

Her August 16 entry details her discovery:

Over the next few days, I continued to go by the Henderson Point site and the Gulfport site. The Henderson Point site brought back a few boats, but none of the tank skiffs or the large plastic tanks. The Gulfport site stayed the same, full of everything. On August 25, I received an email with a link to an article about dispersants. It had a picture of the tanks that dispersants come in, with the label "Nalco Corexit EC9005A." They were 330 gallon, large, plastic, white tanks with a yellow base. These were the same tanks that I had been seeing at the Henderson Point site and the Gulfport site. I was able to get the name of the manufacturer of the tanks, off a picture I took and compared it to the picture in the article. It was the same manufacturer. I researched this company on the internet and found the 330 gal tanks. They are marketed as: "The only manufacturer in the industry to offer portable tanks certified for hazardous goods transport by the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Transportation."

Shirley and Don are, like tens of thousands of other VOO workers and Gulf residents, left with more questions than answers.

"While working on the boats, if you pull boom back onto the boat, you not only had to wear Tyvek suits, protective glasses and gloves, you also had to put tape around the gloves and suit sleeves, as well as around your boots and the suit." Shirley asks, "Why would it be safe for people to get into the same water that all of this hazardous stuff was coming out of?"

For the Coast Guard, she asks:

How can you not know there are boats in the VOO program if you are in charge of the VOO program? The Coast Guard was supposedly over the VOO program, but they acted like they don't know anything about the Carolina Skiffs. The boats were in either a task force or strike force. Every VOO boat has a flag. We all had transponders. This was VOO and Coast Guard regulations. But these skiffs didn't have flags and we never saw transponders on them, nor did they have Coast Guard with them and supposedly every group had at least one Coast Guard in each group. Sometimes we would have two. But the Skiffs didn't have any.

Local media in Pass Christian and Gulfport, Mississippi, are now reporting that BP hopes to have the VOO program in that area completed by September 19.

Shirley is incredulous. "Why would anyone bring their children here and put them in water that has had millions of gallons of toxic chemicals dumped into it, not counting the oil itself?" she asks. "Why would you want to eat seafood that has been living and dying in the water, with all those contaminates?"

Truthout has earlier reported on other fisherman in the area, James "Catfish" Miller and Mark Stewart, who have reported being eyewitnesses to the contractors in the Carolina Skiffs spraying dispersant as well.

Meanwhile, local, state and federal authorities continue to claim that dispersant was only used south of Mississippi's barrier islands and that the Carolina Skiffs and the large tanks they carry are only used to "skim" oil.

"If dispersants were only being sprayed South of the islands, why would these 330 gallon hazardous goods tanks be located at two different work sites, right by the tank skiffs?" Shirley asks. "Why would the skiffs tanks be so clean if they were really skimming oil?"

The Tillmans and thousands of other fishermen and residents along the Gulf of Mexico are deeply concerned about local, state, and federal government complicity in what they see as a massive cover-up of the oil disaster by using toxic dispersants to sink any and all oil that is located.

Dr. Riki Ott, a toxicologist and marine biologist, is a survivor of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska. She recently submitted an open letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expressing many of these same concerns.

Ongoing government denials of this problem neither fool nor dissuade Shirley. "I know what I have seen," she told Truthout. "I know what I have been told. I know what I have experienced. I know what I have documented. I also know that I have taken hundreds of pictures to verify what I am saying."

[Houston native Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey over the last five years.]

Source / Truthout

Oiled boom, August 5, 2010.
Oil sheen and dispersant remnant, August 1, 2010.
Corner of Canal Road and I-10, in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the Gulfport site used as a BP staging area, August 14, 2010.
Corner of Canal Road and I-10, in Gulfport, at the Gulfport site used as a BP staging area.
Corexit tanks, September 1, 2010.
Dead flounder among fish kill, August 6, 2010. Photos by Shirley Tillman / Truthout.
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