On George Soros, Occupy Wall Street, and Reuters

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The Banks Are Made of Marble

Over the weekend, a CBS News blogger covering the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations happened on someone singing “The Banks are Made of Marble,” a tune Pete Seeger and The Weavers covered.

The banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for…

This was an encore performance, of sorts: Peter Yarrow (of Peter Paul and Mary fame) sang the tune for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators last weekend. People have been tweeting links to the song on YouTube; they were singing the song at Occupy Cincinnati.
This simple little song — which so nicely captures the spirit of the music the Weavers, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie made — is everywhere in this movement. Maybe Occupy Wall Street will bring about a resurgence of simple little songs like this — songs that tell the truth about people’s lives, songs that everybody can sing.
And maybe that’s why the story of the 1913 Massacre resonates more powerfully now than ever before. For Woody, what happened at Italian Hall in 1913 was a story about what was happening in America in the 1930s and 1940s, a story about “greed for money” and the destruction it leaves in its wake.
And greed is what the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are all about: it’s almost as if these protests are the long-awaited answer to Gordon Gekko’s infamous “Greed is good.”
The connections are there, waiting to be made; it’s 1913 or 1937 or 1941 all over again. That’s why for Arlo Guthrie, the Italian Hall disaster as captured in Woody’s song is almost an archetypal event, or at least an event that helps us (still) understand “who we are and where we came from”; it gains and gathers meaning, tying past to present. As he says at one point in the film:

These events are like stones in a pond that have waves that go way into the future. This is where I think my dad was at his best: thinking about these things, wondering about them.

The story of what happened in Calumet is not just a story about what happened in 1913. That’s a very important story, because it left an indelible mark on many people’s lives, on a whole town, on the country. But as many people have said to us after watching the film, the real “massacre” in the town and in people’s lives seems to have taken place — or continued — long after the 1913 event. And now, it appears, the event is still unfolding, 100 years after the fact.
@'1913 Massacre'

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Inside Obama's War Room

President Barack Obama and Vice President JoeBiden attend a meeting on Libya in the Situation Room of the White House. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

On the afternoon of monday, March 14th, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy stood nervously in the lounge of Le Bourget Airport on the outskirts of Paris, waiting for a private jet carrying a lone Libyan rebel to land. At 62, Lévy is one of France's most famous writers and provocateurs, a regular fixture in the tabloids, where he's known simply as BHL. He rarely goes a month without controversy – whether defending the reputations of accused sex offenders like Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or waging one-man foreign-policy campaigns that usually end in failure. In 1993, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade President François Mitterrand to intervene in the Balkans. In 2001, he personally arranged for Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Massoud to meet with President Jacques Chirac, only to have the French Foreign Ministry scuttle the trip for fear of angering the Taliban. Now, as he anxiously paced the airport lounge, he was embarking on what would turn out to be one of the most audacious and improbable feats of amateur diplomacy in modern history.
Wearing his trademark outfit – designer suit, no tie, white shirt unbuttoned to reveal a deeply tanned chest – Lévy was waiting for the arrival of Mahmoud Jibril, the leader of the Libyan rebels who had been fighting for three weeks to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi. Lévy had secretly helped arrange for a meeting in Paris later that day between Jibril and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Prodded by Lévy, France had granted formal recognition to the Libyan opposition, known as the National Transitional Council. But no other European country had followed France's lead, and the uprising now appeared in danger of being crushed by Qaddafi, who had just launched an all-out military counteroffensive. Both Lévy and Jibril believed that getting the support of the Americans was the rebels' last hope. "If he doesn't succeed with Clinton," Lévy thought, "all we achieved in France this past week will have been for nothing."
But the meeting with Clinton had already run into a serious snag. Jibril, a 58-year-old political scientist who once taught at the University of Pittsburgh, had been detained at customs. Though he had been received in the Élysée Palace only days before for a meeting Lévy had arranged with President Nicolas Sarkozy, Jibril did not have official clearance to re-enter France. As the hours ticked away, the 5 p.m. time slot for the meeting with Clinton came and went. Lévy scrambled to reschedule. "At six she had a meeting with Sarkozy, at eight was a dinner or something with the G8," he told me recently in St. Paul de Vence, his home in the south of France. "It was very complicated." The consequences of the delay, he feared, could be catastrophic.
After Jibril finally cleared customs, Lévy succeeded in getting Clinton's last free moment of the night before she flew on to Cairo – 10 p.m. in her hotel suite. Lévy and Jibril took a black Mercedes sedan from the Raphael, the luxury hotel in Paris where Lévy lives when in the city, to the Westin, where Clinton was staying.
Forty-five minutes later, Jibril emerged from the meeting. "He goes out furious, he goes out fuming," Lévy recalls. "He was convinced he had failed." Coached by Lévy, Jibril had urged Clinton to support a no-fly zone, arm the rebels and launch attacks on Qaddafi's army. If the U.S. failed to intervene, he warned, there would be mass killings, just as there had been after Bill Clinton failed to take action in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s. But Hillary appeared unmoved by the plea, and Jibril was distraught. To avoid reporters who were traveling with Clinton, Jibril left the hotel through a back entrance.
Lévy and Jibril returned to the Raphael. At 1 a.m., they sat down to write a press release – a desperate call for support that was, Lévy says, "implicitly addressed to the Americans." "Friends around the world!" it implored, "Libya's freedom is in danger of death – come to our rescue... Don't let the Arab Spring die in Benghazi." They finished an hour later, but decided to hold off until morning before hitting SEND. Jibril was scheduled to fly back to Qatar, where the National Transitional Council had set up a base of operations. "Then we waited," Lévy told me. What, he wondered before going to sleep that night, would President Obama do...?

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EdwynCollins Edwyn Collins

Here's @vic_godard 's bio : Vic Godard is a vocalist, Subway Sect front man, songwriter & postman. Add: genius.

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Photojournalism Behind the Scenes

Presentation of Photojournalism Behind the Scenes, an auto-critical photo essay showing the paradoxes of conflict-image production and considering the role of the photographer in the events.
This project was awarded the Photodreaming Contest organized by Forma Foundation in which I was then selected by Denis Curti, the director of Contrasto (the major photo-agency in Italy, which represents Magnum's work in the country and for which the top Italian photographers work) to shoot an assignment for the prestigious agency.
rubensalvadori.com
for publications or any other info and comment contact me at info@rubensalvadori.com

Exposing the 'Invisible Photographer' Behind Conflict Journalism

A Closer Look at the Haqqani Anniversary Attack on American-Afghan Outposts

American forces fired 105-millimeter artillery toward an insurgent rocket position near the Pakistan border after being attacked on the 10th anniversary of the Afghan war.

FORWARD OPERATING BASE ORGUN-E, Afghanistan – Last Friday, on the 10th anniversary of the start of the Afghan war, at least several dozen fighters from the Haqqani insurgent network launched a complex attack against multiple American-Afghan outposts near the Pakistan border.
Firing scores of high-explosive rockets and mortar rounds, they struck nearly simultaneously at outposts occupied by the 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, and, using a tactic that has succeeded elsewhere, they tried to breach one of the positions with a suicide truck bomb and a contingent of gunmen on foot.
The significance of the attack was, as is often the case, a matter of uncertainty and dispute. The American-led NATO command framed the Haqqani attack as a failure. In the tactical sense this might be so. For all of the effort, the attackers managed to wound only one American soldier, and his wounds were not serious. American machine guns, artillery, attack helicopters and aircraft, firing munitions throughout much of the day, stopped the advancing fighters short of an outpost they apparently had hoped to overrun.
But as a strategic matter, the attack came with a message some soldiers found startling, if grudgingly so. It showed that even after the Pentagon has had its troop levels at a peak for two full so-called fighting seasons, the insurgents who crisscross between Pakistan and Afghanistan remained able to plan complicated attacks and to mass fighters and weapons against multiple American bases at once. And their rocket and mortar fire was accurate. Many rounds, fired from the distance, struck squarely within the outposts – a feat that suggested a considerable degree of training and skill.
Moreover, though all of the Haqqani firing positions were within Afghanistan, some of them were within hundreds of yards of the border with Pakistan – a fact pointing toward the sanctuary from where, soldiers said, the coordinated assault was likely planned and where the dozens of 107-millimeter rockets fired against the American soldiers were probably acquired.
And then there was this question: What might happen in a similar attack against Afghan outposts without American military presence?
The relative weakness of the Afghan security forces was on full display. This battle was fought with American communications networks and American firepower. The distant Haqqani firing positions and an apparent cluster of Haqqani fighters were stopped or silenced by a suite of modern American weapons systems — helicopter gunships, artillery, attack aircraft and GPS-guided bombs — that the Afghans either do not possess or do not know how to use. One example: Lt. Col. John V. Meyer, the battalion’s commander, said that 14,000 pounds of munitions were dropped from aircraft during the daylong fight.
(At Forward Operating Base Tillman, where the photographer Tyler Hicks and I were present for the fighting, the Afghan soldiers did not participate at all. As the rockets came in and American officers and noncommissioned officers tracked the battle in an operations room, and coordinated and calibrated their return fire from the gun line, the Afghan Army representatives in the room excused themselves, left the room for roughly 30 minutes and returned with plates of food. Beyond that poorly timed display of appetite, they did nothing further that could be observed.)
But for the moment, let’s set the larger analysis aside, and be reminded of something else. It is one of the things that conventional infantry soldiers are often told, and sometimes get to see: that there are moments in war when one or two alert people, properly equipped and willing to act, can determine the local outcome of a fight...