Salon.com > Christian Parenti

Big government, our one shot against crazy storms

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Look back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees, touched off wildfires that burned four million acres, and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture, particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion -- and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.

In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.

When food shortages mean war

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:25:00 +0000

What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world?

The answer is: far more than you might imagine. For one thing, that loaf can be "read" as if it were a core sample extracted from the heart of a grim global economy. Looked at another way, it reveals some of the crucial fault lines of world politics, including the origins of the Arab spring that has now become a summer of discontent.

Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most disturbingly three new wars began in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Even on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country's interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks.

And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not "resource conflicts" in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals.

Good morning, Baghdad!

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 13:14:00 +0000

It was another quiet evening in the suburban Sunbelt -- Dallas to be exact, February 2006 -- and a short, puckish, middle-aged and middle-class father of four named Dave Rabbit was helping his youngest son, a senior in high school, do homework on the Vietnam War. Although Dave had spent most of his adult life managing a family-owned business that designed and manufactured custom T-shirts and caps, he knew about Vietnam, having served three tours there with the Air Force from 1968 to 1971. But that was 35 years ago and now almost a universe away. The decades since the war had been consumed by the simple pleasures and routine trials of being married, raising children, maintaining a summer house on the Gulf Coast and now watching two grandkids grow up.

His son's homework assignment involved the subject of music and the war, so Dave started Googling "rock 'n' roll" and "radio" and "Vietnam War." Then a very strange thing happened. The all-American dad ran into his former incarnation as wild young renegade. Dave Rabbit, the 57-year-old regular guy, stumbled upon Dave Rabbit the drug-addled, smack-talking, 22-year-old Air Force sergeant who was responsible for one of the strangest stunts in broadcast history. It all went down in 1971, when Dave manned a pirate radio show from the back room of a brothel. He blasted Jimi Hendrix and Steppenwolf, portrayed LBJ as a pervert, talked constantly about smoking pot and having sex with Vietnamese hookers.

Guarding their silence

Mon, 22 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

The acquittal earlier this month of four California corrections officers charged with arranging for a young inmate to be raped by Corcoran State Prison's notorious "Booty Bandit" was the result of a massive legal and political show of force on the part of the state's prison guards union, prisoners' advocates say. The four guards were facing nine years in prison.

State prosecutors alleged that in March 1993, the four Corcoran State Prison Security Housing Unit officers, led by Sgt. Robert Alan Decker, deliberately transferred inmate Eddie Dillard to the cell of Wayne Robertson, aka the "Booty Bandit" knowing that the younger, smaller inmate would be raped. At trial, Robertson testified that he had indeed beaten and sodomized Dillard for two days because guards had said that Dillard needed to "learn how to do his time."

But the defense -- led by four adroit lawyers and funded by the guards' union -- countered that the accused guards had no idea at the time that Robertson was a rapist. "I agree that Wayne Robertson is a rapist and a thug, but that fact was not known to the floor staff," said defense attorney Curtis Sisk in his opening arguments. One of the officers told the jury that the first time he even heard of Wayne Robertson was in an article in the Los Angeles Times.

Death in custody from “excited delirium”?

Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

America's latest cultural export to the United Kingdom isn't some hot new software or a hip-hop single, it's a controversial medical theory that seeks to explain why so many people die in police custody. The concept, called "excited delirium" (ED) or "in-custody death syndrome," is being put forward by a small but vocal clique of big-city coroners. Proponents of excited delirium argue that most people who die in police custody are not the victims of police brutality, but rather victims of their own cocaine or amphetamine abuse, which can trigger this fatal condition.

Since the mid 1990s excited delirium has been floated as an explanation in several high-profile police custody deaths in the United States. But so far, the "excited delirium" debate has yet to begin in the U.K. Last week, the Royal Society of Medicine in London held a conference on "The Medical Aspects of Death in Custody" due to the record number of people (65) who died in custody last year in England and Wales.

Rape as a disciplinary tactic

Mon, 23 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Eddie Dillard, a 23-year-old gang member from Los Angeles
serving time for assault with a deadly weapon in California's
Corcoran State Prison, was a prison malcontent. One day Dillard
made the mistake of kicking a female guard; for this sin and
others he was promoted to the top of the correctional officers'
shit list.

Dillard was transferred to the cell of Wayne Robertson, better
known as the "Booty Bandit." For a time, his vocation was
beating, torturing and sodomizing fellow inmates while prison
guards looked the other way. This psychopathic serial rapist was
the guards' resident enforcer, one whose specialty was reining in
abrasive young toughs.

Dillard protested the transfer, pointing out that Robertson was a known
predator. "Since you like hitting women, we've got somebody for
you," came the reply. There, in a tiny box with the Booty Bandit,
began the tragic re-education of Eddie Dillard.