WikiLeaks: defeating the conspiracy of [illegitimate] governance

By Nozomi Hayase, ROAR Mag

The contagious courage of the whistleblowers — from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden — is helping to defeat the conspiracy of illegitimate governance.

Illustration by Latuff

In 2010, ongoing wars and government corruption spread through a fog of apathy. The world appeared to be reaching a tipping point for either global crisis or transformation. In this climate, WikiLeaks emerged into the limelight like a call to the conscience of humanity. Over the last few years, they released secret documents revealing Kenyan government corruption, Iceland’s financial collapse, the criminality of US wars in the Middle East and more. Their very existence and what they revealed called into question the legitimacy of imperial power structures around the world.

Ever since its initial public insurrection, WikiLeaks kept making the headlines. In spite of founder Julian Assange being immobilized — first under house arrest and then confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London — the stateless organization has continued to publish documents, shedding light on corruption and abuse of power. One might well have thought the life of this transparency advocacy group would be over after the massive US government retaliation and financial blockades by PayPal, Visa and other US financial giants. Yet, in the year 2013, WikiLeaks showed itself to be resilient and relevant as ever by releasing a secretive draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty and aiding the world’s most wanted whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, in his quest for asylum.

The inception of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website goes all the way back to late 2006. At that time, Assange wrote a kind of Manifesto called Conspiracy as Governance. In analyzing how corruption and secrecy are tied together, he described how “illegitimate governance is by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries working in collaborative secrecy … to the detriment of a population.”

In the introduction, Assange cited the words, “Conspiracy, Conspire” to mean “mak[ing] secret plans jointly to commit a harmful act; working together to bring about a particular result, typically to someone’s detriment”. The word “Conspire” originates in Latin; con (together) and spire (breathe). It means to breathe together. The common use of the word is by nature exclusive, where two or more people share the fetid intellectual air behind closed doors, shutting out fresh ideas and cleansing sunlight from outside. Conspiracy is sustained by inbred collusion of selfish interests. It is like smoke surrounding those who are bound by it, disconnecting them from the reality of everyday people who are kept outside of such elite circles and often exploited or harmed by their actions.

Assange saw how “a conspiracy … is the agent of deception and information restriction.” Enactment of hidden motives of conspiracy depends on secrecy. Whether elected government officials or corporate executives, their interests are mostly divorced from ordinary people who are excluded from the circle. The primary motive behind this secrecy is to guard the self-interests of those involved.

The Battle over Public Perception

Secrecy is created and maintained through two means. One is simply to close information off from access by the public through government classification of documents. The other is to deceive by way of ‘public relations’ — propaganda used to control or distort public perception. Secrecy and corruption of government and the corporate state have reached a point of no return as the US government over-classifies information under the pretext of national security, including information that undeniably belongs in the public domain. “Currently the executive branch is the sole determinant of what is classified,” activist and whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds said, pointing to how excessive government classification is being used as a tool to silence whistle-blowers.

Secrecy creates a gap in public perception and a loophole in the responsibility of governance. This gap gives power to rich corporations and governments to erase their bloody footsteps and hide the exploitative motives behind their actions. The power of secrecy is primarily the invisibility it grants to those actions who would be universally condemned if their actions were placed in the public eye. If the real motives and actual effects of rapacious forces in government and industry are kept invisible to those who are outside of the inbred circle, the conspirators can carry out their agendas without any real opposition.

Moreover, the Pentagon spends an ever-increasing amount of money on PR every year and there has been an alarming merger of commercial and government interests with mainstream journalism through the consolidation of corporate media. The forces behind state and corporate collusion are increasingly the primary forces shaping new laws and public policy — and these forces are heavily invested in maintaining control of public perception.

For instance, the actions of corporations overseas involving cheap labor and exploitation are largely kept out of public sight. This creates a gap between the actions of the powerful and how everyday people see the world. What people see are beautiful clothes displayed at shopping malls. The names on store tags such as Old Navy, Banana Republic and Gap found in the horrific aftermath of burned out or collapsed sweatshops in Bangladesh reveal this insidious practice, yet to the Western consumer it is just nice branding with appealing images of beautiful models. These kinds of corporations perform Orwell’s doublespeak with ironic store names that carry colonial connotations as they manufacture consumer consent in their support of this exploitative model. Another example is the current round of negotiations over the TPP, which is a brazen attempt to subvert national law and individual enterprise so corporations can guarantee profits by overruling protections for the people and the free sharing of information.

This simple concealing of information and motives of those in power often goes hand in hand with the work of propaganda, keeping the public ignorant of what lurks behind the scenes. A vital part of PR work involves creating false perception regarding the merging self-interests of the elites; spinning a false image that those in conspiracy are working for the common good. This form of manipulation creates what the father of Public Relations, Edward Bernays, described as “an invisible government”, which he observed as being the “true ruling power of our country.”

Illegitimate Governance

We are surrounded by an invisible force of control. Assange saw through its inner working and pointed out how these governments that operate in secrecy are inherently conspiratorial and how such governance is by definition illegitimate. His observation led him to his first hypothesis for solving the problem of dissolving conspiracy. He wrote that “when a regime’s lines of internal communications are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves.”

Assange put this forward as kind of a mathematical formula that he thought could be used to dissolve conspiracy. Exposing secrecy = weakening trust lines of communication = collapse of conspiracy. With this act, the conspirators’ power of invisibility from outsiders is undermined. In order for a formula to hold true and manifest, it needs a precise logic of architecture that would carry out each step. The act of becoming a watchdog on power usually comes from within the system, somewhere closer to the circle of conspiracy. This has traditionally come in the form of whistle-blowers. The original Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA) was enacted to ensure this necessary check and balance on power. Yet, recent years have seen a steady erosion of this law, and with Obama’s aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers, there is no denying that this system of accountability has broken down.

The same can be said to some degree about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that was passed by Congress in 1966, which set limits on government’s withholding of documents. FOIA made federal agency documents except Congress and the Judiciary available to not only US citizens, but persons of any nationality upon request, with certain exemptions. Over the years, this has been rendered increasingly ineffective. One example is the case of a classified US military video of the incident on July 12, 2007 in New Baghdad, depicting three airstrikes from a US Apache helicopter (which WikiLeaks released with the title Collateral Murder). Reuters, whose journalists were killed in the video, tried to obtain the footage through FOI requests, but without success.

The Method of Leaking

It was in response to this breakdown of traditional checks and balance on power that WikiLeaks blazed onto the world stage with a new model of stateless free press that practices adversarial journalism. The method of leaking was made possible through a unique technical infrastructure. The system of anonymous drop-boxes provides a secure platform which helps those inside an organization have the confidence to step forward and reveal wrongdoing without fear of their identity being revealed.

Exposing secrecy can bring the actions of conspirators into the public eye and rectify distorted public perception. Assange described a particular kind of information that signals the presence of conspiratorial work. He explained how concealed information sends an economic signal for oppression because it shows someone putting economic input or work into concealing that information. This means it would be most effective to focus on the information that is most concealed and bring it out into the open, as that which is most heavily invested in keeping secret likely has the strongest effect when unveiled to the public eye.

Assange also spoke of censorship as a signal of corruption. He holds that censorship ”reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that [they] have got to care about what people think.” After releasing authentic classified documents that are gained through an inside source, WikiLeaks disseminates this information as widely as possible with the intention ”to get the maximum possible political impact.”

In April 2013, WikiLeaks published a trove of 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents called the Kissinger Cables, spanning from 1973 and 1976. WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson noted that hiding information behind the wall of complexity is also a form of secrecy. By developing a highly searchable database, WikiLeaks made documents usable that were normally quite difficult to access.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Leaks

Then came the TPP leaks. On November 13, WikiLeaks released a complete draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. TPP is a backroom corporate deal that enforces US interests and corporate hegemony over other countries. A major controversy over this bill is how its documents and dealings have been kept in extreme secrecy. Fast-track authority written into it is part of the corporate takeover of basic lawmaking, as only a few members of Congress have seen parts of it. Upon releasing the documents, WikiLeaks provided their interpretation in a short statement:

If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.

Critics call the bill “ACTA on steroids“ and a “super-sized NAFTA“, arguing that it violates privacy, sovereignty, internet freedom and effectively tramples many basic information and environmental protections. Its main elements undermine popular sovereignty and democracy and empower transnational corporations to change certain laws to suit their fancy. After WikiLeaks revealed this group of documents that seems designed mainly to expand US hegemony and corporate penetration, there was a serious backlash from civil rights groups and the other negotiating parties. Despite the Obama administration’s aim to reach a deal by the new year, disagreements boiled over and the time-line for the agreement is now delayed.

Once concealed information is revealed, conspirators lose the cloak of invisibility and the public can grasp the tails of the conspirators’ intentions. This begins a process that can lead to justice. In the case of the TPP leaks, people could see real corporate interests and agendas disguised as a governmental trade agreement. This is the formula: expose heavily guarded secrecy = correct public deception = bring about social and political transformation toward justice.

WikiLeaks’ “mathematical” formula to dissolve conspiratorial governance seems to have begun proving its validity. Yet, as the world engages with deepening political and moral dilemmas, a more complex problem has surfaced within this increasingly corrupt and corporatized civil society. What new variable was added to the equation?

The Death of the Fourth Estate

There is no question that after WikiLeaks, the world had changed. The organization published documents evidencing war crimes and government corruption, but this is not all it revealed. Over the years, WikiLeaks has become the acid test that unveiled how the Fourth Estate has degraded into a conspiracy of consolidated corporate media networks. It is now more clear than ever how mainstream journalism has become a guardian of conspiratorial power rather than performing any real check and balance on corruption for the public good.

Back in 2010, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, in an exclusive interview with Raw Story, declared that “the Fourth Estate is dead!” and described the US media’s complicity with the Pentagon: “The Fourth Estate in this country has been captured by government and corporations, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus. Captive! So, there is no Fourth Estate.”

Control of information and perception has become the real war of the 21st century. This year has seen the overreaching decay of the Fourth Estate as the ubiquitous Hollywood entertainment industry collaborated in character assassination. In contrast to powerful propaganda films about WikiLeaks, like the multi-million dollar DreamWorks film The Fifth Estate and Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets, WikiLeaks themselves released a documentary called Mediastan to reveal the trend towards globalized media corruption, which also put forward their own narrative of these game-changing events that WikiLeaks helped set in motion.

In many ways, WikiLeaks embodies a new form of this essential function of the Fourth Estate. In a span of three years, they disclosed more relevant authentic documentation than all corporate news media combined. Yet in the process, they faced another conundrum. Anyone who strives for truth meets challenges, and Assange is no exception. In an interview with Al Jazeera, he was asked by the interviewer what he expected and what he did not expect prior to the releases. He responded that after the release of two war logs he was surprised by the lack of public response to the leaked materials.

In a 2010 Time interview, Assange talked about the role of social media in assisting the work of WikiLeaks. He described how the analytical effort he expected from internet citizens around the world did not occur, so WikiLeaks, professional journalists and human rights activists had to do the bulk of the work. This relative lack of interest was also brought out during WikiLeaksOperation Cablerun, featured in their film Mediastan. The film followed a crew of WikiLeaks associates in a quest for media outlets to publish secret US diplomatic cables throughout Central Asia. One after another they met corruption, cynicism or apathy from publishers. With the undeniable global decay of the Fourth Estate, people’s sense of justice and morality seem to have become neutered.

Martin Luther King Jr once said that “the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of bad people, but the appalling silence of good people”. What prevails today, after decades of corporate and state propaganda, is a passive and apathetic populace.

Re-Awakening the Civic Duty of Resistance

Leaking concealed information is fundamental for humane governance, yet without a dedicated public willing to check and balance the inevitable and increasing abuse of power, there is little possibility of effectively transforming corrupt structures and dissolving any conspiracy of illegitimate authority. The problem of our age takes a new twist. There is now another factor that needs to be added to the equation: the awakening of citizens who are motivated to perform civic duty to hold the powerful accountable and demand justice in a rapidly changing global landscape.

This leads to the deeper impulses behind leaking. In his 2006 paper, Assange laid out insights to dissolve conspiracy and stated how “we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling and effective action to replace the structures that lead to bad governance with something better.” Assange clarified his insight on transparency, saying that “it is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it’s our goal to achieve a more just society.” Transparency through leaking is not a goal in itself, but a method for achieving an even higher moral goal. It is a way to break the shield of power that keeps citizens in the dark and to counter the kind of extractive and abusive behavior that human nature tends toward when working in secret.

Leaks are a way to break down walls, yet dissolving the conspiracy needs something more than simply releasing information. It requires an active force to confront and transform the centralized power necessary for those who conspire against the public good. Transparency in the form of whistle-blowing is a courageous act. It opens locked doors, bringing air into the deep reaches of a rotting system. It allows those close to or within it to breathe fresh air. What transformative variable arises when an individual decides to act on this principle of transparency that is crucial for dissolving conspiracy?

The Conscience of Chelsea Manning

In his formula for achieving fundamental change, Assange points to inspiration as a critical factor when combined with knowledge. It is indeed this inspiration from sources that is the fount of WikiLeaks’s contagious courage. In an interview onDemocracy Now! when he was asked what gives him hope, Assange responded:

What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change. They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way.

Now the equation advances: courage and conscience of the source + means of transparency = movement towards justice. In 2013, we have seen this contagious quotient of inspiration prove itself vital to the equation of dissolving conspiracy. Two weeks after the court-martial proceeding of Chelsea Manning began, an unauthorized audio recording of her initial courtroom statement spread through social media, despite the extraordinary secrecy surrounding her trial. For the first time after three years of silence, the world heard Manning’s voice of conscience. In it, Manning laid out why she chose to release the massive trove of documents. After admitting that she was the source of the largest leak of classified information in history, Manning spoke about the motivation behind her actions:

I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.

As she had hoped, her courage sparked new waves of insurgency. Manning’s role in inspiring the Arab Spring was praised by Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst and America’s most renowned whistle-blower. On the first day of Manning’s pretrial hearing, Ellsberg acknowledged her act as the impulse behind critical global movements that have quickly risen as tides of change for our time:

The TIME Magazine cover gives … an anonymous protester as “Person of the Year,” but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of “Person of the Year”. And the American face I would put on that is Private [Chelsea] Bradley Manning… And, the combination of the WikiLeaks and [Chelsea] Manning exposures in Tunis and the exemplification of that by Mohamed Bouazizi led to the… non-violent protests.

In September of this year, Tunisian activist Sami Ben Gharbia paid homage to Manning for her role in inspiring the Arab Spring. He said the revolution “had to start somewhere, and the release of the cables started with Private Chelsea Manning, alone in the Iraqi desert”:

After she was sentenced to 35 years in prison, Chelsea Manning said in her statement that “Sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.” I don’t know if she knows that she helped us, in this part of the world, to move toward that noble goal. Closing a cell door on a prisoner with a free mind has opened a thousand and one doors for a free society.

The Contagion of Courage

While Manning’s act of conscience became a catalyst for the global uprising, it also paved the way for other whistle-blowers to courageously step forward. In 2013, the world saw a new wave of dissent. 28-year-old political activist Jeremy Hammond hacked into Stratfor, the Texas based global intelligence company to expose the inner workings of the insidious and pervasive surveillance state, including their spying activities on activists around the globe.

Right after his sentencing hearing this year, WikiLeaks finished publishing the Global Intelligence Files – over five million emails from Stratfor. In pleading guilty to one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for his role in hacking into the computers of this private intelligence firm, Hammond stated that “people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors,” and indicated clearly that he did what he believed was right.

At his sentencing hearing, Hammond spoke about how his act was inspired by his forerunner Chelsea Manning and her courage in exposing the atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan:

She took an enormous personal risk to leak this information — believing that the public had a right to know and hoping that her disclosures would be a positive step to end these abuses … I had to ask myself, if Chelsea Manning fell into the abysmal nightmare of prison fighting for the truth, could I in good conscience do any less, if I was able? I thought the best way to demonstrate solidarity was to continue the work of exposing and confronting corruption.

Then came Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on the most powerful surveillance entity in history. In a video interview with former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, Snowden spoke of the motives behind his action:

I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity…. My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.

Snowden admired Manning and learned from his young forerunner. Behind the NSA leaks are others who were infected by their courage. Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Laura Poitras — who was the first media contact on the story — and Glenn Greenwald were both inspired by Chelsea Manning and Snowden’s contagious courage.

In a statement he made one year after entering the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange called out the US government for framing those who speak truth to power as “traitors” and criminalizing them. He defended these whistle-blowers, describing them as “young, technically minded people from the generation that Barack Obama betrayed,” and “the generation that grew up on the internet, and were shaped by it…” Assange then urged the public to help Snowden in his quest for asylum.

This past year we have seen WikiLeaks continue to walk their talk. When the US government revoked Snowden’s passport, journalist Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks helped him escape Hong Kong and inevitable jailtime in the United States. Months later, Snowden remains free to speak and engage in the public debate he unleashed.

“Citizens have to fight suppression of information on matters of vital public importance. To tell the truth is not a crime,” Snowden wrote in his letter to the German government. On Christmas day, Britain’s Channel 4 televised his message: “Privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.” In an interview with Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, Snowden expressed his sense of victory and stated that his mission had already been accomplished. The genie was not going to be put back in the bottle. This contagion of courage cannot be stopped as people have begun to inspire each other.

The Courage to Inspire

Snowden’s pursuit for asylum has created a new discourse. WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison played a crucial role in making this possible. Referring specifically to Chelsea Manning, who is now serving decades behind bars, Harrison explained the reason for risking her life and liberty to accompany Snowden thus: “there needs to be another narrative … There needs to be a happy ending. People need to see that you can do this and be safe.” In her November 6 statement, Harrison articulated her conviction of the importance for transparency that was demonstrated in her extraordinary commitment to source protection:

When whistle-blowers come forward, we need to fight for them so others will be encouraged. When they are gagged, we must be their voice. When they are hunted, we must be their shield. When they are locked away, we must free them. Giving us the truth is not a crime. This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.

The 30th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) held in Hamburg in the last days of 2013 saw a significant increase in the number of participants, which showed how this whistle-blower support community is thriving. In the opening keynote speech, Glenn Greenwald shared with the audience the profound impact Snowden’s act had on him and on people around the world:

The courage and the principled act of conscience that he displayed will shape and inspire me for the rest of my life, and will inspire and convince millions and millions of people to take all sorts of acts that they might not have taken because they’ve seen what good for the world can be done by even a single individual.

Later he reminded the crowd of Harrison’s heroic act as well. Greenwald empowered the audience, noting that there is now a huge network of human beings around the world who believe in causes for transparency and who devote time and sacrifice for it.

Assange joined the CCC talk ‘Sysadmins of the World, Unite!’ via Skype with Jacob Applebaum, independent journalist and security expert, and with Harrison, who was welcomed with a standing ovation by more than 4.000 people. Assange spoke to the audience about how high-tech workers compose a particular class and how, as system administrators, they are part of an important administration of interconnected individual systems. He encouraged these administrators to unite in their fight for internet freedom, reminding them how they “have extraordinary power, in a way that is really an order of magnitude different to the power industrial workers had back in the 20th century”.

Applebaum asked the audience “what is it that you feel like you can do?” and emphasized the positive contribution one can make, each in their own way. He used Harrison’s action as an example that embodies individual courage and creates a link that inspires others.

Inspiration is an antidote to conspiracy. It is like a compassionate bullet that brings down the walls around armored hearts and breaks up the conspiring of narrow interests. In solving the problem of illegitimate governance, we are now waking up to the fact that ordinary people are the vital quantity for the equation. The numbers are growing as the new network of awakened and impassioned individuals expands.

Activist Gregg Housh pointed to the decline of true investigative journalism and noted how the failure of the press in holding the government accountable has created a vacuum. He noted how “that void grew for years, and finally when we could stand it no more it got filled … by Anonymous, WikiLeaks, new whistle-blowers, and a new prevalent culture of transparency.”

On November 15, Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release at the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. As he was escorted out of the courtroom, to the crowd of supporters, Hammond pumped a fist in the air and said “Long live Anonymous!”

Online and off, the trend of civil disobedience refuses to go away. In response to the brutal indiscriminate shelling of Gaza in November 2012 by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Anonymous engaged in DDoS attacks and took down hundreds of Israeli websites. On November 5th 2013, protesters wearing Anonymous Guy Fawkes masks gathered all around the world to rally in over 400 cities for the Million Mask March.

In her impassioned speech after Hammond’s sentencing Bria Grace of JeremyHammond.net spoke of how Hammond “is the reason a flame has been lit in so many of us.” The torch of justice is carried through his courageous acts, and its light burns ever stronger.

Three years after WikiLeaks came to public prominence, where are we with the equation in Assange’s Conspiracy as Governance? Has it been tested and its solution enacted? As leaked documents continue to shed light on the darkness of the world, illegal wars, drone attacks, bankster heists and corporate dirty deals continue. Yet thanks to Manning, we now have a clearer picture what modern war really looks like and the extent to which the military-industrial complex has morally bankruptcy itself. Thanks to Hammond, we are more aware of the collusion of governments and corporations in a network of spying on activists. Thanks to Snowden’s NSA files, we are now only beginning to see the latent tyranny of an out-of-control surveillance state.

2013 was the year that we saw the courage of individuals who speak truth to power become truly contagious. There is no doubt that in this past year, WikiLeaks and other budding organizations have helped the world move one step closer toward a more humane form of self-governance. More and more people are counting themselves into the equation. In the presence of love, hatred cannot last. In the light of transparency darkness dissolves, and in the presence of inspiration people can no longer conspire. Each person’s act of conscience breathes into the other, eventually becoming the critical mass needed to solve the critical moral math of our time.

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In 2014, ROAR will be revolutionizing its online presence and greatly expanding its reporting. One of the plans we are currently discussing is to open a whistle-blowing functionality within our new web platform. To make this happen, and to remain fiercely independent from governments and corporations, we rely entirely on you for financial support. Please consider contributing to the IndieGoGo campaign we just launched and help us ROAR for real democracy!

Nozomi Hayase is a contributing writer to Culture Unplugged. She brings out deeper dimensions of socio-cultural events at the intersection between politics and psychology to share insight on future social evolution. Her Twitter is @nozomimagine.

This piece was originally published on ROAR Magazine.

Fallout: Documentary about On the Beach

By Richard Phillips, wsws.org

Written and directed by Lawrence Johnston; co-written and produced by Peter Kaufman

The subject of Australian documentary filmmaker Lawrence Johnston’sFallout is the novel On the Beach and subsequent Hollywood movie of the same name. The feature-length work premiered at the 2013 Melbourne film festival and screened in a handful of Australian cinemas late last year.

Nevil Shute

Published in June 1957, On the Beach by popular-fiction writer Nevil Shute (1899-1960) is a story that gave voice to the British-born, former aeronautical engineer’s concerns about the possible destruction of humanity. Set in the Australian city of Melbourne in the then near future, Shute’s novel occurs in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war in the northern hemisphere.

Melbourne residents and the crew of a visiting US submarine prepare for their inevitable deaths, including by state-sanctioned suicide pills, as radioactive clouds are pushed southward by prevailing winds. Human life has already been destroyed in North America, Europe, China and the Soviet Union. Melbourne citizens are given about five months to live.

The novel of On the Beach was an immediate success. It sold a hundred thousand copies in the first weeks of its release and quickly became an international best-seller. The rights were sold to director Stanley Kramer (The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) for £A80,000, the equivalent today of about $A4 million [$US3.6 million], and the movie was shot on location in Melbourne by Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno. Starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins, On the Beach was released in December 1959 with unprecedented simultaneous premieres in 18 major international cities, including Moscow and Tokyo.

Stanley Kramer on location in Melbourne

Kramer’s movie is not a complete artistic success, but it is a commendable work and one that continues to resonate because it seriously grapples with the danger of global nuclear destruction. Perkins’ performance is strong, with sincere efforts by the other Hollywood actors, all genuinely committed to the project. As Ava Gardner later commented: “It was a fictional scenario, but my God, everyone in the cast and crew knew it [nuclear war] could happen… I was proud of being part of this film, proud of what it said.”

Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner on the set of On the Beach

Johnston (Night [1994], Life [1996], Eternity [2008]), a technically skilled filmmaker, explores the events in Fallout, bringing together interesting interviews with Shute’s daughter Heather Mayfield, Kramer’s wife and many others. Australian historian Paul Ham, the author of Hiroshima Nagasaki, and journalist Gideon Haigh provide background commentary, and Wayne Miller, one of the first American press photographers sent to Hiroshima after it was decimated by a US atom bomb, is also interviewed. Miller was later hired to photograph the production of On the Beach.

Fallout captures something of the period and the widespread and entirely justifiable fears about global nuclear destruction gripping people during the 1950s.

The documentary begins with footage of US President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 United Nations address: “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment.” The film then reviews the US nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, President Harry Truman’s chilling political justification of the bombing and the horrible impact of “radiation sickness” on the Japanese city’s residents.

Johnston’s work correctly observes that the US was ready to use nuclear weapons against 30 Chinese cities during the Korean War, refers to British nuclear testing in Australia and has footage of US “instructional” films on how ordinary people were supposed to survive a nuclear attack.

Fallout’s title is not simply a reference to nuclear radiation, but also to the conflict that developed between Shute and Kramer. Shute, a political and socially conservative man, bitterly opposed Kramer’s decision to modify the relationship between book’s two central characters—US submarine captain Dwight Towers (Peck) and Melbourne resident Moira Davidson (Gardner). In the movie, their love is consummated; in the book Towers remains loyal to his wife who has died in the US.

Shute was so angry about the change, his daughter tells the documentary makers, that it brought on a serious stroke from which he died not long after On the Beach was released. Johnston’s Fallout focuses too much on this issue, however, to the exclusion of more significant questions.

The documentary, for example, provides no detailed examination of the US government’s intense hostility to the film. While Kramer makes brief reference to this in a 1960s television interview, little more information is provided.

In line with its Cold War rhetoric and the growing power of America’s military-industrial complex, Washington vigorously worked against On the Beach.

Hiroshima, after atom bomb attack

A recent essay by Murdoch University academic Mick Broderick points out that there was “an elaborate and orchestrated campaign” by the Eisenhower administration to undermine the film’s “cultural and political impact.” This involved high-level discussions involving Vice President Richard Nixon, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Atomic Energy commissioner and the heads of the US Information Agency (USIA) and the Office of Civil Defense Management.

The USIA and the State Department, in conjunction with the Pentagon, even drew up “infoguide” notes about the movie for leading government officials. The notes stressed that it was necessary to counteract “the film’s strong emotional appeal for the banning of nuclear weapons,” which could “lead audiences to think in terms of radical solutions to the problem.”

Broderick’s essay concludes: “There are few other documented examples, if any, of US Cabinet level deliberations detailing White House directed interventions in an attempt to mould the public reception of a Hollywood film.”

The New York Daily News, no doubt responding to the government campaign, declared Kramer’s film to be a “defeatist movie … the thinking it represents points the way toward eventual enslavement of the entire human race.”

Fallout, unfortunately, does not include this crucial material. Nor does it mention the dangers posed by contemporary militarist aggression on the part of the US and other imperialist powers.

Journalist Gideon Haigh, given considerable prominence in the documentary, lends credence to Washington’s oft-repeated claim that the “greatest problem” facing humanity is the prospect of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or so-called rogue states. Haigh is not contradicted when he asserts that Iran is attempting to construct a nuclear bomb.

The film’s most serious omission is its failure to mention Washington’s so-called “pivot to Asia.” Overseen by US President Barack Obama, this increasingly aggressive military and diplomatic effort to isolate China is dramatically exacerbating tensions throughout the region and creating the conditions for a US-led military conflict. Washington, in fact, is the most destabilising factor in geo-political relations.

When Shute wrote On the Beach in 1957, Australia was regarded as something of a backwater, the last place on earth to be decimated by a nuclear war. All this has changed.

Canberra’s active involvement in the “pivot”—coordinated US-Australia military operations, high-level electronic spying and military targeting through the joint Pine Gap base in central Australia and other facilities, the basing of thousands of US marines in Darwin and advanced plans for joint naval blockades against China—make Australia an immediate military target in any future conflict.

Whether the lack of any reference to this reality is deliberate or the product of ignorance is not clear. Whatever the case, it is at odds with the approach taken by Nevil Shute and Stanley Kramer who resolved to use their skills to sensitise millions of ordinary people about the real and growing danger of nuclear war.

The author also recommends:

Military interference in American film production

The Confidence Men

When Scorsese Imitates Scorsese

by LOUIS PROYECT, Counterpunch

In addition to sharing the inside track for a fistful of Oscars in January, both David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” feature confidence men as antiheroes. They also are based on actual historical events, with the late 70s Abscam sting of American politicians featured in Russell’s film, and the rise and fall of penny stock swindler Jordan Belfort in the late 80s dramatized by Scorsese.

Although both Abscam and the Belfort tale are ripe for social commentary, the primary goal of these two “prestige” directors is to make entertaining films that dance around the social problems they should address. Finally, both films are imitations of Martin Scorsese, a director who has seen better days. “American Hustle” borrows liberally from the tricks of the Scorsese trade and so does Scorsese himself, who in his 25th film since 1972 ends up plagiarizing “Goodfellas”.

Although David O. Russell has written and directed one of the best comedies of the last two decades—“Flirting with Disaster”—his latest left me looking at my watch after the first half-hour. Although not so nearly as long as Scorsese’s elephantine three-hour opus, it would have been more tolerable if a half-hour had been shaved off its 138 minutes. I can’t say that it would have been any funnier. Shakespeare said that brevity is the soul of wit, but even at 13 minutes “American Hustle” would have been a slog.

In one of the most obvious signs of his lack of command over his material, Russell cast Christian Bale in the role of Irving Rosenfeld, a Bronx Jew who was based on Melvin Weinberg, the con man who the FBI coerced into acting as an intermediary between a fake Sheikh and the politicians they hoped to sting. After Weinberg was arrested on ten counts of fraud, the FBI offered him immunity if he became part of their operation. Let’s leave it like this, casting Bale in such a role makes about as much sense as casting Woody Allen as an Episcopalian minister whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.

Since the plot of the film has very little to do with historical events (Russell puts in a disclaimer at the beginning of the film that “some of this actually happened”), you have to wonder why in the world Bale felt the need to put on 40 pounds to look like the portly Mel Weinberg. Maybe he thought that this would put him in the record book as the actor who bested Robert DeNiro on the weight alteration scale. Not only did he add a ton of weight to play Irving Rosenfeld, he also lost about the same amount when he was the lead character in “The Machinist”, a film about a man whose chronic insomnia caused such a weight loss that he looked anorexic.

Unlike other films about confidence men such as “The Sting” or “Paper Moon”, the humor in “American Hustle” is conceptual rather than so old-fashioned as to rest on witty dialogue or farcical situations. For example, there’s a scene in “American Hustle” where we see the FBI agent Richard DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) running Abscam in hair curlers. That prompted a wave of laughter from the audience almost equal to the opening scene where we see Irving Rosenfeld gluing a toupee to his baldpate and weaving it into what’s left of his hair. As in almost every scene he appears in, Bale wears a glum face that makes you think he was auditioning for the role of a dying man.

Not that this would have saved the movie, but Louis C.K., who was utterly miscast in a semi-serious role as DiMaso’s boss at the FBI, would have been a much better choice to play Rosenfeld. In fact I would love to sit down with Louis and ask him if he thought the film was funny. I bet he would say no. We Louis’s have a special way of communicating.

The film has a score that amounts to the Greatest Hits of the late 70s, probably meant to capture an era musically that it showed little interest in capturing historically. It goes along with an almost religious dedication to showing how people dressed and what furniture they owned. This faithfulness to period detail smacks of AMC-TV’s “Mad Men” and most Scorsese films.

Through these stylistic flourishes, Russell’s film seeks to stimulate some portion of the average ticket-buyer’s brain by reminding them of their ill-spent youth. In one scene, we see DiMaso dancing at Studio 54 with Rosenfeld’s partner in crime, the beautiful Edith Greensley, whom he has fallen for. It evokes both the Copacabana scene in “Goodfellas” and “Saturday Night Fever”. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, I guess.

Except for the conflict between Rosenfeld and DiMaso over Edith, there’s not much in the way of drama in “American Hustle”. When gangsters led by Victor Tellegio (Robert DeNiro) enter the scene as possible investors for a phony Atlantic City gambling casino, you expect things to get interesting with DeNiro reprising the role of mob boss Doyle Lonnegan in “The Sting”. No such luck.

I wonder if very many Arab-Americans will get a laugh out of “American Hustle”. It is worth remembering why it was called Arab Scam (Abscam for short) in the first place. The sting coincided with the energy crisis of 1979 in which American motorists stood on line sometimes for hours to fill their tank. OPEC was viewed at the time as a dagger at our throat in almost the same way as al Qaeda today. It was no accident that the FBI would orchestrate a sting that exploited American fears over the ability of Sheiks to buy and sell American politicians.

Standup comedian Ray Hanania, a Palestinian Christian, was one of the few who made the connection between Russell’s film and the anti-Arab racism that has found such a comfortable home in Hollywood over the years:

Abscam symbolized a high point in the rise of anti-Arab discrimination and racism in American in the 1970s and 1980s.

It was an FBI driven undercover sting to arrest politicians and mobsters in New Jersey and Washington D.C. who were lured into accepting bribes in 1982 from a fictitious Arab sheikh, who was played by an undercover FBI agent of Lebanese heritage.

None of that racism aspect is addressed in the new movie produced by anti-Arab Hollywood called “American Hustle” which stars Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence.

http://thearabdailynews.com/movie-review-american-hustle-Abscam-1982/

Whenever I am tempted to write that a global warming skeptic at some university is a prostitute of the petroleum industry, I have to remind myself that prostitution is an honorable profession compared to a scientist taking money from Exxon. But that pales in comparison to Jordan Belfort titling his memoir “The Wolf of Wall Street”. Wolves, an endangered species, are social animals whose predatory character helps to maintain a healthy ecosystem. Stockbroker crooks like Belfort have no business calling themselves wolves. Bedbugs or scabies is more like it.

I imagine that most people have some inkling about the story, but for those who don’t, this summary should suffice. Belfort started a “bucket shop” called Stratton Oakmont in the late 1980s that eventually turned into a billion-dollar operation that challenged blue chip firms like Goldman Sachs for market share. A bucket shop specializes in selling dubious penny stocks to working class people over the phone using high-pressure tactics with a high commission to the salesman. There is only a difference in quantity as opposed to quality between a Stratton Oakmont and a Goldman Sachs. The government tends to go after people like Jordan Belfort and Bernie Madoff rather than Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon because their crimes are illegal as opposed to legal. When Blankfein and Dimon were marketing collateralized mortgages, they were inflicting far more damage than a Jordan Belfort could dream of in his wildest imagination.

Belfort was basically a petty thief much like Henry Hill, the lead character in “Goodfellas” whose career was documented in Nicholas Pileggi’s very fine “Wiseguy”. If you’ve seen “Goodfellas”, you will be struck by the similarities with Scorsese’s latest. It has the same heavy doses of nostalgic pop tunes as “American Hustle” but even more ubiquitously. When I think about the heavy reliance of Hollywood movies on background music to prompt an audience on how to react to a scene, my respect for Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi only deepens. His “The Past”, my pick for one of the best films of 2013, dispenses with a film score entirely. But none is needed. The dialog and the acting suffice to allow an audience to know how to feel, at least those members whose brains haven’t been rotted out by laugh tracks on television situation comedies.

The film proceeds at a breakneck pace with Leonard DiCaprio as Belfort coming across as a manic-depressive in the up stage of a psychic cycle, in his instance being triggered by cocaine but just as often by the sight of a Ferrari or a hot looking prostitute. As a character, I am not sure how close he is to the self-portrait found in Belfort’s memoir but if you’ve seen Ray Liotta in the final cocaine-soaked minutes of “Goodfellas” or Al Pacino in “Scarface”, you’ll know what to expect. Alas, that’s part of the problem with “The Wolf of Wall Street”. It starts at one hundred miles per hour in the first 10 minutes and only gets faster. It is the filmic counterpart of a roller coaster ride and amounts to the same kind of cheap thrill.

In a bid to out-Scorsese Scorsese, the director takes the style of “Goodfellas” and ratchets it up to a cartoonish level. There is a grotesque quality to “The Wolf of Wall Street” that reminds you of Hunter Thompson at his worst. For example, in one scene DiCaprio downs a dozen or so Quaalude tablets that don’t kick in immediately. When they do, he tries to make it home safely in his Ferrari driving as slow as he can—or so he thinks. The next day the cops come to arrest him for damage done to property when he was behind the wheel. How could they possibly charge him with a crime when he was driving so slowly, he wonders. They then escort him out to the driveway and show him a nearly demolished Ferrari. I don’t care how many Quaaludes you have taken. If you smack one into a telephone pole or any other stationary object at a high speed, as takes place repeatedly in the flashback, you will remember it the next day. Quaaludes make you stoned but not amnesiac.

I had the same reaction to a scene in which a Forbes reporter visits Stratton Oakmont offices and you see a broker with a python draped around his shoulder and another wearing a half-finished “bespoke” suit. No matter how “wild” a business this was, brokers could not do such things. The visual jokes scattered throughout the film have the net effect of diminishing its reality. I suppose I am one of the few film critics around today that prefers reality, although I do understand the importance of fantasy. Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” remains one of my favorites.

If you want to see how a “bucket shop” operated, there’s no better film representation than the 2000 film “The Boiler Room” that unlike Scorsese’s is steeped in reality (available on Amazon.com streaming). Despite its modest budget, this is a far more impressive work than Scorsese’s.

It was written and directed by Ben Younger and stars Giovanni Ribisi as Seth Davis, a 19-year-old Queens College dropout who is running a betting parlor out of his apartment. One night the manager at J.T. Marlin, a firm just like Belfort’s, stops by to play some Twenty-One. After losing all his money, he makes a bet on Seth. As someone who separates you from your money, he would be an ideal stockbroker.

Unlike “The Wolf of Wall Street” that does not include a single character who was victimized by Belfort, there’s a character in “Boiler Room” who loses his life savings on a bogus stock. Suffering the pangs of conscience, Seth conspires to get the man back his money on the very day the FBI is poised to raid his employer’s office.

Although I have not read Belfort’s memoir, I have a feeling that there was no such similar moral qualms expressed even granting the possibility that the screenplay might have left it out since it would undercut the cartoonish levity of the finished product.

If they did decide to include such characters, a good place to start was with the open letter written to Jordan Belfort by the daughter of a fellow broker he testified against:

So here’s the deal. You people are dangerous. Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers’ fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees.

And yet you’re glorifying it — you who call yourselves liberals. You were honored for career excellence and for your cultural influence by the Kennedy Center, Marty. You drive a Honda hybrid, Leo. Did you think about the cultural message you’d be sending when you decided to make this film? You have successfully aligned yourself with an accomplished criminal, a guy who still hasn’t made full restitution to his victims, exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed and psychopathic behavior. And don’t even get me started on the incomprehensible way in which your film degrades women, the misogynistic, ass-backwards message you endorse to younger generations of men.

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2013/12/wolf_of_wall_street_prousalis.php

Louis Proyect

What Can Mayor Blasio Do?

The Future of New York City
by DEAN BAKER

News reporting on the significance of Bill de Blasio becoming Mayor of New York City may have led some to fear that the Soviet Union was being reincarnated in the country’s largest city. While Bill de Blasio is certainly to the left of many leaders of the national Democratic Party, he is certainly no radical seeking to overthrow capitalism. Furthermore, even if he did plan to seize the means of production, his ability to do so as the mayor of a major city would be quite limited.

Nonetheless there are many areas where the mayor of New York can have a substantial impact. The top of this list would be education policy. De Blasio’s predecessor was a vocal and visible supporter of the education reform movement. While this movement has produced big profits for corporations in the testing business and made some policy entrepreneurs rich and famous, it has not done much to improve education for inner city kids.

De Blasio’s pick for chancellor, Carmen Farina, has decades of experience in the New York school system as a teacher, principle, and administrator. She apparently intends to scale back the intense focus on testing of the Bloomberg administration. She is also likely to work more cooperatively with the teachers union. If this path produces positive results it will be an important example for other school districts.

There are other areas where de Blasio could try innovative policies. The fact that a bloated financial sector can be a drag on growth is getting increasing attention. Even the International Monetary Fund has advocated higher taxes on the financial industry to reduce the amount of waste in the sector.

Ideally the United States would impose a tax on financial transactions similar to the one now being debated in the euro zone. While the city could not impose a large tax on the industry for fear of driving away business, certainly a very modest tax – say 0.01 percent would be doable. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan will not pick up stakes and move across the river over a tax of one hundredth of a percent. A tax of this size could raise billions of dollars a year.

In the same vein, the city could impose a tax on the flipping of mortgages attached to property in the city. This tax would apply regardless of where the transaction took place. A tax of 0.15 percent on a mortgage sale would be a trivial cost for most homebuyers (a first sale could be exempted), but it would provide a substantial disincentive to repeated turnover.

The city could also move to discourage real estate speculation by imposing a tax on vacant property. This one has the great effect that the best way to evade the tax is to rent or sell property that had been sitting empty.

De Blasio could also try some useful experiments in making the workplace more family friendly. The City Council recently voted to require most employers to provide at least five paid sick days to workers. This rule is being phased in over the next two years. De Blasio could look to experiment with more flexible work schedules with the city’s labor force. For example, if many workers opted for four day workweeks, it would substantially reduce the time and money wasted in commuting. If four day workweeks ever became the norm, it would mean a huge reduction in the amount of traffic and congestion during rush hours.

De Blasio could also look to promote work sharing program that is already part of New York State’s unemployment insurance system. Under this program, employers have the option to reduce workers’ hours rather than lay them off. Rather than getting unemployment benefits for losing their jobs, workers would have roughly half of their lost reimbursed from unemployment insurance system.

This keeps workers on the job and improving their skills rather than risk being unemployed for a long period of time. Germany’s effective use of work sharing and comparable programs has brought its unemployment rate down to 5.2 percent from 7.8 percent at start of the downturn, in spite of the fact that its growth rate is virtually the same as the U.S. rate. Work sharing should be popular with the state government also since the cost of the program is picked up by the federal government, at least through the end of 2014.

There are many other areas where de Blasio could be an innovator. He could try experiments with free transit on the buses and subway to see how much ridership would increase and greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced. He could also look to have modest subsidies for retrofitting homes and businesses to make them more energy efficient. This would also be a great way to help generate employment.

There are certainly limits to what a big city mayor can do, but Mayor de Blasio can make a difference for both the people of New York City and the country, if he is willing to try.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and False Profits: Recoverying From the Bubble Economy.

This article originally appeared in The Guardian.

Animal lives on the chopping block: Holding Period Legislation

By Nathan J. Winograd
From the No Kill Advocacy Center:

Butch63

In September 2013, the No Kill Advocacy Center issued a position paper in response to the California Sheltering Report written by the Humane Society of the United States, the ASPCA, and other shelter lobbying organizations and shelters, warning of the dangers associated with many of those recommendations: http://bit.ly/184Rlm9. That report, while at long last finally admitting to the efficacy of various lifesaving programs which these organizations opposed for many years, stated that whether or not shelters chose to implement alternatives to killing should be left up to the discretion of the individual shelters; in their own words: they “remain at the discretion of each community to choose whether and how to implement.”

At the same time, these groups made several recommended changes to current, widespread shelter policies such as the reduction and, in some cases, elimination of holding periods which, without the lifesaving infrastructure and philosophical reorientation of shelters away from killing in favor of lifesaving, would prove deadly. We predicted that many shelters would cherry pick which recommendations issued in the report to follow, choosing to implement those which expand their powers and discretion to kill while entirely ignoring those which would save lives. Specifically, we wrote,

Communities are not free to cherry pick some while ignoring others, as to do so leaves particular groups of animals entering shelters with no protections or alternatives to killing… As a result, regressive shelters are likely to adopt only those provisions, like the licensing scheme, which empower them to impound even more animals. After being told they need not also implement the programs that provide an alternative to killing for the additional impounded animals, this proposal has the potential to exacerbate, rather than lessen, shelter killing; while shielding shelters from public scrutiny as they acted within the guidelines of the stakeholder group.

Tragically, this dire prediction has come to pass.

Right now, and as a direct result of the California Sheltering Report, shelters nationwide are seeking to eliminate or reduce holding periods for cats, one of the report’s recommendations, even though holding periods are often the one and only protection cats have in shelters. Ignoring those parts of the report which suggest the implementation of lifesaving policies and procedures, shelters are seeking not to include them, as we describe in a subsequent report: http://bit.ly/1kgJNxK.

Although billed as an effort to get cats adopted faster, experience proves it would have the opposite effect: allowing more cats to be killed and to be killed quicker. In fact, cats would be killed before their families actually begin looking for them; in some cases, before a family even knows he/she is missing. Nothing in the proposal requires shelters to make cats available for adoption after the shortened (and in some cases eliminated) holding period, but it will give the shelters full authority to kill them and that is what it will do. How do we know they will do this? Because that is what these shelters are already doing to animals who are not subject or no longer are on holding periods such as cats surrendered by their families and stray cats after their holding periods expire. Eliminating this protection would not only seriously limit and even eliminate the opportunity for people to reclaim their lost animals, for many animals, it would mean quicker and often immediate killing the moment they enter a shelter. This is not only a betrayal to animals, but to their families and to the taxpayers who fund these institutions in order to provide a safety net of care for stray and lost animals.

Holding periods are important. They allow people the opportunity to reclaim their missing animals, one of the primary purposes of shelters. Nationwide, animal lovers are seeking to lengthen, not reduce, their state’s mandated holding periods, on the understanding that doing so is vitally important to protect lost pets. Indeed, it is a fundamental precept that holding periods should never be shortened. To the contrary, they need to be longer in many states. However, we can address the professed rationale of quicker adoptions by making holding periods more flexible without simultaneously placing cats in greater mortal peril. By bifurcating holding periods, cats can be adopted out more quickly, without eviscerating the minimal protections cats and their human families have in holding periods.

We also suggest additional language that would give shelters the discretion to transfer animals to a rescue group immediately upon impound, with the same rights of reclamation for the “owner” as if the animal was still in the shelter. This frees up scarce kennel space, without giving pounds a “quick kill” provision as current proposals do. It also shifts the cost of care from taxpayer to private philanthropy. In other words, the animals would remain in the “constructive” custody of the pound while being held in a foster home, private shelter, or rescue group during the reclaim portion of the state mandated holding period; but taxpayers would incur none of the cost. Finally, we suggest that the holding period not come into play in cases where cats are taken in for purposes of sterilization and are then returned.

Excluding laws imposed by health departments regarding the use of controlled substances, the disposition of rabid and potentially aggressive animals and mandated holding periods, shelter directors in this country have essentially unlimited discretion as to how they operate their facilities. If a shelter director decides to kill each and every animal even if there are empty cages, it is legal for him to do so. If a non-profit rescue organization wants to save an animal on death row at a shelter, the shelter director has the authority to deny the group the ability to do so, and they frequently do. Likewise, shelter directors can kill orphaned kittens and puppies rather than work with volunteers who want to provide foster care. They can ban volunteers from walking dogs and socializing cats. And they can limit the number of hours they are open to the public for adoptions, or have hours that make it difficult for working people to reclaim their lost animals or adopt new ones. In short, there are very few checks and balances to ensure that our shelters are run in line with the most up-to-date sheltering policies and procedures. Instead, our shelters are run on the honor system, and it is a discretion shelter directors abuse time and again by failing to implement readily available lifesaving alternatives or to work cooperatively with those who want to help them save lives. To shorten holding periods in this environment is a death sentence. In many shelters, holding periods are often the only thing standing between life and death for an animal.

A mandated, bifurcated holding period, by contrast, will help increase reclaims, rescues, and adoptions. Combined with a very narrow exception for irremediably suffering animals, rigorously defined, it will accomplish the stated goals, without also imperiling the lives of animals. In fact, it would save lives and it would save money—a “win” for taxpayers and a “win” for the animals. In other words, it would solve problems rather than just create new ones.

That these shelters are rejecting these compromises suggests that they are not sincere in their desire to save more cats. Without protective language, these proposals should be opposed.

Legislation:

The required holding period for stray animals shall be five business days, not including the day of impoundment: animals shall be held for owner redemption during the first two days of the holding period and shall be available for owner redemption, transfer, and adoption for the remainder of the holding period. The holding period expires once the animal is redeemed, transferred or adopted, except as follows:
(a) The requirements of this provision do not apply to cats who are impounded for purposes of sterilization and are then returned.
(b) Shelters may transfer animals at any time after impound to a non-profit rescue group, a private shelter, or an organization formed for the prevention of cruelty to animals as long as potential owners are afforded the same rights of reclamation as if the animal was still in the shelter.

The required holding period for an owner relinquished animal impounded by public or private sheltering agencies shall be the same as that for stray animals. The holding period expires once the animal is redeemed, transferred or adopted as follows:
(a) The animals shall be available for owner redemption, transfer, and adoption for the entirety of the holding period.
(b) The requirements of this provision do not apply to cats who are impounded for purposes of sterilization and are then returned.

To download a copy, click here.

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