New Panopticon
15 Cameras and You

The Classic City soon will have its own version of the panopticon.

Invented by the English prison theorist and Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1787, the panopticon is a prison in which every prisoner is visible from a central location. The power of such a system is that prisoners may be - but do not need to be - watched by a guard at any time and that they cannot see each other or the guards. Aware that any and every movement may be under surveillance, prisoners develop a self-imposed, self-maintained discipline. They cannot plan escapes, foment uprisings or abuse themselves when someone is (or might be) watching.

Although the original panopticon was never built, the idea has surfaced more recently thanks to modern technology. Bentham himself saw the panopticon as "a new principle of construction applicable to any sort of establishment, in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection," and he hoped his idea would spread from prisons to hospitals, mental asylums, factories and schools.

Today, if you have Internet access at work, your employer can monitor your Internet use, which is a deterrent against not only wasting company time, but surfing for porn, writing anti-company email messages and conducting risky business online. As with the panopticon, the possibility of surveillance can be as effective in maintaining discipline as actual surveillance.

According to Police Chief Lumpkin and the eight commissioners who voted for the project on July 13, the 15 cameras to be installed in downtown Athens are intended to assist police with law enforcement. Officers can respond to potential and real problems more quickly with 15 permanent sets of eyes at strategic locations. When crimes do occur, the cameras will assist with investigations.

What the cameras create, however, is much larger and more ominous than a law enforcement tool. They create a modern version of the panopticon, in which citizens, not prisoners, may be watched by a police officer at any time. Downtown Athens will have 15 guards always watching and recording the populace, the vast majority of whom have broken (and are breaking) no laws.

This is a form of social control and discipline, and its most insidious effect will not be individual citizens trying to spy on each other (as one commissioner speculated at the meeting). The worst effect of these cameras will be the ability of the government to watch law-abiding citizens whenever they go downtown. And this does not stop with the Athens-Clarke County government.

Consider the locations of these cameras, one of which is proposed for College Avenue and Broad Street - the site of The Arches at UGA. There are no bars at that location - just coffee shops and restaurants - but it happens to be where most political protests in Athens are held. With a camera there and with a hastily approved PATRIOT Act in Washington, the local and U.S. governments can determine who is protesting, what they are protesting and how long and how frequently they are protesting without having to be present at the scene. The FBI and Secret Service will have a much easier time determining who is anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-anything thanks to the Athens panopticon.

Although Chief Lumpkin (to my knowledge) did not mention the cameras as a potential tool in the "War on Terror," is it possible that the new panopticon would help on that front as well? Only if terrorists like to attend political demonstrations. It seems unlikely that terrorists would subject themselves to public scrutiny and the attention of law enforcement by appearing at such protests.

I hope these surveillance cameras do not discourage citizens from exercising their rights of free speech and assembly. I also hope the local and national governments subject themselves to the same levels of transparency and constant surveillance as they subject their citizens. Unfortunately, until the PATRIOT Act is revised or scrapped, the national government is free to do anything - to strip anyone of their constitutional rights or U.S. citizenship - as long as it claims to be fighting terrorism. And as long as George W. Bush is in office, the executive branch is free to withhold documents and data whether or not the release of information may help the government fight terrorism, remain accountable, or keep itself part of that ingenious system of checks and balances that our founding fathers established.

Under the new panopticon, it is the citizenry, not the government, that bears the burden of accountability. In a true democracy, the government is just as accountable.

Brian Henry
Brian Henry is a writer and teaches in the UGA writing program.

Who Knew?
A New Oconee Plan

It is becoming more and more obvious that Oconee's leadership has decided on a goal of greatly accelerating growth in the county.

I attended the "Public Information Meeting" on August 24 for the massive $126 Million Master Wastewater Plan for Oconee County. Last week one was held for the Hard Labor Creek Reservoir project with a total cost of $342 Million.

Neither meeting had many citizens - some Walton citizens attended the Water meeting. The format used by the Oconee County commissioners does not allow audience questions. It uses the GA DOT format of a general presentation and then "breaking into small groups" and discussing the project with consultants.

This type format avoids any real public discussion. It allows the commissioners and consultants to "control" the press reports and agenda. These type presentations are usually attended by more county officials, staff, consultants, developers and land investors than citizens. In the past, some of us old veterans of local government called such events "a dog and pony show." They are designed to sound positive and simple. As usual, "the devil is in the detail."

The presentations for both water and sewer had similar points - that Oconee will experience "fast growth" and will have approximately 65,000 people in less than 25 years- over double what we are now.

Question: At what point and in what manner did Oconee County decide on fast development? Who decided it? Where were the meetings? Who participated?

With current infrastructure plans and zoning decisions, this fast growth rate will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The sewer plan calls for most of Oconee County to have sewer service and smaller, more dense lots.

During the last year, we have witnessed some neighborhoods attend meetings and question MPD's and their density. Growth was debated during the recent election cycle. The pro-development group argued for "progress" and that Oconee was not growing fast. Folks, that is not the case now.

Citizens should attend the infrastructure meetings. It is all related. We will have water and sewer lines all over Eastville, Dark Corner, Buncombe and High Shoals. We will have wall to wall subdivisions!

It is obvious that the county is headed toward issuing more bonds for these improvements. The debt payment will extend well past the terms of current commissioners. A number of consultants, attorneys (bond and county), engineers, etc. stand to make big bucks.

We can repay the bonds if we allow the fast growth policy that has apparently been adopted by the commissioners. However, it will take much tax money to build the schools, maintain and upgrade our two-lane-1950s farm to market roads, libraries, more fire stations and firemen, larger county facilities and so on!

Property owners and developers can benefit from this policy. However, residents should expect quite a different Oconee County. It is regrettable that real public meetings and discussions weren't held before we quietly embarked on this course.

It will be interesting to see where the lines are run first: influential landowners, developers and even speculators. An area getting a lot of attention is the GA Highway 53 corridor - one of the last real agricultural corridors north of Greensboro Highway.

It is becoming obvious to me that a Master Plan is being followed to make the Hog Mountain Road the new "growth center" for Oconee County. This is being done at the expense of Epps Bridge Parkway, University Parkway, U S 441 and U S 78. The plan can be found in many matters under consideration by the board of commissioners.

Wendell Dawson
Former Oconee County Board of Commissioners Chairman Wendell Dawson edits the weblog Another Voice From Oconee County (http://avoc.info/index.php), from which this was excerpted.

Left vs. Right
Origin Of The Species

The division of the human family into its two distinct branches occurred some 10,000 years ago, a few hundred years after the Flood. Humans coexisted as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers.

In the pivotal event of societal evolution, beer was invented. This epochal innovation was both the foundation of modern civilization and the occasion of the great bifurcation of humanity into its two distinct subgroups: liberals and conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain, and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can had yet been invented, so it was necessary to stick pretty close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days killing animals to barbecue at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of the conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting, learned how to live off conservatives by showing up for the BBQs every night and doing women's work like sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the liberal movement. Later, some of the liberals actually became women.

Liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, invention of group therapy and democratic voting to see how to divide the beer and meat that the conservatives provided. Women were not interested in democracy at that time because most of them were still women back then, and the conservatives fed them.

Conservatives are symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (they add lime), but most prefer white wine or foreign water in a bottle. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu and French food are on liberal menus. Their women have more testosterone than the men. Liberals like deviant sex and want others to like it, too. Their first successful city governments were Sodom and Gomorrah.

Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule in baseball because it wasn't "fair" to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, soldiers, athletes and generally anyone who works productively outside government. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals do not produce anything. They like to "govern" the producers and decide what is to be done with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals just stayed in Europe when conservatives were coming to America. Liberals do not have principles, except for their dedication to stealing the production of conservatives.

The American cowboy, of course, is your basic, full-bore conservative. A hundred years ago, an Englishman visiting Texas was attempting to find the owner of a huge cattle ranch. He rode up to one of the ranch hands, and inquired, "Pardon me, but could you perhaps tell me where I might locate your master?" To which the cowboy replied, "That sumbitch ain't been born yet."

So, what'll it be? Wine or beer? Domestic or imported?

Ripped from the web with thanks to the anonymous creator.

Institute Index
The Elections Business

• Amount of political contributions given by top four voting machine companies since 2001: $485,870

• Percent of that given to Republicans: 90

• Amount given by employees of CIBER Inc., the leading company contracted to verify results of touch-screen voting machines: $75,000

• Percent given to Republicans: 96

• Percent of contributions to Republicans by Accenture, the group which created Florida's 2004 "purge list" of supposed felons, eventually abandoned: 62

Sources on file at the Institute for Southern Studies, www.southernstudies.org.

Rambo A Chump
Be Ashamed, Kerry

John Kerry has made a career out of trying to have things both ways. Now it's catching up with him.

In October, 2002 when he voted for a Senate resolution giving George W. Bush the authorization to invade Iraq, Kerry knew that there was no solid proof that Saddam Hussein had illegal weapons.

"Let me be clear," he said at the time, "the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies." That was an exact summary of the position that most Americans supported at the time. Sixty-three percent told the October 7, 2002 CBS News-New York Times poll that they favored giving the UN inspectors as much time as they needed to get the job done. But while just 30 percent favored war, Kerry knew that the Bushies were just beginning to unleash a blizzard of pro-war propaganda. Banking that the percentage of hawks would soon increase, he voted with the winning team.

Indeed, by March 2003, 72 percent of the U.S. public supported attacking Iraq. Kerry's cynical calculus, it seemed, had paid off.

Five months after the fall of Baghdad, Bush asked Congress for $87 billion to finance the occupation of Iraq. But with 130,000 troops bogged down by a resistance movement that was killing at least one soldier a day, the war had already become unpopular. Only 41 percent of Americans - the number kept sliding - remained sweet on regime change. Again wanting to be on the winning side of the polls, Kerry voted against the appropriation.

Republicans have had a field day with his hawk-to-dove act. "[Kerry] tried to explain his vote by saying: I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it. End quote," Bush told his chortling audiences. "He's got a different explanation now. One time he said he was proud he voted against the funding; then he said that the whole thing was a complicated matter. There is nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat."

Kerry has a reasonable explanation for voting against the money to pay for the war he voted in favor of: he preferred that the $87 billion come from a partial repeal of Bush's tax cuts, whereas Bush tacked it onto the deficit. The elephant in the room, however, is this: he never should have voted for the Iraq incursion in the first place.

The debate about Kerry's Vietnam War record similarly revolves around the Democratic candidate's penchant for flipfloppery.

Kerry returned from the war in Vietnam in 1971. An early supporter of the conflict, what he saw there changed his mind - prompting him to help found Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

"I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones," he told "Meet the Press." "I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns… I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley [found guilty in the My Lai massacre], are war criminals."

By 1971, American public opinion had turned against the war in Vietnam. Kerry's views were widely accepted. But it has now been three decades since we fled Saigon. Hollywood movies have portrayed Vietnam vets as noble warriors hampered by simpering politicians. We've forgotten the million-plus people we killed to prop up a right-wing puppet dictatorship. And militarism is in the air. Vietnam has been rehabilitated, and no one has done more to rewrite this history than John Kerry.

When Kerry reappeared on "Meet the Press" in 2001, the new rightist paradigm prompted him to back down from his original comments: "I don't stand by the genocide. I think those were the words of an angry young man. We did not try to do that. But I do stand by the description - I don't even believe there is a purpose served in the word 'war criminal.' I really don't."

The Kerry campaign has played both sides of the Vietnam equation. He scores points both as a pacifist hippie and as a Silver Star-winning war hero! Choose whichever Kerry you prefer - 1969 or 1971 or 2004 - and vote for whichever version you like best.

Serious people and historians know that Kerry was right the first time around. Like Iraq, Vietnam was an ill-conceived, doomed war that wasted countless lives for no good reason, launched by a president who lied about a Cold War threat (the absurd "domino theory") that simply didn't exist. As U.S. troops are doing now in Iraq, we committed horrific atrocities in Vietnam.

Not only did the guys in black pajamas beat us fair and square, we deserved it. We were wrong. We deserved to lose. Service in the wars against Vietnam and Iraq are nothing to be proud of. If John Kerry can't admit now what he knew in 1971, at least he can stop bragging about his medals.

That, of course, would require that he pay more attention to his heart than the polls.

Ted Rall
Ted Rall is the author of two new books, Wake Up, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right and Generalissimo El Busho: Essays and Cartoons on the Bush Years.