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HarlanCountyDVD

Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) Directed by Barbara Kopple; watched on Criterion Collection DVD. An urgent, immersing documentary of an Appalachian coal mining community’s more than year-long strike against corporate overlord Duke Power. The camera gets itself everywhere you would hope it could – the families’ homes, union meetings, planning sessions by the miners’ wives (who show at least as much grit as the men, often more), on the picket lines when the strikebreaking gun thugs attack, a mile underground in the mines themselves, at Duke Power shareholder meetings, and more. Unforgettable characters emerge, underscored by the raw honesty of the area’s indigenous bluegrass songs vocalized by subjects of the film. Parallels to recent WV mine explosion & 29 deaths are, unsurprisingly, present in several instances. A work of passionate storytelling, made at no small personal risk, richly deserving of its Best Documentary Academy Award, and absolutely among the great documentary films of the last 50 years. See it.


May 1, 2010 | 1 comment

No Government Takeover of Public Safety!

April 24, 2010 | Permalink

You remember Richard Clarke. He was the counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and (briefly) George W. Bush. He’s the guy who implored the second Bush Administration in January of 2001 to keep a close eye on Al Qaeda, and move forward with measures to that effect which were still in place from the recently departed Clinton administration. In response, the Bush administration blew off Clarke’s warnings and demoted him to non-cabinet level status.

Richard-Clarke

photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons

He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.

These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.1 After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:

CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.

That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.

GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…? Read the rest of this entry »