Hhaing The Yu, 29, in rain falling on the ruins of his home, in a township outside Yangon, Myanmar.

This is not about politics; it is about saving people’s lives. There is absolutely no more time to lose.

— United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, pressing the military junta in Myanmar to accept international assistance as hundreds of thousands of its citizens reel from the effects of a devastating cyclone earlier this month; May 14.
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If our profits are taxed, that means we’ll have less capital to invest in new production.

— John Hofmeister, president of Shell U.S., to CNNMoney.com; May 6.

These companies are spending a very small amount of their operating cash flow on exploration. They are spending the majority of their funds buying back stock.

— Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow in energy studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, discussing results of her just-finished a two-year study looking at oil companies and how they spend their money; May 6.
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One makes a life-changing decision for some time in the future and then … And then time goes by. The shock wears off. Denial (or futurism) creeps in.

It wasn’t until I was emptying my flat as my cleaning lady took possession of most of my bits and bobs that it really hit home.

The life of a cleaning lady

There are around 15 million South Africans of working age (out of a population of 41 million). Around 8 million have jobs. The rest don’t.

For 2 million uneducated, barely literate women there really is only one choice for earning a living. They clean the homes of the people who do have jobs. These are the cleaning ladies, or “Domestic Workers”. Maids, in other words.

Sometimes they live in and cook and clean and wash. Sometimes they turn up once a week to do some ironing and basic cleaning. They’re not paid much. The minimum Government-mandated wage is less than $1 per hour.

Since most white English-speaking South Africans battle with African names, these women call themselves mundane platitudes, like Beauty, or Faith, or Monica. I think half the cleaning ladies in Cape Town are called Monica. Full Story »

Item: Citizens are concerned about online privacy and security. According to a new report from USC’s Center for the Digital Future, “Sixty-one percent of adult Americans said they were very or extremely concerned about the privacy of personal information when buying online, an increase from 47 percent in 2006. Before last year, that figure had largely been dropping since 2001.” These fears are well-founded.

The study, to be released Thursday, comes as privacy and security groups report that an increasing number of personal records are being compromised because of data breaches at online retailers, banks, government agencies and corporations. Full Story »

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, believes that a Yahoo / Microsoft tie-up would be awful for the Internet. Schmidt issued the vague sequitur that we should all beware of, “the things that it has done that have been so difficult for everyone.” Of course, everyone knows that Microsoft is the Great Satan, so it stands to reason that anything they do should be regarded as automatically the equivalent of making baby stew.

Here, though, it is Google - owner of 62.9% of all Internet searches ($16.4 bn in ad revenue) - which dwarfs any tie up (Yahoo-Microsoft have a combined search share of 15.7% and $ 9.8 bn in ad revenue). Could it be that Google is trying to pull a Microsoft and protect its home-turf advantage from a healthy rival? Full Story »

On February 14 Silvestre Reyes, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, crawled up in Dubya’s grille and dropped some righteous nard-stomping pro-democracy rhetoric on his punk ass. We were as happy as we were stunned to see a Democratic leader swinging an actual set of cojones in the face of Mr. President’s fragrantly anti-liberty pro-corporate full-monty assault on our freedoms.

Talk, as they say, is cheap. Full Story »

Maybe you once cared for a drug addict? What led them there, what keeps them there? Not your problem. And you believe in all that “tough love” shit; you know that they must make the decision to come clean and live responsibly.

But you also believe that you can make that journey easier for them by showing them how an addiction-free life can be, and by offering them the advantages that make it worth going cold to achieve.

At some point, though, maybe you get an inkling that the process isn’t working. Maybe it’s after they’ve come out of rehab once too often, only to go on a binge again, that you start thinking that the effort isn’t worth the stress.

Countries are like that too.

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President Bush yesterday took as harsh a one-two beatdown as he has endured in the entire seven cynical, corrupt years of his doomed presidency.

First Silvestre Reyes, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, sent him a damning letter on his stubborn and hypocritical position on FISA. The letter not only outlines the facts of the law and the circumstances surrounding it for those who might only be familiar with the overt lie that Bush has been pandering to the American public, it concludes with a statement of intent that every single Member of Congress would do well to adopt: Full Story »

I live in Washington, D.C. For those who don’t know, that means I have no Senator or official Representative to speak for me in Congress. I have a shadow delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who does an admirable job of fighting for our rights, but she has no vote. I’ve supported and fought hard for the right of the citizens of the nation’s capitol to have a voice in deciding legislation that affects us as it would a resident of any other state.

Today, however, after seeing a travesty such as this, I am glad that I don’t have a Senator to speak for me, for that means I’d be spared the morbid embarrassment of someone I voted for doing their part to eradicate the fundamental right to privacy and justify egregious corporate lawbreaking.

The battle now shifts to the House, and it looks like (contrary to my earlier concerns) the will to fight is much greater. At the risk of being dramatic, this is where we draw the line in the sand–where we stand up and say “No more abuses of power. No more spying. No more breaking the law. No More.”

We’ve lost a major battle, but the greater struggle is still ahead. And we can win it.

Earlier today, Sam asked a very important question: When it comes to convincing the public that it’s somehow justifiable to give a pass to corporations that illegally spied on Americans without a warrant, how stupid do you think we are?

Well, the answer is that the so-called “Democratic” Congress doesn’t give a damn what we think, as they’ve voted down virtually all amendments to the FISA reauthorization bill that would have granted oversight and accountability–including blocking immunity for telecoms. As Glenn Greenwald eloquently notes, this day we’ve seen a so-called “bipartisan” Congress justify lawbreaking and illegality on a level that even the previous Republican majority couldn’t pull off.

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Africa has a problem with causality.

Not that the rest of the world consistently gets the idea either, but there are no other regions that so consistently mess up the nature of cause and effect. The source of this confusion is the economic boom that results from the mere good fortune of having some valuable resources.

In both Russia and Venezuela the near vertiginous rise of oil prices has stimulated economic growth; which is a good thing. It has also led the Big Men in power to associate that boom with their own blunt political ministrations. Both Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin have perverted their constitutions to ensure their continued control. “After all,” they think, “if it weren’t for me the economy wouldn’t be doing so well.”

Sadly - for themselves - this is a woeful fantasy that the citizens of these oppressed lands are willing to go along with. They remember the poverty of previous leaderships and confuse democracy with economic neglect.

Lest you think this is mere speculation, consider the following: In 2003 Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, took control of his country’s oil production after declaring his lack of faith in private endeavour. It is difficult arguing that Chavez’ nationalisation was a bad thing when daily oil revenues have risen from $ 50 million in 2003, to $ 190 million in 2007. Yet it has been an appalling disaster. Full Story »

With the war in Iraq, the faltering economy, and health care dominating the issues front for the candidates, it’s no wonder technology issues have largely been back-burnered in the mainstream political debate. But that doesn’t make them any less relevant or important–or less requiring of coverage.

CNet’s Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache sent 10 technology-oriented questions to the candidates, discussing net neutrality, Internet taxation, REAL ID, wiretapping, and other issues, and CNet has published the answers as part of their Technology Voter’s Guide. After the jump, we’ll take a closer look at who answered (and who didn’t), and what they said. Full Story »

Welcome to the fifth and final installment of the Scholars & Rogues year-end wrap-up. Today we tackle the dirty, but oddly riveting world of politics. We’ll take a couple shots at the even dirtier world of media that makes it all possible. Let’s start at the top, shall we?

George Walker Bush: I’ve been telling my Republican friends for five years now that Dubya was going to do more damage to their party than an army of Hillarys could dream of doing. And 2007 was the year where I think the truth of this proposition finally started becoming evident. Scandals at the Justice Department and World Bank did him no favors, nor did the conviction of Scooter Libby (which necessitated the most politically debilitating pardon/commutation sequence since Ford saved Nixon). Iraq got worse by the day and we’re not seeing a lot of GOP presidential hopefuls looking to surf that Bush legacy. Full Story »

Hey, what’s that in our stocking? It’s Ron Paul! Oh joy - we got The Truth® for Christmas!

Ahem. So those of you who thought Ron Paul was going to go away once the big boys got serious have probably been surprised by his staying power so far. He’s polling in the high single digits (something Ronald Reagan Fred Thompson can’t say) and one pollster thinks his actual numbers are in the double digits. He says he’s raised $19M this quarter. His supporters are insane courageously enthusiastic, and he seems to be showing strength among some groups that you wouldn’t expect - progressives, younger voters, etc.

And of course, he’s left the rest of the pack for dead in the highly scientific S&R reader poll, where at the moment of this writing he has over twice as many votes as the rest of the GOP candidates put together (unless you count “other”).

Election watchers in both parties are trying to better understand Paul’s appeal and what it means for their candidates’ chances. Full Story »

Today Chris Dodd is going to take the floor of the Senate chamber and not let go of it in order to prevent the passage of legislation that would not only reauthorize and extend the NSA surveillance program on millions of Americans, but would grant retroactive immunity from prosecution to the telecom companies that participated in this illegal program.

Thank You, Chris Dodd has more details about what this means and what you can do to help. I also recommend Scarecrow’s post at Firedoglake for some eloquent thoughts on why our system of government must be preserved. Russ Feingold has also pledged to stand with Dodd. Full Story »

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, first published October 2007, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0439895293

The dividing line between comic books and graphic novels - for many - seems to lie in the question: “Would I show this to a kid?”

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, or When the Wind Blows, by Raymond Briggs, are astonishing reinventions of the art, claiming a space in literature that defies either category. Both opened up the creation of artworks that tell human stories; allowing emotion and empathy with the images to fill the space left by the absence of words.

Taking four years to research and produce, The Arrival stands alone - not just amongst graphic novels - but amongst all art. It is like stumbling across The Kiss by Auguste Renoir placed inconsequentially at the base of the stairs in London’s Tate Modern, or hearing Pachelbel’s Canon played in the midst of a mix of faded pop-songs. Full Story »

Some products are so critical to life and living that their absence would cause tremendous harm to society. One such line of products are pharmaceutical medications aimed at combating the diseases that fall predominantly on the poor.

Oxfam – a non-governmental organisation dedicated to “finding lasting solutions to poverty and injustice” – has released a report, “Investing for Life” in which they claim to have identified the source of injustice and illness amongst the world’s poor. It is the world’s large pharmaceutical firms.

Oxfam claims that, by enforcing their intellectual property rights and charging high prices for their products, Big Pharma is undermining everyone’s universal “right” to health. Full Story »