Month: June 2010

Do It Yourself

June 17, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Tuesday night’s blathering address from the Oval Office about the disaster in the Gulf has been widely panned for its timidity in the face of what could be the world’s worst ecological disaster - a disaster for which the President clearly bears some responsibility.  And meanwhile Obama has just approved 400 new leases for oil companies to operate in the gulf.

Since it seems like people are starting to realize, finally and begrudgingly, that their boy is a pro-war, anti-civil libertarian, corporatist spokesliar, I’m starting to feel like there is less of an urgent need to propagate that particular piece of increasingly obvious information.

So I thought I’d turn attention to some locals who are doing it for themselves – and, unlike the federal government, successfully fighting to address our culture’s addiction to the vile substance at the heart of many of the world’s problems.

Several months ago, these “Caution: Please Pass With Care” signs started popping up all over L.A.  They are the work of a group of guerrilla citizen-artists who call themselves the Department of D.Y.I.  Here is a video of them walking the walk:

L.A. Streets Blog covered an earlier guerrilla campain by D.I.Y. here, andThe LA.ist published the group’s manifesto here.  Their work can be seen all around the city:

Now it turns out that these guerrilla art campaigns – in conjunction with a sustained lobbying effort by the biking community — prepped the way for actual, official civic change: The LADOT has finally started to install “Sharrows,” which are an essential, although imperfect, piece of biking infrastructure.

Other things are afoot, as well: Only a few weeks after police harassment of a BP protest ride in Hollywood organized by Critical Mass, the L.A.P.D. is going to join Critical Mass as participants of a ride scheduled for June 25.

The la.ist hopes it is a game changer of cyclist/police relations in Los Angeles.

(BTW: If you are interested in following bike news, I recommend these feeds: Bike Commute News, L.A. Bike Coalition, L.A. Critical Mass, L.A. Streets Blog.)

You Say Tomato, Part II

June 3, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

The Jolly Netanyahu

Early Monday morning Israeli pirates stormed an international aid convoy in international waters, stormed the lead Turkish vessel and then killed at least 9 of the passengers – including a U.S/Turkish teenager who was shot in the head 4 times.

Last time there was an act of piracy that attracted this much international attention, Obama sent snipers to blow their heads off.  But this time the pirates come from Israel, whose “security is sacrosanct“, so they get to hijack a relief boat in international waters, slaughter people and then call it “self defense”.

Passengers fought back, according to IDF video, but their resistance to the attack  is understood by Zionists and their apologists as provocation and therefore a justification for murder.  Survivors of the massacre have been taken hostage by the pirates, so it has been hard to get their side of the story:

Reporters Without Borders notes that, as of yesterday, Israel continued to detain most journalists on the ships, including their film and cameras, thus preventing any of them from disputing Israeli propaganda; as the NYT reported, Israel was also “refusing to permit journalists access to witnesses who might contradict Israel’s version of events.”  Manifestly, all that was done to ensure that the highly selective and edited video released by the IDF would shape the narrative of what happened and could not be challenged in the first few days of reporting.

Update: Some hostages are now being released, and Amy Goodman interviews two of them here.

Here, Ray McGovern reviews Obama’s subservience to the Likud lobby, and enumerates other instances of Israeli aggression.  But Glenn Greenwald points to the hypocrisy that would result from a U.S. condemnation of the raid:

One can express all sorts of outrage over the Obama administration’s depressingly predictable defense of the Israelis, even at the cost of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but ultimately, on some level, wouldn’t it have been even more indefensible — or at least oozingly hypocritical — if the U.S. had condemned Israel?  After all, what did Israel do in this case that the U.S. hasn’t routinely done and continues to do?  As even our own military officials acknowledge, we’re slaughtering an “amazing number” of innocent people at checkpoints in Afghanistan.  We’re routinely killing civilians in all sorts of imaginative ways in countless countries, including with drone strikes which a U.N. official just concluded are illegal.  We’re even targeting our own citizens for due-process-free assassination.  We’ve been arming Israel and feeding them billions of dollars in aid and protecting them diplomatically as they (and we) have been doing things like this for decades.  What’s the Obama administration supposed to say about what Israel did:  we condemn the killing of unarmed civilians?  We decry these violations of international law? Even by typical standards of government hypocrisy, who in the U.S. Government could possibly say any of that with a straight face?

See also: You Say Tomato, Part I

Two Wheels Better Than Four

June 2, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Over the weekend the BP’s “Green Curve” gas station at Olympic and Robertson was once again the target of a collective protest, this time by a Critical Mass of Los Angeles bike riders.

After the demonstration, certain dickless piglets harassed the bike riders as they passed through Hollywood, and then tackled a videographer who caught an incident on tape:

WeHo Daily first covered the story here, the laist picked it up here, KPCC here.  The LAPD met with an LA bicycle advisory committee yesterday to discuss the incident, which the LA.streets blog covers here.

Los Angeles Critical Mass has a twitter feed here, where you can get updates on the story and info about future rides, etc.

Meanwhile the ecocide in the gulf will continue to unfold over the next decades.  Google has tool that can be used to compare the current size of the oil spill to the size of your own city.  Here is ours: