Scientologist John Travolta in “Battlefield Earth,” based on SciFi by Church founder L. Ron Hubbard

Here’s something extraordinary: a big expansion by the controversial Church of Scientology, barely covered by the hometown LA Times.

This story is full of irony. Here’s how the seller reported it in a press release:

KCET, the nation’s largest independent public television station, announced today that it has sold its production facility to the Church of Scientology for an undisclosed amount.

And the buyer:

The Church of Scientology acquires the historic KCET studio lot in Hollywood. The 5 acre studio includes two sound stages, extensive post production resources and state-of-the-art TV, satellite and Internet broadcasting capabilities.

The Church of Scientology is pleased to have acquired the historic KCET studio lot in Hollywood. At nearly 5 acres, this studio includes two sound stages, extensive post production resources and state-of-the-art TV, satellite and Internet broadcasting capabilities. It is a perfect fit, in both size and location, for the expansion of the Church of Scientology’s production of religious and social betterment audiovisual properties, and we welcomed the unexpected opportunity to acquire it.

Language like “unexpected opportunity” in Scientology-speak usually hints at something deeply intriguing. Now, maybe it was an unexpected opportunity. After all, KCET had been having difficulties related to its fee-based decision to sever ties with the Public Broadcasting System. But always worth inquiring, where this highly aggressive paramilitary “church” is involved.

If you’ve been living in a cave and are completely unfamiliar with the background to this unusual entity, do a little googling. Or read this recent New Yorker piece. Or, read these pieces I did in past years: this one, on Scientology’s battle with the government of Germany, and this one about an attempt by Scientology to open, under wraps, a film studio in Hollywood.

In any case, this seems like a superb reporting opportunity for the Los Angeles Times, should they still have any investigative reporters on staff after all their cuts.

To be fair, the Times did publish a short, bland piece about a month ago anticipating the sale, which you can read here, and then this new piece pretty much right off the Scientology press release.

On with the Scientology press release

This fully modern facility is just down Sunset Boulevard from our Los Angeles headquarters, within a few miles of the main offices of the Church’s global humanitarian programs and but a few blocks away from our recording studio in Silver Lake.

The Church of Scientology is already well established in the audiovisual field with, as but one example, more than 400 videos presenting information about the religion, its beliefs and its social betterment and humanitarian programs, all of which can be seen at http://www.scientology.org.

This new studio is a turnkey setup that provides the Church the means to move into broadcasting for both the religion and its many social betterment and humanitarian programs. It is also ideally set up to establish a central media hub for our network of Churches around the world. Utilizing the studio’s existing satellite uplink, we will be able to provide our Churches and affiliated groups globally with instantaneous access to a wealth of content, all in high definition, ranging from the Church’s six annual international events to new educational and introductory films and even video updates for the public informational displays located in Churches around the world.

This new studio enables the Church to establish one of the most advanced centers used by religious broadcasters with the ability to harness 21st century broadcast technology and production power to deliver its message to the largest international audience possible.

Oh, goody.

Even better that it is “the nation’s largest independent public television station” making the sale, instead of reporting on the outfit. Perfectly underlining the state of media in this country today.

Image Credit:  (http://www-movieline-com.vimg.net/images/john_travolta_worst_battlefield_earth_4287fcf4.jpg)

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WhoWhatWhy is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news site founded by Russ Baker. Follow it on Facebook and Twitter or visit WhoWhatWhy.com

So, here it is. Musical chairs time.

CNN Breaking News:

President Obama to name CIA Director Leon Panetta to succeed Robert Gates as defense secretary, official says.

Huh? What’s that all about?

Wait, there’s more.

New York Times

President Obama is expected this week to name Leon E. Panetta, the director of central intelligence, as defense secretary and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, as director of the C.I.A., administration officials said Wednesday.

Am I the only person who thinks it is interesting that a former Congressman with unusual credentials to head the CIA then goes on to head the Pentagon, again with unusual credentials for the job?

The appointments, set in motion by the impending retirement of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, are part of a significant rearrangement of Mr. Obama’s national security team that will include several new assignments within the closest circle of his diplomatic, military and intelligence advisers.

I’d like to know much more about this “significant rearrangement” and what, behind the scenes, is causing this. For that matter, I’d like to know much more about how the man representing “change we can believe in” created his “closest circle” of advisers and who in turn suggested them.

As I reported in my book Family of Secrets , nobody bothered to figure out why  President Ford named George H.W. Bush his CIA director in 1976:

Why install a purported intelligence virgin—and, moreover, a fellow widely regarded as a lightweight—in this highly sensitive post, and in this period of intense pressure on the agency?

The newspapers at the time seemed bewildered, though unwilling to say so explicitly. In an unsigned profile headlined “A Breezy Head of the C.I.A.,” the New York Times struggled to find some achievements. “As a chief American representative in China, George Bush has succeeded, at least in a limited degree, in erasing the image that many persons in Peking had of America as an elitist country. Instead of formal dinners and receptions, the Bushes entertain by serving soft drinks and popcorn while showing old movies.” Another Times article noted that on a visit to China, Kissinger “did not set aside any time for consultations with Mr. Bush before plunging into dealings with Chinese leaders.”

Yet, just as his brief and undistinguished congressional service had supposedly qualified him for the United Nations, and his unexceptional United Nations service somehow qualified him for the China post, George H. W. Bush’s brief experience in China was now invoked as somehow qualifying him to run the CIA. The central assumption in all this was that Poppy did not have an intelligence background. To some, this was seen as a liability, to others an asset. But no one considered the possibility that his supposed lack of experience in spycraft was, in fact, part of that craft, and his long- running cover story.

Indeed, it was unlikely that with all the Sturm und Drang over intelligence, the kind of person that George H. W. Bush appeared to be in public could possibly be the choice of insiders and hard- liners. There had to be more to it….

And, as I recount in detail in that book, there was.

We can be sure there is more, too, to this range of curious decisions by Obama. But who will get to the bottom of it? Back to the Times:

Mr. Gates is expected to step down this summer.

The changes at the top of Mr. Obama’s national security team have long been expected.

That’s pretty blasé. Long been expected? Makes it sound like there’s no reason to understand these crucial reshufflings of the junta…er ..government.

Not long after Mr. Gates leaves, the term will expire for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who, like the defense secretary, was appointed by President George W. Bush. And Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg has announced that he is leaving for an academic job — removing one of the crucial players in Mr. Obama’s efforts to manage China’s rise.

Why is a crucial player in the efforts to “manage China’s rise” leaving the government? What exactly is that effort, and how is it going? Presumably it is something considered quite urgent, but I don’t recall nearly enough reporting on what it entails. Also worth noting— as with George H.W. Bush curiously coming in from his China assignment to take over CIA in 1976—what we don’t know about the US government’s true views on China today, and its course of action on that country, would presumably make for riveting reading.

…Mr. Gates’s role is the most critical. He often allied with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — who has said that she intends to leave the administration when this term ends — including persuading Mr. Obama to start the military buildup in Afghanistan in 2009.Together they won many other battles, but they visibly split last month on the military intervention in Libya.

Do tell? Gates, a longtime Bush family associate, CIA director under HW Bush and Defense Secretary under W Bush, stays on under Democrat Obama for more than half of his first term, creates an alliance with Hillary Clinton in which they persuade Obama to “start the military buildup,” among other things, then “visibly split” over Libya. All seems worthy of much more ongoing reporting. By the way, would have been nice to say here who took what position on Libya. (Btw, for a bit of perspective on the CIA and Libya, see our piece here.)

Also worth understanding more about the relationship between the Bush group and the Clintons. For more on this, see our WhoWhatWhy exclusive, here.

Back to the Times again.

In naming Mr. Panetta to the Pentagon, Mr. Obama is selecting an already confirmed cabinet official with strong ties to both the White House and Capitol Hill. In selecting  General Petraeus, who at least initially did not have a strong relationship with the Obama White House, the president is retaining a high-profile military official who has extensive knowledge of intelligence gathering in both Afghanistan and Iraq in recent years.

I can just imagine the barroom chatter on what’s not being said in the above paragraph. Why would the president put in yet another Bush guy, Petraeus, in a top position in his administration? What happened that Petraeus, who did not have a strong relationship with the Obama White House, apparently now does? What about those rumors that Petraeus was considering a run for the GOP presidential nomination, and that he needed something sweet to discourage him? How do we feel about a military guy heading the CIA? And by the way, what really do we understand about what the almost totally opaque CIA does, after all these years, with those thousands of staffers and billions of taxpayer funds?

The president is also likely soon to nominate the veteran diplomat Ryan C. Crocker as the next United States ambassador to Afghanistan. That move would, at least for a while, reunite Mr. Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq, with General Petraeus, with whom he worked closely in Iraq during the Bush administration.

Do you ever feel you really understand what these moves are about? That seems to me the mark of a top-notch news organization—plugged in enough, talking to enough “unauthorized sources” and keen observers, to figure out what is behind all of this. And how it is likely to affect us all.

There have been articles, occasionally, with a bit of speculation on these internal dynamics of the Obama administration. But not nearly enough—and news outfits should have a full-court press on this, especially when the deal goes down. And even more so, before, given that they had plenty of advance notice through the patter of authorized leaks.

Image Credit:  (http://www.bagram.afcent.af.mil/photos/mediagallery.asp?galleryID=1435&?id=-1&page=88&count=24)

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WhoWhatWhy is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news site founded by Russ Baker. Follow it on Facebook and Twitter or visit WhoWhatWhy.com

Marijuana prohibition ‘celebrates’ its centennial anniversary today. That’s right, the government’s war on cannabis consumers is now officially 100-years-old.

Self-evidently, cannabis has won.

Although many credit the passage of the federal Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 with the initiation of pot prohibition, the reality is that one hundred years ago today, Massachusetts Governor Eugene Foss signed the first statewide anti-pot prohibition into law. Following Massachusetts, over 30 states quickly followed suit — including California, Maine, Indiana and Wyoming in 1913 — leading the way for federal prohibition some two-and-a-half decades later.

Of course, cannabis use was practically non-existent in Massachusetts (as well as in most of the rest of the country) in 1911. Yet today, 100 years following the plant’s criminalization, the state boasts one of the highest rates of pot use in the nation.

Writing today in the Milford (Massachusetts) Daily News, former NORML Board Member Richard Evans, author of Massachusetts House Bill 1371, the Cannabis Regulation and Taxation Act, nails it:

“Despite a century of ever-zealous enforcement and thunderous propaganda at taxpayer expense, marijuana inextricably permeates our culture. Its cultivation, commerce and use have proven ineradicable. We have tried mightily and we have failed to extirpate it. If anyone, anywhere, believes that spending more money on marijuana enforcement will drive out pot, let that person come forward and tell us plainly what it will take to make that happen, how much it will cost, and where the money will come from.

The futility of enforcement, however, is not the urgent reason to legalize it. The reason is that prohibition has become a destructive force in our society.

Most perniciously, marijuana prohibition provides the tools and the excuses for the oppression of minorities. No historian denies that the early drug laws were conceived for that purpose, and today’s grotesquely disproportionate incarceration rate of African-Americans proves that the drug laws have shamefully accomplished that purpose.

Prohibition divides us. Getting caught with pot, or the fear of getting caught, divides parents and teens, employers and employees, friends, neighbors, colleagues, doctors and patients, and citizens and the police. That divisiveness weakens us as we face colossal challenges like a sick economy, the insolvency of states and municipalities, climate change and our addiction to imported oil. As long as cannabis remains illegal, it cannot be a part of the solution to those colossal challenges.

… Our immediate challenge is not to legalize cannabis, but to legalize serious talk about it, without smirks and snickers. How legalization can best protect public health and safety, and discourage abuse, and how to tax the substance, are issues not just for politicians, but for everyone. Legalization is no longer for stoners; it’s for taxpayers, entrepreneurs and grandparents, horrified at the likely state of the planet on which their grandchildren will grow up.

Let the debate begin now, lest another hundred years go by.”

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the CEO of Green For All

In 2008, Americans were fed up. Wars, a terrible economy, dishonesty, a drift from our core beliefs. That November, Barack Obama said, “Change,” which may basically have meant, “Not that.” Not that direction for America. Not that economic policy.

And it worked. America didn’t want that. America wanted something different.

Now, reasonable people can debate the extent to which America got something different. It’s certainly the case that the driving motivations of Presidents Bush and Obama are quite distinct. But as next year’s election looms, Obama’s problem is that wars and the economy and the vision for how America should act in the world are still on shaky ground. It opens wide the door for an opponent to say: not that. READ FULL POST

Donald Trump’s haranguing of the President over his birth certificate is a bone deep example of white racism. Commentators of all stripes took to the airwaves yesterday to finally call out the Birthers for what they are–not so polite bigots. In the broadsides fired by many in the pundit classes there is rage and offense at how Trump and the Tea Party GOP mine white bigotry for political gain. But, there is not a sense of personal offense. Sure, there is upset at Trump and the Birthers for their nonsense, but an offense of principle is not that same as feeling that you were collectively slapped in the face by the repeated insinuations that America’s first black President is somehow a fraud.

Many black Americans are deeply offended by the white nationalist coloured Birther conspiracy because it signals once more that our citizenship and belonging is always in question. In total, the anti-black animus of the Birthers and their obsession with Obama’s birth (and commitment to devaluing all of his life accomplishments) is a textbook example of symbolic racism. And on a more personal level, how many successful black folks can relate to having their accomplishments questioned at every turn, even by white folks who are utterly mediocre and that would be lucky to shine our shoes if we blessed them with the opportunity to do so?

History runs deep here, both in the bigotry of the Birthers, as well as in the hurt felt by Black Americans during this debacle. Obama’s birth certificate is his 21st century slave pass or set of freedom papers. The unapologetic gall and dastardly nerve of the Birthers is that they feel entitled and free to question a man of great accomplishments simply because he is not White. As Judge Taney wrote in the infamous Dredd Scott decision, black Americans are “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

When the white trash “conspiranoids” of the Birther movement, and a man like Donald Trump who was born on 3rd base and thinks he hit a triple in life, demand “the papers” on President Obama, they are just signaling to a deep history that Barack–like other black folks–had best know their place and don’t ever dare to step out of it.

So much for post-racial America and the Age of Obama, for just as during Jim and Jane Crow the lowest white man can feel right and just in trying to knock the highest black man from his perch because for a negro to dream and achieve is too much for the White (Conservative) Racial Id to countenance or accept.

By now, we should have heard much more on the Greg Mortenson scandal from the New York Times, home to two powerful columnists who helped turn Mortenson, his book, and his charity into global success stories. (See our earlier piece on how the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman promoted Mortenson.)

Instead, here’s the British newspaper Guardian supplementing that big CBS News exposé on  Mortenson, the author of the bestseller Three Cups of Tea, and his charity.:

Greg Mortenson, the author and philanthropist accused of fabricating large parts of his autobiographical writings, is to be sued by the Pakistani tribesmen he claimed kidnapped him.

In his bestselling books about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, one of the most startling stories tells how he was kidnapped by the Taliban and held hostage in Waziristan, the most dangerous part of Pakistan’s western tribal border area with Afghanistan. A photograph in one book showed him with a dozen tribesmen, some armed, who were supposedly holding him captive.

However, as with much else in the books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, the tale is unravelling, following a US television exposé earlier this week.

Mansur Khan Mahsud, who featured in the photograph, said that Mortenson came to his village of Kot Langer Khel, in the Laddah area of South Waziristan, in July 1996. Mahsud, who is the research director of a thinktank in Islamabad that specialises in the tribal area, said that the Taliban did not appear on the Pakistani side of the border until 2002, following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

“Greg Mortenson came with a relative of mine and he was a guest of the village. He stayed for about 10 days. He was living in the village, sightseeing, taking photographs. He had a really good time,” said Mahsud, adding that some of the tribesmen carried guns to protect Mortenson.

In Mortenson’s account, his hosts from the Mahsud tribe have been turned into the then better-known Wazir tribe, while the location has morphed to Razmak, North Waziristan.

“It’s lies from A to Z. There’s not one word of truth. If there had been a little exaggeration, that could have been forgiven,” said Mahsud. “The way that he’s portrayed the Mahsuds, as hash-smoking bandits, is wrong. He’s defamed me, my family, my tribe. We are respected people in my area. He’s turned us into kidnappers.”

Mahsud said that he had decided to file a lawsuit against Mortenson and was in contact with a lawyer in the US.

“I am looking into how to sue him,” said Mahsud, who only found out about the story in the book when he was contacted in February this year by a whistle-blower, Jon Krakauer, who was featured in the US investigative show 60 Minutes on CBS News.

The programme raised serious doubts over how many schools Mortenson had actually built in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even his original story that he vowed to build his first school, for a Pakistani village, after its inhabitants rescued him when he got lost mountaineering. It also questioned the use of the millions in charitable funds he collects each year for the schools.

Mortenson, whose charity is now under investigation by US authorities, has defended his work, admitting to only “some omissions and compressions”.

This is certainly damaging stuff. And what are we learning of this from the United States’ top news organizations? I did not see the above material reported in major US newspapers, and it was strikingly not in the New York Times, though there was a tepid piece in the Times’s Week in Review section by a reporter who had visited one of the schools while on vacation last year, headlined “Two Schools in Afghanistan, One Complicated Situation.”

Another New York Times item was a column by Nicholas Kristof, who like Thomas Friedman is in an awkward position because of the way in which he was used to advance Mortenson and the Pentagon’s propaganda machine with which Mortenson closely cooperated. Excerpts from this quasi-apologia:

…In person, Greg is modest, passionate and utterly disorganized. Once he showed up half-an-hour late for a speech, clumping along with just one shoe — and then kept his audience spellbound with his tale of building peace through schools.

…I’ve counted Greg as a friend, had his family over at my house for lunch and extolled him in my column. He gave a blurb for my most recent book, ”Half the Sky,” and I read his book ”Three Cups of Tea” to my daughter.

…I don’t know what to make of these accusations. Part of me wishes that all this journalistic energy had been directed instead to ferret out abuses by politicians who allocate government resources to campaign donors rather than to the neediest among us, but that’s not a real answer. The critics have raised serious questions that deserve better answers: we need to hold school-builders accountable as well as fat cats.

My inclination is to reserve judgment until we know more…

As we sift the truth of these allegations, let’s not allow this uproar to obscure that larger message of the possibility of change. Greg’s books may or may not have been fictionalized, but there’s nothing imaginary about the way some of his American donors and Afghan villagers were able to put aside their differences and prejudices and cooperate to build schools — and a better world.

Kristof and Friedman, highly interested parties, should not be taking a “let’s wait and see” attitude, but jumping in and finding out for themselves—and the rest of us. After all, they’re navel-gazers now, but they only got those columns because they were at one time actual reporters. And, like it or not, they, and their paper, are now part of the story.

Image Credit:  (http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/files/ricks2_55.jpg)

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WhoWhatWhy is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news site founded by Russ Baker. Follow it on Facebook and Twitter or visit WhoWhatWhy.com

We often hear about the revolutionary power of the Internet to take down authoritarian regimes. Less often do we consider how online technologies can provide dastardly means for repressive governments to locate, monitor, and persecute dissidents.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

The geniuses over at the RSA Animate have recently posted an annotated talk by Evgeny Morozov. If you’re not familiar with RSA Animate, its method is to create videos in which a cartoonist illustrates a brief lecture by a writer or academic. The resulting animations are clever and engaging, adding an extra layer of clarity and humor to whatever topic the speaker is discussing. Some of their past hits include presentations by David Harvey and Barbara Ehrenreich.

With this one, Morozov–currently a visiting scholar at Stanford and author of a new book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom–criticizes the assumption that the Internet is necessarily helping to promote democracy.

Morozov has emerged in recent years as a leading critic of “techno-utopian” perspectives on the Internet and social networking. The talk that RSA has animated is actually one from 2009, but Morozov’s points are very pertinent to discussions of current uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.

One argument he consistently makes is that while tech enthusiasts regularly highlight the benefits of new Internet innovations for activists, rarely do they consider the other side of the equation: how technology can also aid enemies of democracy and free expression. He suggests that dictators are not nearly so afraid of the Internet as we might imagine, and that in many cases they have effectively co-opted bloggers and mined social networks to promote their repressive ends. “States used to torture to get this kind of information,” he says. “Now all they have to do is go onto Facebook.”

I’ve waded into debates on the Internet as a tool for organizing on a few previous occasions. In general, I’m inclined to agree with the commonsense view that an increased flow of information hurts dictatorships, making it more difficult for them to control public opinion. So I don’t wholly buy Morozov’s contrarianism. But I am more skeptical than many of the claims of Facebook and Twitter revolutions, and I appreciate Morozov’s critical perspective. I especially enjoy seeing him picking fights, at his Foreign Policy blog, with the likes of Clay Shirky and Thomas Friedman.

For those who prefer to read Morozov’s writing instead of watching the video, he lays out his views about the role of the Internet in the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt at the Guardian:

Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled. Internet = democracy. QED.

Sadly, this is the level of nuance in most popular accounts of the internet’s contribution to the recent unrest in the Middle East….

[T]oday, the role of the telegraph in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution–just like the role of the tape-recorder in the 1979 Iranian revolution and of the fax machine in the 1989 revolutions–is of interest to a handful of academics and virtually no one else. The fetishism of technology is at its strongest immediately after a revolution but tends to subside shortly afterward.

In his 1993 bestseller The Magic Lantern, Timothy Garton Ash, one of the most acute observers of the 1989 revolutions, proclaimed that “in Europe at the end of the 20th century, all revolutions are telerevolutions”–but in retrospect, the role of television in those events seems like a very minor point.

Will history consign Twitter and Facebook to much the same fate 20 years down the road? In all likelihood, yes.

At New Scientist, Morozov considers how “The Internet is a Tyrant’s Friend“:

Thanks to radical improvements in technologies such as face recognition, it may become even easier for the secret police to track their opponents. Here, too, there is a cut-throat competition among western firms, who rightly smell lucrative commercial opportunities–wouldn’t it be wonderful if all those online photos of your friends could be tagged automatically? And yet you can almost guarantee that such technologies would be abused by authoritarian states.

Lastly, for the Fall 2009 issue of Dissent, Morozov wrote on the Green Revolution in Iran and the “Downside to the ‘Twitter Revolution’“:

[T]his new media eco-system is very much like the old game of “Telephone,” in which errors steadily accumulate in the transmission process, and the final message has nothing in common with the original. Judging by the flawed media coverage of the events in Tehran, the game never sounded more Iranian. Thus, to blame Andrew Sullivan for first dreaming up the “Twitter Revolution,” we have to blame a bevy of English-speaking Iranian bloggers who had shaped his opinion (many of them from the Iranian diaspora, with strong pro-Western feelings–why else blog in English?), as well as Farsi-speaking bloggers in Tehran who had shaped the opinion of the English-speaking Iranians, and so forth. Factor in various political biases, and it becomes clear that what Andrew Sullivan is “seeing” might be radically different from what is actually happening.

Morozov has his more balanced moments and inserts the necessary concessions that, yes, the Internet is a powerful tool that can be fruitfully employed by pro-democracy forces. But in a debate filled with techno-utopian assumptions, it is his penchant to debunk that rightly catches our attention.

Written by Patrick Malone and Martha Kempner for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

A point-counterpoint discussion between Patrick Malone of SIECUS and Martha Kempner, RH Reality Check.

Patrick’s Point: You Can Control Your Daughter’s Pretty Princess Exposure

In case you have been living under a rock on Mars and haven’t heard, the royal wedding is upon us and, with it, one of the largest media circuses to surround a non-event in a generation.  The last royal wedding, which took place 30 years ago, resulted in divorce, heartbreak, controversy, and more TV movies than you can shake a stick at.  But, come hell or high water, the American public is committed once again to following every detail of the upcoming nuptials, despite the fact that opposition to monarchical rule, specifically rule by this monarchy, is one of the founding ideals of our nation.

Fine.  Whatever.  There are a lot stupider things that people watch on television, and adults are allowed to pitter away their time on such frivolities as the Kardashian sisters, giant inedible cakes, or even this wedding.  Adults are going to do what adults are going to do.  But, I ask you this, Martha: are you really going to watch this with your four-year-old daughter? 

Martha’s Counter-Point:  A Little Princess-time With Mommy Can’t Hurt

What can I say Patrick, you’re right.  The media frenzy around this wedding is ridiculous.  It absolutely perpetuates every stereotype that I have tried to keep away from Charlie and may usher in a princess phase that is far worse than the Disney-mandated one that she seems finally to be growing out of.  And yet, not only am I going to watch it with her, I’m keeping her home from school and making a special day of it.  (Nobody yell, it’s preschool, also known as daycare, she won’t be missing any SAT prep.) 

Here’s the thing; I think it’s going to be fun.

Read more

The Clearwater Paper Corp. in Lewistown, Idaho chose the king cobra to symbolize its workplace safety program. A cobra. One of the deadliest snakes on the planet.

Every day on his way to and from work at Clearwater, John Bergen III drove past a billboard in the company parking lot sporting a picture of a king cobra and the explanation that it represented the company’s behavior-based safety program – Changing Our Behavior Reduces Accidents – COBRA.

Bergen, a devoted father, a gifted artist and a conscientious worker who urged everyone to observe safety rules, died last summer after inadvertently stepping through a gaping opening in the floor of the Clearwater Paper mill.

Behavior-based workplace safety programs like COBRA are attempts by corporations to shirk responsibility to eliminate hazards by blaming workers instead. When workers die, behavior-based programs disrespect the deceased by blaming them for their own deaths. These safety programs say to Bergen’s young son, “Your daddy’s dead because he wasn’t careful enough.”

These programs are cruel. They don’t work. And they must stop. This Workers Memorial Day, a day on which we honor those killed in the workplace and recommit ourselves to ending the slaughter, workers and their families across America demand an end to “blame the worker” safety programs.

Last year, among those killed on the job were 44 members of my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), which represents industrial workers including those in the paper sector. That is nearly one a week. Bergen was among them. His friends Jesse and Nigell Hutson wrote after his death:

“Such a tragic loss for everyone. He will be missed more than words can say. We love you, John.”

Over the past 18 years, the number of Steelworkers who died on the job has remained tragically constant, at about one every 10 to 12 days. So far this year, 11 Steelworkers died at work.

The stubborn consistency of the death toll demonstrates that the corporate-favored behavior-based safety programs achieve nothing.

The premise of behavior-based safety is that employees can work around hazards if they are just careful enough — if they are ever vigilant. “You are looking at the person responsible for your safety,” these programs proclaim on stickers attached to workplace mirrors. One behavior-based safety consultant actually counseled that if there were an opening in the shop floor, the employer should leave it there because repairing it would give workers a false sense of security.

Al Chapanis, an expert on workplace safety, explained why behavior-based programs fail to keep workers safe. Chapanis was a professor of psychology and industrial engineering at Johns Hopkins University and a founder of ergonomics — the branch of engineering that considers product and workplace design from the physical point of view of the actual user.

“Everyone, and that includes you and me, is at some time careless, complacent, overconfident and stubborn. At times each of us becomes distracted, inattentive, bored and fatigued. We occasionally take chances; we misunderstand; we misinterpret, and we misread. These are completely human characteristics. . . Because we are human and because all these traits are fundamental and built into each of us, the equipment, machines and systems that we construct for our use have to be made to accommodate us the way we are, and not vice versa.”

His message is simple: eliminate or control the workplace hazard. Cover the opening in the floor or at least surround it with a guard railing; don’t expect ever-vigilant workers to walk around it because humans aren’t ever-vigilant. Change the workplace because human nature won’t change.

In behavior based programs like Clearwater Paper’s COBRA, observers scrutinize workers’ performance. Their reports say: These workers acted like humans this many times today. They don’t say: There’s a giant gaping opening in the floor and someone might fall through it to their death!

At the Clearwater Paper Corp. plant in Lewistown, Idaho, the COBRA safety program failed to correct a gaping opening in the floor.

On June 30, late in the evening, 35-year-old John Bergen, a third generation paper worker and model employee, attempted to remove jammed paper from what was called the third auxiliary roll, a massive steel roller with paper wrapped around it. It stood above two other giant steel rolls of paper.

Bergen reached above his head with a knife and sliced into the paper. Beginning at one end, he walked forward, dragging the knife through the paper. Another worker, who was kneeling on a landing above the rolls, reached down and cut starting from the other end.

As Bergen scored the paper above his head, he stepped into a huge opening in the floor, two feet wide by four and a half feet long. He fell through to a conveyer belt below. There, unconscious, he was delivered to a 1,500-gallon hydrapulper tank, where he suffocated.

The opening in the floor accommodated a particular paper process called “thread up.” When that process was not occurring, a hatch was to be placed over the opening. But when the thread up process was done, vibrations caused the hatch to fall, covering the opening and thwarting the threading.

Someone tied the hatch open to keep production running. Afterward, the opening in the floor remained uncovered. In addition, no guard railing enclosed the opening to prevent workers from falling in. An inspection of the opening revealed post holders around it that could have secured a guard railing. But the railing was missing. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited and fined Clearwater for not covering the hole or providing a railing.

Bergen died because of design and maintenance flaws. Clearwater’s COBRA did not work because the philosophy behind blame-the-worker programs is fatally flawed.

Today, in Lewiston, Idaho, the two USW local unions that represent workers at the Clearwater plant, will conduct a special Workers Memorial Day ceremony honoring John Bergen III and other fallen workers.

Clearwater, and employers across America, must stop trying to cover their culpability with “blame the worker” programs and, instead, cover dangerous floor openings — which means pursuing life-saving and worker-respecting workplace hazard elimination and control.