A BRIEF HISTORY OF TORTURE

Back in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous Torquemada didn't have to bother producing the "metrics" or data that would prove the productiveness of torture. This is because the confessions of so-called heretics had no intrinsic significance. Nearly everyone confesses under torture, regardless of whether they have anything important to confess. Torture, after all, is an instrument of terror. Former Vice-President Cheney was an advocate of torturing prisoners in US military custody. He still crows about it; he is still quoted on cable news, saying that we need more waterboarding, more criminal mistreatment of our prisoners, more and more of the inhumanity--and only then will we be safe as a nation.

Whatever it is that makes civilization so civilized went missing during the Bush and Cheney administration. Admittedly, there have been crimes tucked away from sight by this National Security State, since the Vietnam War ended; but the vulgarisms and the crimes committed wantonly by the past administration have represented such a break with traditions and law, as to leave most of us dumbfounded or in a state of shock. With torture policy released through the chain of command, these leaders severed all ties with decency, soiling themselves and their country.

It was frankly disconcerting to see how wildly the staff at Langley, CIA Headquarters, cheered President Obama, when he paid them a visit recently, and gave assurance that none of their interrogators would be brought up on charges for "following orders". On the other hand, our new president, to his credit, has signaled his willingness to let justice take its course, if evidence points toward the architects, major figures in the former administration. Those who manipulated and subverted the law, and the decision makers who threw in their lot with the torturers, will need lawyers if they hope to make a defense in court.

The Bush White House was at war with law, against both US law and international legal norms, which were the law of the land under treaty obligations the US government had supported and signed.

Sam Stark's 2007 February essay in Harper's, Flaming Bitumen, Romancing the Algerian War, builds upon Alistair Horne's historical account of the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s.

[Historian Alistair Horne] shows the psychological trauma [torture] imposes on those ordered to commit it, as well as the corrosion of military discipline and morale that spreads as exceptions to the laws of war become the norm. Donald Rumsfeld, it is reassuring to know, received a personal copy of A Savage War of Peace, alerting him to such relevant passages as the chilling words of Paul Teitgen, a former hero of the Resistance, who, as secretary-general of Algiers, recognized in Algerian prisoners "profound traces of the cruelties and tortures that I personally suffered fourteen years ago in the Gestapo cellars." "Once you get into the torture business,' Teitgen told Horne in an interview, "you're lost...All our so-called civilization is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear." " (my bold)

Fear, wearing a mask of bravado and daring, could be seen on the faces of those French colons who were proud to have their pictures taken for the bloody news stories, standing in front of heaps of Arab corpses, men whom they had tortured and executed. French men and women reading the stories, absorbed in the photos, were horrified at the cost of "victory" in Algiers. How could they live in a world with their Arab brothers, those who presumably belonged to the same culture, the same language, after such crimes had been committed? The conclusion, the consensus in metropolitan France, was that such a victory could never be worth the cost.

Americans still have to live in the same world with populations its military is regularly mutilating and killing. This is a war in which no end is predicted. A war that has included torture of captives: waterboarding, beatings, extreme sensory deprivation for men in solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, stress positions, terrorizing with dogs, sexual humiliation, anal rape with broomsticks and other objects;...and the list goes on.

America's leaders have yet to explain how a war waged at such a cost, a war that is never contained, but always expanding, can either be won, or end.

PIRATE IMBROGLIOS AND MEDIA SALIVATIONS

CNN simplifies it for you: civilized nations si, pirates no. The human interest story of an American merchant captain tossed into the lifeboat and his voyage through dread in the hands of three Somalian pirates, in waters off the Horn of Africa, is one of those stirring soap operas you won't forget until a few days have passed. Watching CNN and Fox News, it becomes more and more evident that the public is being constantly doped up on yellow journalism, fear, and sentimentality. And news anchor, Wolf Blitzer, is titillated by the suggestion that news broadcasts are not so much about informing the viewers, as in making sure they take a timely delivery on all the things they would be pleased to learn. For instance, the saga of the Portugese Waterdog that the Obama children have named, Bo.

The orchestra sat on its hands; there was no crescendo of Victory at Sea when three pirates were shot dead, in a combined operation of Navy Seals and the US ships and aircraft that supported the operation. One is breathless, nonetheless. And who isn't impressed at such a daunting rescue? And all snark and sarcasm aside, who is unmoved by a beaming, bearded American sea captain, who is relieved that his ordeal is over?-- not to mention the sight of his wife in tears, in the grips of laryngitis, barely able to speak, to stammer out her thankfulness to the heroes who saved her husband?-- and flanked by older children, a daughter and a son, with stunned expressions on their faces? And then the mood of grandeur, the pièce de resistance: to make it an affair of state, to ennoble it, the report cuts to the president of the USA, Barack Obama.

But what have we not been told? What is the backstory? What events preceded this week's episode of Heroes? Well it's only been a short while since the Bush administration basically hired the Ethiopian army to invade Somalia, and topple its Islamic government. The Ethiopians have withdrawn, leaving the nation prostrate and in the grip of political anarchy. Then there is the consideration of what so-called civilized nations have been doing in the waters off the coast of Somalia.

London Independent Columnist, Johann Hari, writes in Huffington Post that European nations have abused the fishing grounds off the coast of Somalia; and since an earlier collapse of government in that nation, have polluted its sea lanes and coast.

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged.

To summarize this little pocket of history, it seems that at the very moment that the Islamic Courts government had brought some stability to Somalia, in the belly of the beast that was Bush/Cheney, was brought forth the cunning plan to push the people of that country back into chaos, using a little Ethiopian muscle. Most Americans are sadly unaware of the chain of events; and cable news and the big network establishments are nothing if not scrupulous at keeping them dumbed down and barefoot, as they stare vacantly at the latest action thriller, while Wolf Blitzer holds the simple script for simple minds. The power and majesty of the United States of America.

copeland morris DRAWING WATER

A belief in words is like water captured,
What you drew from the well, whatever
The sketch became under your hand. It was
Dressed up like a raincloud. It lay in the swells
Of the ocean. It had as many moods
As the seasons reveal, shifting as I longed
To be near you. There is a rhythm in what
I would say; though when I heard your voice
My own words were paralyzed. Years become
Reservoirs into which thoughts have pooled.
There is a Hausa saying--"It is with the body's
Water that one draws water from the well."

CHOMSKY THINKS GEITHNER BANK PLAN IS MUCH LIKE BUSH/PAULSON POLICY

ONE DAY THE BOTTOM WILL FALL OUT

This week the doomsaying over the world financial crisis became hard to ignore. In a Reuters report, Paul Volcher was quoted as saying, "I don't remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world". George Soros likened the current tailspin to the financial collapse of the Soviet Union, a turbulence more severe than the Great Depression. (Pedro Nicolaci da Casta/Juan Logoria reporting)

According to Soros, the financial system worldwide has "effectively disintegrated".

Topping the list of radical measures to meet this crisis, we have the idea of nationalizing the banks, and the less discussed notion of abolishing the Federal Reserve altogether, and printing "greenback" dollars, as Lincoln did during the Civil War. This was money not borrowed nor beholden to interest payments, but created from whole cloth, so to speak, on the full faith and credit of the USA.

The world today has stepped into a hole, and no one yet knows how deep it is. The terrible danger is in not being able to put a reliable number on the numerous debts and defaults that the banks are holding.

The best argument for nationalization of the banks is that it would make all the "toxic" papers visible. This would act like a formal bankruptcy proceeding; by audit and evaluation of all holdings, examiners could be able to advise as to invalidating the credit swaps or making the necessary markdown of assets. Some debt would be written off in this process.

Without such examination and consolidation, it seems futile to try piecemeal bailouts for banks, on the order of a $trillion or a $trillion-and-a-half, against an occult debt, that may run to the tens of trillions of dollars. But this is the avowed policy of the new administration, plus a supplement of around $800 billion to stimulate the economy.

Abraham Lincoln believed a government had the power to issue its own currency, and was not bound or obligated to borrow it from private sector sources. The Federal Reserve is a collection of powerful banking interests, which have insinuated their way into the status of a "semi-governmental agency", by the power of compound interest. We might want to change that at some point.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled to China this week, with hat in hand, it has been said. And under the circumstances, the Chinese are not altogether happy with the posturing of certain American politicians, who accuse China of manipulating its currency, the yuan. And the Obama administration includes some of those trying to scapegoat China; but the light has not yet gone on in American heads to acknowledge that US lifestyles are to some degree negotiable, contrary to longstanding belief, since all other nations are beset by this calamity. There is undoubtedly a lot Americans can learn from the collapse of the late Soviet Union. Dmitry Orlov recently gave a speech to a small audience in San Francisco, where he outlined what he calls Social Collapse Best Practices, a concise guide to coping with the kind of meltdown the Russians experienced; and he describes how they were able to survive that ordeal. Orlov has long predicted that the US was headed for the kind of breakdown that befell the Soviets.

Thanks is owed to blogger, badger, for catching a translation of this excellent report by Frederico Rampini, from Italy's La Reppublica:

The palpable tension on the upper floors of China's leadership structure is proportionate to the wealth that Beijing has entrusted to its great overseas debtor. Fang Shangpu, the head of China's foreign exchange bureau, makes this very clear: "America must protect the interests of foreign investors. Its currency is China's number one foreign investment". With 2,000 billion dollars in official foreign currency reserves, Beijing's central bank is the richest on the planet. But that war-chest is subject to de facto sterilization. Its destination is obligatory: US Treasury Bonds, yet again, as always. In 2008 China bought a further 700 billion of them. Every US treasuries auction would fail if the Chinese central bankers did not turn up to play the role of kind-hearted creditor. And this situation continues despite the exchange-rate losses they have already suffered : since China's renminbi abandoned its fixed parity to the dollar (in July 2005) it has risen by 21%, thereby decreasing the value of China's dollar investments to an equal extent.

Meanwhile, the social costs of the US locomotive's crash are extremely severe. In the third quarter of 2008, as a result of the fall in exports, China's growth rate was brutally halved: 6.8% in GDP growth as compared to 13% in 2007. Following the mass layoffs in the textile, toys and electronics industries, the unemployed workers forced back into the rural economy now officially number around 27 million. Over a million and a half young college graduates too are unemployed: an even more politically explosive army of discontents. Now that Beijing needs to mobilize all available resource to relaunch its domestic growth, it is frustrating to remember those 2,000 billion dollars "frozen" to finance America.

The straw that has broken the camel's back is the revival of protectionism in Washington. First Treasury secretary Tim Geithner accused Beijing of "manipulating" its currency. Then came the Buy American clause in the 787 billion dollar public expenditure package launched by Congress, with Chinese steel as its number-one target. Xi Jinping, China's vice president and designated heir to the supreme leadership position, is furious. He too briefly abandons the language of diplomacy: "Even in this crisis", says Xi, "certain westerners seem to have nothing better to do than pick on us. I would like to remind them of some of our merits. Firstly, China does not export revolutions or hostile ideologies. Secondly, we do not export poverty or hunger. Thirdly, we do not export armed conflicts".

The seething resentment in these words does not yet mark the end of Chimerica. With Mrs Clinton the regime's leaders will rehearse the continuation of a constructive dialogue, convinced as they are that aggravating the global recession would benefit no-one. But in the light of mainstreet America's increasing hostility towards them, the leadership of the People's Republic is studying a "Plan B". Its most audacious moves include using the country's massive currency reserves for new purposes: to finance buy-ups of deposits of raw materials in other countries, ranging from Australia to Africa to Latin America. A reconversion that would have heavy consequences: a blow to the stability of the dollar, a worrying shortfall in treasury funding for Washington. However, the decision to step over this fatal threshold has not yet been reached: "We hate you but we can't do without you" is still the key sentiment in the present phase. But even Confucian patience has its limits.

What should we make of the power relationship between China and the US? One is the ascendant power, the other a power in decline. The world's manufactured goods are being made by the lender, while the borrower is the world's most strung out consumer and debt addict. Grab those dollars till they scream, for one day the bottom will fall out.

grayson harper TERRORISTS

Those red devils that whipped
Custer at Little Big Horn
rode into battle spangled and costumed
or stripped naked painted
red yellow charcoal black the color of death
Some decorated their faces with dragonflies
they put handprints on their horses' flanks
drew rings around their horses' eyes
dangled human scalps from spears.
They were terrorists. They flew
screaming through the blue coat troops
unhinging them so they could scarce think
how to work their carbines
scared so bad they shit themselves
then shooting, stabbing,
bashing out their brains with stone clubs.
So there's nothing new about our folk
feeling entitled to invade and murder
darker skinned people in their homes
or slaughter their women and children
while they sleep in their beds,
only these particular ones apparently
weren't interested in our brand of
democracy
but instead decided
maybe they should give the stupid
fuckers something to think about.

ISRAEL MASSACRES CIVILIANS IN GAZA

The carnage Israel is committing in Gaza is entering its third week. This is more of a mass murder than a war, with Palestinian deaths now numbering over 900. Israeli deaths will add up to only 15 or so as things stand now. What is happening is a disproportionate destruction of the weak by the strong. The Israeli Air Force is bombing what is essentially a vast ghetto of one-and-a-half million people. This ghetto is cut off from most outside aid, and has been under economic siege by Israel long before the present hostilities broke out.

American congressmen and US media giants are endlessly versatile when it comes to marketing a case for the Israelis, no matter what cruelty is visited on women and children in Gaza by the IDF. It appears as a novelty whenever any instance provides the Palestinian side of the story.

The Israeli blockade of the necessities of life, supplies they have held up and limited to an insufficient trickle of humanitarian goods, has choked life in Gaza, and made it impossible for the local generators to run, which provide water for a great many families. How often has it been reported that such a strangulation of humanitarian goods is itself an act of war against Gaza and its people?

And what is the sin that the Palestinians committed? Not the unguided rockets which one can say are insignificant compared to the US armaments that the Israelis are using on schools and ambulances, and on neighborhoods where they have wiped out whole families. No this is not a very credible pretext for Israel. The real offence for which the Palestinians are so harshly condemned to death, is that they refuse to renounce the Hamas government they themselves elected. This is what the Israeli leaders will not tolerate.

And then there is the cynical timing of this slaughter to consider. And the veto by the US ambassador to the UN, blocking a cease fire resolution. Here we are at a moment in the US where presidential power is about to be transferred to a new administration. The Bush administration in its last days in office is rushing sophisticated weapons to the leaders of Israel, bunker busting bombs supposedly meant to target Hamas fighters.

And very little light is shed in America upon the tactics Israel pursued against the lawful Hamas government, the habitual use of extrajudicial murder, in what are called its "targeted assassinations", orchestrated as a political front of war against Hamas leaders, the arrest and incarceration of parliamentarians and holders of executive office, or the real campaign of terror against municipal government, the murder of policemen and police cadets.

How should responsible people outside this tragedy react when they learn that half the population of Gaza are only children?

Under international law Israel bears the responsibility, enumerated in that body of law, since it is acknowledged to be an occupying power, with respect to the Palestinians. Under these laws occupiers are expected to behave as if they were the responsible grownups. This ongoing massacre in Gaza exposes the lie of all of Israel's professed humanitarian language and talk of self-defense. There is no self-defense that can be claimed by a powerful oppressing nation over subject peoples.

An article by Nir Rosen, Gaza: the logic of colonial power, exposes the hypocrisy under which the powerful get to name terrorists and define what constitutes terror:

I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose. [...]

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

2009: A NEW YEAR LIKE THIS CALLS FOR DYLAN THOMAS

"DON'T BEND YOUR HEAD DOWN...THE ONLY WAY IS RESISTANCE"

Woman in front of Greek Parliament, in protest, shouts at riot police.

The killing of a 15 year old boy, Andreas Alexis Grigoropolous, by an auxiliary policeman, put the match to a fire of uprising that has spread all across Greece. We don't know whether these unleashed furies will lead to a full insurrection that changes the political landscape fundamentally, or if there will be a repressive backlash, or if the right-center government of Prime Minister Karamanlis will fall, or resign, prompting new elections. But a poll taken in the shadow of this violence shows that the vast majority of Greeks believe this revolt has broad support and is not merely a rebellion of a fringe element. There is a long standing animosity not only against police brutality, but against the collusion of the two major political parties, where crimes committed by those in uniform ultimately go unpunished.

The revolt also seems to address the ruinous impact of privatization upon education, and a dearth of employment for 25% of young people, after they leave school and try to find jobs in their own country. There is also the situation, familiar to us in America, of a government whose agencies have so withered from corruption, that there is little evidence of governing at all, while the enrichment of the rich drives the middle class to a state of desperation. The ravages of class war can no longer be ignored as these kids watch the lives of their parents reduced by debts and overwork. "Graft, of course, goes hand in hand with incompetence," as Maria Margaronis writes, in The Guardian. The uprising has been identified as a burden carried mostly by the very young, who have occupied hundreds of schools in protest throughout the country, and come out bravely into the streets.

It is a revolt of schoolchildren and students, most on the street for the first time. There are reports of children as young as 12 battling riot police, shouting "Cops! Pigs! Murderers!"

The teenagers and twenty-somethings who have come close to toppling the Greek government are not the marginalized; this is no replay of the riots that convulsed Paris in 2005. Many are the sons and daughters of the middle classes, shocked at the killing of one of their own, disgusted with the government's incompetence and corruption, enraged by the broken promises of the education system, scared at the prospect of having to work harder than their exhausted parents. [...]

Police violence is not new, it is just that previous victims have been immigrants or Roma and so do not make the media. As usual when there is social dislocation, the far right has gained strength: the populist Orthodox Rally won 10 seats in parliament for the first time last year, and the neo-fascist Golden Dawn organization is known to have supporters inside the police. Now that the lid has blown off the pressure cooker, repression may take more blatant and more violent forms.

Andreas Alexis Grigoropoulos, 15 years old.

On the walls in front of the Greek Parliament, there is graffiti that reads "Alexis, these nights are for you." Throughout the country there is a revolt against the very alienation that the corruption of government has made possible. There is revulsion not merely at police excesses, but at the toleration of those excesses, that reach the highest offices. What the world witnesses in Greece is cause for wonderment, just as Greeks have been a cause of wonderment in times past; and today the coming together of people in the streets, both young and old, reveals much about human solidarity, and a democracy that is still capable of vitality and honesty at the grassroots. People from all walks of life are willing to meet face to face, students and teachers, trade unionists and ordinary laborers, professionals, artisans, and even some from the privileged class. And like Greeks from all times, they have a built-in suspicion of authority.

For example, Indymedia has reported a statement of protesting citizens, who briefly took control at a TV station:

Our action is a response to the accumulated pressures that ravage our lives, and not simply an emotional outburst in the wake of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos by the Greek police.

We are yet another spontaneous collective that forms part of the social uprising in progress.

In a symbolic move to prevent the media from subduing us, citizens & civilians, we interrupt the newscast of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (NET). We believe that the media systematically cultivates a climate of fear, promoting misinformation as information, and portraying a multi-faceted uprising as an outburst of reckless violence.

The explosion of civil unrest is explained in criminal rather than political terms. Crucial events are selectively brushed under the carpet. The uprising is served up as entertainment, something to watch until the next soap opera comes on. The media are being used as a means of suppressing free and original thought on a daily basis.

Let us organise ourselves. No authority can provide solutions to our problems. We must rally together and turn our public spaces – streets, squares, parks, and schools – into areas of unhindered expression and communication. Let us come together, face to face, side by side, to formulate our cause and our course of action as one.

Let us overcome the fear, switch off our television sets, come out of our houses, continue to assert our rights, and take our lives into our own hands.

We condemn police violence and call for the immediate release of all protesters held in custody.

We stand for emancipation, human dignity, and freedom.

GAS DRILLING NOT A GAS

by Barron Harper

When I was growing up in Odessa, Texas in the 1950s, I remember with no particular fondness the considerable oil and gas drilling going on in the Permian Basin. Big oil literally transformed the economies and populations of my town and neighboring Midland 20 miles to the east. Business catered to it. Drillers and suppliers reeked of the smell of it. And the locals tolerated the changes it produced.

But some of us remember that where oil was being drilled gas was being burned off. For years in fact gas burning in West Texas sent up pinnacles of smoke and fire that nightly lit up the landscape of those high plains. Seen from long distances, onlookers over time grew somewhat accustomed to these fiery spectacles among scores of unsightly wells. But to astute observers in the ‘50s and ‘60s, closer inspections of these towering infernos would have portended catastrophic reckonings for peoples caught up in the explosive growth of intractable global societies.

Some 30 years later in the heart of Guadalajara, Mexico’s downtown district, ten massive gas explosions occurred over a two hour period due to gas leaking in the sewer system. Measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, the explosive quakes damaged and destroyed over 1,000 buildings and created an enormous nine mile ditch down the middle of a major thoroughfare that measured 80 feet wide and 25 feet deep. The blast killed 200 people, injured 2,000 local inhabitants and left 20,000 homeless. Buildings suffered over $300 million in damages. The suffering of the people could not be measured.

Gas is volatile, inflammable, explosive. The production, transport and storage of this diminishing resource in spite of due diligence destroy property and lives due to inevitable accidents. In the drilling process, hazardous chemicals are injected into the ground. Radioactive materials, arsenic and hydrogen sulfide in the ground are disturbed. These and other toxic substances contaminate the ground and the air, gradually poisoning the environment and the people. But should any gaseous substances be ignited as demonstrated in Guadalajara, the consequences will be felt in less than a heartbeat.

While my childhood was giving way to adolescence in West Texas, my grandparents, Joe and Mary Clarke, were leading lives as prominent citizens in Fort Worth. He was the executive vice-president of the Fort Worth National Bank and she was a noted historian and author. The two of them cared about the welfare of the city, belonged to influential organizations, received favorable publicity, and in general supported causes that were fair and open-handed. They resided near Texas Christian University in an unpretentious home made beautiful by their patient and loving care.

Joe and Mary possessed an integrity that tolerated no deception or manipulation. Generous with their time and resources, they were blessed by their inherent goodness. Rather than being somehow compromised for their generosity, they prospered. They appeared to understand that deprivation in the end is the consequence of coveting.

Exceptionally well-liked and respected in the community, they would have been horrified to learn that gas drilling was being contemplated in some 15 neighborhoods in their beloved city. They would have unhesitatingly considered the consequences to public health and safety as eclipsing any benefits to the city from the discovery of gas or the enrichment of coffers. So like me they would never have compromised human security for a fickle prosperity.

-Barron Harper is a U.S. international tax advisor residing in France.

copeland morris NEW LIGHT

The roof and wall subsided with storm
For a miracle in your grasp, still being alive.
Prepare then a way for me by cloud
And by rain. The new light. It enters
The broken half of a house. You won't
Give up on me too soon, I hope,
By way of Jordan, pale jasmine.

This is how you enter a sacred place
On brittle stalks, the soothsayer's white
Miniatures. This is how you have prolonged
Your embrace, beckoning to me: absorbed
In the perfumed letter that took so long
To catch my attention. The crease in the envelope
Turning my eye to the long curve of your fingers.

Artwork by anna missed, New Light (oil on wood)