Montebello E-News

June 12, 2008  

For better or worse, editing is what editors are for; and editing is selection and choice of material. That editors-newspaper or broadcast-can and do abuse this power is beyond doubt, but that is no reason to deny the discretion Congress provided.
Warren Earl Burger, 1907 – 1995,
was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1969 to 1986. Although Burger was a conservative and considered a strict constructionist, still under his leadership, the United States Supreme Court delivered a variety of major decisions on abortion, capital punishment, religious establishment, and school desegregation.  

[If government cannot, must not, step in to stop editorial abuse, that means that we the public must.  How do we do that, because dishonest and negligent reporting affects our decisions and actions?]  

1.  It’s Fine If You Whine

2.  It’s a Small World after All, Part 5

3. Announcements

4. Fun Facts about Rhode Island

5. The Flashback Quarterback:  The International Mafia in Montebello?

6. Be Aware and Share:  Italian Magic

7. About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello”

 It’s Fine If You Whine  

In my work, I visit government Web sites at times.  I notice that they have two things in common, namely,  

·        a means for somebody to complain and

·        no means for somebody to share an idea.  

Examples of such Web sites:  Los Angeles Police Department, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.  

To me, there is an unhappy conclusion underlying this “You can complain, but do not strain the brain.”  These agencies do not want to partner with us, the public, perhaps because  

·        they believe that we would have nothing useful to offer or

·        we believe that we would have nothing useful to offer or

·        they are not interested in changing the status quo.  

Whichever belief is correct, we have a problem, as they become our inflexible patrons and protectors, while we become the hopeless and helpless.  Such a relationship is not good for democracy, more so when a growing population and scarcer resources point to the need for us, the public, to take more charge of our lives. 

If you answer the multiple-choice questions below and e-mail to lessonanswers@mymontebello.com with “Lesson answers” in the subject field, you will be credited toward a “certificate of recognition in community affairs” to be awarded in 2008 by a local nonprofit organization. 

 1. What is government thinking?

(a) That we, the public, complain too much.

(b) That we, the public, have no useful ideas to offer.

(c) That its job is the preservation of the status quo.  

2. What is the consequence of government’s thinking?

(a) We, the public, do not learn to care for ourselves.

(b) Government becomes an impediment to needed change.  

 The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., 1924 – 2006,
 was a liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist with international stature. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ.  In his younger days he was a superb athlete, a highly talented pianist, a CIA agent, and later chaplain of Yale University, where the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's social philosophy led him to become a leader in the civil-rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  

Have you thought about getting away, about being left alone and leaving others alone?  As the population of our planet increases and the amount of land upon which we can live remains unchanged—if not, in fact, decreasing—this dream of many becomes a fading, wistful thought.  

In the previous part, we looked at an inspiring music program for poor children in Venezuela and asked whether the people behind such a program should have a larger, permanent, voice in government.  (Imagine if people of goodwill, instead of people of strong will, ran the world.)  In this part, we look at an inexpensive way to win the hearts and minds of the world’s young.  Conceived by people of goodwill?

Newsweek, April 15, 2008  

“Jihadi Cool”  

Comic book action heroes may be better weapons against terror than bullets or bombs.  

Scott Atran is an anthropologist who studies the kids who keep Al Qaeda and its spinoffs going. They're young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005 and hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006.  

Atran has looked at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them. And he's reached an unconventional but, to me, convincing conclusion: what has inspired the "new wave" terrorists since 2001 is not so much the Qur'an as what Atran calls "jihadi cool." If you can discredit these kids' idols (most notably Osama bin Laden), give them new ones and reframe the way their families and friends see the United States and its allies, then you've got a good shot at killing the fad for terror and stopping the jihad altogether.  

For Atran, a senior fellow at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, this is pretty much Public Diplomacy 101. But he's found that the battle of ideas is not just hard to win in the field, it's a very tough slog at home.  In Washington last year he was briefing White House staffers on his findings when a young woman who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney said in the sternest tough-guy voice she could muster, "Don't these young people realize that the decisions they make are their responsibility, and that if they choose violence against us, we're going to bomb them?"

Atran was dumbfounded. "Bomb them?" he asked. "In Madrid? In London?"

So when Atran went back to Washington to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed—with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration's warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called "The 99."

The comics are the creation of Kuwaiti psychologist and entrepreneur Naif Al-Mutawa, and—let me make a confession here—I've been reading them since my colleague Florence Villeminot first wrote about them early last year. My reasons for following the series are probably as atavistic as analytic. I grew up with Marvel and DC comics, spending my impressionable pubescence getting deep into the gothic drama of Batman, delighting in the athletic insolence of Spider-Man, savoring the unsublimated sexuality of the women in X-Men. And, yes, there's something of all of that in "The 99," with its hulking fighters and sultry enforcers. ...  For the rest of the article, http://www.newsweek.com/id/132147.

FOR EVERYONE.  Commission meeting.  The Montebello City Planning Commission is holding its regularly-scheduled meeting on Tuesday, June 17, 2008, at 7 p.m. at city hall.  The meeting is open to the public.  For more information, 323.887.1200.  

FOR MOTORISTS AND RESIDENTS.  Traffic tickets bring Montebello money.  Some cities, including Walnut, Santa Clarita and Montebello, have netted tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars above camera operating costs, officials say. … June 6, 2008. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-redlightmoney6-2008jun06,0,1041866.story.  It would have been good if the article had given statistics about the reduced number of injuries, deaths, and property damage.  

FOR EVERYONE.  Beverly Hospital recognized.  ... For the second consecutive year, HealthGrades, the leading independent healthcare ratings company, has ranked Beverly Hospital among the elite Five Percent [sic] of all hospitals nationwide, receiving high honors. ...  From Spotlight on Montebello, May – June, 2008.  For more information, go to "When Montebello Goes National" at www.mymontebello.com/best_tc.

Rhode Island is the smallest state in size in the United States. It covers an area of 1,214 square miles.  Its distances north to south are forty-eight miles and east to west thirty-seven miles.

Rhode Island was the last of the original thirteen colonies to become a state.

Rhode Island never ratified the Eighteenth Amendment prohibition.  [Do you wonder why not?  Did they foresee the problem which ensued?]

Rhode Island has no county government.  It is divided into thirty-nine municipalities, each having its own form of local government.  [And our San Francisco has a combined city council and county board of supervisors.  Why?]

The first circus in the United States was in Newport in 1774.  [What do you imagine a circus did back then?]

Rhode Island is home to the tennis hall of fame.

Rhode Island’s official state name is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  [Good as a "Jeopardy" question.]

George M. Cohan was born in Providence in 1878.  He wrote, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and a wide variety of other musical entertainment.

Rhode Islanders were the first to take military action against England by sinking one of her ships in the Narragansett Bay located between Newport and Providence.  The English ship was called “The Gaspee”. [I imagine the reference is to the Revolutionary War.  Probably a sneak attack, as is now being done to us in Iraq.]

Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, established the first practical working model of democracy after he was banished from Plymouth, Massachusetts, because of his “extreme views” concerning freedom of speech and religion.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams publicly acknowledged Roger Williams as the originator of the concepts and principles reflected in the First Amendment.  Among those principles were freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of public assembly. [Now, this is interesting.]

Though second in command to George Washington, Nathaniel Greene, a Rhode Islander, is acknowledged by many historians as having been the most capable and significant general of the Revolutionary effort.  Cornwallis feared Greene and his forces most. Greene ultimately defeated Cornwallis.

New England’s oldest Masonic Temple in Warren was built in the eighteenth century with timbers from British frigates sunk in Newport Harbor during the Revolutionary War. [Speaking of recycling.]

The Touro Synagogue is the oldest synagogue in North America.  Built in 1763, the synagogue houses the oldest torah in North America.

The first Afro-American regiment to fight for America made a gallant stand against the British in the Battle of Rhode Island.  [And some blacks in the South fought against the Yankees because the British promised them freedom.]

Jerimoth Hill is the state’s highest point at eight hundred twelve feet above sea level.  [How much flatter can a state become?]

Salon.com, April 16, 2008

“Criminals of the World, Unite and Take Over”  

In "McMafia," author Misha Glenny takes us on a startling tour of the new international underworld, documenting the hidden costs of an unregulated global free market.  

In 2003, a joint operation of British intelligence, the Bulgarian police, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Spanish police and the Bolivian Special Antitrafficking Force pulled off a bust that netted the largest amount of cocaine ever seized.  The drug was hidden among blocks of medicinal clay destined for Madrid and also, authorities soon discovered, mixed into 770 boxes of powdered mashed potatoes set to be shipped to Varna, Bulgaria, via Chile. A couple of years earlier, a Colombian drug cartel (the source of the shipment) had smuggled a chemist into Bulgaria, where he trained Soviet-educated chemists to extract the coke from various seemingly innocuous substances. ...  

For Misha Glenny, a journalist specializing in the Balkans and author of the new book "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld," the smuggling operation was a prime example of what he calls the "internationalization of organized crime," a phenomenon that has flourished over the past two decades.  Estimates suggest that crime accounts for almost one-fifth of the planet's gross domestic product, he reports, and "McMafia" is a sprawling, pell-mell tour of the world's shadow economies, ranging from Russia to Israel to the Mideast, as well as India, Africa and Latin America.  Glenny even makes it to western Canada, a seemingly mellow region that, due to the proliferating industry of marijuana cultivation, "is home to the largest per capita concentration of organized criminal syndicates in the world." ...  

The reasons for this outrageous blossoming of so many flowers of evil are, according to Glenny, essentially twofold.  "The collapse of ... the Soviet Union is the single most important event prompting the exponential growth of organized crime around the world in the past two decades," he writes.  A key event in that breakdown was the bizarrely selective deregulation of the Soviet economy.  The officials under Boris Yeltsin who executed this "reform," for reasons not entirely clear, liberalized the prices of everything but Russia's natural resources: oil, gas, diamonds and metals.  Those lucky enough to get ahold of these commodities at the artificially low, state-mandated prices could turn around and sell them at market rate to the rest of the world.  The result was the overnight creation of a generation of Russian oligarchs and "quite simply the grandest larceny in history." ...  

We did the world a favor by bringing down the Soviet Union, right?  Another example of LOCO, that is, unintended consequences.

From Euronews, April 14, 2008.  Translation below.  Note the percentage of people who voted.  

Der 71jährige Multimilliardär und Medientycoon hat es wieder geschafft. Nach 1994 und 2001 wird er nun zum dritten Mal Regierungschef in Rom. Zwei Tage hatten die fast 50 Millionen wahlberechtigten Italiener Zeit an die Urnen zu gehen. Schon bei seine Stimmabgabe an Sonntag schien Il Cavliere zu ahnen, daß er gewinnen wird.

In den Umfragen lag er mit seiner rechten Sammelbewegung "Volk der Freiheit" immer vorne. Mit von der Partie ist die rechtspopulistische Lega Nord von Umberto Bossi.

Die Wahlbeteiligung war diesmal mit 80,4 Prozent etwas geringer als vor zwei Jahren. In Italien herrscht Wahlpflicht. Jedoch wer seine Stimme nicht abgibt, muß keine Sanktionen fürchten.  

The seventy-one year old multi-billionaire and media tycoon has done it again.  Following from 1994 and 2001, he has become the head of government in Rome for the third time.  The nearly fifty million Italian voters had two days to go to the polls.  When he voted on Sunday, “the Knight” [can also be translated as “the Cavalier”] already suspected that he would win.  In surveys, he and his rightwing movement, “People of Freedom,” were always ahead.  Aligned with the party is the populist North League of Umberto Bossi.  Participation in the election was 80.4 percent this time, somewhat less than two years ago.  In Italy there is a duty to vote.  However, he who does not vote need not fear sanctions.

To learn about this newsletter, Montebello E-News, and the accompanying, growing Web site, “My Montebello”, visit www.mymontebello.com.  Also, you will find instructions and contact information for submitting announcements for publication in this newsletter, and for submitting stories to “Montebello Memories” at the Web site.