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Economists: People Who Paint Selves Silver And Pretend To Be Statues Make Average Of $10 Million Per Year
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Economists at Harvard University released a new study this week indicating that Americans who paint themselves silver and pretend to be statues in public spaces make, on average, $10 million per year.
3.10.07
The following poem was chosen by Marc Falkoff, editor of Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, as an example of a poem, which, as he described in an interview with me on Nth Position (and here), is “striking in terms of imagery, metaphor and thematic complexity.” The former detainee (he was released from Guantánamo in December 2006) is described as follows in an introduction to the poem:
“Ibrahim al-Rubaish was teaching in Pakistan when he was arrested by mercenaries and sold to allied forces. A religious scholar who dislikes hostility and was once a candidate for a judgeship, Rubaish has a daughter, born just three months before he was captured, who is now five years old. During a military administrative hearing, he was told, ‘If you are considered to be a continued threat, you will be detained. If you are not considered a threat, we will recommend release. Why should we consider releasing you?’ Rubaish’s response was, ‘In the world of international courts, the person is innocent until proven guilty. Why, here, is the person guilty until proven innocent?’”
ODE TO THE SEA
By Ibrahim al-Rubaish
O sea, give me news of my loved ones.
Were it not for the chains of the faithless, I would have dived into you,
And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.
Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice.
Your bitterness eats away at my patience.
Your calm is like death, your sweeping waves are strange.
The silence that rises up from you holds treachery in its fold.
Your stillness will kill the captain if it persists,
And the navigator will drown in your waves.
Gentle, deaf, mute, ignoring, angrily storming,
You carry graves.
If the wind enrages you, your injustice is obvious.
If the wind silences you, there is just the ebb and flow.
O sea, do our chains offend you?
It is only under compulsion that we daily come and go.
Do you know our sins?
Do you understand we were cast into this gloom?
O sea, you taunt us in our captivity.
You have colluded with our enemies and you cruelly guard us.
Don’t the rocks tell you of the crimes committed in their midst?
Doesn’t Cuba, the vanquished, translate its stories for you?
You have been beside us for three years, and what have you gained?
Boats of poetry on the sea; a buried flame in a burning heart.
The poet’s words are the font of our power;
His verse is the salve for our pained hearts.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.
– See more at: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2007/10/03/a-poem-from-guantanamo-ode-to-the-sea-by-ibrahim-al-rubaish/#sthash.a1YeDwSz.dpuf
and see what happened : Ibrahim al-Rubaish’s ‘Ode to the Sea’ Pulled from Calicut University Syllabus
ttp://youtu.be/hgrunnLcG9Q?]
My name is Paolo Dall’Oglio, I am a Jesuit, and for more than thirty years I have promoted in Syria the Islamic-Christian harmony-building.
I took a position in favor of the Syrian democrats crushed by an inhuman and indiscriminate repression that I was hoping not to have to see in the twenty-first century. I was expelled in June 2012, and have since been working full-time in defending the rights of Syrians and the legitimacy of their revolution.
Today we know that Syria is the ring of a regional geopolitical fight to death. In all this, the Churches have not been able to react in time, and Christians, now trapped in the war zones, simply tend to leave the country.
Unfortunately, the Syrian regime has been very clever in using a certain number of clergymen, men and women, for its propaganda in the West, in which it represents itself as the only and ultimate bastion defending Christians persecuted by Islamic terrorism.
This manipulation of the public opinion has succeeded in discrediting to a large extent the Syrian revolutionary effort, both on the ground and abroad, in the eyes of many citizens around the world, and was thus able to create a paralysis of European diplomacy and politics, which ultimately only strengthens the most extremist groups and weakens the civil society.
The strong and instrumental implication of the Churches in the systematic manipulation of lies by the regime cannot but require a conscious and responsible reaction on behalf of the Catholic Church and therefore of the Pope of Rome. The petition I present to your attention will show the most cohesive and mature face of the Italian and international society, and will allow Pope Francis to overcome the resistance of his context which tends to be islamophobic, though often in a typically subtle and indirect way, and to launch his own diplomatic initiative, requesting the intervention of new actors such as Latin America.
This my petition, which is now yours, presents to the Pope the need to counter the current systematic use by the regime of clergymen among the most important in the Middle East, in order to look beyond and meet the expectations of all Syrians who are suffering for freedom, and to prepare a positive future for those Christians who will choose to remain in the country or return.
—-
Here my letter to Pope Francis:
Dear and most esteemed Pope Francis,
Knowing you as a lover of peace in justice, we ask you to personally promote an urgent and inclusive diplomatic initiative for Syria which would ensure the end of the torturous and murdering regime, safeguard the unity in diversity of the country, and allow by means of democratic self-determination with international assistance to exit from the war between armed extremisms.
We ask with confidence Pope Francis to personally inquire about the systematic manipulation of the catholic opinion in the world by accomplices of the Syrian regime, especially clergymen, with the intention to radically deny the democratic revolution, and justify with the excuse of terrorism the repression that is increasingly acquiring genocide character.
Activists have uncovered details of a horrific massacre that left as many as 191 civilians dead in the southern town of Khanasser on Saturday 22nd of June, reportedly perpetrated by Hezbollah militants and Abul Fadel Al-Abbas Brigade.
Halab News, a network of media activists in Aleppo, is now reporting that victims of Khanasser Massacre were either burned alive or thrown to their deaths in the towns’ wells, according to testimonies given to the news networks by those who survived the horrific massacre.
As activists continue to uncover more details regarding the massacre that took place on the 22nd of June in Rassm Al-Nafel, a small impoverished town of 1,600 located in the southern Aleppo region of Khansser, new reports that emerged following interviews with survivors claim that 21 families were among the 191 deaths, and that the brutal massacre was perpetrated by Hezbollah Militants, along with Abul Fadel Al-Abbass Brigade, a Shiite militia that is fighting alonside the Assad regime in several areas.
By mlynxqualey on July 24, 2013 • ( 0 )
Ismael will be one of three residents at the Institute, along with historian-reporter Sally Denton and memoirist Matthew Davis. All three, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, ”are slated to work in offices provided by the university, participate in BMI programs and potentially visit UNLV classrooms throughout their fellowships spanning from late August to mid-May.”
Ismael was born in 1963 in Latakia, Syria. He spent his early years there, later moving to Damascus, where he completed his high-school education and went on to teach at Damascus University. Just before the uprising, he spoke with poet Nathalie Handal about Damascus, telling her about places in the city he treasured, including:
“A famous café in downtown Damascus called ‘Havana’ built in 1945, where poets and politicians used to meet. The place is often associated with the poet Mohammad al-Maghout (1934-2006), widely acknowledged as the spiritual father of the modern Arabic prose poem, who used to sit there, drink his famous Arabic coffee and compose poems and plays. Although the place has been renovated recently and lost some of its iconic glamour, it is still referred to as the birthplace of many novels, poems, and even “ideologies.’”
In the interview, he pointed to one of his poems about the city, “Mirrors of Damascus,” which was trans. Issa Boullata and published in the collection Unbuttoning the Violin. From the poem:
The life, which walks at the end of the night
and sees with its own eyes the perforated barrels
and the rifles trained on our backs
and the telephone receivers hanging down on the pavements
as if a crime has just taken place,
is our life. . .
The life, which passes in front of Parliament
heavily armed with applause. . .
The life, which enters the bedroom
with dark sunglasses
and a revolver at its hip. . . (read the complete poem here)
Ismael’s publications include four collections of poetry and thirteen translations from English into Arabic of works by Walt Whitman, V S Naipaul, Jorge Luis Borges, Noam Chomsky, Harold Bloom and others.
His poems, according to the International Literature Festival Berlin, “are characterized by dark colours which exude human pain. The poem appears as a place of dreams, and his voice, shifting between the first person and other narrative perspectives, conveys a sense of the profound isolation of an individual who retreats from society for self protection and to avoid the enormous demands placed on them.”
Poems by Ismael:
A number have been translated by Issa Boullata and are available online, including: “Mirrors of Damascus,” “Where does it come from?”, “Statues”, “Don’t wake him up”, “…Days fly”, “Past dates”, “A mere ghost”, “Sorrow”
Three poems are available from Banipal, trans. the author: “Against Romanticism”, “A School Hobby”, “The Damascene Bird”
CLICK ON IMAGE ON SYRIA Listen from 8:15 till 16:16
Greg Palast is an investigative reporter and author of several New York Times bestselling books including his latest, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
You just knew it had to be one of those brie-biting, Sartre-spewing, overly-garlicked Frenchmen who pushed the Earth’s finance system over a cliff.
This week, US prosecutors finally began the trial of the only person on the entire planet whom they have charged with the financial crimes that sank worldwide stock markets by trillions in 2008 and left millions homeless and jobless, from Detroit to Manchester.
Amazingly, say prosecutors, it all came down to a single Frenchman, Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, only 29 years old at the time. Even Julius Caesar waited until he turned 51 to bring the known world to its knees.
Here’s the story which his defence team does not dispute:
In August 2007, hot-shot hedge fund manager John Paulson walked into Goldman Sachs with a brilliant plan to cash in on the US housing crisis.
He paid Goldman to announce that Paulson would invest a big hunk of his fund’s wealth, $200 million, in securities tied to the US mortgage market’s recovery. A few lucky investors would be allowed to give Goldman their billions to bet with Paulson that Americans would not default on their home mortgages.
It was a con. Secretly, Paulson would bet against the mortgage market, hoping it would collapse – making sure it would collapse. All he needed was Goldman to line up the suckers to put up billions to be his “partners”.
It was Goldman’s and Paulson’s financial version of Mel Brooks’ The Producers, in which a couple of corrupt theatre producers schemed to suck investors into a deliberate flop.
Throughout 2007 and 2008, Paulson & Co. worked with Goldman to create the financial equivalent of Springtime for Hitler.
Paulson personally chose the group of mortgages for the fund. Rather than pick the least risky, he deliberately loaded the fund with sub-prime losers. To polish this turd, Goldman and Paulson paid a highly respected risk analysis firm, ACA, to endorse the selection. Paulson and his vice president met with ACA to assure them of the value of the crappola – never telling ACA that, in fact, Paulson would profit if the securities failed.
Based on Paulson’s pitch, ACA endorsed the value of these “synthetic derivatives” securities. This led rating agencies Moody’s and S&P – recipients of fat fees from Goldman – to give the package an AAA rating – that is, marking them as safer than US Treasury notes.
In just a few weeks, by August 8, 2008, the securities lost 99 percent of their value.
The dupes paid up. One, Royal Bank of Scotland, handed over nearly a billion dollars ($840,909,090) to Goldman. Goldman then quietly shifted the loot, minus its fee, to Paulson & Co.
The payout busted RBS. But don’t shed tears. The Bank of England and British taxpayers took over the bank and covered the loss.
The collapse of RBS and the billions lost by others in the scheme fuelled a panic which caused banks in the US to shut their lending windows, refusing to re-finance sub-prime mortgages. Over two million American families now faced eviction.
Paulson was thrilled. Each default and eviction just made Paulson & Co. richer, altogether pulling in a profit for the hedge fund of over $3.5 billion on the Springtime-for-Hitler game. Paulson’s personal earnings on this economic tragedy exceeded one billion dollars.
I happened to be in Detroit that August, at the home of auto union member Robert Pratt. He’d already received his eviction notice. Like almost all black home buyers in the USA, he was steered to a “sub-prime” mortgage. Under a formula years later deemed to be “predatory” his payments suddenly doubled. Pratt’s mortgage balance grew to $110,000 on a home worth $30,000. The bank would not refinance, so Pratt prepared to move into his car with his wife and four kids.
Government watchdogs hunted for the financial crimes perpetrators, and, discovering the Goldman/Paulson fraud, brought charges against… the French kid. Goldman had leant Fabrice Tourre to Paulson to take on flunky tasks, including putting together a 28-page “flip book” to lure European banks into the scam.
In a text message discovered by investigators, Fabrice admitted to a friend that he couldn’t understand the insanely complex derivatives Paulson had crafted with Tourre’s bosses at Goldman. He did, though, grasp that the strange securities were, he wrote, “monstrosities”. A collapse was coming that would “bring down the whole house”, leaving Fabrice standing in a ruined planet – with a fat bonus.
What did the Feds do to Paulson? He received… a special tax break.
Am I defending the Fabulous Fabrice, the French-fried scapegoat? After all, he was just along for the ride. But he was deeply thrilled to carry water for the Bad Boys. And the charges against him are merely “civil”, meaning he won’t get jail time even if found guilty.
And what about Goldman, whose top brass knew of the entire game? The Securities and Exchange Commission did fine Goldman for its duplicity – a sum equal to 5 percent of the cash Goldman got from the US Treasury in bail-out funds.
After Goldman’s con became public, its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein was hailed as a visionary for offloading mortgage-backed securities before the shit hit the finance fan. Blankfein hailed himself for, he said, “doing God’s work”. God did well. Blankfein’s bonus in 2007 brought his pay package to $69 million for the year, a Wall Street record.
Rather than prison or penury, Blankfein was appointed advisor to Harvard University’s business and law schools.
So here’s the lesson all Harvard students are taught: If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime… unless your booty exceeds a billion.
Read more about Paulson, Blankfein and their other schemes in Greg Palast’s New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. www.BallotBandits.org.
Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast
Previously – My War On Stupid Is Facing Defeat On Every Front
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