Atenção à corrupção, mas nem só desta vive o defraudador

Carlos Pimenta

1. Lopes da Mota foi considerado culpado pelo Conselho Superior do Ministério Público e foi obrigado (por decisão voluntaria do mesmo, como sempre acontece no mundo do faz de conta) a demitir-se da Presidência do Eurojust.

Considerarão muitos dos portugueses que a suspensão por trinta dias é pena demasiado leve. Quem assim pensa, não está a ter em conta um conjunto de factores relevantes: Lopes da Mota apresenta-se frequentemente de colarinho branco, apenas colaborou num tipo de fraude que contribui para a redução do crescimento económico e para o desprestígio internacional do nosso país, e a ética nem nos saldos é procurada.

Considerarão outros que a suspensão por tantos dias foi uma penalização demasiado severa para quem apenas pretendeu transmitir um conselho amigo: não incomodem o Sócrates porque ele já pertence à história (grega). Também estes não se deverão preocupar porque durante muito tempo andará de recurso em recurso, porque há muitos lugares disponíveis (e se não os há criam-se!) para ele vir a desempenhar, onde talvez falte o brilho da ribalta mas não deixarão de acontecer chuvas de pó de ouro (fenómeno meteorológico não muito raro mas que nunca acontece aos milhões de desfavorecidos deste país). E tudo isto se passará sob a suave brisa do rodopiar das portas giratórias dos que sucessivamente (quiçá em movimentos pendulares quotidianos) rodopiam, ou poderão vir a rodopiar, entre o interesse colectivo (será também meu?) e o plutocrático interesse individual.

Já tivemos ocasião de em crónicas anteriores chamar a atenção para os grandes perigos da corrupção (ver as crónicas de 30/04/2009, 02/07/2009 e 12/11/2009) de que recordaríamos os seus elevados níveis de contágio - destruindo quase todos os guardiões da ética, da cooperação e da concorrência leal - e a degradação das condições de vida da maioria dos portugueses, com agravamento das desigualdades sociais. Neste momento em que tanto se discute o pomposamente designado Plano de Estabilidade e Crescimento e em que a credibilidade externa do País, nomeadamente junto dos credores, é tão badalada, convém recordar o que também já foi referido em crónica de Costa Lima (18/02/2010): segundo a prestigiada Transparency International e o seu Índice de Percepção da Corrupção (elemento objectivo de avaliação do país!), Portugal afastou-se dos países com menor corrupção perceptível, sendo esse movimento particularmente vincado a partir de 2006:

Esta degradação da transparência e da integridade dos "portugueses" (aqui impõe-se reafirmar o que o leitor já sabe, que há "portugueses" - íntegros - e "portugueses" - corruptores e corruptos) em quanto fez aumentar as taxas de juros dos empréstimos a Portugal? Em quanto fez regredir os investimentos, em quanto torpedeou a imagem do nosso país?

2. É desnecessário insistir na imperiosidade cívica e democrática, em nome da ética e dos mercados, de combater a fraude, prevenir a sua ocorrência. Será tema para outras conversas com o leitor três pontos que reputamos essenciais:

- Uma política anti-corrupção não pode ser constituída por medidas avulsas de curto prazo, mais ou menos ao sabor do calendário mediático e político. Exige-se uma leitura e prática sistémica.

- A corrupção tem manhas e procedimentos que ultrapassam o conflito de interesses (desde a personalidade individual do corruptor e do corrompido até à criminalidade organizada), mas é ao nível do conflito de interesses que se deve iniciar a política anti-corrupção.

- Se a corrupção é um fenómeno velho quanto a humanidade, a sua intensificação é recente, apresentando a juventude de poucas décadas. O combate a este agravamento, indissoluvelmente associado à estrutura da sociedade contemporânea também passa por reinventar a democracia (com a promoção e a valorização de um comportamento político irrepreensivelmente ético) e por uma educação sem facilitismos, rigorosa cientificamente, com um funcionamento institucional irrepreensível, com a forte valorização do respeito mútuo, contando com a força do exemplo e o sistemático confronto de todos com dilemas éticos.

3. Contudo é necessário alertar para que a atenção dada à corrupção não faça todos nós esquecermos todas as outras fraudes que pululam pela nossa sociedade. Dos crimes em que a violência impera certamente não nos esqueceremos, mas será que acontece o mesmo com as fraudes e evasões fiscais, com as manipulações sub-reptícias com a saúde pública, com as manobras das empresas contra os clientes e destes contra aquelas? Estaremos mesmo atentos? Saberemos na altura oportuna fazer adequadamente as nossas escolhas?

http://aeiou.visao.pt/atencao-a-corrupcao-mas-nem-so-desta-vive-o-defraudador=f552137

Greve da British Airways mantém-se

Antigo comandante da NATO afirma que soldados homossexuais enfraquecem exércitos

Scorcese's "Shutter Island": Labyrinth of Madness

Kim Nicolini

In Scorcese’s latest film Shutter Island, he masterfully leads us into the dark labyrinth of insanity, and he twists and bends our perceptions of madness until we find ourselves complicit in our own kind of mad paranoia. Focusing on U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (played by Scorcese favorite Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) who are assigned to Shutter Island to help find an escaped mental patient, Scorcese takes a basic cat-and-mouse mystery and twists the plot until our minds are bent into as many confusing and tangled corridors as the institution itself. As Teddy and Chuck seek clues to the disappearance of the missing Rachel Solando, rather than finding solutions to the puzzle, all we find is more confusion and paranoia at every turn. As the movie progresses, we question the line between sanity and insanity, between delusion and reality. Eventually, like the paranoids locked away in the asylum on Shutter Island, we come to the realization that nothing can be trusted. Just like the island’s name, we feel the shutters of our sense of reality and sanity close in on us, and what we are left with is a dark and foreboding understanding of the insanity of everything.

Though set in the 1950s during the Post-WWII McCarthy era America (the height of American institutionalized paranoia), the movie uses the historic specificity of its time to transcend history and paint a pretty dark picture of the inherent violence and corruption of everything. Much of the movie centers around an impending hurricane that eventually arrives, batters the island and reduces everything to chaos. With threads of McCarthy witch-hunting, Nazi death camps, and American Civil War prison camps, we get the sense that Teddy isn’t just caught up in the specific moment of his circumstances, but that he is a kind of “everyman” navigating his way through the hurricane of human history. In one scene, when the Warden takes Teddy for a ride in his jeep, he looks at Teddy with a knowing and sadistic smile and says, “God loves violence. It’s in us. It’s what we are. God gave us violence to wage in his honor. There is no moral order . . . if you had the chance, you would crack my skull with a rock and eat my meaty parts.” This savage and nihilistic sentiment rests at the core of the movie.

Throughout history, men have cracked each other’s skulls open and eaten the meaty parts, and they legitimize their actions by creating institutions to carry out their violent acts. They create militia, death camps, slavery and insane asylums. The minute Teddy and Chuck step onto Shutter Island, we feel the imposing madness of the institution itself close in on them. As the gates of Shutter Island close behind Teddy and Chuck, men in black uniforms frame the scene and lurk in every corner, representing the oppression of the military state. Once inside the institution the boundaries between law and order and sanity and insanity rapidly begin to blur, until we question whether the institution itself is what is really mad. Everything in the institution is laden the sense of a hallucinatory nightmare --- cages, chains, shackles, bars, cells, and winding stairways that only lead to more winding stairways. As Teddy winds his way through the institution, we feel it closing in on him and us, until we realize that no one can be trusted. From the moment the gates close, we feel the stability of Teddy’s ground start to crumble as he is caught in the insanity of the institution itself. The uniformed guards, the sneering mocking nurses, Max Von Sydow’s ominous Dr. Naehring, Ben Kingsley’s gleefully self-deluded Dr. Cawley, and the whole stream of “patients” all seem insane while at the same time they work together to make Teddy question his own sanity. It’s a real mind fuck.

Scorcese’s masterful direction beautifully creates the movie’s claustrophobia and paranoia. It’s like Scorcese took the Dennis Lehane book on which the movie is based, and he lifted out poetic nuggets, images that Lehane expresses in just a few words, and turned them into enormous portents of beautiful paranoia. A cigarette resting on a cliff edge, ashes falling through a room, rats crawling on rocks, a leaking ceiling -- every single image in the movie is laden with paranoia and insanity. Two of the most beautiful examples of Scorcese taking a few words from the book and expanding them into cinematically gorgeous extended sequences both involve memories from Teddy’s past.

In an early scene, Teddy walks into the excessively luxurious headquarters of Drs. Cawley and Naehring, and he hears classical music playing. In the book, Dr. Naerhing identifies the music as Mahler, and Lehane very briefly describes Teddy’s memory of his experience at Dachau. In the movie, it is Teddy who identifies the Mahler, and then Scorcese leads us on a long, hallucinatory, brilliantly bloody and poetic recalled memory of the Gestapo officer lying on the floor in a pool of blood with half his face missing. As he reaches for the gun over and over in perfect syncopation to the Mahler playing in the background, Teddy studies his face, and the ashes of violent history fall all around him in a beautiful ballet of hopeless destruction. The repetition of the officer’s hand reaching for the gun then pulling back, reaching for the gun then pulling back, and the ashes falling in their balletic display and landing in the pools of blood on the floor make the scene not only surreal but also seem like an endless repetition. This moment in history will play over and over again. This is Scorcese’s way of putting his stamp on the material. He takes a single small scene in the book and turns it into an ominous portent of the repetition of the insanity of everything.

In another scene in the book, Teddy briefly recalls a dream he had of his wife Dolores who died in a fire. He remembers seeing that her back turned to ash. Again, Scorcese takes this single image – the back turned to ash --, and he expands it into operatic brilliance. When Teddy has the dream in the movie, the colors are brilliantly real. So real they hurt. The scene is slowed down as if being sifted through a layer of psychedelic narcotics. Dolores’s every word seeps through her mouth like flowers dipped in sugar. Teddy reaches out to hold her, and she turns to ash and crumbles. He is left holding air in a room full of flames, as the ceiling leaks water all around him.

The leaking is critical to understanding how this film functions. It opens with Teddy on a boat surrounded by water, the sight of which makes him violently ill. He works his way through the ship’s hold where chains and shackles dangle from the ceiling while waves crash against the ship’s hull. From that moment on, water is leaking everywhere in this movie. It leaks into Teddy’s dreams of his dead wife Dolores. It batters the asylum in a hurricane. It crashes against the island’s rocky shore. Even glasses of water become portents of poison. And as the movie progresses, we have to question whether Teddy’s sanity itself is leaking as he recalls (or has planted inside is brain) the memory of a lake and the dripping, leaking, tragic murder that took place there.

But what is it, actually, that is leaking in Shutter Island? I would have to say that seeping is the more appropriate word for what is happening in this movie. Insanity is seeping into everything, into every action, interaction, scene and symbol. Scorcese relies on his veteran editor Thelma Schoonmaker to execute perfectly orchestrated chops, cuts and sequences. As the movie leaks, drips, and explodes in hurricane proportions, it never once falters. Even though water is leaking everywhere, the movie is tight as a drum, so tight that it gets its claustrophobic hold on us with the first notes of music that open the film and it never lets go. Filmed in an actual abandoned mental institution, the production design exploits its environment to maximum potential. Color, framing, composition, and sound are so precisely calibrated that each scene hits us like shots of a cinematic gun.

Schoonmaker’s masterful editing works in perfect syncopation with the amazing soundtrack produced by Scorcese longtime collaborator Robbie Robertson (of The Band). Using music from Nam June Paik, John Cage, Brian Eno, and modern composers such as Torleif Thedeen & Entcho Radoukanov, combined with the croons of Johnny Ray and Dinah Washington, the music has the same audio effect as the visuals of the island. The music leads us through corridors and chambers of madness, hints at claustrophobic doom, gives us momentary reprieve in dreams, and then disintegrates into more insanity. Including work by John Cage/Nam June Paik is definitely a nod to Dada, its antiwar politics and its recognition of the inherent madness of systems and institutions.

Indeed the institution of Shutter Island is mad. As Teddy finds himself caught in the labyrinth of deceit, lies, and confusion, Leonardo DiCaprio does an amazing job of showing the conflict and tension between what he believes, what the institution would like him to believe, and the questioning of his own sanity. As we see his character mirrored, fragmented and reflected in a myriad of paranoid interactions, we have to question how much of what Teddy believes is real, how much was “planted” by the institution (think The Manchurian Candidate), and how much is just madness that knows no bounds. From the insane glint in Ben Kingsley’s eyes, to the amused nods of Max Von Sydow’s Laehring, to the sideways glances of nurses, orderlies, and patients, to the first Rachel Solando’s mournful embrace, to the desperate pleas of the brutally beaten George Noyce, to the gleefully fascistic Warden, and finally to the all too eager to sympathize Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), every character in the movie seems to be a reflection of Teddy but also a conspirator against him.

As the movie plows through its Kafkaesque nightmare of doubt, paranoia, and claustrophobia, Teddy becomes more and more focused on a singular goal – to reach the lighthouse. Cited at various points in the movie as a sewage treatment facility, a site for torture and inhumane brain surgery and experiments, and as evidence of a government conspiracy, Teddy is desperate to make it to the lighthouse to shed light on the truth. As we watch him run through corridors, scramble up rocks, and (in a scene that recalls Hitchcock) wind his way up the spiral staircase, we can’t help but question whether Teddy is literally traversing the landscape of the island or whether we are following him through the corridors of his own madness.

When Teddy finally does reach the lighthouse and is given what seems to be “the answer” to the impossible mystery he was charged to solve, Scorcese throws one hell of a plot twist at us that can either shed light on Teddy’s paranoid conspiracies or shut out any hope for light in the future. Teddy is told that he is not Teddy at all but the very monster who haunts his nightmares. In the ambiguous final scenes we are forced either to side with the institution or with Teddy, to believe that the lighthouse does shed light on the truth or to accept that the lighthouse is a tower of lies. Many critics cite the ending as confusing and problematic. In fact, many critics cite the movie as confusing and problematic, but what they fail to see is that the movie is about the whole system being confusing and problematic. It is about the whole history of the insanity of everything, and insanity doesn’t provide tidy answers. The ending is ambiguous and confusing because we can’t make sense of an insane world. The whole point of the movie is to make us complicit in the paranoia, to make us experience and feel it, to doubt everything we see and everything that is said. If the movie gave us easy answers, then that would mean that the insane world is full of easy answers. Scorcese doesn’t allow for such pat and tidy solutions.

On a final note – you may want to stop here if you haven’t seen the movie yet--, I decided I needed to watch the movie a second time to understand more how it works structurally. I can say that this is a movie that definitely deserves a second viewing. Rather than making things clearer, knowing the outcome of the movie only made things much more complex and grounded in suspicion and paranoia. From the moment I saw Chuck, I suspected him as a conspirator. Every single glance and word had double meanings. I found myself in a constant state of flux between believing Teddy and believing the institution. This state of flux is Scorcese’s intentional manipulation of the audience. On a broad scale, we are being asked to question how much we accept what we are given by institutions as truth and how much we question what systems manufacture as lies. Ultimately, because of the way the movie packages and frames the institution, we can’t help but see the institution as the real source of the nightmare. But infusing that knowledge with doubt is what makes the film so interesting to watch. I can that when I finally got through the mind-bending twists and turns of my second viewing and reached the final scene, I realized that the answer is not to be found in the lighthouse, but in the final words that are uttered in the movie. Teddy says to Chuck (Dr. Sheehan), “This whole situation has made me think of this question. Is it better to die as a good man or to live as a monster?” Chuck’s eyes take him inside himself for a moment, and the very final word he says and that is uttered in the film is, “Teddy?” Hearing that one word at the end of my second viewing confirmed my suspicions. It is not Teddy but the institution and the men who create it who are insane. But we all know that already.

http://www.counterpunch.org/nicolini03122010.html

Anthropologists in the Amazon: Secrets of the Tribe

Barbara Rose Johnston

I am an anthropologist.

Sometimes this is a hard thing to say aloud. It certainly was the case this past January when I attended the Sundance premier of Brazilian Director Jose Padilha's documentary "Secrets of the Tribe." As one of the anthropologists appearing (very briefly) in this film, I attended the premier and answered audience questions.

As described by the Sundance Film Festival promo, in this documentary "The field of anthropology goes under the magnifying glass in this fiery investigation of the seminal research on Yanomami Indians. In the 1960s and '70s, a steady stream of anthropologists filed into the Amazon Basin to observe this "virgin" society untouched by modern life. Thirty years later, the events surrounding this infiltration have become a scandalous tale of academic ethics and infighting. The origins of violence and war and the accuracy of data gathering are hotly debated among the scholarly clan. Soon these disputes take on Heart of Darkness overtones as they descend into shadowy allegations of sexual and medical violation. Director José Padilha brilliantly employs two provocative strategies to raise unsettling questions about the boundaries of cultural encounters. He allows professors accused of heinous activities to defend themselves, and the Yanomami to represent their side of the story. As this riveting excavation deconstructs anthropology's colonial legacy, it challenges our society's myths of objectivity and the very notion of "the other."

Truth be told, I dreaded the trip to Sundance to see this film, but I was also compelled to go. Like a number of anthropologists interviewed by Padilha for this film, I really wanted to know how he would edit his hundreds of hours of interviews down to weave together a coherent narrative. What story would this narrative tell? Whose interviews would make the cut, and, more importantly, whose perspectives would ring true? What notions of right and wrong would be depicted? How will a critical examination of events and actions so many decades ago resonate with today's viewers? What will this movie say about anthropology and the work that anthropologist do? And, at a personal level I worried that my interview, which focused on the question of why the Atomic Energy Commission funded some of the Yanomami research expeditions, would survive the editing process. Was I prepared to see myself on screen? Would there be sufficient context to explain my comments?

None of those interviewed for this film had a sense of what was actually in the final cut (the final edits being completed in Brazil by Padilha only the day before the premier). But all of us knew firsthand that José Padilha is a masterful interviewer. It was obvious from his conversation and questions that he had thoroughly researched this story, the issues, and its cast of characters. And he had a way of presenting questions that made you believe "he understands my point of view" "he is on our side".... So we relaxed, became uninhibited, and inevitably said things aloud that we might never articulate in print.

In those interviews José Padilha put anthropologists in an unfamiliar position - we were the subjects of his study. I remember thinking, as I closed the door after my 90-minute interview, that maybe I had relaxed too much. I remember watching my colleagues emerge from that interview room. I remember thinking that all of those interviewed for this film would, at one point or another, be captured on camera with a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease.

I was right.

Much of the film focuses on the academic debate over Napoleon Chagnon and his research, the validity of his data, his representations of the Yanomami, and whether his field work praxis constituted gross ethical breaches. In juxtaposing the academic debates with Yanomami experience, this film allows the viewer to consider and question the underlying issues in this depiction of science/subject relationships. It raises important questions of why research was conducted, how was it funded, the ethical dimensions of fieldwork praxis, how the research was used (or intended to be used), who profited, and who paid the price?

Dennis Harvey's review in the Hollywood magazine Variety describes the film as an inside look at the seamier side of anthropology:

The anthropological field resembles a vipers' nest of ethical breaches and academic backstabbing in "Bus 174" helmer Jose Padilha's "Secrets of the Tribe." This eye-opening docu views several decades of questionable research and behavior that ultimately rendered Amazonian Brazil's Yanomami -- once considered the last, "purest" primitive society untouched by outside influence -- bitterly cynical toward First World interlopers ...

The major adversaries here are two well-known U.S. authorities on the subject. Napoleon Chagnon began studying the Yanomami in the 1960s, penning the popular tome "Yanomamo: The Fierce People," which described bloody intertribal wars. But his data, conclusions and tactics (plus involvement in a reckless spread of Western diseases) have been seriously questioned. Ardent foe Kenneth Good's books sparked a flood of New Age-y media portraying Yanomami as peaceful innocents, but Good was criticized for marrying a 13-year-old tribeswoman. Levi-Strauss protege Jacques Lizot (who refused to be interviewed) allegedly traded Western goods (even guns) for pederastic sexual services. Colleagues both supportive and appalled are featured in this fascinating assembly of heated debate and archival footage.

This is a pretty good summation. In "Secrets of the Tribe" Padilha exposes the secrets of my tribe, of anthropologists. It is true we are an intellectual enterprise that is based on a researcher-subject relationship that has been, in far too many instances, horribly exploitative. Such experiences prompted Native American scholar/activist Vine De Loria to pen his famous critique of the discipline, in his 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins.

It is true that when complaints are voiced by the subjects of research, acknowledgement and accountability has been rarely achieved and institutional or disciplinary indifference has been a historic norm -- as was the case with the involvement of anthropologists in Japanese internment camps, as pointed out by David Price in his 2008 book Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War.

It is true that the academic enterprise is often funded and used for horrific purposes. As Gretchen Schafft clearly demonstrates in her 2004 book From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich anthropological theory helped shape some of Hitler's most infamous policies, and anthropologists were employed by the Third Reich to identify racial traits and determine who was sent to the concentration camps - who lived and who died.

And it is true that this episode in our history - Cold War era human population research with indigenous groups in the Amazon, the varied social impacts of such research, and the broader ethical questions raised about praxis, scientific responsibility, and accountability -- is, to this day, the subject of heated debate.

The "tribe" in the film's title, however, is not simply an "anthropology" tribe, but the more diverse group of scientists who study human populations. Thus, the film also pays considerable attention to the 1968 Amazonian research expedition led by James V. Neel, a geneticist whose earlier accomplishments included establishing the genetic basis for sickle cell anemia and the research design for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, including it's study of pregnancy outcomes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.

Neel's 1968 trip up the Amazon had as its' goal the collection of population-wide data on the human biology and social relationships of Yanomami to contribute towards his study of genetic evolution (gene frequency changes in human populations). To achieve his research goal of assessing "the rate of mutation of new alleles, selection of genes in various environments, as well chance genetic events and founder effects in small populations" he needed definitive interpretations of "data on inbreeding, effective population size, differential fertility, age pyramids, and survival curves as well as an accurate assessment of health and disease in the population under study" (as noted in the American Society of Human Genetics 2002 "Response to Allegations Against James V. Neel in Darkness in El Dorado, by Patrick Tierney). To conduct such work, Neel's 1968 expedition team included geneticists, cultural and physical anthropologists, physicians, linguists, and statisticians.

The role of anthropologist, in this case a new PhD named Napoleon Chagnon, was that of the culture broker and research facilitator -- to gather the information on who is related to whom (and thus properly code the genetic relationship between biosamples), and to develop rapport and soothe tensions in ways that allowed the scientists to get their data.

Neel's 1968 expedition into Yanomami territory is presented in the film as an episode of human subject experimentation with disastrous consequences. Research was conducted with an isolated community, sought out explicitly because of their relatively minimal contact with the broader world. This isolation produced a well-known vulnerability to disease, including and especially the measles that was reported to be in the lower reaches of the Amazon.

With modern interview footage of the Yanomami, and historical and archived footage of the scientists on their 1968 expedition, Padilha takes the viewer up the river and into the village, where we listen to scientists and subjects, and watch the story of the measles epidemic and its consequences unfold. In the words of the scientists - Yanomami exposure to measles was inevitable. A vaccination effort was attempted with problematic results. The audience watches medical exams and biosampling, and realizes that these intimate acts were conducted by people who themselves were ill. Neel had upper respiratory illness that he thought was influenza. Another team member had dysentery. Another had malaria. The audience also sees imagery of ill Yanomami and hears scientists discuss the outbreak of high fevers. The epidemic, and the growing fear amongst the scientific team that their presence and activities were helping to spread measles to an unexposed population, are depicted in painful detail. Interviews with Yanomami survivors make it clear that the impact of this measles epidemic was profound, involving many deaths, with lasting social repercussions.

This film is not, however, simply a depiction of how Atomic Energy Commission-funded scientists collected and interpreted human population data. Nor, is it singularly focused on anthropologists and their arguments over theory, data, ethics. This is also a film, as the camera lens reminds the viewer again and again, about the Yanomami. A truly difficult story of what it is like to play host to scientific aliens in a Yanomami world is, with the inclusion of Yanomami voice, laid out in graphic terms. Their experience, so clearly depicted and recounted, cuts through the mud and muck of academic debate.

I was very grateful for the way in which Padilha tells this story, not simply from one vantage point or another, but, holistically -- in our own words.

I was also frustrated, as I suppose many involved in this enterprise will be, as there was such minimal attention to what I saw to be the central question: why was the Atomic Energy Commission funding this sort of research in the Amazon?

The answers to this question lie in the very large and very alarming record of human radiation experimentation conducted by the United States. Declassified after the Clinton-era Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experimentation, this record was available on the web between 1997-2001 when the Bush Administration began to remove key documents and, in 2003, shut down the website on the grounds that such information constituted a threat to security. (Hard copies of this record are still available at George Washington University's National Security Archive). The Atomic Energy Commission and other US agencies and departments funded numerous Cold War-era human population research projects with indigenous communities serving as human subjects in experiments involving the administration of radioisotopes with research goals that included, among other things, how the human body functioned at different altitudes, adjusted to intense cold, and what role was played by thyroid in this process (the thyroid being especially vulnerable to injury from the uptake of radioiodine present in the nuclear weapons fallout that was then blanketing the globe). These and other research questions -- such as how in radiation moves through the environment, food chain, and human body, and to what effect -- led to US-funded research using biologically-discrete populations who largely live off the land: Indigenous groups living in the Amazon, Andes, Arctic, Pacific and the American Southwest.

Ah, but this is the stuff of a bigger story that perhaps may be told in some future film. Clearly, Padilha had more than enough on his plate with the consequences and controversies surrounding the 1968 Yanomami expedition.

Audience questions asked of the producer Mike Chamberlain following the screening included: Do anthropologists still work in such fashion? Is the conflict between scientific anthropology and humanist anthropology still ongoing? And, what has been the response to this history from the anthropological establishment? Good questions.

In response to the circa 2000 media attention to these stories of professional misconduct and human rights abuse, some universities and organizations issued a defense of the scientists and their research. The American Anthropological Association adopted a strategy of broad inquiry, reconciliation, and remedy, producing a report on the controversy that found, among many other things, that the 1968 expedition played a role in intensifying a measles epidemic; that biomedical research with Yanomami subjects was conducted without attention to the principles of informed consent then in effect, including the lack of informed consent in collecting blood and other tissue samples, and lack of informed consent in giving radioiodine injections. Draft versions of the report were posted on the web for members to comment and provide additional information. The final report and its recommendations -- including guidance for ethical praxis -- was presented to the membership and adopted by a formal vote.

This action produced a reaction. Arguing that the role of scientists in introducing or spreading the measles outbreak amongst the Yanomami had been discredited by reputable scientists and scientific organizations, and with concern that the problem-focused participatory and collaborative research recommendations adopted by the AAA would weaken the science of anthropology, some AAA members drafted proposals to rescind the recommendations. In the spring of 2005 a ballot was sent to the AAA membership (arriving as many members were packing to leave, or had left, for summer fieldwork).

The vote, 846 to 338, approved the referendum and remedial mechanisms, including the ethical praxis recommendations were repealed. Eligible voting membership at that time was 11, 340. Some 89.6% of the membership failed to cast their ballot.

So here we sit, in the year 2010. A new film raises up again the old arguments and recirculates the controversies involving scientific research in the Amazon. In telling the secrets of my tribe, Padilha leaves the viewer keenly aware of the social responsibility associated with working with human subjects - especially the unique vulnerabilities of indigenous peoples - and the ease in which such responsibilities can be and have been ignored, discarded, abused. And, viewers wonder, is this history? Or, is this a view of current anthropological praxis?

At some levels, this is history. Human population research with any group, including the Yanomami, is conducted today under very different terms. Meaningful informed consent is the core element of those terms, and often such work is designed and developed in ways that reflect the human needs of the research subject. And, despite the vote to rescind "Darkness in El Dorado" recommendations over the past decade there has been explosive interest in professional ethics, as indicated not only by papers at annual meetings, but more importantly, by the number of course taught each year on the subject and on this controversy.

Yet, then again, while teachers teach and students learn, Yanomami grievances, for many reasons, have yet to be meaningfully addressed. Resurgent gold mining, dam construction, and other development all threaten the ability of the Yanomami to survive and thrive. Life remains precarious.

And, taking a broader look at the social impact of anthropology in today's world, the questions raised by this film are echoed in critiques of current praxis. The core elements of anthropology's ethical code are the obligation to secure free and prior informed consent and the commitment to do no harm. Today's ethical norms strive towards research that not only occurs with informed consent, it is problem-focused -- shaped in collaborative ways to address problems and needs of mutual concern. Such an approach is impossible when research is defined, funded, and used by more powerful actors in non-transparent ways.

Consider the role of anthropologists in assisting the US military and their efforts to secure valuable data from vulnerable communities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The role of the anthropologist, like that in the 60s era Atomic Energy Commission-funded research expeditions, is that of the culture broker and research facilitator. The anthropologist develops rapport and soothes tensions in ways that allow their military companions to get their data. Given that the research objectives, the setting, and the conduct of "researchers" and subjects is defined or dictated by an external authority - in this case, the military - compromises and ethical quandaries become the norm.

This point is illustrated in David Price's interview with John Allison, a recently resigned trainee in the Human Terrain Systems program, who describes "Ethnographic Field Methods" training as including the minimalist guidance that: "Consent is implied by the continued participation" of the 'informant', and also, by those who join in the discussion without an invitation." Price notes, "Not only is this a predatory standard of consent, but it runs counter to the Nuremberg Code, the Belmont Report, and US federal research consent

There is considerable irony here. "Secrets of the Tribe" depicts a scandal involving the human consequences of scientific research amongst the Yanomami that had the potential to push anthropology -- and the other sciences and governments in which such research was funded and conducted -- to develop an honest accounting of past abuses, their ramifications, and to construct meaningful remedial measures. These remedial actions included ethical guidance on how to structure research with vulnerable peoples in rights-protective ways. Instead, while the need is so apparent, guidance is ineffective, and accountability appears elusive.

About the film

"Secrets of the Tribe" premiered at the Sundance Festival in Park City, Utah on January 22, 2010. Directed by José Padilha and distributed by HBO and BBC, this documentary will air later this year.

http://www.counterpunch.org/johnston03192010.html

"My Fellow Americans, Tonight I'm Going to Talk Frankly About a Pesky Little Nation Called Israel ... "

Alexander Cockburn

Don’t get excited. It’ll never happen. Is there really a crisis in US-Israeli relations? Yes and No. Yes, because the world’s premier power doesn’t care to have its vice president publicly humiliated by a midget of a nation whose entire population is smaller than that of Los Angeles country. No, because the elected politicians nominally running the government of the world’s premier power live in mortal fear of the Israel lobby in the United States. This time, as always, No will carry the day. (You can find a detailed narrative by Jeffrey Blankfort on this site today, from which much of this Diary is drawn.)

Consider Biden’s reaction the day after Interior Minister Eli Yishai, probably with Netanyahu’s foreknowledge, announced the scheduled building of 1600 apartments – Jews only – in East Jerusalem, right at the moment Biden was trying to breathe life into the “peace process”. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz points out, those projected 1600 units are part of 50,000 planned for the eastern part of the city.

So here’s the vice president of the United States of America,standing with all the injured dignity of a man who has just had a bucket of sewage dumped over his head and who amid his discomfiture, actually did use the word “condemn” and “Israel” in the same paragraph. The next day Biden heads for Tel Aviv university and confides to the audience that he is a Zionist and that, “throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States.” Get that: “the center of my work.” This mission statement is not quoted in the U.S. press.

Then Biden repeats the nonsense he spouted when he arrived in Jerusalem: that “there is no space -- this is what they [the world] must know, every time progress is made, it's made when the rest of the world knows there is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to security, none. No space. That's the only time when progress has been made.”

Of course, if any “progress” can be identified across the past forty years – a debatable claim – it’s only because an American president has nerved himself to briefly lay down the agenda with threats and menaces, all duly retracted when the Lobby regroups and commences its counter-attack.

Finally Biden sidles up the “crisis”. “I appreciate… the response your Prime Minister today announced this morning that he is putting in place a process to prevent the recurrence of that sort of that sort of events [sic] and who clarified that the beginning of actual construction on this particular project would likely take several years … That's significant, because it gives negotiations the time to resolve this, as well as other outstanding issues. Because when it was announced, I was on the West Bank. Everyone there thought it had meant immediately the resumption of the construction of 1,600 new units.”

Yes, that’s exactly what it did mean, the resumption of the construction of the 1600 units. And as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz points out, those projected 1600 units are part of 50,000 units planned for the eastern part of the city. Natanyahu has said these are non-negotiable, whatever Washington might say, let alone the pitiful Palestinian Authority.

Amid the anguished cries of the Arab princes and emirs that Israel’s brazen conduct towards Biden made it that much harder for them to sell the Palestinians down the river, Obama’s chief political aide, David Axelrod, undoubtedly with clearance from his boss, told NBC News that not only was Israel’s conduct an "insult" to the United States but "destructive" of the Middle East peace process.

Hillary Clinton let it be known she’d read the riot act to Netanhayu down the phone for 43 minutes. Her spokesman claimed she’d described the planned units in East Jerusalem as sending a “deeply negative signal about Israel's approach to the bilateral relationship and counter to the spirit of the vice president's trip" and that "this action had undermined trust and confidence in the peace process and in America's interests." Meanwhile, special envoy George Mitchell cancelled his trip to the region.

So, yes, we can call it a crisis, but not one that will be prolonged. Obama is not the first president to have lost patience with Israel for messing up Uncle Sam’s larger plans. Mrs Clinton is not the first Secretary of State to shout angrily down the phone to Tel Aviv.

Blankfort, historian of the Lobby, reels off other crises, all satisfactorily resolved in Israel’s favor. In 1975 President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly blamed Israel for the breakdown of negotiations with Egypt over withdrawing from the Sinai. Ford said he was going to tell the American people that US-Isarel relations should be recast. Prodded by AIPAC, 76 US senators signed a letter to Ford telling him to lay off Israel. He did.

In March, 1980, President Carter was forced to apologize after US UN representative Donald McHenry voted for a resolution that condemned Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied territories including East Jerusalem and which called on Israel to dismantle them.

In June of the same year, after Carter requested a halt to Jewish settlements and his Secretary of State, Edmund Muskie, called the Jewish settlements an obstacle to peace, Prime Minister Menachem Begin announced plans to construct 10 new ones.

In August, 1982, the day after Reagan requested that Ariel Sharon end the bombing of Beirut, Ariel Sharon responded by ordering bombing runs over the city at precisely 2:42 and 3:38 in the afternoon, the times coinciding with the two UN resolutions requiring Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

In March, 1991, Secretary of State James Baker complained to Congress that “Every time I have gone to Israel in connection with the peace process.., I have been met with an announcement of new settlement activity… It substantially weakens our hand in trying to bring about a peace process, and creates quite a predicament.” In 1990, he had become so disgusted with Israel’s intransigence on the settlements that he publicly gave out the phone number of the White House switchboard and told the Israelis, "When you're serious about peace, call us."

On September 12, 1991 President George Bush, Sr got sufficiently infuriated by AIPAC’s success in getting enough votes in both houses of Congress to override his veto of Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan guarantees, that he declared to the television cameras, "I'm up against some powerful forces. They've got something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little guy here doing it." A national poll taken immediately afterward gave the president an 85 per cent approval rating. The Lobby blinked but not for long. Not only did the loan guarantees ultimately go through, but Jewish voters turned strongly against Bush in the ’92 elections, a fact which Bush Jr never forgot.

As Blankfort also recalls, in January 2009, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly boasted that he had “shamed” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice by getting President Bush to prevent her from voting for a Gaza cease-fire resolution at the last moment that she herself had worked on for several days with Arab and European diplomats at the United Nations.

Olmert bragged to an Israeli audience that he pulled Bush off a stage during a speech to take his call when he learned about the pending vote and demanded that the president intervene.

“I have no problem with what Olmert did,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Forward. “I think the mistake was to talk about it in public.”

In sum, as Stephen Green wrote in "Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with Militant Israel" (Morrow, 1984) a quarter century ago, "Since 1953, Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with tactical issues."

There are powerful forces in America that wish that this was not so, starting with the US military. Before Biden’s trip no less a prominent and widely admired commander as General David Petraeus wrote a memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with its sentiments reduplicated in testimony last Tuesday before a US Senate Armed Services Committee.

In his prepared statement to Congress, Petraeus described the Israeli-Arab conflict as the first “cross cutting challenge to security and stability” in the CENTCOM area of responsibility [AOR]. “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR.”

Petraeus then told the Senate committee that “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.” Not long before, Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, warned the Israelis publicly that an attack on Iran would be a “big, big, big problem for all of us.”

In Israel the widely-read Yediot Ahronoth reported that privately Biden had echoed Petraeus’s sentiments, telling Netanyahu that Israel’s conduct was “starting to get dangerous for us.” “What you’re doing here,” Biden reportedly said, “undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.”

Would not the charge that Israel is putting harm’s way the lives of Americans battling terror on the front lines be devastating if toughly presented by a capable politician to the American people? Yes it would. Honestly conducted polls, without weasel wording, would probably give the politician making such a charge ratings as higher or higher than Bush got in 1991.

So will Gen. Petraeus, assuming he embarks on a political run in 2012 or 2016, make such a move? First of all, one can make the assumption that after his memo and testimony it won’t be long before we’re reading some investigative story about the “questionable claims”, associated with Gen. Petraeus’ numerous medals, maybe even disclosures of Flashmanesque prudence on the field of battle. Secondly, any Republican candidate has to court the Republican ultra-Christians, passionate in support of Israel, by reason of doctrinal scheduling of the ultimate Rapture. Thirdly, why scare all Jewish campaign money back into the Democratic Party?

As Blankfort remarks, shortly before the first time he met with President Obama, 76 US senators, led by Christopher Dodd and Evan Bayh, plus 330 members of the House, sent AIPAC-crafted letters to the president calling on him not to put pressure on the Israeli prime minister when they met. The House, do not forget, cheered on Israel’s onslaught in Gaza and by 334 to 36 condemned the Goldstone Report.

The Democrat Party is heavily reliant on major Jewish political funders, up to 60 per cent of the top tier of contributors, according to Blankfort. Soon AIPAC has its convention (at which Tony Blair will be a minor attraction). Here will come all major politicians to fawn and pay tribute. On June 3, 2008, right after he had finally prevailed in the race for the nomination against Hilary Clinton, Obama addressed the AIPAC crowd, some 7,000 strong: “We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran,” he assured AIPAC.” I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power. Everything and I mean everything.” He swore he wouldn’t talk to the elected representatives Palestinians, Hamas. To thunderous applause he declared, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." The next day, Obama’s foreign policy advisors, aghast at this outburst, issued some corrections.

As Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli writer and peace activist expostulated furiously in the wake of this last sentence: “Along comes Obama and retrieves from the junkyard the outworn slogan ‘Undivided Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel for all Eternity’. Since Camp David, all Israeli governments have understood that this mantra constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process…. The fear of AIPAC is so terrible, that even this candidate, who promises change in all matters, does not dare. In this matter he accepts the worst old-style Washington routine. He is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future - if and when he is elected president… If he sticks to them, once elected, he will be obliged to say, as far as peace between the two peoples of this country is concerned: ‘No, I can't!’

So yes, the crisis will soon be over, and no, there is no new era in US-Israel relations in the offing.

The Fight Against Corporate Power

In his important special report in our latest newsletter, Mason Gaffney addresses the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious January 21, 2010, ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, that a corporation may contribute unlimited funds advertising its views for and against political candidates of its choice – in practice, the choice of its CEO or directors. “The United States was born in rebellion against corporations,” Gaffney writes. “The U.S. Supreme Court soon began restoring their power. When it overreached, strong executives and popular movements set it back: under Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR. Today it has overreached again; it remains to see if a new movement or leader will arise to set it back again.”

Gaffney assays the best political strategies for popular counter-attack. As he concludes, “Will ‘ordinary’ taxpayers rebel, as they did in the American Revolution, Emancipation, the Progressive Age of Reform, and the New Deal, or will corporate power wax unchecked until it replaces democracy altogether? Cyclical theory says we will have another anti-corporate reaction, but history also records tipping points in the decline of nations, from which they do not recover for generations, if ever. This one may be a squeaker.”

Back to FDR, I say. Pack the Supreme Court!

In the same bumper newsletter JoAnn Wypijewski has a truly terrific piece about the “cargo chain” as described at a recent conference of radical dockworkers from around the world, meeting in Charleston, S.C.:

“The people who move the world can also stop it,’ radical dockworkers like to say, and that captures the essential fragility of a global production and distribution system that depends on the precise coordination of hundreds of thousands of moving parts. If some of those moving parts—workers at a major trucking hub, a major rail switching network or, especially, a strategic string of ports—refuse to do their part, the whole system gets jammed up. Refuse long enough and broadly enough, and the system would be in crisis.“

Read her powerful reporting from the front lines of the world class struggle.

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How the Economy Was Lost

We’re now proud to publish How the Economy Was Lost, Roberts’ searing, succinct history of how the US economy has been captured by a gangster elite. Roberts gives us the shortest, sharpest outline of economics for the new century ever put between covers.

Go to our bookstore. Buy it now!

http://www.counterpunch.org/

ARESER, LETTRE D’INFORMATION N°21

ÉDITORIAL
FAUX DÉBATS, VRAIE CATASTROPHE

Quand une société ou un système ne fonctionne plus, les responsables à court d’idées inventent des faux débats. Ils servent de leurres pour maintenir une apparence d’espace public et de projection vers l’avenir alors que chacun sait que rien n’en ressortira de concret que du temps gagné jusqu’à la prochaine crise. La politique universitaire ou d’enseignement en général et la politique française tout court en ont donné des exemples variés ces derniers temps. Le plus récent est la fausse querelle à propos des boursiers dans les grandes écoles. Avec ces deux chiffons rouges aux résonances historiques nobles et prestigieuses les « responsables » étaient sûrs de leur coup. Susciter de faux espoirs ou de fausses craintes, faire jouer à fronts renversés des réflexes rhétoriques de l’inconscient national, masquer par un théâtre de grandes phrases les véritables évolutions sous-jacentes et les vraies responsabilités politiques à l’œuvre depuis de longues années dans le silence des mesures techniques dont les effets se font sentir quand les décideurs ne sont plus là. « Démocrates » contre « élitistes », « baisse du niveau » contre « méritocratie », fils du peuple contre privilégiés, ces vieux antagonismes qui ont beaucoup servi dans les querelles scolaires anciennes sont ressortis des placards comme si rien n’avait changé depuis les années 1950. On oubliait au passage quelques problèmes qui ruinaient pourtant la plupart des arguments : ce « niveau » arbitrairement défini par des épreuves qui n’ont cessé de changer au cours de l’histoire, que mesure-t-il sinon l’arbitraire d’un rapport de force entre disciplines ? En quoi prédit-il autre chose que la conformité des lauréats à cet arbitraire ? La suite de l’existence, sauf pour quelques écoles très élitistes assurant des rentes de situation, démontre combien ces classements scolaires sont largement bouleversés par les classements sociaux et les héritages familiaux. Plus grave, n’oubliait-on pas surtout que l’on confondait, sous cette notion de grandes écoles aujourd’hui indéfiniment extensible, des institutions aux fonctions, aux recrutements et aux positions extraordinairement hétéroclites ? On mélangeait la dizaine d’établissements assurant à une minorité de ses diplômés les plus hautes positions sociales avec une masse d’écoles commerciales ou techniques, dont beaucoup privées ou payantes, fournissant certes des garanties d’emplois supérieurs à celles consenties aux diplômés des universités mais nullement ces rentes de situation mythiques extrapolées à partir de la minorité visible ? Enfin et surtout, alors qu’on avait affirmé haut et fort que c’était la seconde massification des universités qui, il y a plus de vingt ans maintenant, était censée relancer l’ascenseur social et ouvrir l’avenir aux enfants des classes populaires et des petites classes moyennes, n’avouait-on pas, avec ce remake troisième République des boursiers contre les héritiers sorti d’un mauvais roman de Bourget ou de Barrès, que les universités, une fois de plus, étaient poussées hors du jeu, qu’elles avaient échoué dans leur tâche et qu’il fallait revenir à la charité élective dans des « réserves » protégées, puisque l’Etat providence éducatif avait failli à concilier ouverture et promotion sociale sur fond de chômage et de déclassement ? Au moment même où les bonimenteurs de la grande école pour tous lançaient leur tour de passe passe, les technocrates de la RGPP détruisaient tranquillement la base même de tout l’édifice en sabotant l’encadrement pédagogique des futurs enseignants, en lançant une réforme absurde des concours de recrutement pour mieux les remplacer par des professeurs à tout faire ou des maîtres auxiliaires tenus en laisse et en obscurcissant un peu plus l’avenir pour les rescapés des universités dont on supprime les débouchés publics au moment même où le secteur privé licencie à tout va.
C. Charle, président de l’ARESER

Pierre Bourdieu un Hommage: ARESER, LETTRE D’INFORMATION N°21

Ce que Taxi Driver fait à la sociologie

Jean Marcel - Idees - La revue des sciences économiques et sociales

"Comment mettre en rapport cinéma et sociologie ? Le questionnement est double dans la mesure où la sociologie peut contribuer à l’analyse d’un film. Mais un film peut, simultanément, permettre de féconder l’analyse sociologique. Nous privilégierons l’exemple de Taxi Driver de Martin Scorsese (1976). Le film de Scorsese, mais le propos pourrait être élargi à bien d’autres films, permet en effet de mieux saisir comment articuler microsociologie et macrosociologie. Travis, le protagoniste de Taxi Driver, interprété par Robert De Niro, réunit un certain nombre de traits de comportements contradictoires, ceux-ci vont nous aider à mieux situer les enjeux de la confrontation cinéma/sociologie. Pour reprendre la problématique de Norbert Elias, lors du « processus de civilisation » les conflits sociaux tendent à se déplacer de la société vers l’individu qui devient le théâtre d’un conflit individuel intérieur, produit d’un champ de forces contradictoires. « Dans un certain sens, le champ de bataille a été transposé dans le for intérieur de l’homme » [1]1. - À lire

http://www.sceren.fr/revuedees/