What Obama Has Done Right : The List of 90

Grading Obama's presidency:
A list of 90 accomplishments

By Betty Dubose Hamilton / The Rag Blog / November 16, 2009

See 'A Grade for Obama: First six months' record,' by Robert P. Watson, Below.

With his list of 90 accomplishments, Dr. Robert P. Watson of Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, has graded Barack Obama on his first six months in office.

I think the list is invaluable even though, as a progressive, I don't believe things are quite as rosy as Dr. Watson's inventory might suggest.

For instance, I have been extremely disappointed with the president on health care reform and was completely shocked when he took single payer out of the mix from the very beginning. Even I, an unseasoned political person, did not (and do not) trust health insurance, big pharma, and AMA to make our costs less expensive.

I wholeheartedly agree that defending Obama on effectively false grounds will help neither him nor us. But I believe the list can be helpful, as a starting point for analyzing his presidency so far.

He has certainly disappointed us in a number of areas, but I do think it important that we acknowledge his positive actions. Let's add to the list as more accomplishments come to light. And if we think certain items are misleading, we can make note of them. We'll send him The Rag Blog with our additions.

I am saving the list in a file and using appropriate parts for different blogs. For example, in the Lubbock paper there was recently a comment about President Obama not being deserving to be Commander-in-Chief of the military. I went through the list and picked out all of the items that pertained to what he has done for our soldiers and their families and posted them in the comment space. Some of these items I was already aware of, some I was not.

Although I knew that the president had lifted the veil of secrecy (with appropriate family permission) over the returning war dead that had been established by both H. W. Bush and G. W. Bush, I was not aware that the expenses for families of the fallen soldiers are now covered so that they could be at Dover A.F.B. when their loved ones came home (#5). I am also grateful that he is phasing out the "back-door draft" caused by the stop-loss policy that kept soldiers in Iraq-Afghanistan longer than their tours of service (#12).

I believe that numbers 1, 2, and 9 were instrumental in exposing the Medicare fraud recently publicized in Florida. Even though I was aware of the rules limiting lobbyists in the White House (#10, 11), I am glad to be reminded and to have them in a list that I can go to for reference.

I read certain newspapers and blogs religiously, and will use the various items in the list to support my arguments against the propaganda perpetuated by other bloggers who merely repeat pundits' talking points.

I am so tired of the swiftboat types cherry-picking words and using them as sound bites that I try to back my statements with examples (such as what he has attempted for the military). The sound bite I hear the most in my part of West Texas is that President Obama says we are "no longer a Christian nation." FactCheck.org has the quote from his speech that says we are "no longer JUST a Christian nation," but that doesn't mean a thing to the groups I am addressing.

Note that I've added a couple of items at the end.

A grade for Obama:
First six months' record

By Robert P. Watson

I am always being asked to grade Obama's presidency. In place of offering him a grade, I put together a list of his accomplishments thus far. I think you would agree that it is very impressive. His first six months have been even more active than FDR's or LBJ's -- the two standards for such assessments.

Yet, there is little media attention given to much of what he has done. Of late, the media is focusing almost exclusively on Obama's critics, without holding them responsible for the uncivil, unconstructive tone of their disagreements or without holding the previous administration responsible for getting us in such a deep hole. The misinformation and venom that now passes for political reporting and civic debate is beyond description.

As such, there is a need to set the record straight. What most impresses me is the fact that Obama has accomplished so much not from a heavy-handed or top-down approach but from a style that has institutionalized efforts to reach across the aisle, encourage vigorous debate, and utilize town halls and panels of experts in the policy-making process. Beyond the accomplishments, the process is good for democracy... and our democratic processes have been battered and bruised in recent years.

Let me know if I missed anything in the list (surely I did).

Here is a list of Obama's accomplishments as of August 2009.

1. Ordered all federal agencies to undertake a study and make recommendations for ways to cut spending;
2. Ordered a review of all federal operations to identify and cut wasteful spending and practices;
3. Instituted enforcements for equal pay for women;
4. Beginning the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq;
5. Families of fallen soldiers have expenses covered to be on hand when the body arrives at Dover A.F.B.;
6. Ended media "blackout" on war casualties; reporting full information;
7. Ended media "blackout" on covering the return of fallen soldiers to Dover A.F.B.; the media is now permitted to do so pending adherence to respectful rules and approval of fallen soldier's family;
8. The White House and federal government are respecting the Freedom of Information Act;
9. Instructed all federal agencies to promote openness and transparency as much as possible;
10. Limits on lobbyists' access to the White House;
11. Limits on White House aides working for lobbyists after their tenure in the administration;
12. Ended the previous "stop-loss" policy that kept soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan longer than their enlistment date;
13. Phasing out the expensive F-22 war plane and other outdated weapons systems, which weren't even used or needed in Iraq/Afghanistan;
14. Removed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research;
15. Federal support for stem-cell and new biomedical research;
16. New federal funding for science and research labs;
17. States are permitted to enact federal fuel efficiency standards above federal standards;
    
18. Increased infrastructure spending (roads, bridges, power plants...) after years of neglect;
19. Funds for high-speed, broadband Internet access to K-12 schools;
20. New funds for school construction;
21. The prison at Guantanamo Bay is being phased out;
22. US Auto industry rescue plan;
23. Housing rescue plan;
24. $789 billion economic stimulus plan;
25. The public can meet with federal housing insurers to refinance (the new plan can be completed in one day) a mortgage if they are having trouble paying;
26. US financial and banking rescue plan;
27. The "secret detention" facilities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere are being closed;
28. Ended the previous policy; the US now has a no torture policy and is in compliance with the Geneva Convention standards;
29. Better body armor is now being provided to our troops;
30. The missile defense program is being cut by $1.4 billion in 2010;
31. Restarted the nuclear non-proliferation talks and building back up the nuclear inspection infrastructure/protocols;
32. Reengaged in the treaties/agreements to protect the Antarctic;
33. Reengaged in the agreements/talks on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions;
34. Visited more countries and met with more world leaders than any president in his first six months in office;
35. Successful release of US captain held by Somali pirates; authorized the SEALS to do their job;
36. US Navy increasing patrols off Somali coast;
37. Attractive tax write-offs for those who buy hybrid automobiles;
38. "Cash for clunkers" program offers vouchers to trade in fuel inefficient, polluting old cars for new cars; stimulates auto sales;
39. Announced plans to purchase fuel efficient American-made fleet for the federal government;
40. Expanded the SCHIP program to cover health care for 4 million more children;
41. Signed national service legislation; expanded national youth service program;
42. Instituted a new policy on Cuba, allowing Cuban families to return "home" to visit loved ones;
43. Ended the previous policy of not regulating and labeling carbon dioxide emissions;
44. Expanding vaccination programs;
45. Immediate and efficient response to the floods in North Dakota and other natural disasters;
46. Closed offshore tax safe havens;
47. Negotiated deal with Swiss banks to permit US government to gain access to records of tax evaders and criminals;
48. Ended the previous policy of offering tax benefits to corporations who outsource American jobs; the new policy is to promote in-sourcing to bring jobs back;
49. Ended the previous practice of protecting credit card companies; in place of it are new consumer protections from credit card industry's predatory practices;
50. Energy producing plants must begin preparing to produce 15% of their energy from renewable sources;
51. Lower drug costs for seniors;
52. Ended the previous practice of forbidding Medicare from negotiating with drug manufacturers for cheaper drugs; the federal government is now realizing hundreds of millions in savings;
53. Increasing pay and benefits for military personnel;
54. Improved housing for military personnel;
55. Initiating a new policy to promote federal hiring of military spouses;
56. Improved conditions at Walter Reed Military Hospital and other military hospitals;
57. Increasing student loans;
58. Increasing opportunities in AmeriCorps program;
59. Sent envoys to Middle East and other parts of the world that had been neglected for years; reengaging in multilateral and bilateral talks and diplomacy;
60. Established a new cyber security office;
61. Beginning the process of reforming and restructuring the military 20 years after the Cold War to a more modern fighting force... this includes new procurement policies, increasing size of military, new technology and cyber units and operations, etc.;
62. Ended previous policy of awarding no-bid defense contracts;
63. Ordered a review of hurricane and natural disaster preparedness;
64. Established a National Performance Officer charged with saving the federal government money and making federal operations more efficient;
65. Students struggling to make college loan payments can have their loans refinanced;
66. Improving benefits for veterans;
67. Many more press conferences and town halls and much more media access than previous administration;
68. Instituted a new focus on mortgage fraud;
69. The FDA is now regulating tobacco;
70. Ended previous policy of cutting the FDA and circumventing FDA rules;
71. Ended previous practice of having White House aides rewrite scientific and environmental rules, regulations, and reports;
72. Authorized discussions with North Korea and private mission by Pres. Bill Clinton to secure the release of two Americans held in prisons;
73. Authorized discussions with Myanmar and mission by Sen. Jim Webb to secure the release of an American held captive;
74. Making more loans available to small businesses;
75. Established independent commission to make recommendations on slowing the costs of Medicare;
76. Appointment of first Latina to the Supreme Court;
77. Authorized construction/opening of additional health centers to care for veterans;
78. Limited salaries of senior White House aides; cut to $100,000;
79. Renewed loan guarantees for Israel;
80. Changed the failing/status quo military command in Afghanistan;
81. Deployed additional troops to Afghanistan;
82. New Afghan War policy that limits aerial bombing and prioritizes aid, development of infrastructure, diplomacy, and good government practices by Afghans;
83. Announced the long-term development of a national energy grid with renewable sources and cleaner, efficient energy production;
84. Returned money authorized for refurbishment of White House offices and private living quarters;
85. Paid for redecorations of White House living quarters out of his own pocket;
86. Held first Seder in White House;
87. Attempting to reform the nation's healthcare system which is the most expensive in the world yet leaves almost 50 million without health insurance and millions more underinsured;
88. Has put the ball in play for comprehensive immigration reform;
89. Has announced his intention to push for energy reform; and
90. Has announced his intention to push for education reform.

Oh, and he built a swing set for the girls outside the Oval Office!

[Robert P. Watson, Ph.D. is Coordinator of American Studies at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. This list covers Obama's presidency through August, 2009.]

Betty DuBose Hamilton's additions:
91. Signed the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act.
92. Discovery and publicizing of Medicare fraud, making the public more
aware of not turning a blind eye to such fraud.

[Editor's Note: This is basically a list of positives and there are many items on this list that progressives will disagree with, will consider to be cosmetic, or will fault for a lack of follow-through -- and there are without doubt a lot of negatives not included. But we think this is an impressive list just the same.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

A Morally Bankrupt Military : Spc. Alexis Hutchinson and Pvt. Paul Rich

Army Spc. Alexis Hutchinson. Below, Alexis with son Kamani Hutchinson. Photos from Oakland Tribune.
U.S. Army:
Infant to protective services, mom to Afghanistan

By Dahr Jamail / November 16, 2009

See 'Morally bankrupt military: When soldiers and their families become expendable,' by Dahr Jamail, Below.

VENTURA, California -- U.S. Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother, is being threatened with a military court-martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan, despite having been told she would be granted extra time to find someone to care for her 11-month-old son while she is overseas.

Hutchinson, of Oakland, California, is currently being confined at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, after being arrested. Her son was placed into a county foster care system.

Hutchinson has been threatened with a court martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan on Sunday, Nov. 15. She has been attempting to find someone to take care of her child, Kamani, while she is deployed overseas, but to no avail.

According to the family care plan of the U.S. Army, Hutchinson was allowed to fly to California and leave her son with her mother, Angelique Hughes of Oakland.

However, after a week of caring for the child, Hughes realised she was unable to care for Kamani along with her other duties of caring for a daughter with special needs, her ailing mother, and an ailing sister.

In late October, Angelique Hughes told Hutchinson and her commander that she would be unable to care for Kamani after all. The Army then gave Hutchinson an extension of time to allow her to find someone else to care for Kamani. Meanwhile, Hughes brought Kamani back to Georgia to be with his mother.

However, only a few days before Hutchinson's original deployment date, she was told by the Army she would not get the time extension after all, and would have to deploy, despite not having found anyone to care for her child.

Faced with this choice, Hutchinson chose not to show up for her plane to Afghanistan. The military arrested her and placed her child in the county foster care system.

Currently, Hutchinson is scheduled to fly to Afghanistan on Sunday for a special court martial, where she then faces up to one year in jail.

Hutchinson's civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, told IPS, "The core issue is that they are asking her to make an inhumane choice. She did not have a complete family care plan, meaning she did not find someone to provide long-term care for her child. She's required to have a complete family care plan, and was told she'd have an extension, but then they changed it on her."

Asked why she believes the military revoked Hutchinson's extension, Sussman responded, "I think they didn't believe her that she was unable to find someone to care for her infant. They think she's just trying to get out of her deployment. But she's just trying to find someone she can trust to take care of her baby."

Hutchinson's mother has flown to Georgia to retrieve the baby, but is overwhelmed and does not feel able to provide long-term care for the child.

According to Sussman, the soldier needs more time to find someone to care for her infant, but does not as yet have friends or family able to do so.

Sussman says Hutchinson told her, "It is outrageous that they would deploy a single mother without a complete and current family care plan. I would like to find someone I trust who can take care of my son, but I cannot force my family to do this. They are dealing with their own health issues."

Sussman told IPS that the Army's JAG attorney, Captain Ed Whitford, "told me they thought her chain of command thought she was trying to get out of her deployment by using her child as an excuse." '

Major Gallagher, of Hutchinson's unit, also told Sussman that he did not believe it was a real family crisis, and that Hutchinson's "mother should have been able to take care of the baby".

In addition, according to Sussman, a First Sergeant Gephart "told me he thought she [Hutchinson] was pulling her family care plan stuff to get out of her deployment".

"To me it sounds completely bogus," Sussman told IPS, "I think what they are actually going to do is have her spend her year deployment in Afghanistan, then court martial her back here upon her return. This would do irreparable harm to her child. I think they are doing this to punish her, because they think she is lying."

Sussman explained that she believes the best possible outcome is for the Army to either give Hutchinson the extension they had said she would receive so that she can find someone to care for her infant, or barring this, to simply discharge her so she can take care of her child.

Nevertheless, Hutchinson is simply asking for the time extension to complete her family care plan, and not to be discharged.

"I'm outraged by this," Sussman told IPS, "I've never gone to the media with a military client, but this situation is just completely over the top."

Source / IPS

Fort Bragg, N.C. The flowers are a nice touch. Photo by Gerry Broome / AP.
Morally bankrupt military:
When soldiers and their families become expendable

By Dahr Jamail / November 11, 2009

The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as “nondeployable for medical reasons” have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless.

The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this. Maj. Nidal Hasan had worked as a counselor at Walter Reed, hearing countless stories of bloodshed, horror and death from dismembered veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While he had not yet served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the major was overloaded with secondary trauma, coupled with ongoing harassment about his being a Muslim. This, along with other factors, contributed towards Hasan falling into a desperation so deep he was willing to slaughter fellow soldiers, and is indicative of fissures running deep into the crumbling edifice upon which the US military stands.

The case of Pvt. Timothy Rich also demonstrates the disastrous implications of the apathetic attitude of the military toward its own. Not dissimilar from Major Hasan, who clearly would have benefited from treatment for the secondary trauma he was experiencing from his work with psychologically wounded veterans, one of the main factors that forced Private Rich to go absent without leave (AWOL) was the failure of the military to treat his mental issues.

Rich told Truthout, “In my unit, to go to sick call for mental health was looked down upon. Our acting 1st Sergeant believed that we shouldn’t have mental issues because we were too ‘high speed.’ So I was afraid to go because I didn’t want to be labeled as a weak soldier.”

What followed was more harrowing.

The other problems arose when I brought my girlfriend down to marry her. My unit believed her to be a problem starter so I was ordered not to marry her, taken to a small finance company by an NCO and forced to draw a loan in order to buy her a plane ticket to return home. They escorted her to the airport and through security to ensure that she left. Once the NCO left she turned around and hitchhiked back to Fort Bragg.

Before the unit could discover us, we went to the courthouse and got married. We were then summoned by my Commander, Captain Jones, to his office and reprimanded. He called me a dumb ass soldier and a shit bag for marrying her and told my wife that she was a fool to marry someone as stupid as me. Members of my unit started referring to me as Pvt. Bitch instead of Pvt. Rich. The entire episode caused a lot of strain in our relationship. Unable to cope with all this, I bought two plane tickets and went AWOL with my wife.

Rich was later apprehended when a federal warrant was issued against him. After 11 days in a country jail, he was transported back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. On August 17, 2008, he was wrongly assigned to Echo Platoon that was part of the 82nd Airborne, whereas his unit was part of the 18th Airborne.

Rich recollects, “I was confused when they assigned me to the 82nd. I was dismissed as a liar when I brought this up with my NCO Sgt Joseph Fulgence and my commander, Captain Thaxton. I ended up spending a year at Echo before being informed that I was never supposed to have been in the 82nd.”

At Fort Bragg, he was permitted to seek mental health treatment and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, psychosis, insomnia and a mood disorder. This, however, did not stop his commander from harassing him. His permanent profile from the doctor restricted him from being on duty before 0800 (8 a.m.) hours, but his commander, Sergeant Fulgence, dismissed the profile as merely a guideline and not a mandatory directive.

The soldier was accused of using mental health as a pretext to avoid duty. So, Rich was up every morning for first formation at 0545 (5:45 a.m.). It wasn’t until he refused to take his medication because it made him groggy in the morning that his doctor called his commander and settled the matter. By then, Rich had already been forced to violate his profile for six months.

During this period, his mental health deteriorated rapidly. The combined effect of heavy medication and restrictions on his home visits resulted in his experiencing blackouts that led him to take destructive actions in the barracks. When he was discovered talking about killing the chain of command, he was put on a 24-hour suicide watch that seemed to have served little purpose, because on August 17 he was able to elude his guards and make his way to the roof of his barracks.

“I climbed onto the roof of the building and sat up there thinking about my family and my situation and decided to go ahead and end my suffering by taking a nose dive off the building,” Rich explained to Truthout.

His body plummeted through the air, bounced off a tree, and he landed on his back with a cracked spine. The military gave him a back brace, psychotropic drugs and a renewed 24-hour suicide watch, measures as effective in alleviating his pain as his failed suicide attempt.

When Truthout contacted him just days after his failed suicide attempt, a fatigued Rich detailed his hellish year-long plight of awaiting a discharge that never came.

I want to leave here very bad. For four months they have been telling me that I’ll get out next week. It got to the point that the NCOs would tell me just to calm me down that I’d be going home the next day. They went as far as to call my wife and requesting her to lie that she was coming to get me the next day. I eventually stopped believing them. I didn’t see an end to it, so I figured I’d try and end it myself.

The noncommissioned officers in his barracks thought it was hilarious that Rich had jumped, and he was offered money for an encore that could be videotaped.

At the time he was in a “holdover” unit, comprised mostly of AWOL soldiers who had turned themselves in or had been arrested. Others in his unit had untreated mental health problems like him or were suffering from severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from deployments in Iraq and or Afghanistan.

According to Rich, every soldier in his platoon was subjected to abusive treatment of some kind or the other. “It even got to the point when our 1st Sergeant Cisneros told us that if it were up to him we all would all be taken out back and shot, and that we needed to pray to our gods because we were going to pay (for our actions).”

Tim’s wife Megan had to bear his never-ending ordeal in equal measure. She witnessed the military’s callousness up close. She informed Truthout,

Since February of this year, Tim’s unit had been telling him he would be out in two weeks. After two weeks when he asked, they would repeat the same thing. At times he would get excited and start packing his belongings and I would try to figure out how to get him home to Ohio. He would call me crying in relief because he thought we were going to be together again real soon. The military forced me to lie to him too. When he realized they did not mean to release him he grew very destructive during his black out spells. Eventually he simply gave up on coming home.

Megan first realized there was a problem with the way the military was treating her husband when she noticed him doing and saying things that were out of character for him, like apologizing for not being a good husband and father and being openly suicidal. He had also begun to self-medicate with alcohol, an increasing trend among soldiers not receiving adequate mental-health treatment from the military.

She revealed to Truthout,

He had quit for the girls and me but it seems like he could not handle the stress and needed an escape. This caused a huge problem between us and we began to argue about it. He became severely depressed, pulled away from me, and started to do things he normally doesn’t do, such as giving away his money and belongings, and telling the recipients that he wouldn’t need those things in hell.

She sensed that her husband would be in trouble if he were to stand up for himself, so she began to advocate on his behalf. Her attempts to do so met with fresh abuse from his commanders. The chain of command banned her from the company barracks and had her escorted off post. The couple was commandeered into Sergeant Fulgence’s office where they were chastised. The sergeant referred to Megan as “a bad mother” and “a bitch.” When Megan attempted to leave the office in protest, the sergeant ordered her to stay and listen to what he had to say.

This was followed by an encounter with the commander of the platoon, Commander Thaxton. The commander in this case ordered Tim to shut up, and threatened him with confinement. He demanded that Megan explain what kind of mother would bring her child to a new location without a place to live. She tried telling him that the AER loan was for her to come to Fort Bragg since they had lost their house after Tim’s arrest and loss of job.

Although the paperwork for the loan clearly stated that it was for her travel, food and lodging at Fort Bragg, the commander insisted it was for an apartment. When Tim intervened to say that the $785 would not be sufficient to pay rent and bills, especially since he wasn’t being paid his wages and his wife couldn’t work because of the baby, and according to Tim, both Sergeant Fulgence and Captain Thaxton “had a nice laugh over that” and dismissed the duo, referring to them as “juvenile dumb-asses.”

After Tim returned from being AWOL and was brought up on charges, he went through 706 (a psychology board) that declared him mentally incompetent at the time of his being AWOL. It took a painfully long amount of time for the charges to be dismissed without prejudice. The soldier believes that his superiors deliberately refused to do the requisite paperwork for his clearance and subsequent resumption of his pay.

He told Truthout,

Every time I came on base I got arrested even though I was on active duty again. Then my wife and I got an AER loan for her to come down to Fort Bragg. When she got there and my pay continued to be withheld, the AER money ran out and my wife and child had to sleep in the van we owned. When my unit found out they called the Military Police and ordered me to give custody of my daughter to my father.

When Tim refused to do that, they punished him by confining him to the barracks and barring his wife from entering the base. To add insult, the chain of command took away his van keys and said that neither he nor Megan was allowed use it.

The nightmare ended when the military finally released Pvt. Timothy Rich, and by default, Megan. He was discharged and “allowed” to enter the ranks of US citizens searching for jobs and health care. Their traumatic journey to that starting point is what distinguishes them from their civilian counterparts.

Rich’s advice to anyone thinking of joining the military today: “Don’t join. Everything they advertise and tell you about how it’s a family friendly army is a lie.”

Sgt. Heath Carter suffered a similar fate at the hands of an indifferent military command. Upon return from the invasion of Iraq, he discovered that his daughter Sierra was living in an unsafe environment in Arkansas under the care of his first wife, who had full custody of the child. Heath and his new wife, Teresa, started consulting attorneys in order to secure custody of Sierra, who also suffered from a life-threatening medical condition.

Precisely during this time, the military chose to keep changing Carter’s duty station from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, then to Fort Stewart, Georgia. Not only did these constant transfers make it difficult for Carter to see his daughter, they also reduced his chances of gaining custody of Sierra. Convinced that this was a matter of life and death for his daughter, he requested compassionate reassignment to Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, about two hours from his first wife’s home in Arkansas.

His appeals to the military command, the legal department, chaplain and even to his congressman failed, and the military insisted that he remain at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Having run out of all available avenues, in May 2007 he went AWOL from Fort Stewart and headed home to Arkansas where he fought for and won custody of Sierra, and was able to literally save her life by obtaining needed medical care for her.

However, on January 25 of this year, Carter was arrested at his home by the military police, who flew him back to Fort Stewart where he has been awaiting charges for the past eight months. Being a sergeant, he is in a regular unit and not in a holdover, but that does not help his cause. Initially, his commander told him it would take a month and a half for him to be sent home. Several months later, it was decided he would receive a court-martial.

Carter feels frustrated,

Now I have to wait for the court martial. It’s taken this long for them to decide. If we had known it would take this long, my family could have moved down here. Every time I ask when I’ll have a trial, they say it is only going to be another two weeks. I get the feeling they are lying. They have messed with my pay. They’re trying to push me to do something wrong.

His ordeal has forced Carter to reflect on the wars. He admits that, although his original reason for going AWOL was personal and he had otherwise been proud of his missions, he sees things in Iraq differently today. “I don’t think there is any reason for us to be there except for oil.”

Yet, both Private Rich and Sergeant Carter were offered deployments to Afghanistan amid their struggles. It is soldiers like these that the military will use to fill the ranks of the next “surge” of troops into Afghanistan, which at the time of this writing, appears to be as many as 34,000 troops.

The stage is set for more tragic incidents like the recent massacre at Fort Hood.

[Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years. This report was originally published by Truthout.]

Source / Dahr Jamail's Mideast Dispatches

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Hot Oil! Narco Pirates Smuggle Mexican Petrol into Texas

Hot oil? Petroleum "pipa" with the mark of the Zetas, the infamous drug cartel branching out into petro-piracy. Photo from NarcoGuerra Times.
HOT OIL!

Union crooks, drug cartels and U.S. corporations are stealing billions of bucks of Mexican petroleum.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / November 16, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- In a catchy photo op staged this past August, officials of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are pictured handing over a four foot-long government check for $2.4 million USD to Mexican finance ministry officials as recompense for shipments of stolen Mexican oil smuggled into Texas right under the noses of U.S. customs enforcement officers and sold to Trammo Petroleum, a Houston transnational with branch offices in China, Brazil, Egypt, France, the U.K., and Switzerland.

Part of the shipment of purloined petroleum was then sold off to a German BASF subsidiary in Port Arthur for $2.4 million. According to the New York Times, the deal was brokered by one Josh Crescenzi, Rio Grande Valley supervisor for Continental Fuels and a bundler for former Texas oilman George Bush during his 2004 election campaign who is now in a federal protected witness program. Trammo CEO Donald Schroeder has pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property and will be sentenced in December.

The Texas case is, in fact, the tip of a sinkhole that involves tens of millions of barrels of stolen Mexican oil worth billions of greenback dollar bills, U.S. customs enforcement, corrupt oil union officials, dozens of mysteriously "disappeared" oil workers, and a dread drug cartel.

Mexican authorities calculate that more than 2,000,000 barrels are stolen from PEMEX, the national petroleum monopoly, each year by workers, company insiders, and organized crime. A 2007 New York Times investigation estimated that a billion dollars worth of Mexican oil was being siphoned from PEMEX annually through fraud, theft, and clandestine "tomas" ("takes") drilled into company pipelines. Thousands of gallons of jet fuel allegedly wound up in the tanks of drug cartel jets carrying cocaine in from Colombia for transshipment to the U.S.

PEMEX numbers (questionable at best) reveal that more than 1.5 million barrels were sucked out of the oil giant's pipelines in the first nine months of 2009 alone. A Mexican government investigation into one network of oil thieves operating in the Burgos sector along the border in Coahuila and neighboring Nuevo Leon states yielded 740,000 pesos in cold, hard cash and evidence of $46,000,000 USD in stolen oil sales, presumably to U.S. buyers.

The modus operandi of the petrol pirates is simplicity itself: "chupaductos" ("duct suckers") are attached to perforated pipelines and the oil pumped into tanker trucks or "pipas" that sometimes bear the PEMEX logo. Pipa drivers are provided with phony documentation from the Mexican Environmental Secretariat (SEMARNAP) attesting that the contents of the loads they are moving are liquid petroleum waste -- the documentation is apparently good enough to satisfy the curiosities of U.S. customs inspectors.

Some of the stolen crude is processed at clandestine refineries into gasoline that is sold in both Mexico and the U.S. Gas stations in central Mexico, particularly in Puebla state, are ready customers for the hot oil if a recent article in the daily El Universal is to be believed. Major trucking and bus companies buy the purloined gasoline without any questions asked. A May 16th, 2008 raid by federal police agents at offices in Acolman, Mexico state resulted in the confiscation of documentation for dummy companies created to distribute the product.

PEMEX bulletins reported by El Universal establish that nearly half the stolen petroleum (48%) is sucked from pipelines that supply the country's six major refineries -- Mexico, which has limited refining capabilities, sends most of its crude to Texas to be converted into gasoline that is then re-imported for domestic use.

22% of the "tomas" are tapped from two oil ducts feeding the Hector Lara refinery in Cadareyta, a city of 75,000 in central Nuevo Leon. Local papers report that PEMEX has shut down 33 "takes" in the Cadareyta pipeline network so far this year, most recently this past August 30th along the national highway in San Juan, one of dozens of tiny communities that pertain to the municipality. The perforated duct measures 24 inches around which experts say translates to a lot of petroleum.

Who is stealing Cadareyta's oil? One PEMEX investigation suggests the involvement of organized crime, most pertinently the Zetas, a ruthless band of narco traffickers, who began life as the dreaded enforcers for the Gulf Cartel. Noted for their expertise in beheading their rivals, the original Zetas were Mexican Army officials trained in drug war strategies at the Center for Special Forces in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Osiel Cardenas Guillen, reputed kingpin of Mexico's notorious Gulf cartel, faces 30 years in a U.S. prison. Photo from U.S. News and World Report.
Bored with protecting the interests of Osiel Cardenas, the Gulf Cartel capo who is now facing 30 years in the U.S. super-maxi penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, the Zetas have gone into business for themselves and are now assigned full-blown cartel status by Mexican drug fighters. More than a dozen Zeta offshoots now operate throughout Mexico and the cartel is diversifying into extortion, kidnapping, pirate goods, and the sale of stolen oil.

With 2000 members, Section 49 of the Sindicato Mexicano de Petroleros de la Revolucion Mexicana (STPRM) which holds the contract for the Cadareyta refinery is notorious for corruption and gangsterism. Up until 2007, the section was controlled by ten brothers named Vega, disciples of STPRM boss Carlos Romero Deschamps. In fact, Hilario Vega, then in his third term as secretary general of Section 49, was considered Romero Deschamps' heir apparent when leadership of the union devolves to northern sections of the STPRM in 2012.

One ex-Cadayreta worker, Tony Cantu, interviewed by the New York Times' Tim Weiner, testified that the Vegas were perfectly capable of killing dissidents to protect their concession -- Cantu now lives in Houston. Hermen Macias, a Cadareyta newspaper editor who dared to cross the Vegas, claims he was repeatedly threatened with death before the union bosses began to mysteriously disappear.

The Vega brothers' enterprise began to unravel some 30 months ago when, on May 16th 2007, David Vega, AKA "El Ganso" ("The Goose") left a union meeting in high spirits with three fellow oil workers -- the four reportedly had been plotting strike tactics if then-upcoming negotiations with the PEMEX refinery division fell through. But David Vega and his three companions never returned home. One unidentified eyewitness to their forced disappearance or "levanton" ("pick-up" in narco parlance) reported that the petroleros were waylaid by a commando of men dressed in black uniforms with no insignias and bullet-proof vests and carrying automatic weapons with grenades strapped to their belts -- an outfit that fits the Zeta dress code -- and spirited off in several large black cars.

The morning after the "levanton," Hilario Vega, the long-time Section 49 boss, received a phone call instructing him to rendezvous with the kidnappers in the parking lot of a Cadareyta Wal-Mart mega-store if he wanted to see his brother alive again. According to his son Josue Vega, Hilario complied and was never seen again.

Some news stories suggest that there were over 100 "levantones" in Cadareyta in 2007 -- the number is imprecise because many families failed to report the disappearances of their loved ones to the police who did not seem very interested in clearing up the cases anyway -- if recent criminal enterprise is any teacher the cops may well have been involved in the crimes themselves. Although an unspecified number of kidnapping victims were eventually allowed to return home, leftist Mexican senator Rosario Ibarra, the founder of the EUREKA Mothers of the Disappeared group, holds a list of 38 refinery workers who remain missing. Ibarra, whose own son, Jesus, a member of the 23rd of September Communist League, was disappeared by government agents in 1976, is a native of nearby Monterrey.

The indifference of local authorities, state and federal prosecutors, Section 49, and the national leadership of the STPRM at the disappearances of 38 oil workers, has been nothing short of sensational. Despite a resolution of the Mexican Senate urged by Ibarra and calling for a thorough investigation, the Federal Prosecutors' Office (PGR) insists it has no new information on the kidnappings and the investigation remains frozen in the cold case file. Even clues supplied by witnesses, such as the license numbers of vehicles used in the "levantones," have evaporated, according to Hilario's son Josue.

The younger Vega complains that, disillusioned by the PGR's lethargy, he contracted a billboard near the Cadareyta airport to display photos of his father and other missing petroleros but the billboard company canceled the contract on the pretext that it constituted "political advertisement." Candidates of Mexico's two most powerful parties, the PRI and the PAN, often advertise on billboards outside the Cadareyta airport.

Two and half years after the mystery "levantones," Hilario Vega's replacement as the interim secretary general of Section 49, Jose Izaguirre, has issued no public statement about his predecessor's disappearance. Izaguirre, who is under federal investigation for selling refinery jobs, makes no bones about his candidacy to become permanent secretary general of the section.

The silence of accomplices extends to STPRM boss of all bosses Romero Deschamps who the surviving Vegas inevitably refer to as "Don Carlos." "Don Carlos and my father were friends for life," affirmed Josue Vega in a recent Internet interview.

Carlos Romero Deschamps succeeded the legendary STPRM czar Joaquin Hernandez Galicia in 1989 after the omni-powerful "La Quina" was arrested and stripped of office on orders from then-president Carlos Salinas in a murderous raid on Hernandez Galicia's stronghold in Ciudad Madero Tamaulipas state -- the body of a police agent freshly gunned down in Ciudad Juarez was purportedly flown into Madero so that La Quina could be charged with murder.

Hernandez Galicia had incurred the now-reviled ex-president's wrath by endorsing leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of Lazaro Cardenas who nationalized Mexico's oil industry back in the 1930s, from whom Salinas embezzled the 1988 presidential election. La Quina reportedly opposed Salinas's plans to re-privatize PEMEX and also had financed a slim volume -- A Killer In Los Pinos (the Mexican White House) -- that revealed how Carlos and his black sheep brother Raul shot and killed an Indian servant during a childhood game of Cowboys & Indians.

The PRI's Carlos Romero Deschamps isn't afraid to send in the muscle. Photo from La Economia.
Carlos Romero Deschamps is a veteran mover and shaker in the ranks of the once-and-future ruling PRI party that after 71 years in power was finally deposed in the 2000 presidential elections by Vicente Fox's rightist PAN party. In a doomed scheme to stymie Fox's bid, the STPRM was used as a pipeline to funnel $110,000,000 USD in illegal contributions from PEMEX operating funds into the campaign coffers of losing PRI candidate Francisco Labastida, the so-called PEMEXgate scandal. Although PEMEX director Rogelio Montemayor was forced to flee Mexico to escape prosecution for the scandal, Romero Deschamps, then a PRI senator, enjoyed immunity that exempted him from prosecution (the "fuero") because he was a member of congress.

The PAN's unexpected triumph in 2000 taught Romero Deschamps which side of the coin the money was posted on and he soon closed ranks with Fox's successor Felipe Calderon in his designs to re-privatize PEMEX. During 45 Senate debates on Calderon's privatization bill, Romero Deschamps was a perpetual no-show despite the key role played by the STPRM in the nationalization process --- a strike by petroleros against the transnational "Seven Sisters" that then controlled Caribbean oil fields resulted in Cardenas's expropriation and nationalization of Mexico's petroleum industry in 1938. PEMEX was created soon after.

Both PEMEX and the STPRM soon fell under the control of the PRI from whose ranks corrupt union leadership emerged. By the oil boom and bust of 1976-82, corruption had become institutionalized and with 90,000 dues-paying members (and another 30,000 contract workers), the union has long been a PRI cash cow.

Like La Quina, Romero Deschamps is not reluctant to send in muscle to silence detractors. As recently as early October, "Don Carlos" dispatched his goons to attack dissident petroleros peacefully protesting outside the STPRM's Mexico City headquarters. Rivals disappear -- the suspected fate of the Cadareyta workers is a case in point -- and some suffer an overdose of lead.

Despite plunging PEMEX revenues as major offshore oilfields like Cantarell play out, Romero Deschamps and his cronies continue to be handsomely rewarded by the Calderon regime for their "cooperation." For years, investigators have sought to determine the dimensions of the pay-offs with which PEMEX buys the STPRM's allegiances. Recent revelations by the Federal Institute for the Freedom of Information (IFAI) indicate that between 2005 and 2007, management gifted Romero Deschamps and the union's executive board with over a billion pesos -- 1,273,588,029 of them to be exact.

In 2007 alone, the oil union boss received 139 million pesos for "expenses." 75 million were issued for two STPRM "fiestas" and 532 million for "travel." Although the destination of these trips was not spelled out, Romero Deschamps, like his predecessor La Quina, seems to spend more time at the craps tables in Las Vegas than he does at STPRM headquarters.

[John Ross will present his latest cult classic El Monstruo -- Dread and Redemption in Mexico City ("a lusty corrido about a great betrayed city" -- Mike Davis) at Modern Times, 888 Valencia Street in San Francisco's La Mision this Wednesday November 18th at 7 p.m. The masses are cordially invited. Ross is scouting venues in the midwest, south, and east coast for his winter-spring 2010 Monster Tour. Write him at johnross@igc.org with ideas.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Cannabis Café : Getting High in Portland

Portland's Cannabis Cafe opened on Friday the 13th of November, 2009. Photo from The Portland Mercury.
Dutch-style pot shop:
Cannabis Café is medical marijuana salon

...the cafe comes almost a month after the Obama administration told federal attorneys not to prosecute patients who use marijuana for medical reasons or dispensaries in states which have legalized them.

By Dan Cook / November 15, 2009

PORTLAND, Oregon -- The United States' first marijuana cafe opened on Friday, posing an early test of the Obama administration's move to relax policing of medical use of the drug.

[Actually, according to The Oregonian, it's the second marijuana cafe; see story below.]

The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it -- as long as they are out of public view -- despite a federal ban.

"This club represents personal freedom, finally, for our members," said Madeline Martinez, Oregon's executive director of NORML, a group pushing for marijuana legalization.

"Our plans go beyond serving food and marijuana," said Martinez. "We hope to have classes, seminars, even a Cannabis Community College, based here to help people learn about growing and other uses for cannabis."

The cafe -- in a two-story building which formerly housed a speak-easy and adult erotic club Rumpspankers -- is technically a private club, but is open to any Oregon residents who are NORML members and hold an official medical marijuana card.

Members pay $25 per month to use the 100-person capacity cafe. They don't buy marijuana, but get it free over the counter from "budtenders". Open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., it serves food but has no liquor license.

There are about 21,000 patients registered to use marijuana for medical purposes in Oregon. Doctors have prescribed marijuana for a host of illnesses, including Alzheimer's, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and Tourette's syndrome.

On opening day, reporters invited to the cafe could smell, but were not allowed to see, people smoking marijuana.

"I still run a coffee shop and events venue, just like I did before we converted it to the Cannabis Cafe, but now it will be cannabis-themed," said Eric Solomon, the owner of the cafe, who is looking forward to holding marijuana-themed weddings, film festivals and dances in the second-floor ballroom.

No prosecution

The creation of the cafe comes almost a month after the Obama administration told federal attorneys not to prosecute patients who use marijuana for medical reasons or dispensaries in states which have legalized them.

About a dozen states, including Oregon, followed California's 1996 move to adopt medical marijuana laws, allowing the drug to be cultivated and sold for medical use. A similar number have pending legislation or ballot measures planned.

Pot cafes, known as "coffee shops", are popular in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, where possession of small amounts of marijuana is legal. Portland's Cannabis Cafe is the first of its kind to open in the United States, according to NORML.

Growing, possessing, distributing and smoking marijuana are still illegal under U.S. federal law, which makes no distinction between medical and recreational use.

Federal and local law enforcement agencies did not return phone calls from Reuters on Friday seeking comment on the Portland cafe's operations.

"To have a place that is this open about its activities, where people can come together and smoke -- I say that's pretty amazing." said Tim Pate, a longtime NORML member, at the cafe.

Some locals are hoping it might even be good for business.

"I know some neighbors are pretty negative about this place opening up," said David Bell, who works at a boutique that shares space with the cafe. "But I'm withholding judgment. There's no precedent for it. We don't know what to expect. But it would great if it brought some customers into our store."

[Writing by Bill Rigby; editing by Mohammad Zargham]

Source / Reuters / Yahoo News

NORML's Executive Director Madeline Martinez at Portland's Cannibis Cafe. Photo from The Portland Mercury.

But it was not all cheers outside the grand opening.

"Despite the hype, opening night seemed like kind of a bust," a blogger with Portland Mercury deadpanned. "As I stood at the back of the line talking with Ian, a long-time cardholder who was up for the idea of a sociable 'medicating' environment ('Do you like to sit and drink in your house?' he said. 'It's nice to get out.'), people kept ditching out from the front of the line, shaking their heads. 'Why would I want to smoke with a bunch of people I don't know?' grumbled an old man in a black cowboy hat, striding away. 'Save your money and buy a bag!' shouted a twenty-something dude as he left."
[....]
The new café is something of a test for the Obama administration's policy that it will respect individual states' medical marijuana laws. During his presidential campaign, Obama had promised to stop raids on medical dispensaries that were operating within state law.

"I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors, I think that's entirely appropriate," the president said.

Laws in California and Colorado, which also allow medical marijuana, do not make provisions for anything other than dispensaries. Oregon has about 21,000 medical marijuana patients.

-- Stephen C. Webster /the raw story

Highway 420 in Portland.

The Cannabis Cafe will be the second public place for medical-marijuana patients to get together. On Oct. 1, Steve Geiger opened Highway 420, a small lounge at the back of his pipe shop at 6418 S.E. Foster Road.

"We've been kind of discreet about it. It's not something that we put out on a sign," Geiger said as he rang up customers Tuesday. "We've had great response in the neighborhood from people who are just happy they don't have to go all the way to 39th and Hawthorne" to buy pipes.

The pot lounges are the first of their kind in the nation, said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the national NORML. California has dispensaries where medical marijuana can be purchased, but only Oregon will have public places where people can socialize and use marijuana.
[....]
[NORML Executive Director Madeline] Martinez said the need for an Oregon community center for program participants became clear to her when she heard from patients from all over the state who came to Portland to visit a doctor or a hospital and had no place to medicate afterward.

"Do they go out into an alley and hide in the back of their car?" Martinez said. "There needs to be a place, much like our meetings are, where people can socialize and network."
[....]
In Oregon, only patients with a qualifying debilitating medical condition -- chronic pain, cancer, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, among others -- can participate in the medical marijuana program. Patients are not permitted to buy marijuana, but they can chip in on the growers' costs. While in the cafe, patients will be monitored and not permitted to leave for at least two hours after using.

"We don't want anyone to get too medicated," Martinez said.

Oregon NORML is structuring the cafe to avoid having money change hands anywhere, Martinez said. Before entering the cafe, a cardholder can buy a gift card of any denomination to buy coffee, food or other goods inside.

Oregon was the second state in the nation, after California, to create a medical-marijuana program, and now a dozen other states allow medical marijuana in some form: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

On Tuesday, Maine residents voted 59 percent to 41 percent to approve changing the state's medical marijuana law, expanding the conditions under which people can be prescribed marijuana and allowing for marijuana dispensaries.

New Mexico already allows licensed dispensaries; Rhode Island is considering it. In 2010, Nevada voters will for a third time consider whether to simply legalize marijuana altogether.

-- Anne Saker / The Oregonian

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Health Care, Congress and the Inquisition

It's pure torture:
Reviewing the House Health Care plan

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / November 15, 2009

See 'Healthcare-NOW on the House Health Care bill,' Below.

In his excellent review in TheRag Blog, Alex Knight discussed Silvia Federici's new book Calaban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

Caliban and the Witch is a study of women accused of witchcraft, and their ultimate fate of being burned at the stake, in Europe and America during the 16th and 17th Centuries. It details the collusion between state and church in relegating women to a secondary place in society. The author notes:

"Frederici goes on to show how female sexuality, which was seen as a source of women's potential power over men, became an object of suspicion and came under sharp attack by the authorities. The assault manifested in new laws that took away women’s control over the reproductive process, such as the banning of birth control measures, the replacement of midwives by male doctors, and the outlawing of abortion and infanticide. Federici calls this an attempt to turn the female body into 'a machine for the reproduction of labor,’ such that women's only purpose in life was supposedly to produce children.’”

In my morning newspaper an Associated Press dispatch:

"WASHINGTON -- The call came in from Rome, just as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants were scrambling to round up scarce votes to pass their sweeping health overhaul. Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, was on the line for Pelosi, calling to discuss adding strict abortion restrictions to the House bill. It was just one element of an intensive lobbying effort orchestrated by the nation's Catholic bishops, who have emerged as a formidable force in the health care negotiations. They used their clout with millions of Catholics and worked behind the scenes in Congress to make sure the abortion curbs were included in the legislation -- and they are now pressing to keep them there."

Thus, the last minute motion by Rep. Bart Stupak that places a strict anti-abortion clause in the House health care bill. Rep. Stupak, as revealed by Rachael Maddow. is a member of The Family, a group of extreme right wing fundamentalist protestants that inhabit 311 C Street and many other residential facilities in and around Washington, D.C.

(Be sure and read Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and Sherman DeBrosse's Rag Blog article on this subject.)

The Stupak Amendment goes much further than the long standing Hyde Amendment which forbids federal funds to cover abortions. This one "mandates that no federal funds can be used to pay for an abortion or 'cover any health care plan' that includes coverage of abortion, except in cases where the mother's life is in danger or the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. Rachael Morris, writing in Mother Jones, continues:

"The first part of the amendment isn't new. The 1976 Hyde Amendment already prevents the use of federal dollars to pay for most abortions. Where pro-lifers won big was on the second part which would significantly limit the availability of private insurance plans to cover the procedure. That's because Stupak's amendment doesn't just apply to the public option. The House health care bill will also provide subsidies to help people and small businesses purchase plans at an exchange. This represents a lucrative new market for insurers: anyone earning less than $88,000 for a family of four qualifies for assistance, as well as certain small companies. But to gain access to these new customers, insurers will have to drop abortion from their plans."

In short this indicates that even if you pay for the plan with your own money, abortion coverage will be excluded.

Another excellent piece on the subject was Barbara J. Berg's Rag Blog article entitled "The House Health Care bill: Compromising away women's rights".

An already farcical "health care” bill has been made even more absurd by the forces that oppose a woman's right to chose. Again we are faced here -- in a nation founded on the belief that there shall be no established state religion -- with forces wishing to impose medieval theological values on our society. Will the next step be a return of the Inquisition?

A personal note. I am an 88-year old secularist who feels, as my friends know, that one’s religion should have nothing to do with friendship. I prefer to judge a person by his/her ethical character and intellect. I find religious proselytizing to be objectionable, whether it be from Christian, Buddhist, Jew or atheist. I ask of others that they not try to force their beliefs upon me as I will not force mine upon them. That is not to say that I do not enjoy listening to, or joining in, an intelligent discussion of theology, just as I am content to listen to physicists discuss the theory of thermodynamics. We can always learn, and some of my best informal teachers have been Jesuits or Rabbis.

Not only does the Pelosi health care bill face self immolation with the introduction of theological fiat, but it has deserted the concept of a public option for all. The Socialist Worker from Nov. 3, 2009, points out that

"According to a Congressional Budget Office study of the House bill, only 6 million Americans would be enrolled in the public option by the time it is fully phased in, in 2019. That's just 2% of the 282 million Americans younger than 65 (who are not covered by Medicare). The CBO explains that the low numbers are in large part because the plan would typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans.”

In other words, as pointed out in The Nation, the rates would not be tied to Medicare rates but tied to those of the big insurance companies. That is a big victory for the insurance industry and it will undermine the ability of the public option to compete and create pressure for reduced costs. Also, the bill eliminates the state single payer option, that is alive and well in Pennsylvania for instance, while forcing most people to buy private insurance.

Force them to buy insurance! As The New York Times points out:

"A survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that 73% of the adults who tried to buy insurance on the open market over a three-year period never bought a plan -- because they could not afford it, could not find a plan that met their needs, or were turned down. Pending legislation would help some of them by preventing rejections or high charges based on health status and by setting minimum benefit requirements. But many people who might find the premiums too high will face an agonizing choice: buy insurance or pay a penalty of hundreds or even thousands of dollars per family if they still decide to forego insurance."

Never has there been a greater boon to the profits of the insurance industry than the House health care bill, and one can be assured there will be little effort in the Senate to correct this. In my previous columns in The Rag Blog I have referred to an article by Karl Manheim, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles questioning the constitutionality of legislating the mandatory purchase of health insurance.

The advocates of the bill keep making the point that the insurance carriers will be required to insure those with preexisting conditions. Great, we insure those folks -- but in view of the fact that the prime purpose of the health insurance industry is profit for the executives and stockholders, and not patient care, the insurance industry will merely raise rates for the current subscribers. In the House bill there are absolutely no price controls on the insurance industry.

Another cry I hear comes from the elderly, who fear that the legislation will take money "from my Medicare." I have found this difficult to understand; however, recently while watching the series of ads on TV I have come to the realization that these poor folks are discussing Medicare Advantage plans -- private insurance plans that incorporate the name of Medicare, but which actually are not administered by the Medicare program.

These plans were a creation of the Bush administration, circa 2003, to privatize Medicare (since they had failed in privatizing social security), and thus, under the first rule of neoliberal economics, to deplete the Medicare trust fund. In short, the elderly are conned into signing up for these programs, they sign their Medicare rights over to a private insurance company, and are covered by the rules and regulations of that specific insurance company.

The private insurance companies are currently being paid, for each subscriber, the estimated amount that it would require to attend to that person under Medicare per se, plus an extra 17%. The current house legislation now anticipates reducing that 17% overpayment in an effort to preserve Medicare in the future.

By a slight of hand the insurance carriers convince the subscribers that they are receiving an enhanced program, while indeed, the purpose, once again, is to increase insurance company profits. An example: these plans promise "dental care,” perhaps a yearly dental examination or cleaning. Watch what happens when a $1000 gold tooth capping is suggested!

The carrier allows choice of physician, but from a group of physicians on their panel. Many physicians refuse Medicare advantage patients, because of the low fees paid initially (the remainder is compensated by a higher co-payment than under Medicare, payed by the subscriber). Or if the doctor accidentally treats a patient from a specific Advantage program, and receives payment, he is thereafter, without signing a contract, considered under contractual obligation to that insurance company.

Under regular Medicare I can go to the Mayo Clinic if desired, and without question; However, if the Medicare advantage subscriber mentions the Mayo Clinic he will probably be told that it is “out of area” and cannot be paid. A local contracting substitute will be approved. One will encounter the same problem in requesting specialist consultation.

The Advantage program permits only specified “specialists,” and only those referred by the primary physician who is possibly being rewarded by the insurance carrier at year’s end, for avoiding specialist consultations. Under regular Medicare I can see any specialist I desire, though I might have to wait for an appointment. A Google search will show a significant number of Medicare fraud cases against the Advantage carriers.

As noted in Market Watch, "Following a series of Medicare Advantage sales scandals, seven companies -- United health Care, Humana, WellCare, Universal American Financial, Coventry Health Care, Sterling Life Insurance, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee --voluntarily suspended their marketing of private fee-for-service programs." We might note that they are back in business...

Another big issue with The Republicans is “medical liability.” As a physician, I agree that this must be addressed; however, I am not sure that it should be included in a health care bill. I think Congress should take a close look at the Canadian system of handling malpractice claims on a national basis. Both physicians and trial lawyers seem to find it equitable.

Also, I find little in the summaries of the House Bill regarding the specifics of physician payment. As pointed out by both the American College of Physicians and Physicians for a National Health program, the United States is in severe need of more primary care doctors, internists, family practitioners and pediatricians. This matter is not addressed nor is reasonable payment for these specialties given in depth consideration.

In short, a current review of the House legislation offers little encouragement. It fails to address the matter of 45,000 deaths a year from lack of medical attention, or the high rate of child poverty and excessive death rate for children -- especially as contrasted with the Western European nations. It does not address the matter of long term care as opposed to that provided in Western Europe. To date it would appear that those Americans who looked for something really better have been sold out to the great corporations once again.

Finally, to those who feel that this is a first step, the political reality of the Obama administration's handling of the economy, of much of our foreign policy, of civil rights, of gay issues, does not bode well for a more liberal consensus in the congress in the near future. It would seem that presently the White House is playing directly into the hands of the tea-baggers.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform. His writing appears regularly on The Rag Blog.]

Healthcare-NOW on the House Health care bill

It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry.

On Saturday, November 7, 2009, the House passed H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, to much celebration by the Democratic party. Healthcare-NOW!'s view, however, is that the House bill is a gift to the insurance industry at the further expense of the people of this nation.

The bill's advocates claim it will cover an additional 36 million people, subsidize the cost of insurance for families up to 400% above the poverty level, increase Medicaid coverage to 150% above the poverty level, close the Medicare donut hole by 2019, place a surcharge on individuals making more than $500,000 and couples making more than $1,000,000, will end rescissions and pre-existing conditions.

What the Democrats fail to mention is the bill leaves millions of people uninsured, allows medical bankruptcies to persist, criminalizes and fines the uninsured, increases the number of underinsured, does nothing to contain the sky rocketing costs, blocks women from their reproductive rights, transfers massive public funds to private insurance companies strengthening their control over care, protects pharmaceutical companies' superprofits at patient expense, fails to reclaim the 31% of waste in our system, expands Medicaid without regard to the state budget crises, discriminates based on immigration status and age, and sets up several levels of care covering less for those without the ability to pay. Those who have coverage will increasingly find care unaffordable and will go without. The whole system will inevitably fail from being fiscally unsustainable.

So is the House bill better than nothing?

"I don't think so," writes Marcia Angell, M.D. , former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. "It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right."

Given that the bill does nothing to contain or reduce rising costs or end the private health insurance industry's dominance, we hoped that the Progressive Caucus would stand strong. But they did not. All but two of H.R. 676's cosponsors voted for H.R. 3962 -- Rep. Eric Massa [D-NY] and Rep. Kucinich [D-OH].

Rep. Massa stated, "At the highest level, this bill will enshrine in law the monopolistic powers of the private health insurance industry, period. There's really no other way to look at it."

Despite telling single-payer advocates that Congressman Weiner's single-payer amendment could not go to vote because it would open the floodgates for regressive amendments on abortion and immigrant access, the Democratic leadership allowed votes on both. Prior to the vote on H.R. 3962, the Stupak Amendment passed that will prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion and in many cases will prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely.

"The House of Representatives has dealt the worst blow to women's fundamental right to self-determination in order to buy a few votes for reform of the profit-driven health insurance industry," writes Terry O'Neill, President of National Organization for Women. "We must protect the rights we fought for in Roe v. Wade. We cannot and will not support a health care bill that strips millions of women of their existing access to abortion."

Healthcare-NOW! fought to win a fair and open debate on healthcare reform including the merits of a single-payer system. This has not yet happened, but the advocacy for this system has greatly impacted the debate in meaningful ways.

We need to continue to build the grassroots movement for single-payer, not-for-profit, national healthcare. We look forward to much brain-storming at our upcoming national strategy conference in St. Louis this weekend, and the opportunity to move forward with renewed energy, creative ideas, and resolve.

Meanwhile, we have the opportunity NOW to continue to support the Sanders' Single-Payer Amendment to be introduced in the U.S. Senate, Congressman Kucinich's efforts to get the state single-payer amendment back in when the House and Senate bills are reconciled, and the efforts of the Mobilization for Health Care for All.

-- Healthcare-NOW

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bitter Tears : The Untold Story of Johnny Cash

Top, Cash's album, "Bitter Tears," met with opposition from the music industry. Below, Pima Indian Ira Hayes, celebrated by Johnny Cash, helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima, an act caught in the famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal. Hayes died a broken man at 33. Oil print by Pima Indian and former Marine, Urshel Taylor.
The bitter tears of Johnny Cash:

Protest singer and Native American activist,
And his feud with the music industry

By Antonino D'Ambrosio / November 15, 2009

In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House's Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America's "silent majority." "Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.

"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind.

Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself -- a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.

Years later, "Man in Black" is remembered as a sartorial statement, and "What Is Truth?" as a period piece, if at all. Of the three songs that Cash played for Nixon, the most enduring, and the truest to his vision, was "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." The song was based on the tragic tale of the Pima Indian war hero who was immortalized in the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, and in Washington's Iwo Jima monument, but who died a lonely death brought on by the toxic mixture of alcohol and indifference and alcoholism. The song became part of an album of protest music that his record label didn't want to promote and that radio stations didn't want to play, but that Cash would always count among his personal favorites.

The story of Cash and "Ira Hayes" began a decade before the meeting with Nixon. On the night of May 10, 1962, Cash made a much-anticipated New York debut at Carnegie Hall. But instead of impressing the cognoscenti, Cash, who had begun struggling with drug addiction, bombed. His voice was hoarse and hard to hear, and he left the stage in what he described as a "deep depression." Afterward, he consoled himself by heading downtown with a folksinger friend to hear some music at Greenwich Village's Gaslight Café.

Protest balladeer Peter La Farge introduced Cash to his "The Ballad of Ira Hayes."
Onstage was protest balladeer Peter La Farge, performing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." A former rodeo cowboy, playwright, actor and Navy intelligence operative, La Farge was also the son of longtime Native activist and novelist Oliver La Farge, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1930 Navajo love story, "Laughing Boy."

The younger La Farge had carved out an intriguing niche in the New York folk revival scene by devoting himself to a single issue. "Pete was doing something special and important," recalls folksinger Pete Seeger. "His heart was so devoted to the Native American cause at a time that no one was really saying anything about it. I think he went deeper than anyone before or since."

Cash never pretended that music could stay immune from social, but he tried his best to "not mix in politics." Instead he talked about the things that unite us like the dignity of honest work. "If you were a baker," he told writer Christopher Wren in 1970, "and you baked a loaf of bread and it fed somebody, then your life has been worthwhile. And if you were a weaver, and you wove some cloth and your cloth kept somebody warm, your life has been worthwhile."

Raised in rural poverty on the margins of America, Cash empathized with outsiders like convicts, the poor and Native Americans. But his identification with Indians was especially deep -- even delusional. During the depths of his early '60s drug abuse, he convinced himself, and told others, that he was Native American himself, with both Cherokee and Mohawk blood. (He would later recant this claim.)

At the Gaslight, once he had listened to "Ira Hayes' and La Farge's other Indian protest tunes, including "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" and "Custer," Cash was hooked. "Johnny wanted more than the hillbilly jangle," Peter La Farge would write later about meeting Cash at the Gaslight. "He was hungry for the depth and truth heard only in the folk field (at least until Johnny came along).

The secret is simple, Johnny has the heart of a folksinger in the purest sense." In fact, Cash had written an Indian folk protest ballad of his own in 1957. "I wrote 'Old Apache Squaw,'" Cash later explained to Seeger. "Then I forgot the so-called protest song for a while. No one else seemed to speak up for the Indian with any volume or voice [until Peter La Farge]."

Cash, like many in the 1960s, could see that everything that was certain, rigid and hard was breaking apart. Social movements were blossoming. But the thunderous American choir that was singing "We Shall Overcome" and "We Shall All Be Free" drowned out the cry of the loose-knit Native movement. As Martin Luther King and other leaders steered their people toward legislative victories that would further integrate them into a society they were locked out of, the rising tide of Native youth activists wanted something different.

"In my mind, Native people could not have a civil rights movement," American Indian Movement activist and musician John Trudell says. "The civil rights issue was between the blacks and the whites and I never viewed it as a civil rights issue for us. They've been trying to trick us into accepting civil rights but America has a legal responsibility to fulfill those treaty law agreements. If you're looking at civil rights, you're basically saying 'all right treat us like the way you treat the rest of your citizens'. I don't look at that as a climb up."

Rather than pursue assimilation into the American system, Native American activists wanted to maintain their slipping grip on sovereignty and the little land they still possessed.

By the early '60s, the burgeoning National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was attempting to stake its own claim for their equal share of justice. With the expansion of fishing treaty violations and the breach of two major land treaties that led to the loss of thousands of acres of tribal land in upstate New York for the Tuscarora and Allegany Seneca (the story behind La Farge's "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow"), the NIYC, led by Native activists like Hank Adams, responded by adapting the sit-in protest. Rechristened as the "fish-in," the NIYC disputed the denial of treaty rights by fishing in defiance of state law. Fish-ins were held in New York and the Pacific Northwest.

The fish-in tactic worked in helping build some public support, but it did little to stop the treaty violations. Instead, the U.S. government ramped up its efforts to crush any momentum the Native movement was building. Oftentimes their tactics were brutal and violent. "This was the time of Selma and there was a lot of unrest in the nation," remembers Bill Frank Jr. of Washington state's Nisqually tribe. "Congress had funded some big law enforcement programs and they got all kinds of training and riot gear-shields, helmets. And they got fancy new boats. These guys had a budget. This was a war."

By 1964, the Native American cause had attracted the interest of another celebrity. On March 2 the NIYC gained national attention as actor Marlon Brando joined a Washington state fish-in. Already an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement, Brando's very public support and subsequent arrest for catching salmon "illegally" in Puyallup River helped to boost the Native movement.

Brando's involvement with the Native cause had begun when he contacted D'Arcy McNickle after reading the Flathead Indian's book "The Surrounded," a powerful novel depicting reservation life in 1936. Brando's involvement in Native issues led to government surveillance that lasted decades. His FBI file, bursting with memos detailing possible means of silencing the actor, quickly grew to more than 100 pages.

Marlon Brando arrested at fish-in in support of Native American treaty rights. Clip from Bellingham Herald, March 2, 1964
Three days after Brando's arrest in Washington, Cash, fresh off the biggest chart success of his career, the single "Ring of Fire," and having just finished recording a very commercial album called "I Walk the Line," began recording another, very different album.

When Cash left Sun Studios for Columbia in the late 1950s, he believed his rising star would give him the creative capital to produce and record something a little outside the pop and country mainstream -- albums of folk music and live prison concerts. He was alternating folky albums like "Blood Sweat and Tears," a celebration of the working man, with commercial discs laden with radio-ready singles. "Ring of Fire," which had reached No. 1 on the country charts and had crossed over to pop, had bought him the permission of Columbia to make an album of what he called "Indian protest songs."

In the two years since Cash had first met La Farge and listened to "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," Cash had educated himself about Native American issues. "John had really researched a lot of the history," Cash's longtime emcee Johnny Western recalled. "It started with Ira Hayes."

As Cash explained, "I dove into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. By the time I actually recorded the album I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage."

But Cash felt a special kinship with Ira Hayes. Both men had served in the military as a way to escape their lives of rural poverty longing to create new opportunities. Plus, both suffered from addiction problems; Cash and his pills and Hayes with alcohol. He decided to anchor the album with "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." And since the song had provided the spark for Cash's vision, it just felt right that he should learn more about the song's subject.

Cash contacted Ira Hayes' mother and then visited her and her family at the Pima reservation in Arizona. Before Cash left the Pima Reservation, Hayes' mother presented him with a gift, a smooth black translucent stone. The Pima call it an "Apache tear." The legend behind the opaque volcanic black glass is rooted in the last U.S. cavalry attack on Native people, which took place on Apaches in the state of Arizona.

After the slaughter, the soldiers refused to allow the Apache women to put the dead up on stilts, a sacred Apache tradition. Legend says that overcome by intense grief, Apache women shed tears for the first time ever, and the tears that fell to the earth turned black. Cash, moved by the gift, polished the stone and mounted it on a gold chain.

With the Apache tear draped around his neck, Cash cut his protest album. He recorded five of La Farge's songs, two of his own, and one he'd co-written with Johnny Horton. All were Native American themed. "When we went back into the studio to record what became 'Bitter Tears,'" Cash bassist Marshall Grant says, "we could see that John really had a special feeling for this record and these songs."

Yet the album's first single, "Ira Hayes," went nowhere. Few radio stations would play the song. Was the length of the song, four minutes and seven seconds, the problem? Radio stations liked three-minute tracks. Or maybe disc jockeys wanted Cash to "entertain, not educate," as one Columbia exec put it.

"I know that a lot of people into Johnny Cash weren't into 'Bitter Tears,' " explains Dick Weissman, a folksinger, ex-member of the Journeymen and friend of La Farge. "They wanted a 'Ballad of Teenage Queen' not 'The Ballad of Ira Hayes.' They wanted 'Folsom Prison.' They didn't want songs about how American's mistreated Indians."

The stations wouldn't play the song and Columbia Records refused to promote it. According to John Hammond, the legendary producer and Cash champion who worked at Columbia, executives at the label just didn’t think it had commercial potential. Billboard, the music industry trade magazine, wouldn't review it, even though Cash was at the height of his fame, and had just scored another No. 1 country single with "Understand Your Man" and No. 1 country album with "I Walk the Line."

One editor of a country music magazine demanded that Cash resign from the Country Music Association because "you and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists and country DJs." Johnny Western, a DJ, singer and actor who for many years was part of Cash's road show, recalls a conversation with "a very popular and powerful DJ." According to Western, the DJ was "connected to many of the music associations and other influential recording industry groups. He had always been incredibly supportive of John."

Western and the DJ started discussing Cash's new album and the "Ira Hayes" single. "He asked me why John did this record. I told him that John and all of us had a great feeling for the American Indian cause. He responded that he felt that the music, in his mind, was un-American and that he would never play the record on air and had strongly advised other DJs and radio stations to do the same. Just ignore it until John came back to his senses, is what he told me."

"When John was attacked for 'Ira Hayes' and then 'Bitter Tears,'" explains Marshall Grant, "it just ripped him apart. Hayes was forced to drink by the abuse and treatment of white people who used and abandoned him. To us, it meant Hayes was being tortured and that's the story we told and it's true."

When "Bitter Tears" and its single did not get the attention he felt they deserved, Cash insisted on having the last word. He composed a letter to the entire record industry and placed it in Billboard as a full-page ad on Aug. 22, 1964.

"D.J.'s -- station managers -- owners, etc.," demanded Cash, "Where are your guts?" He referred to his own supposed half Cherokee and Mohawk heritage and spoke of the record as unvarnished truth. "These lyrics take us back to the truth... you're right! Teenage girls and Beatle record buyers don't want to hear this sad story of Ira Hayes... This song is not of an unsung hero." Cash slammed the record industry for its cowardice, "Regardless of the trade charts -- the categorizing, classifying and restrictions of air play, this not a country song, not as it is being sold. It is a fine reason though for the gutless [Cash's emphasis] to give it a thumbs down."

Cash demanded that the industry explain its resistance to his single. "I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of Ira Hayes. Just one question: WHY???" And then Cash answered for them. "'Ira Hayes' is strong medicine ... So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham and Vietnam."

As Cash later explained, "I talked about them wanting to wallow in meaninglessness and their lack of vision for our music. Predictably enough, it got me off the air in more places than it got me on." In reality, however, as Cash noted in his letter, "Ira Hayes" was already outselling many country hits. Ultimately, thanks in part to aggressive promotion by Cash, who personally promoted the song to disc jockeys he knew, "Ira Hayes" reached No. 3 on the country singles charts, and "Bitter Tears" peaked at 2 on the album charts.

Johnny Cash touring Wounded Knee with the descendants of those who survived the 1890 massacre in December of 1968. Courtesy of John L. Smith / from Salon.com.
Later, long after "Bitter Tears," and after he'd won his battle with drugs, Cash would dial back his claims of Indian ancestry. But he never wavered from his support for the Native cause. He went on to perform benefit shows on reservations -- including the Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee in 1968, five years before the armed standoff there between the FBI and the American Indian Movement -- to help raise money for schools, hospitals and other critical resources denied by the government.

In 1980, Cash told a reporter: "We went to Wounded Knee before Wounded Knee II [the 1973 standoff] to do a show to raise money to build a school on the Rosebud Indian Reservation" and do a movie for "Public Broadcasting System called 'Trail of Tears.'" He joined with fellow musicians Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Robbie Robertson to call for the release of jailed AIM leader Leonard Peltier.

Since Cash first recorded "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" in 1964, many musicians have recorded their own versions. Kris Kristofferson is one of those musicians. He summed up the spirit behind Cash's now nearly forgotten protest album in his eulogy for Cash, who died in 2003. Cash, he said, was a "holy terror... a dark and dangerous force of nature that also stood for mercy and justice for his fellow human beings."

Four years before his famous concert at Folsom Prison, four years before the American Indian Movement formed, and at the pinnacle of his commercial success, Cash insisted on producing an uncommercial, deeply personal protest record that was as close as he could come to truth. He would always cherish it. "I'm still particularly proud of 'Bitter Tears,'" Cash would say near the end of his life, while talking about the topical music he recorded in the 1960s. "Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don't see much reason to change my position today. The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we're not making any moves to make things right. There's still plenty of darkness to carry off."

[Antonino D'Ambrosio is the author of A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears. This article was first published by Salon.com on Nov. 8, 2009. Research assistance was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.]

Source / Salon.com

Johnny Cash: 'The Ballad of Ira Hayes'



Also see:

• Peter Matthiessen : The Tragedy of Leonard Peltier by Peter Matthiessen / The Rag Blog / Nov. 11, 2009

Thanks to Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Furor in Colombia : The Yanks are Still Coming

Venezuela Pres. Hugo Chavez addresses rally in Caracas, Friday, Nov. 13, 2009, protesting U.S.-Columbia military agrement. Photo by Fernando LLano / AP.
The U.S. Invasion of Colombia:
Touching all the bases

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / November 15, 2009

CARTEGENA DES INDIES, Colombia -- The furor over a newly-signed agreement between the U.S. and Colombian governments continues, with denunciation of what was signed on Oct. 30 from all sides.

I must say “what was signed” because as of now it is being called many different things. There is a category four bullshit storm blowing across most of South America. “What it is” seems as much in doubt as “what is in it.” At various times it is described as a U.S. pact, an agreement, the pact, security pact, or as an addendum to an existing agreement; each description is then negated by a critic or a supporter and a substitute term inserted.

Last August, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said, “The United States does not have and does not seek bases inside Colombia." Maintaining that line this week, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters the agreement "doesn't provide us with any kind of bases in Colombia. It provides us with an opportunity to cooperate with Colombia in some issues related to counternarcotics and interoperability in that regard."

However, that doesn’t quite jibe with a U.S. Defense Department document that stated the U.S. military will not only have access to Colombian military bases, but also be able to use major international civilian airports. While we will attach to existing bases, we will build our own sections. This is already started with a $46 million dollar expansion of a runway at Palanquero Air Base in Puerto Salgar, Cundinamarca. June 15th the U.S. State Department authorized a contract worth almost a half million dollars to expand warehouses at Tolemaida.

According to reported provisions, U.S. military personnel and defense contractors will also enjoy diplomatic immunity in Colombia. But President Alvaro Uribe's conservative government says there will be "no impunity" for any crimes committed by the U.S. military, insisting the agreement commits Washington to investigate and punish such cases. "The agreement includes such important things [as]… no U.S. jurisdiction or courts martial in Colombia, or that Colombia may participate in investigations conducted against American officials," added Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez.

Immunity for U.S. soldiers in Colombia raises hackles because a U.S. soldier and contractor reportedly raped a 12-year-old Colombian girl inside Tolemaida military base in 2006, dumping her outside the gates in the morning. The two alleged rapists remain free and returned to the U.S. without facing any charges. U.S. soldiers in Colombia reportedly committed 37 acts of sexual abuse from 2006 to 2007.

U.S. Ambassador to Colombia William Brownfield, one of the signatories, said the pact "updates" and "modernizes" agreements already in place between the two countries, signed in 1952, 1962, and 1974. The new 10-year deal allows the U.S. military to use seven bases in strategically located Colombia, which shares borders with Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, and Panama, and boasts both Pacific and Caribbean-Atlantic ports.

The agreement caused early concern not only among neighboring countries, but among inhabitants of Colombia, because its details were not known, nor was the Colombian Congress consulted. An August meeting of concerned South American countries called the previous U.S.-Colombia agreement “extra-regional interference” and an act of imperialism. The Colombian government refused to give details of the agreement because it was not signed yet and because it was “a reserved matter according its sovereignty.”

After the signing, Bermudez said the exact text of the agreement would be announced in one week, in a letter to foreign ministers of the nations concerned. Well, that was last week’s news; it didn’t happen. Now Bermudez promises to release it to the countries “involved,” this week.

As of November 9, 2009, four Colombian bases had been confirmed as part of the new deal. They are:

1. Apiay Air Force, assigned to Colombian Air Force Aerial Combat Command 2 also hosts members of the Colombian Army and Colombian Navy; it is located near the city of Villavicencio, Departmento (state) Meta, in central Colombia;
2. Malambo Naval Airbase, near Puerto Salgar, Departamento Atlántico, on the Caribbean Coast; South of the city of Baranquilla in Departmento Atlantico;
3. Palanquero Air Base in, Departamento Cundinamarca; half way between Bogotá and Medellín; and
4. The Pacific Naval Base at Bahía Malaga, Departamento Valle del Cauca, equidistant from the borders of both Panama and Ecuador. It is home to the Colombian Pacific fleet.

Three bases yet to be confirmed but strongly suspected by this writer to be included are:

1. Tolemaida, the Army training base at Nilo, Departamento Cudinamarca. You can Google-Earth it and take a look for yourselves 4 degrees 14’ 38” N and 74 degrees 38’ 43” W;
2. Larandia Air Force Base, located in Caquetá, southern Colombia, shared by the Colombian National Army, the Colombian National Police (DAS), and the Colombian Air Force; and
3. The naval base in Cartagena, Departmento Bolívar, home to the Armada Republica de Colombiana (ARC) Atlantic fleet.

The U.S. and Uribe both say the agreement will help Colombia deal more effectively with drug gangs and left wing rebel groups. One problem with that is that Hugo Chavez’ neighboring Venezuela and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are characterized (FARC by the U.S. government; the Venezuelan government in Congress; and both, routinely, by Uribe’s government) as both terrorists and drug dealers.

The FARC has responded to the newly-inked agreement. In a communiqué to Colombian military of honor and the people in general, FARC urges them to defend Colombia’s sovereignty and Latin American dignity, both "deeply tarnished with disgrace, blood, corruption and servility by President Alvaro Uribe."

The group says that, without even blushing, since he lacks any dignity, Uribe accepted the installation by the Empire of seven military bases in Colombia in an act of high treason, “a poisoned dagger plunged into the body of the Latin American Homeland, with its tip hurting the very heart of [the continent].”

The guerrillas add that the only objective of the agreement is to thwart the democratic, pro-integration process of the peoples who, led by the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA), have continued the unfinished liberation project started by Simon Bolivar, South America’s Liberator.

Asi es en Colombia hoy...

Also see:

• Columbia Military Pact : The Yanks are Coming by Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / November 4, 2009

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Ven. Sevan Ross : A Buddhist's View of Wage Theft

Ven. Sevan Ross, on right, with Unitarian Universalist minister James Ford. Photo from Monkey Mind.
A Buddhist’s view of wage theft
Right Livelihood and paying people what’s right

As long as we regard each other not as humans but as the "other," we will suffer profound abuses in the workplace.

By Ven. Sevan Ross / November 14, 2009

When I was a boy and asked my coal miner father one time too many for money, he got me a job as a "myrtle plugger." I sat all day in a field of ground cover with a special tool and "plugged" one plant at a time from the ground into a "flat" -- a large wooden box. Each plant took up a four-square-inch space. I saw immediately that I could fit between 50 and 60 plants into the box. Upon filling a flat I was to take it to the Yard Boss who was to "count" it and give me a fresh one to fill. I was to be paid five cents per flat. This was child labor, and it was in the early 1960s in Pennsylvania.

When I took up my first flat, the Yard Boss reached into the box and used his hand to squeeze my plants together to one side. They now filled 40 percent of the flat. He smiled, winked, grunted, and handed it back to me.

This was wage theft, and although I was only 10 years old, I knew it. I quit that "job" at the end of my first week. My father simply said, "Now you know what a union is for."

I was too young to understand what my father meant, but I was developed enough to see that the yard boss did not see me as human in some important way. He regarded me as the "other" -- as a tool like any other tool, to be used as needed for as long I held up to his purpose.

Many years later I heard a talk given during my priest training in which Yasutani Roshi, a well-known Japanese Zen Master, said these words: "The fundamental problem for all humanity is that you believe that you are there and I am here." This sums up how Buddhism casts a critical eye on the behavior of people -- especially in commercial enterprises.

As long as we regard each other not as humans but as the "other," we will suffer profound abuses in the workplace. Employers will steal their workers' wages, either overtly or covertly. And all the while they will deny both to themselves and others that this is the case. After all, they are only employees. I -- or we -- happen to be management, and as such are responsible for the survival and the thriving of the organization. Except that the workers are the organization and a theft against them is one against the group -- and me too.

I'm sure that the Yard Boss was being stolen from in some way by his betters back in that myrtle field. He could not have invented the workplace abuse of a child all on his own. I'll bet it went all the way to the top. After all, what happens at the top flows directly to the bottom in organizations. If "the other" is how we see individuals, we will guarantee they will see us this way also.

So from a Buddhist perspective it is not quite enough to say that we each are our brother's keeper. We need to feel instead that we actually are our brother. And from this, fair treatment flows naturally. There is then what we Buddhists call Right Livelihood -- mutually productive work, with everyone being treated fairly, everyone being treated Right.

[Ven. Sevan Ross was ordained in 1992 as a Zen Buddhist priest by Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, director of the Rochester Zen Center. Sevan has been training in Zen since 1976 and has served on the resident staff of the Rochester Zen Center for eight years where he served as both administrator of the Center and as Head of Zendo (head priest in charge of training under the Roshi).]

Source / Interfaith Worker Justice

Thanks to Danny Postel / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Republicans : Hypocrisy as a Pre-Existing Condition

Republican Chairman Michael Steele says abortion coverage has been removed from the party's insurance policy.
Republican Party insurance policy
Has covered abortion for eighteen years

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / November 14, 2009

A few days ago, 176 Republicans joined a few blue dog Democrats in voting to attach the odious Stupak amendment to the Health Care Reform Bill passed by the House of Representatives. This horrid amendment made sure that poor and working class women would not be able to include the payment for voluntary abortions in their health insurance.

Of course, almost all of those voting for the amendment were men, who will never have to make the awful choice of having an abortion or an unwanted baby (which probably can't be cared for financially). This doesn't surprise me, because most Republicans believe women should be second-class citizens, and their bodies should be controlled by men.

That would be enough hypocrisy for a party that claims to believe in equality and freedom, but the Republicans have taken their hypocrisy to a new level -- a level I wouldn't have believed possible until now.

Politico has reported now that the health insurance policy provided by the Republicans Party actually includes payment for voluntary abortions. That's right, while they are telling the rest of America that abortions are an evil sin and should be outlawed, they are providing insurance that will pay for abortions for their own employees -- even though their party platform calls abortion "a fundamental assault on innocent human life." Is this not the epitome of hypocrisy?

Now some of you may be thinking this is a new policy and the Republicans didn't know what was in it yet. Wrong!!! They have had this same policy since 1991 -- that's eighteen years.

And the Cigna Company, who supplies the policy, said the provisions of the policy were explained to the Republicans when they bought it (and you would think at least a few of them would have read the policy by now). Republicans were given the chance to opt out of any provisions they didn't want in the policy, and they chose for 18 years to include the abortion provision.

Personally, I don't see how anyone could have a health insurance policy and not know what it covers and doesn't cover. I know when I worked for the state and received employer-provided insurance, every employee was notified of the health insurance benefits (and given a copy of exactly what the insurance would and wouldn't pay for). Are we supposed to believe the Republican Party (or Cigna) didn't do that for their employees?

But that's exactly what the Republicans want everyone to believe -- that they didn't even know the benefits provided in their own insurance policy. Evidently no one in the party has the ability to read.

They are also saying that there is no proof that anyone ever had an abortion that was paid for by the insurance policy. Really? In eighteen years? Is that even near the realm of believability?

Spokesmen for the party say now that RNC Chairman Michael Steele has made sure the clause has been eliminated from the insurance policy. Can we believe that? After all, they've been talking out of both sides of their mouth for at least the last eighteen years. This whole mess just emphasizes the fact they they consider themselves to be above the rules they want to lay down for the rest of us.

By the way, the Democratic Party's insurance policy contains the same provision. But most Democrats support choice and opposed the Stupak amendment. And their party platform says the party "unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay." No hypocrisy there.

How can anyone still vote Republican? They just can't be trusted.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Curbing John O'Neill : The Pipeline and the Saudi-Al Qaeda Connection

The late John P. O'Neill, former assistant director of the FBI, saw threat of bin Laden early on. O'Neill's attempts to investigate connections with Saudis were thwarted.

John O’Neill, the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline:
The Saudis, the Bushes and bin Laden

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / November 13, 2009

The terrorist attack on the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001, was successful in part because of flaws in this nation’s counterinsurgency efforts. There was a deliberate policy of avoiding careful scrutiny of what Saudis were doing in the United States.

Saudi ties to Al Qaeda were not examined closely. Friendship with Saudi Arabia was considered crucial for a number of reasons. One important priority was obtaining Saudi help in advancing an American controlled pipeline to bring Caspian natural gas to Pakistan and India.

Al Qaeda and the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline

The U.S. had obtained a report written by Mohammed Atef, head of military operations for Al Qaeda. It stated that the terrorist organization was alarmed by secret Taliban negotiations with the American oil companies who wanted to build the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline, fearing it would increase U.S. influence in Afghanistan. The August 1998 bombing of the two embassies in Africa was most probably an effort to end the Taliban-U.S. talks about the pipeline. It was clear that Al Qaeda had great influence within the Taliban and that it was working against an American-controlled pipeline.

This made it essential that the U.S. obtain the help of the Saudis, who were pumping money into Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia was in a position to help the United States bring about the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline, The Saudis had a standing interest in moving oil across Afghanistan going back to their funding of the Taliban in the 1970s and 1980s. They were doing this even before the U.S.

Later, the American companies used the Saudi intelligence people to begin talks with the Taliban. Enron served as a consultant for Unocal. Price Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, made several trips to Afghanistan on behalf of the energy firms. He was close to the Bin Laden family and it is said that he promised them the construction contract in return for a kickback for the Saudi royal family. Some link his firing to the breakdown of pipeline talks in August, 2001.

Red Herring magazine reported that George W. Bush and his father were not in agreement on the importance of keeping close ties to Saudi Arabia and that they argued about this at Kennebunkport. After this, the Boston Herald, prompted by friends of the young president, ran an expose of the ties of some White House officials to Saudi Arabia and called it an “obscene conflict of interest.” The expose was part of a debate going on at the highest levels of government. There were also leaks from the White House about Saudi ties to terrorism.

Cheney succeeded in changing the president’s view of the Saudis perhaps by pointing out all his family’s ties to the Saudi royal house. King Abdullah’s visit to the Bushes demonstrates that a shift had occurred. The angered Israelis started leaking information on Saudi ties to terrorism.

George W. Bush with Saudi King Faisal.
'Hands-off' investigating the Saudis

Since the administration of George H.W. Bush, there had been a policy of not looking closely into the activities of Saudis in the United States. In 1998, Clinton backed away from that policy; he permitted the FBI to examine the activities of Saudis in the U.S. and Saudi ties to Al Qaeda. The Bush administration reverted to the “hands off” policy and strengthened it. An American intelligence source told the Guardian that the “hands off” order was necessary to prevent it from becoming public that some Saudis were paying protection money to bin Laden.

According to Greg Palast, an American journalist working in London, “A group of well-placed sources -- not-all-too-savory-spooks and arms dealers -- told my BBC team that before September 11 the U.S. government had turned away evidence of Saudi billionaires funding Osama bin Laden’s network.” He continued, “we got our hands on documents that backed up the story that FBI and CIA investigations had been slowed by the Clinton administration, then killed by Bush Jr. when those inquiries might upset Saudi interests.” Another reason was allegedly “Arbusto” and ”Carlyle,” terms that refer to the Bush’s business ties with Saudis.

John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor who claims to have sources within the intelligence community, claimed that Vice President Cheney ordered the FBI and intelligence agencies not to investigate Al Qaeda from January to August because these probes might endanger efforts to negotiate a pipeline deal with Afghanistan. Loftus also reported that Enron was involved in these investigations. Unfortunately, we only have the former prosecutor’s word for all this. We do know that after the brief U.S. War in Afghanistan the pipeline project was again alive and well and slated to terminate at a Pakistan city not too far from an Enron power plant in India that was in desperate need of cheap fuel.

The Guardian obtained FBI documents that indicated there were restrictions on investigating possible terrorist plots. Shown on the BBC television program NewsNight, the file was coded “199,” which was a designation for national security cases. The material indicated the FBI could not investigate two of bin Laden’s relatives who lived in Falls Church, Virginia. Abdullah and Omar bin Laden were associated with a suspected terrorist organization, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) which had an office there. Abdullah was the director of the U.S. branch of WAMY.

Two of the September 11 hijackers used a false address several blocks away from the office. The public statements of two Chicago-based FBI men indicate that from the late 1990s on there was a policy of not opening criminal investigations of potential Islamic terrorists or the financial networks that supported them. It seems clear that the White House had put counterterrorism planning on the back burner.

John P. O’Neill’s Frustrations

The late John P. O’Neill was the most active FBI agent in investigating Al Qaeda. He eventually rose to the rank of assistant director. Earlier than almost anyone else, he saw Osama bin Laden for what he was -- a great threat to the security of the United States. He was obsessed with Bin Laden and told anyone who would listen about the terrorist and his vile network.

In 1997, O’Neill was special agent in charge of national security programs in the New York office. Working around the clock, he coordinated the effort to catch Ramzi Yousef. When ABC News interviewed Osama bin Laden, the producer formulated questions based on discussions with O’Neill. His messy personal life and tendency to bend the rules slowed his advancement. O’Neill could be brutally honest and his direct ways alienated people. When returning from an unsuccessful trip to Saudi Arabia with Director Louis Freeh, he said, “ They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”’ The director had said it was a successful operation, and did not speak to O’Neill for the next twelve hours of flight.

O’ Neill was aware of the Mohammed Atef document, which made it clear that Al Qaeda did not want a U.S.-dominated dual pipeline crossing Afghanistan. He thought concerns about oil led the administration to prevent investigations of Saudi activities in the U.S. John O’Neill resigned shortly after an article criticizing him appeared in the New York Times. He had already been removed from the fast career advancement track, and he thought that interim director Tom Pickard planted the article because incoming director Robert Mueller wanted to replace O’Neill with a minion of the Bushes. O’Neill became director of security at the World Trade Center and died trying to save lives on September 11. The truth of O’Neill’s claims about the Bush administration’s quashing of anti-terrorist activities may have gone to the grave with him.

John O’Neill’s knowledge of the Mohammed Atef document would have led him to see the connection between oil and terrorism and to focus on the Saudi-Taliban-Al Qaeda connection. He later confided to French investigators that concern for oil was behind the Bush Administration’s reluctance to do much about possible terrorism.

His investigations were continually shut down, and he began seeking information from French intelligence by using two reporters, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Both journalist cutouts were experts on oil and terrorism and were consultants for French intelligence. They later wrote The Forbidden Truth. Perhaps the French government permitted O’Neill to learn more because it had been cut out of the Caspian oil deals. O’Neill and another dissenter Robert Baer of the CIA would be forced into retirement in part due to their efforts to probe Saudi ties to terrorists. Much relevant information in Baer’s book, See No Evil, was blacked out by the CIA.

From 1995, the FBI and CIA operated a computer program called “Alex” that tracked Al Qaeda communications. O’Neill was the chief CIA link to the program and Michael Scheuer, was the key CIA figure in “Station Alex” at Langley. They soon learned that Al Qaeda was involved in the diamond trade, drug and arms smuggling, and teen sex businesses. Scheuer and his CIA people, in the words of an O’Neill associate “despised the FBI and they despised John O’Neill.” A CIA officer added that the working relationship with the flashy O’Neill was often very poor.

Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, with Faisal al-Saud, the Saudi king in the middle of the 20th century. Photo from CNN.
When O’Neill began to learn too much about Al Qaeda, his access to Alex information was lifted. O’Neill took to asking French intelligence to monitor Al Qaeda telephone calls. Scheuer resigned when he decided that the Bush administration was not doing enough about Al Qaeda. Soon the Bush Administration shut down Alex, just as it closed its military counterpart, “Able Danger.”

O’Neill had learned that his own agency continually stymied his investigative leads and he had taken to relying on the DEA and French intelligence for help. His frustrations began to mount when he was sent to Aden in 2000 to investigate the attack on the USS Cole. He received little cooperation there from local authorities and was ordered out of Yemen by the U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who gave him the cold shoulder from the outset. Bodine wanted him to dismiss his bodyguard even though O’Neill thought Mossad might move against him because he was open to the possibility that Israel was behind the Cole incident.

O’Neill foolishly spoke openly about Abu Nidal, leader of Black September, probably being a Mossad operative. She did not back him when the Yemeni authorities refused to let him interview the people who saw the explosion, to see the hat of one of the alleged attackers, or to sample sludge in the area. He wanted an explosives analysis done on the mud beneath the ship and a DNA study of hat of one of the two alleged bombers. One former FBI agent believes O’Neill was removed out of fear that he would discover that the ship had been hit by an Israeli missile. In 2001, he wanted to return to Yemen but Bodine would not give him a clearance. In February, 2001, the Yemeni Minister of the Interior announced that he had found no evidence linking the attack to Al Qaeda.

It was natural for O’Neill to rely upon the French because they had the best information in the West on Arab terrorists. They had concluded that an Arab team of 10 under a Yemeni was trained to assault a ship in 1999 at Al Qaeda’s Darounta, Afghanistan base. However, the team did not use its training and was not responsible for the Cole bombing. O’Neill probably learned this from them.

The French looked into two of their nationals who were at the Darouta training camp and found that these people worked with Muslim rebels in Bosnia. The insurgency was largely supported by western intelligence agencies and many of the funds came from the Riggs Bank account of the Bosnian Defense Fund, which was operated by American Neo-Conservatives. Much of their money came from the Middle East, including the Saudi and Egyptian governments. Some of these funds spilled over to Al Qaeda, which had operative in Bosnia working with the Islamic insurgency.

Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill took steps to dry up Al Qaeda funds and was putting pressure on Middle Eastern governments to provide information on how money from that region reached Al Qaeda. It is likely that these investigative activities generated enough opposition to result in his ouster. David D. Aufhauser, Treasury’s General Counsel, soon followed O’Neill into the private sector. He has spearheaded the effort to look into Al Qaeda financing.

In 2000, John O’Neill joined 150 other FBI agents in attending a retirement seminar in Orlando. His briefcase was stolen there, and it contained classified e-mail and a report on anti-terrorist activities. Ninety minutes after he missed the briefcase, it turned up in another hotel. A cigar cutter, a lighter and pen were missing, but the sensitive material was there. It had to be assumed that this information could have been copied.

The bureau investigated the matter and cleared O’Neill of all charges of negligence. It also said the documents had not been touched, but it is hard to imagine how that could have been established. Still, his reputation had been badly tarnished. The loss of the briefcase was used to force him to go through with retirement, and the story was later leaked when there was a chance that he would replace Richard Clarke as the new Bush administration’s chief anti-terrorism advisor. Clarke and O’Neill were friends and allies, and Clarke wanted O’Neill to be his replacement. The FBI refused to investigate the leak, despite a request to do so from the bureau chief in New York City. As it turned out, Clarke remained at the NSC but with a less important title.

The briefcase also had information that showed that O’Neill knew about Michael Dick’s investigation of Israeli agents, working for a moving company in New York and New Jersey. Dick was also aware of the Israeli agents who came to the United States under the cover of marketing art. They were shriveling all sorts of federal facilities, especially those of the DEA. They were also spying on DEA agents and FBI agents. The “Israeli artists” also followed Arabs who would later be accused of involvement in the 9/11 plot.

By 2000, he was busy trying to find Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States, but he was soon taken out of action and assigned to deskwork. Janet Parker, a Seattle veterinarian and O’Neill friend, said that O’ Neill’s superior, Tom Picard, prevented O’Neill from getting a wire tap on Shadrack Manyathella, who was tied to probably double agent Ali Mohammed and Mohammed Atta, possible ring leader of 9/11. Parker and O’Neill were keeping track of one cell through her foster daughter, who had previous ties with the terrorists.

John O’Neill resigned soon after the second Bush took power. O’Neill told two respected French investigators, “All of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia. ” O’Neill was extremely frustrated by the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism, claiming the administration had also made it more difficult to investigate Saudis.

O’Neill retired on August 22, after thirty years of service. He immediately took up his duties as head of security at the World Trade Center on behalf of Kroll Associates and occupied his office on the 34th floor of the North Tower. While trying to rescue people in the South Tire, he lost his life. In November 2001, weapons inspector Richard Butler told TV investigator Paula Zahn, “The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration -- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline across Afghanistan."

It is now nine years later, and the American mainstream media still has not investigated what Butler called “the most explosive charge.” Were there, and are there restraints on the way intelligence people and the FBI deal with Saudi and Pakistani ties to terrorists? If we knew more about how important the gas pipeline is to the .US., we might be in a better position to understand why so many people in power insist on escalating the present war in Afghanistan.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a retired history teacher. Sherm spent seven years writing an analytical chronicle of what the Republicans have been up to since the 1970s. The New Republican Coalition : Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go here.]

Also see:

• Sherman DeBrosse : Pipeline Politics and the Afghanistan War by Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / Nov. 6, 2009

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Nuke 'Renaissance' : Same Old, Same Old

Not looking so good:
Much-hyped nuclear renaissance

'If history repeats itself as farce, then the nuclear power industry represents the most incompetent jester of all time...'

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / November 12, 2009

The much-hyped "renaissance" of atomic power has taken three devastating hits with potentially fatal consequences.

The usually supine Nuclear Regulatory Commission has told Toshiba's Westinghouse Corporation that its "standardized" AP-1000 design might not withstand hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes.

Regulators in France, Finland, and the UK have raised safety concerns about AREVA's flagship EPR reactor. The front group for France's national nuclear power industry, AREVA's vanguard project in Finland, is at least three years behind schedule and at least $3 billion over budget.

And the Obama Administration indicates it will end efforts to license the proposed radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. After more than fifty years of trying, the nuclear industry has not a single prospective central dump site.

"If history repeats itself as farce, then the nuclear power industry represents the most incompetent jester of all time," says Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. It "seems intent on repeating every possible mistake of its failed past—from promoting inadequate, ever-changing reactor designs to blowing through even the largest imaginable budgets. If the computer industry followed the practices of the nuclear industry, we’d still be waiting for the first digital device that could fit in a space smaller than a warehouse and cost less than a family’s annual income."

Nuclear sites throughout the world sit on or near earthquake faults. Ohio's Perry reactor was damaged by a tremor in 1986, just before it went on line. In 1991 Hurricane Andrew did $100 million in damage to Florida's Turkey Point, causing a critical loss of off-site communication. In 2007 a massive earthquake shook Japan's Kashiwazaki, shutting seven reactors.

And radioactive waste continues to build up at sites throughout the world, including some 50,000 metric tons here in the U.S.

The vote of no confidence from regulators in three European countries has stunned AREVA, not to mention its potential customers, including the United Arab Emirates. "It hasn't helped at all," says one key source. "One of the key arguments has been that the EPR is safer than all the others."

That AREVA would sell reactors to the UAE at all has raised widespread fears that atomic Bombs will soon proliferate throughout the Middle East. Both India and Pakistan got radioactive weapons materials from their commercial reactors.

AREVA's design safety fiasco follows a Pink Panther-style stumble in October, when federal and state officials bailed on a massive media celebration planned for the Cadarache nuclear facility's 50th anniversary. As much as 39 pounds of plutonium dust is now believed to contaminate the historic research center, enough to make numerous Nagasaki-sized Bombs.

According to the Financial Times, "the discovery that France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) had wildly under-estimated the quantity of plutonium dust that would accumulate -- and then delayed notifying the Nuclear Safety Authority -- has led the latter to hand its findings to the public prosecutor, who will decide if there should be an investigation into the CEA's management... This is a severe blow to the credibility of the CEA, flagship of French nuclear research, and to Cadarache, soon to be the site of the world's first fusion reactor."

The uproar, writes Peggy Hollinger, has "cast a shadow over the Nuclear Safety Authority's behaviour since it became independent of the government."

Finnish regulators have also gone to virtual war with AREVA over the catastrophic Olkiluoto project. In a conversation with me in southern Ohio this summer CEO Anne Lauvergeon blamed AREVA's problems on the Finns. But similar complaints are now coming from French regulators over AREVA's parallel project at Flamanville, in northern France.

AREVA has also run afoul of British regulators, who say its massive incursions into the UK's nuclear industry have raised serious safety concerns.

Meanwhile the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's critique of the Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor has shattered the industry's expensive image of a "renaissance" that is "ready to go." As the machine of apparent choice at vanguard sites throughout the U.S., the industry has touted the AP-1000 as a standardized "cookie-cutter" design that might make reactor construction and operations easier to manage. Regulators in Florida and Georgia have already imposed massive consumer rate hikes to pay for proposed AP-1000 reactors. An army of high-priced lobbyists is pushing hard for huge subsidies and loan guarantees to go into the Climate Bill.

Wall Street has made it clear it will not finance (or insure) new reactor construction unless backed by the federal treasury. Congressional critics warn half the reactor construction loans are likely to go into default. "This only underscores Moody’s assessment that new reactors are 'bet the farm' investments," says Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility. "So why is the federal government going to back these projects with U.S. taxpayer dollars?"

Now these critiques from the American NRC and regulators in Britain, France and Finland confirm that no safe standardized design exists, either here or in France, and that the industry could be years away from finalizing one that can be successfully deployed.

The same applies to radioactive waste. The Obama Administration now seems poised to finalize its promise that "all license defense activities will be terminated" on the proposed Yucca Mountain dump. Distinguished by its $10 billion price tag and the visible earthquake fault running through it (not to mention the dormant volcanoes that surround it and the water perched at its peak), Yucca is bitterly opposed by some 80% of Nevada's citizenry.

After a hugely subsidized half-century of futility, the U.S. reactor industry has not a single named prospect for a centralized commercial waste dump. The "solution" (about 32 minutes in), as put forth by Stewart Brand and other industry advocates, seems to be focused on leaving high level radioactive waste at the sites and letting future generations deal with it. In the years since the Shippingport (PA) reactor opened in 1957, the industry's go-to device is a concrete "dry cask" with vent holes and armed guards.

Meanwhile, despite repeated industry denials, the bad news about the health impacts of reactor radiation pours in. "Downwind or near eight reactors that closed in the 1980s and 1990s," says New York-based expert Joe Mangano, "there were immediate and sharp declines in infant deaths, birth defects, and child cancer incidence age 0-4" when the reactors shut. "The highest thyroid cancer rates in the U.S. are in a 90 mile radius of eastern PA/New Jersey/southern NY, an area with 16 reactors at seven plants, which is the greatest density in the U.S."

The near-simultaneous demise of Yucca Mountain with the regulatory credibility of the AP-1000 and AREVA EPR, along with the attacks by Moody's and other financial critics, might come as a death blow to any such technology in a sane society. But the financial reach of the atomic lobby remains powerful in Congress and the White House.

At this point, the only certainty about the future of reactor construction is that still more shoes will drop on an industry whose decomposed credibility has become legend.

[Harvey Wasserman is author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth and Senior Editor of freepress.org, where this article also appears.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Israel and Iran : A Countdown to Tragedy?

During Iranian street demonstrations this summer a protester displays a photo of Mohammed Mossadegh, deposed by the Americans and the British in 1953 and replaced with the much-hated Shah Reza Pahlavi. Photo posted on Daily Kos, June 19, 2009.
Who is the existential threat?
Israel and Iran: Countdown to tragedy

By Steve Weissman / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2009

The countdown to open conflict between Israel and Iran has the feel of classic tragedy. Everyone will lose, no one will win. The only question is how many will needlessly die before the final curtain falls.

The Iranian leaders see the story through the prism of their own history. They are heirs of an ancient civilization, humiliated in 1953 when the Americans and British overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh and imposed the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Only with Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 did the people of Iran regain control of their land, and only now are they taking their rightful place as a world player and regional power.

With this view of the world, the Iranians sometimes appear to outsiders to have a chip on their shoulder, always demanding to be treated as equals, as if certain they will be treated otherwise. Too often American officials like Hillary Clinton fulfill Iranian expectations, talking of them in the media as if they were school children.

No one on the outside yet knows if the Iranians stopped trying to develop nuclear weapons in the fall of 2003, as the U.S. U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) reported two years ago. But even if they did stop, their lack of transparency often makes others fear the worst.

Are the Iranians simply channeling the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, who lost his country and his life because he never dared let his Iranian foes know that he did not have weapons of mass destruction or any ongoing program to build them?

Jews, whether in Israel or beyond, have our own historical chip on the shoulder. Every year, religious Jews observe a fast day called Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, as well as subsequent tragedies like the expulsion of Jews from Catholic Spain in 1492 and the European Holocaust.

At home, my family ate the meat and potatoes before we had the soup. The tradition came from Russia and the Ukraine, where terrified Jews wanted to have something solid in their stomachs in case they had to flee from attacking Cossacks.

Living and reliving this tragic history leaves its mark. As the American writer Henry Miller observed in his Tropic of Cancer,

For the Jew, the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not hear. The drama, he thinks, is going on inside the cage. The cage, he thinks, is the world.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and many other Israelis remain trapped in the cage, sincerely believing that a nuclear Iran would threaten their very existence. Defense Minister Ehud Barak has escaped the cage. As he told the Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth, "I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel."

"Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem " (1867). Painting by Francesco Hayez. Observed yearly by religious Jews on the fast day called Tisha B’Av.
"Israel is strong," he added. "I don't see anyone who could pose an existential threat."

A highly decorated military office and former head of the Israeli Defense Forces, Barak is absolutely right. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Israel has a nuclear arsenal of anywhere from 70 to 400 nuclear weapons. Iran currently has none.

The Iranians could conceivably quit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel has steadfastly refused to join. They could refuse inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as Israel refuses to do. Iran could then produce highly enriched weapons-grade uranium and reprocess plutonium from spent fuel rods from whatever nuclear reactors they have in operation.

But even if the Iranians did all this, they could not produce more than a small handful of weapons during the next five to ten years. During that time, the Israelis would have created new weapons and acquired new and more sophisticated aircraft, missiles, and submarines.

This enormous advantage would give the Israelis a powerful incentive to stage a preemptive first strike that would keep Iran from striking back. So, by the numbers, the Israelis pose an existential threat to Iran, not the other way around.

Even if Iran had nukes, they would pose far less of a threat to Israel or anyone else than Soviet missiles posed to the United States and Europe during the Cold War. At the time, Gen. Thomas Power and others talked of removing this truly existential threat with a surprise first strike. Happily, cooler heads prevailed.

Today, too many American leaders are thoughtlessly repeating talk of Iran’s existential threat to Israel and the need for a preemptive military strike on Iran, only "as a last resort," of course.

As Senator Lindsay Graham told Fox News, "if we use military action against Iran, we should not only go after their nuclear facilities, we should destroy their ability to make conventional war. They should have no planes that can fly and no ships that can float."

Such reckless talk only opens the door to another no-win tragedy.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. A former senior editor at Truthout, he now lives and works in France.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Special Delivery : Ft. Hood GI Gives Letter to Obama

Pfc. Michael Kern. Photo from Cynthia Thomas / Under the Hood Cafe.
Stopping by the barracks:
GI Michael Kern hands Obama IVAW letter

What happened at Fort Hood has made it abundantly clear that the military mental health system, and our soldiers, are broken.

By Victor Agosto / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2009

President Obama visited Fort Hood today [Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009]. He dropped by Michael Kern's barracks. Michael handed President Obama a letter, saying, "Sir, IVAW has some concerns we'd like for you to address." Obama then dropped his hand and went on to speak to the next soldier. The secret service then took possession of the letter:

President Obama:

In your recent comments on the Fort Hood tragedy, you stated "These are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk and at times give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis. It's difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil." Sir, we have been losing these brave Americans on American soil for years, due to the mental health problems that come after deployment, which include post-traumatic stress disorder, and often, suicide.

You also said that "We will continue to support the community with the full resources of the federal government." Sir, we appreciate that -- but what we need is not more FBI or Homeland Security personnel swarming Fort Hood. What we need is full mental healthcare for all soldiers serving in the Army. What happened at Fort Hood has made it abundantly clear that the military mental health system, and our soldiers, are broken.

You said "We will make sure that we will get answers to every single question about this terrible incident." Sir, one of the answers is self evident: that a strained military cannot continue without better mental healthcare for all soldiers.

You stated that "As Commander-in-Chief, there's no greater honor but also no greater responsibility for me than to make sure that the extraordinary men and women in uniform are properly cared for." Sir, we urge you to carry out your promise and ensure that our servicemembers indeed have access to quality mental health care. The Army has only 408 psychiatrists -- military, civilian and contractors -- serving about 553,000 active-duty troops around the world. This is far too few, and the providers that exist are often not competent professionals, as this incident shows. Military wages cannot attract the quality psychiatrists we need to care for these returning soldiers.

We ask that:

1. Each soldier about to be deployed and returning from deployment be assigned a mental health provider who will reach out to them, rather than requiring them to initiate the search for help.
2. Ensure that the stigma of seeking care for mental health issues is removed for soldiers at all levels-from junior enlisted to senior enlisted and officers alike.
3. Ensure that if mental health care is not available from military facilities, soldiers can seek mental health care with civilian providers of their choice
4. Ensure that soldiers are prevented from deploying with mental health problems and issues.
5. Stop multiple redeployments of the same troops.
6. Ensure full background checks for all mental health providers and periodic check ups for them to decompress from the stresses they shoulder from the soldiers they counsel to the workload they endure.

Sir, we hope that you will make the decision not to deploy one single Fort Hood troop without ensuring that all have had access to fair and impartial mental health screening and treatment.

You have stated on a number of occasions, starting during your campaign, how important our military and veterans are to this nation. The best way to safeguard the soldiers of this nation is to provide ALL soldiers with immediate, personal and professional mental health resources.

-- Iraq Veterans Against the War

Also see:

• Alice Embree : Here's to the Soldiers of Fort Hood by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / Nov. 6, 2009
• Dahr Jamail : Ft. Hood Shootings Reflect Problems in U.S. Military by Dahr Jamail / The Rag Blog / Nov. 5, 2009
• At Army Base, Some Violence Is Too Familiar by Michael Ross and Ray Rivera / The New York Times / Nov. 9, 2009
• Video of Amy Goodman interviewing IVAW's Michael Kern and journalist Dahr Jamail on Democracy Now

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Peter Matthiessen : The Tragedy of Leonard Peltier

The Tragedy of Leonard Peltier
Vs. the United States of America

...this man's life leaks away behind grim concrete walls for the unworthy purpose of saving face for the FBI and a U.S. Attorney's Office...

By Peter Matthiessen / November 11, 2009

On July 27, 2009, I drove west from New York to the old riverside town of Lewisburg in central Pennsylvania, the site of the federal penitentiary where early the next morning I would make an appeal to the parole board on behalf of the American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier in his first parole hearing in fifteen years.

On this soft summer evening, a quiet gathering of Peltier supporters from all over the country had convened in a small park near the Susquehanna River. Despite his long history of defeats in court, these Indians and whites sharing a makeshift picnic at wood tables under the trees were optimistic about a favorable outcome. Surely a new era of justice for minorities and poor people had begun with the Obama administration, and anyway, wasn't Leonard's freedom all but assured by the Parole Act of 2005, which mandated release for inmates who had spent thirty or more years in prison?

Leonard Peltier, an Ojibwa-Lakota from Turtle Mountain, North Dakota, was one of the three young Indians who were among the participants in a shoot-out with the FBI at Oglala on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation on a hot dusty day in June 1975. They were later charged with the deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams.

Ostensibly searching for a suspect in a recent robbery case, the agents had been warned by tribal police not to enter the property where the AIM Indians had their camp. Their intrusion apparently provoked a warning that led to an exchange of gunfire. Understandably outraged by the deaths of Coler and Williams and in particular by the fact that an unknown "shooter" had finished off both wounded men at point-blank range, their fellow agents would also suffer intense frustration and embarrassment when a dozen or more of the Indians involved, using a brushy culvert under a side road, escaped a tight cordon of hundreds of agents, Indian and state police, national guardsmen, and vigilantes who had the area surrounded.

More galling still, Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, two of the three AIM suspects in the killings arrested during the FBI's huge "ResMurs" (Reservation Murders) investigation, were acquitted a year later in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on a plea of self-defense, as the third and last suspect, Leonard Peltier, would certainly have been as well, had he not fled to Canada. He was arrested there in February 1976, extradited back to the US, and tried separately.

Though originally indicted with the others on identical evidence, he was barred by a hostile new judge, Paul Benson, from presenting the same argument based on self-defense that had led to Robideau and Butler's acquittal. Furiously prosecuted as the lone killer and convicted for both deaths on disputed evidence, Peltier was sentenced in February 1977 in Fargo, North Dakota, to two consecutive life terms in federal prison.

The following year, when Peltier's conviction was appealed, 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Donald Ross denounced the coercion of witnesses and manipulation of evidence in his case as "a clear abuse of the investigative process by the FBI"; the US Attorney's Office, too, would be sharply criticized for withholding exculpatory evidence.

In October 1984, in an evidentiary hearing in Bismarck, North Dakota, ordered by the appellate court to review the possibility of a new trial, the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Lynn Crooks, had to concede that the FBI's own laboratory had failed to verify the claimed ballistics link between Peltier and the murder weapon that was used to nail down his conviction—a shell casing of disputed provenance that Crooks had called "perhaps the most important piece of evidence in this case." Even so, Judge Benson refused to reconsider the conviction.

The following year when the decision was appealed again, Crooks finally admitted that the identity of "the shooter" had never been proven and was in fact unknown to the prosecution even when it was twisting the evidence to ensure Peltier's conviction and make certain that its third and last suspect—by its own description, "the only one we got" -- was imprisoned for life. Yet the appellate court, while noting that so much tainted evidence had deprived the defendant of his constitutional right to due process of law, found "no compelling legal justification" for ordering a new trial.

In a TV interview after his retirement in 1989, Judge Gerald Heaney, who had signed that astonishing decision, called it "the most difficult I had to make in twenty-two years on the bench." The following year, in the National Law Journal, this troubled jurist held the FBI "equally responsible" for the deaths of its two agents; in a letter to Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, he urged commutation of Peltier's sentence.

Questioned on the same 1989 TV show about the perjured affidavits extracted by FBI agents from a frightened alcoholic, U.S. Attorney Crooks declared: "I don't really know and I don't really care if they were false. I don't agree that we did anything wrong, but I can tell you, it don't bother my conscience one whit if we did." Properly outraged by this arrogant refusal to repudiate U.S. government use of fabricated evidence, Senator Inouye, as a former U.S. attorney, called Crooks "a disgrace to the profession."

I first interviewed Leonard Peltier in Marion Penitentiary in 1981, and that same year, with his original codefendant Bob Robideau, I inspected the Jumping Bull Ranch at Oglala where the shoot-out had taken place. Later, after reading many if not most of the pertinent documents, including the FBI field reports and the transcripts of both trials, I returned to Oglala to interview local people and study the scene again.

Like the FBI, I would hear all sorts of rumors about the many young Indians involved without learning which one had fired the fatal shots; however there seemed to me no doubt whatever that Leonard Peltier had been railroaded into prison.

Unfortunately my long book making that case [In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Viking, 1983)] was quickly suppressed by libel suits brought by South Dakota's attorney general, William Janklow, and an FBI agent named David Price. Eight years would pass before both suits were summarily dismissed and the book was back in circulation. Meanwhile Peltier's long fight for a fair trial had won his endorsement as a political prisoner by Amnesty International, and his thousands of supporters throughout the world included the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and the great majority of his own people in the more than 250 Indian nations that had formally demanded his release.

In Peltier's first parole hearing in 1996, the examiner filed an internal recommendation in Peltier's favor. (The U.S. Parole Commission, like the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI, is under the aegis of the Justice Department: its examiner informs himself about the case, questions both sides, and appraises the new evidence, if any.) Yet in actions so belated and irregular as to raise suspicion of undue influence, the commission replaced that first examiner with one more to its liking and denied parole.

By then, the few bold lawmakers who had called for investigations had retreated or retired, and Peltier's best hope was executive clemency. To that end, I wangled my way into the Oval Office and pressed my book about the case into President Clinton's hands. In January 2001, during Clinton's last week in office, as FBI lobbyists -- the Association of Retired FBI Agents and No Parole for Peltier -- marched in front of the White House, I joined attorney Bruce Ellison and filmmaker Jon Kilik in a long meeting with the presidential and White House counsels in which we argued that granting clemency to an American Indian who could offer nothing in return was a bold symbolic step that could only enhance the President's last-minute efforts to prop up his legacy.

The lawyers seemed impressed and hopes were high, but when the clemency list appeared on the Saturday morning of Inauguration Day, Peltier's name was missing. The phone call I dreaded was put through from Leavenworth Prison in early afternoon. "They didn't give it to me," mumbled a stunned voice I scarcely recognized -- the first time in twenty years of visits, letters, and telephone conversations that Leonard Peltier's strong spirit sounded broken. With all court appeals exhausted and no hope of mercy from the incoming Republican administration, this aging prisoner was condemned to wait for his next parole hearing in 2009.

In the park in Lewisburg, people agreed that had the shoot-out victims not been "FBIs," Leonard might never have been convicted; at the very least, he would have been paroled many years before. Someone in the park recalled the fear and disruption on the reservations caused by the FBI's huge ResMurs investigation (which was widely perceived as the latest chapter in the long history of oppression and revenge against "the redskins who killed Custer" that had led up to the shoot-out).

The killing that day in June 1975 of a young member of the AIM by a marksman's bullet in the forehead had gone all but unmentioned, someone said, let alone investigated by "the Injustice Department," doubtless because "Injuns don't count." How about Bob Robideau's statement to an FBI man that he had been "the shooter"? Would the Parole Commission take that into account? And was it suspicious that Robideau had been found dead last February in Barcelona? (The official autopsy concluded that he had struck his head in a fall while suffering a seizure.)

With Peltier's attorney Eric Seitz and the two other parole advocates -- Dr. Thom White Wolf Fassett, a Seneca elder and United Methodist adviser to Congress on Indian affairs, and an Ojibwa woman named Cindy Maleterre representing Peltier's Turtle Mountain Reservation -- I went early the next morning to the prison, passing supporters waving "Free Peltier" signs at the entrance road.

In the hearing room the first to speak were the two sons of the late agent Jack Coler. After testifying to their family's great loss, they suggested that if this man facing them today were to take responsibility and express remorse for those brutal murders he so stubbornly denies having committed, the Coler family might not protest his parole. But the three FBI spokesmen and the assistant U.S. attorney who spoke next were content to repeat the same vilifications and distortions of the facts that won a conviction back in 1977. Locked long ago into their ResMurs myth, they insisted that Peltier was still a danger to the public and cited those provisions in the Parole Act specifying that parole may be denied if the subject's release might "depreciate the seriousness of the offense" or "promote disrespect for the law."

In response to the charge that Peltier has evaded his responsibility for those murders, Eric Seitz countered that the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office have evaded responsibility for their own illegal tactics in his prosecution. Otherwise Seitz made no attempt to retry a long historic case in a few minutes, emphasizing instead the prisoner's exemplary behavior record, serious health problems, and other strong qualifications for parole under the commission's geriatric and medical criteria. He reminded Examiner Scott Kubic that in a few weeks, on September 12, when Peltier would turn sixty-five, he would also become eligible for home detention under the new Second Chance program for elderly inmates designed to ease overcrowding in the U.S. prisons.

Thom White Wolf testified that Peltier's incarceration for nearly thirty-three years has been viewed both nationally and internationally as a gross injustice and a major embarrassment to our country, with a negative effect on the world's view of how the U.S. government treats its native population.

When my turn came, I spoke to the points made in this article, adding how much this inmate had matured over the three decades of our acquaintance, not only as an articulate spokesman for his people but as an artist, self-taught in the prisons, whose work is admired through-out the U.S. And Cindy Maleterre assured the examiner that the prisoner's Ojibwa-Dakota people at Turtle Mountain -- including grandchildren he has never seen -- had already taken care of the parole requirements of social support, adequate housing, and steady employment (as an arts-and-crafts teacher and alcoholism counselor on the reservation), and were planning to welcome him home with a great feast.

That afternoon we left the prison with the feeling that Examiner Kubic had listened carefully and would recommend parole -- a guarded optimism we conveyed to the flag-waving supporters awaiting our report on the public road. But no one forgot how the examiner's finding in Peltier's favor fifteen years before had been aborted; in the next weeks, as so often in the past, the prisoner would have to suffer the suspense of desperate hope.

On Friday, August 20, federal inmate #89637-132 received terse notice that his petition for parole had been denied: not until his "15-year Reconsideration Hearing in July 2024," he was informed, would he become eligible to be turned down again. In the unlikely event that he lives long enough to attend that hearing, Inmate Peltier will be eighty years old.

In his angry response, Attorney Seitz accused the commission of "adopting the position of the FBI that anyone who may be implicated in the killings of its agents should never be paroled and should be left to die in prison." I entirely agree with Seitz and share his anger. For the prisoner and his supporters, the Lewisburg hearing had been hollow, with a predetermined outcome: The United States v. Leonard Peltier had always been a matter less of justice than of retribution.

Americans -- those in public office especially -- should inform themselves about this painful case and demand an unbiased investigation that might start with one simple question: If, in the thirty-three years since his trial, reputable evidence has ever emerged that Leonard Peltier was the lone killer and deserves to be in prison for life, why hasn't the Justice Department produced it?

Without public protest, Peltier will not be granted a fair hearing since his prosecutors know that in the absence of honest evidence, "the only one we got" would be set free. Instead, this man's life leaks away behind grim concrete walls for the unworthy purpose of saving face for the FBI and a U.S. Attorney's Office that together botched the famous ResMurs case and mean to see somebody pay. And who better for this fate than a "radical" AIM Indian who dared stand up to "legally constituted authority" in defense of his humiliated people, as he was doing with such tragic consequences on that long-ago June day?

In reviewing this case with an open mind, as surely he must in fulfilling his oath of office, Attorney General Eric Holder (the assistant attorney general in 2001) might reflect on his own role in the clemency bestowed by Clinton on Marc Rich, the notorious "fugitive felon." He might consider, too, Rich's consequent evasion of even a single day in prison in the harsh light of the eleven thousand days already served by a penniless American Indian who remains innocent before the law, having never been proven guilty.

[Peter Matthiessen won the 2008 National Book Award for his novel Shadow Country. His recent books include End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica and The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes (November 2009). This article first appeared in The New York Review of Books (Volume 56, Number 18, dated November 19, 2009).]

Source / New York Review of Books / Upaya Newsletter

• Go here for other Rag Blog articles about Leonard Peltier.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Mariann G. Wizard : Ft. Holabird Haiku

Still life of toy soldiers. Photo by Margaret Bourke-White, Jan 01, 1937 / Time and Life Pictures / Getty Images


Ft. Holabird Haiku

See the soldiers, row on row,
green leaves on trees --
beware defoliant!

Vietnam had soldiers too,
green boys in trees
whose limbs are now burnt black.

In the spring their leaves renew;
people's roots bring
fresh life to scarred branches.


Mariann G. Wizard
Pacific Grove, CA, 1970

Posted Veterans Day, 2009 / The Rag Blog

Wizard Sez: "For a non-profit group to support this Veterans Day you may not know about yet, check out the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign. Help veterans here and civilians in Vietnam -- including children -- still suffering the aftereffects of US defoliation chemicals."

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Hey Obama : Ride 'em Cowboy!

C'mon Obama,
Let's have a real buildup in Afghanistan!

Barack Obama told the nation/
'Have no fear of escalation/
I am trying everyone to please...'
(With apologies to Tom Paxton)

By Richard Lee / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2009

To Barack Obama:

Let’s have a military buildup! You can show those crazy-ass generals at the Pentagon that you aren’t just a chicken-shit weenie from Harvard.

You gotta do it right, however. Stop waffling about a measly 40,000 or 44,000 troops and do it like you mean it! I know you have never fought for or against anything. (That squabble with the Court Clerk to get your papers filed doesn’t count.) But you can do it! Don’t forget to keep that HOPE and CHANGE thingy going, so we won’t see what is really happening behind the curtain.

Since you don’t have a clue how to go about it, you should go back and dust off the template that the power-drunk cowboy used way back when. Turn to the record of his build-up, covering March 8, 1965, through, say, the end of January, 1966. Yep, that’s right I’m talking about Vietnam (they told me you were smart); don’t let that slow you down, a buildup is a buildup and you can do it in Afghanistan just like Lyndon and Waste-more-land did it back then.

You’ve already got 68,000 troops and an untold number of mercenaries... uh, contractors there so maybe you can forgo the photo op of the Marines stomping ashore like at Da Nang, or maybe you can arrange something like that, it was a good photo. No one will call you on it; the ignorance of the American people knows no limits. Don’t forget to include the Afghani ARVN; they’ll do you a lot of good.

That done, throw caution to the wind, fire anyone who counsels caution, and begin a real buildup!

Expect casualties. Lyndon was told to expect civilian casualties of 25,000 dead, about 68 men, women and children a day, mostly from “friendly fire” and 50,000 wounded. That was an estimate for the one year the generals said it would take to bring the Vietnamese “to their knees” and initiate their surrender; one year, or maybe 18 months at the most. That number was good enough for Lyndon, so don’t let anybody’s numbers scare you. In 1968 there were 85,000 civilians wounded.

Next, establish free fire zones. Once you get all those troops there, they will need some place to fire off all their ordnance. Go to an inhabited area, drop leaflets or have USAID workers visit and tell the population to get on the road and become refugees. Those who are too old or too infirm to go, or who come up with the excuse that Afghanistan is their country and they ain’t going; well, those are Viet Cong... I mean, Tally Band.

What good is a free fire zone if it doesn’t have any targets to shoot at anyway? While you are busy changing “Viet Cong” to “Taliban," change the name “free fire zones” to Specified Strike Zones; those pesky Congressional liberals will feel better about it. It worked when Lyndon did it.

Get an air war going. Crank up the SAC B-52’s, they don’t have anything to do now that the Russians opted out of the Cold War. One B-52 at 30,000 feet can drop a payload that will take out everything in a box five eighths of a mile wide and two miles long. You can still call it “Operation Arc Light”; no one will remember that’s been used before.

Don’t forget to let the other planes in on the fun! Fighter bombers can deliver ordnance too. Lyndon, in that first 10 months, got it up to 400 sorties a day, add in the B-52’s and they were able to drop 825 tons of bombs a day. Some even hit their targets.

Drop more than bombs. I hate to suggest a return to Agent Orange. Military science must have come up with better stuff in the last 50 years. If not, then use the leftover Agent Orange, the residual effect is worth it. Not only will those enemy Afghanis (or friendly ones, for that matter) not be able to plant food crops in target areas for decades, but “Taliban fighters” will keep dying from it for years after we’re gone.

During the 10-month Vietnam build-up, specially equipped C-123’s covered 850,000 acres, in 1966 they topped that, “defoliating” 1.5 million acres. By war’s end they’d dropped 18 million gallons of Agent Orange, in addition to millions of gallons of less notorious but still deadly poisons code-named for other colors -- Purple, White, Pink, and more -- over 20% of the south of Vietnam.

To help keep the buildup affordable, take no costly precautions with our own troops; it’s hot in Afghanistan, so let them take off their shirts while spraying. The afflicted Vietnam vets sued the government over it, they won! My brother Tommy was one of them. What did they win? Well, when they die, they get $300.00 from the government. You can forget about the vets anyway when the war is over, that’s S.O.P.

Now, a buildup ain’t all in the air. Howitzers, Long Tom Cannons and mortars expended enough high explosive and shrapnel in Southeast Asia to equal the tonnage dropped from the air.

And it’s not just troop strength that you’ll need to build up. Your friends The Masters of War have probably already told you that. A build-up is troops and MATERIAL. See how Waste-more-land did it, and more or less copy that. Brown and Root are still in business; have a sit down with them; they can help you sort it out.


Build airfields. With hundreds of thousands more troops you will need lots of airfields. Jet airfields are best for business. Lyndon had three in Vietnam before he started, he quickly built five more. So, discount what you have and get cracking! A 10,000 foot runway to start, and then add parallel taxiways, high speed turnoffs, and tens of thousands of square yards of aprons for maneuvering and parking. Use aluminum matting at first; you can replace it with concrete later. You gotta build hangers, repair shops, offices and operations buildings, barracks, mess halls, and other buildings. Don’t stint on the air conditioning!

Build deep water ports. What? Don’t have an ocean? Kee-rist, what kind of a country are we liberating anyway? Well, you still gotta build ports! Guess you can build them in Kuwait and other countries and truck all the shit through Iraq, they will be pacified by then and welcoming us with open arms and goofy little dances. Pakistan might like one or two, it would be good for business and we can just pay them to be our friend like we do now... only more.

Ports were dredged to 28 feet back then, but the newer boats draw 40 feet. It may be only mud to you, but its gold to the contractors. Half a dozen new ports should get you started.

But wait, there’s more. Four or five central supply and maintenance depots and hundreds of satellite facilities, build them along the lines of the prison gulag you are building in the U.S.

Build thirty more permanent base camps for the new combat and support troops you are sending. Another fifty or so tactical airfields long enough to hold C-130’s. Build two dozen or more hospitals that have a total of nine to ten thousand beds. Be sure there are new plush headquarters buildings for the brass and about four or five thousand staff. Everything has to be connected by secure electronic data systems, secure telephones, two or three hundred communications facilities around the country. Tens of thousands of new circuits will be needed to accommodate the built-up war machine.

You are a smart guy, Mr. President, so I won’t belabor an explanation of each thing. But here is a quick list of bare necessities: Warehouses, ammunitions stowage areas, tank farms for all the petroleum, oil and lubricants, new hard top roads, well ventilated and air conditioned barracks with hot water and flushing toilets (think 6-10,000 septic tanks). Food, not just MRE’s, but for all those REMF’s who will need fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and dairy products. Thousands of cold lockers to store this, and you need to build a milk reconstitution plant, maybe two or three, and ice cream plants.

All this is going to take a lot of electricity, so you will need thousands of permanent and mobile gas-driven generators (better add another tank farm). PX’s, not just for cigarettes and shaving cream, but all the things that the consumer army you will be sending is used to having: video game consoles, blackberries, microwave ovens, computers, slacks and sport shirts (to wear on R&R -- could omit that by having no R&R), soft drinks (better build a bottling plant), beer, whiskey, ice cubes (more generators?). Hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, steaks.

Be sure to stock candy, lingerie, and cosmetics to improve the standard of living of the local women. They will also need to buy electric fans, toasters, percolators, TV’s, CD and DVD players, room air conditioners, and small refrigerators.

Movie theaters, service clubs, bowling alleys... will the list ever end? No!

Well, that will get your buildup started. I haven’t even addressed the more and more and more troops the generals will want, that is way too heavy for me!

In re-creating Johnson’s buildup, it will be better to skip over the second week in November, 1965, and all that stuff about the Drang River Valley, that’s just for historians. Close the book when you get to the end of January, 1966. Don’t read through April, with all those dreary reports from Khe Sanh. Don’t read about Tet 1968. Just remember it was the press and the Congress and the people who lost their will that lost that war, and not the stupid blundering generals or the presidents who didn’t give a shit how many they killed on either side.

One last thing: get your architects busy designing the Bush/Obama wall to put opposite ours on the Mall. Maybe you can even have your vets pay for it themselves like we had to.

I go there whenever I am in that stinking city. I sit on the edge of the grass just before sundown and sometimes I talk to the wall. The wall stands silent then; they are still waiting for an answer to the question of why we went to Vietnam. When it gets dark, sometimes the wall talks back. They say a lot of things, but they never say, “God bless my Commander-in-Chief.”

Richard Lee, Vet
Veterans Day, 2009

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Stupak Amendment : Rolling Back Women's Rights

The House Health Care bill:
Compromising away women's rights

Women put Obama in office; now we have to call in our chips.

By Barbara J. Berg / The Rag Blog / November 10, 2009

The thunderous applause greeting the announcement of the House’s health care reform bill, effectively curtailing women’s access to abortion, drowned out the cries and screams from our nation’s recent past. The cries and screams of everywoman, wretchedly pregnant, with no options but to take matters into her own hands.

We don’t talk much about these women today: the single women, poor women, women who already were caring for far too many little ones, women whose boyfriends or husbands would beat them or leave them if they had a baby, women who wanted to leave their boyfriends or husbands, women who wanted to finish their education or hold onto a job, were too young, too immature, too old, had been raped, were victims of incest, or just plain didn’t want to be mothers.

But fortunately, there are those who remember.

The words of Dr. Edward Keemer of Washington D.C. help us imagine the absolute desperation these women must have felt:

I had treated a woman . . . [who] still had the straightened-out coat hanger hanging from her vagina. Some... died from air embolisms or infections. Over the years I was to encounter hundreds of other women who had resorted to imaginative but deadly methods of self-induced abortion... some would swallow quinine or turpentine. Others would insert a corrosive potassium permanganate tablet into their vaginas... A sixteen-year-old girl... died after douching with a cupful of bleach.

During the 1960s, a million women are estimated to have had illegal abortions. Of those who survived, untold numbers became sterile. By one count seven thousand women died from botched abortions in 1966 (compared to three thousand American deaths that year in Vietnam). Hard as it is verify these statistics, what we know is that the deaths and disabilities from illegal abortions fell disproportionately on poor women and women of color.

Maybe Bart Stupak and the merry band of 64 Democrats and 176 Republicans who voted for his amendment missed the memo, but the last time I checked abortion was still legal in this country. Now, though thanks to their cynical maneuvering, it will be beyond the reach of millions of women who need it, possibly forcing them to resort to the horrifying options of Dr. Keemer’s patients.

According to the National Organization of Women, the Stupak Amendment, if it remains in the final version of health insurance reform, will:

• Prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
• Prevent women participating in the public health insurance exchange administered by private insurance companies from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
• Prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely, in many cases.

As Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Herblock commented wryly during the Reagan years, “It’s simple -- if you could afford to have children, you could have an abortion.”

What Bart Stupak and Co. want goes way beyond the thirty year old Hyde Amendment, still in place, that forbids federal funds for abortion. There is a chance that the House abortion restrictions will be modified in committee, but I’m not counting on it. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has already suggested introducing a measure similar to the Stupak Amendment in the Senate Bill, and Harry Reid will have a hard time fighting the anti-abortionists especially since he personally does not support choice.

Dark clouds are looming on the horizon for women’s fundamental right to self-determination. By pandering to the hard-lobbying U.S. Catholic Bishops who demanded the elimination of abortion coverage from healthcare reform, we will now have to contend with a newly energized religious intrusion into our policies. The movement to grant fetuses, even eggs, personhood, supported by the religious right, is thriving.

Bills have recently been introduced into the state legislatures of Michigan and Tennessee, with the ultimate goal of making abortion murder under the Constitution regardless of the any Supreme Court decision. The Stupak Amendment is another tactic in the increasingly organized and well-financed drive to deprive women of their most fundamental rights.

When President Obama first applauded the House bill he not only didn’t express disappointment over the compromise on women’s health care, he didn’t even mention it! Only a day and a half later did he issue a tepid statement about restoring women to the status quo, steadfastly refusing to utter the dreaded a-word.

Maybe we’re seeing something many of us have tried to overlook. But it’s hard to forget the speed with which the president eliminated provisions to expand access to affordable family planning, cost effective legislation which would have helped millions of low-income women, from the economic stimulus bill. Or to overlook his use of the term partial-birth abortion in the third presidential debate, a phrase deplored by all who are pro-choice.

I’m starting to get the uneasy feeling that the Obama administration, like so many Democrats, considers women’s issues as marginal, even separate from their Progressive agenda. How can they believe they are protecting a woman’s health, while taking away her reproductive freedom?

The answer is they don’t.

This is only one more example of the ongoing rollback of women’s rights that we have been ignoring at our own peril. It’s time to say enough! We hear a lot these days about being on the right side of history. If we, as a nation really believe that, than how can we return to a history filled with the cries and screams of our foremothers?

Women put Obama in office; now we have to call in our chips.

[Barbara Berg is the author of Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future (Chicago Review Press, Sept, 2009).]

Also see:

• The Stupak Stupor by Emily Douglas / The Nation / November 9, 2009

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Big Pharma : The Orgasm Scam

'Restless Vagina Syndrome':
Big Pharma's newest fake disease

By Terry J. Allen / November 9, 2009

It’s not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner’s), that you don’t orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the libido of a 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help.

You are among the "43 percent of American women [who] experience some degree of impaired sexual function," according to a Journal of the American Medical Association article. The FDA’s evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties -- but only if the woman feels "personal distress" about it.

So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them.

By promoting the belief that "normal" women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch the disease. However, the FDA has yet to approve a treatment for women who fall short. Until then, they could try the Orgasmatron: a dial-a-delight spinal implant that rarely works -- and risks infection and paralysis. Or, for $60/month, pop LexaFem pills -- containing (how-could-it-not-work) "horny goat weed extract" in order to "feel like a real woman today." Its website promises, "You won’t ever feel unhappy again with LexaFem in your arsenal."

But the big swinging dicks of global FSD marketing (and off-label marketing) are Pfizer -- whose stop-gap strategy is selling women Viagra based on the fact that it works for men, and Procter & Gamble (P&G), which, using the same logic, has put its money on testosterone.

Viagra’s failure in trial after trial to work on women has not stopped doctors from writing 1.4 million off-label prescriptions. FSD is "a classic example of starting with some preconceived, and non-evidence based diagnostic categorization for women’s sexual dysfunctions, based on the male model," said John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute, in an interview with BMJ (British Medical Journal).

No drug follows the male model more literally than testosterone. Despite FDA refusal to approve P&G’s testosterone patch Intrinsa, U.S. doctors wrote 2 million off-label testosterone prescriptions in 2007. Like Pfizer’s little blue pill, the Intrinsa patch doesn’t really work for women. No wonder: Researchers don’t even know what constitutes a "normal" female testosterone level, and women with low levels of the hormone are as likely as those with high levels to be happy with their sex lives. And as filmmaker Liz Canner shows in her excellent new documentary Orgasm, Inc., testosterone is usually teamed with estrogen, which increases risks for stroke, cancers and dementia.

The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them, and vice versa. Either way, the syndrome is typically accompanied by a rash of conflicts of interest.

A Pfizer survey in Malaysia found that Malay women are even more diseased than their American counterparts, with "69.6 percent experiencing some form of FSD," according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which also published an industry-supported supplement on FSD. Journal editor and urologist Irwin Goldstein denies a conflict of interest. "Science is science," he says. "It comes down to the bottom line. What the data shows, the data shows." Actually, no. Drug company-funded studies are more likely than independent studies to find the new drug superior to the old. Perhaps the bottom line Dr. Goldstein refers to is his income as a paid consultant for drug companies, including P&G and Pfizer.

Goldstein established an FSD clinic with Dr. Jennifer Berman, who now heads a Beverly Hills clinic and appears on Oprah. As one of the health professionals on a 1998 panel that received financial sponsorship from eight pharmaceutical companies, she helped define female sexual dysfunction. Some 22 drug companies, including Pfizer, had financial ties to 18 of the 19 authors of that panel’s report, the BMJ revealed.

"Maybe the best approach is not ineffective, over-hyped drugs with nasty side effects, but an end to disease mongering and a strong dose of comprehensive sex education," says filmmaker Canner. Her film hits female erogenous zones that pharmaceutical fixes can’t find: your brain and your funny bone. 

© 2009 In These Times. All rights reserved.

Terry J. Allen is a senior editor of In These Times. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Nation, New Scientist and other publications.]

Source / In These Times / AlterNet

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BBC Poll on Capitalism : Where's the Love?

Global survey on free market capitalism:
Majority say fix it or ditch it

By James Robbins / November 9, 2009

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.

In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well. Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.

There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.

Economic regulation

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, it was a victory for ordinary people across Eastern and Central Europe. It also looked at the time like a crushing victory for free-market capitalism.

Twenty years on, this new global poll suggests confidence in free markets has taken heavy blows from the past 12 months of financial and economic crisis. More than 29,000 people in 27 countries were questioned. In only two countries, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands.

Almost a quarter -- 23% of those who responded -- feel it is fatally flawed. That is the view of 43% in France, 38% in Mexico and 35% in Brazil. And there is very strong support around the world for governments to distribute wealth more evenly. That is backed by majorities in 22 of the 27 countries.

If there is one issue where a global consensus seems to emerge from the survey it is this: there are majorities almost everywhere wanting government to be more active in regulating business. It is only in Turkey that a majority want less government regulation.

Opinion about the disintegration of the Soviet Union is sharply divided.


Europeans overwhelmingly say it was a good thing: 79% in Germany, 76% in Britain and 74% in France feel that way. But outside the developed West it is a different picture. Almost seven in 10 Egyptians say the end of the Soviet Union was a bad thing and views are sharply divided in India, Kenya and Indonesia.

Source / BBC News

Thanks to Common Dreams / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

History as Politics : Remembering the Berlin Wall

Man straddles Berlin Wall in 1989. Photo from photosfan.com.
History as politics, Politics as history:
Remembering the Berlin Wall

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / November 9, 2009

...you are Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.

-- Woodrow Wilson shortly after the Russian Revolution quoted in L.S. Stavrianos, Global Rift, 1981, 492.

There are two great evils at work in the world today, Absolutism, the power of which is waning, Bolshevism, the power of which is increasing. We have seen the hideous consequences of Bolshevik rule in Russia, and we know that the doctrine is spreading westward. The possibility of proletarian despotism over Central Europe is terrible to contemplate.

-- Secretary of State Robert Lansing shortly after the Russian Revolution in Stavrianos, 494.

Daniel Barenboim, who was in town the night the Berlin Wall came down in 1989,” ... said that “the fall of the wall ‘has changed so much of Europe for the better,’ Barenboim said in an interview at the Berlin Staatsoper, where he is chief conductor. ‘It has given so many thousands, probably millions of people, a better existence’

-- Catherine Hickley, Washington Post, November 8, 2009

Debasing the Socialist vision

Reflections on the anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 should stimulate a reexamination of the pain and suffering of the twentieth century.

It was a century in which over 100 million died in wars all around the globe (60 million alone in the two World Wars). Nazis killed six million Jews and six million others in Europe: liberals, communists, gays, opponents of genocide of every persuasion. And, during the Cold War years (1945 to 1991) approximately six million Vietnamese and Korean peoples died in wars and hundreds of thousands in Central Europe, Latin American, and South Asia.

The great revolutions of the twentieth century promised a different outcome for humankind: peace, justice, and democracy. Perhaps the biggest disappointment, the gap between the dream and the practice, resulted from the failures of the former Soviet Union. Masses of its citizens died in campaigns to collectivize agriculture and the purge of dissidents.

The regime developed an omnipresent dictatorship and following the revelations about Stalinism evolved into an autocratic state driven by top down bureaucracy. In addition, the Soviet Union would not tolerate political independence from the Socialist states of Eastern Europe, invading both Hungary and Czechoslovakia to crush reform movements. So from this vantage point, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall was cause for celebration.

But history is complicated

However, as the sentiments of President Wilson and his Secretary of State suggest, the United States as superpower emerged from World War I to embark on a global campaign to crush the new Soviet Union economically. As we know, the United States, along with a dozen other nations sent troops into the Soviet Union to help counter-revolutionaries overthrow the new Bolshevik regime.

In subsequent years, until 1933, the United States refused to recognize the Soviet Union. Western powers watched as Germany rearmed and expanded its control across the heartland of Europe. Italian fascist armies and German airpower were used to destroy democratic Spain, again with the United States and the British on the sidelines.

After the war, the Truman Administration launched a “cold war,” against the Soviet Union. It transferred resources to Western Europe to rebuild the capitalist part of it. It unleashed covert operators to infiltrate trade unions and political parties in Europe and Latin America and began beaming propaganda and sending operatives into Eastern Europe to undermine Soviet influence.

Germany was the centerpiece of this new global struggle. As the source of military forces that killed 27 million Soviet citizens in World War II, the status of Germany became most critical to the Soviets. And for the United States a reindustrialized, remilitarized Germany would constitute the centerpiece of the campaign to fight Communism and promote capitalism on the world stage.

Ironically, the Cold War started over Germany and could have ended there with a mutually derived agreement to create a neutralized and united Germany (much as was agreed to in Austria). But western diplomats ignored Soviet offers to negotiate the creation of such a Germany.

Without revisiting all the critical points of contestation between the East and the West, it is important to make clear that the Soviet Union, the weaker of the two “superpowers,” was targeted for challenge and defeat by every United States administration from 1917 to 1991. This cost both countries and their allies trillions of dollars in military spending and millions of lives.

The Soviet Union had something to do with social change

There were some positive developments during the Cold War years for which the Soviet Union may have made a contribution.

In 1945 most of Africa was still living under the yoke of colonialism. The British, French, Dutch and others still controlled territories and peoples in Asia. The Chinese were mired in a violent civil war. And all of Latin America was “in the backyard” of the United States. Within thirty years all this had changed. Africa achieved its independence, the Communist movement came to power in China, Indochina was freed from French and then American colonialism, and the Cuban revolution provided a beacon of hope for peoples living in the Western Hemisphere.

The Soviet Union provided arms, economic assistance, technical assistance, and inspiration for those seeking independence and economic development. Further, and this may be the most important point, the Soviet Union served as a check on the unbridled expansion of military and economic power of the United States and the Western alliance.

What if the Soviet Union had not collapsed?

Of course, we can never know what might have happened since 1991 if the Soviet Union, after its Eastern European allies, had not collapsed. But we do know what has happened. And we can make educated guesses about what might have happened in a world in which a power competitive in military, economic, and ideological resources with the West still existed.

First, the Gulf War might not have occurred in the way it did, (While the Soviet Union did collaborate with President George Herbert Walker Bush in the fall, 1990, on Gulf War policy, the collaboration was from a position of considerable marginalization). For sure, the Soviet Union would have waged a propaganda war against the U.S. military operation and the economic embargo of Iraq and bombing campaigns that continued throughout the 1990s and, particularly, the second war on Iraq in 2003.

Probably, in the bipolar world of the Cold War, the United States would not have been able to launch a war on Afghanistan and continue it for eight years.

And what about the global economy? Neoliberal globalization, initiated in the 1980s but expanded to every corner of the globe in the 1990s, would have been checked by Soviet influence and arguments about overweening reliance on the “free market.” The mal-distribution of wealth and income might not have been as grotesque as it has become if there had been a Soviet Union critiquing International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies.

Without exaggerating the influence or good intentions of a surviving Soviet Union, I would argue that the world since 1991 might have been different; particularly given the hundreds of thousands who have died in war since 1991 and the devastating impacts of growing economic inequality.

And back to Germany

Bruni de la Motte in the Guardian, Nov. 8, 2009, reported that the collapse of the former German Democratic Republic and its integration into West Germany led to social breakdown of society, widespread unemployment, “crass materialism,” the privatization of public enterprises, farms and forests, and two million lost homes. Hundreds of thousands of professional workers including teachers and professors lost their jobs and were blacklisted because they had been credentialed in the old regime.

There is no question, as one U.S. trade unionist once said to me, the former Soviet Union and the GDR were not “workers’ paradises” but they provided basic economic security to workers. That has long since been lost most places around the world.

And about history

It is a common place now to repeat the old adage: “History is written by the winners.” Old adage or not, the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall is being orchestrated by the same kinds of imperial voices that have been raised for almost one hundred years now.

As contentious as it might be, it is time for progressives to revisit the history of the Cold War in a way that is not chauvinistic and self-serving and does not justify current and future wars.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Mexico : Drug Decrim and the 10,000-Ton Monkey

Pot smoker in Mexico City. Mexicans consume an estimated 342 tons of marijuana a year. Photo by Castillo / AP.
Legalization is the only answer...
Mexico's massive drug problem

As poet Juan Pablo Garcia posited long ago in his 1985 Pacheco (marijuana user) Manifesto: 'drugs don’t make us criminals but laws against drugs do.'

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / November 9, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico has a 10,000 ton monkey on its back and its name is Washington D.C.

While U.S. drug enforcers gloat that 15-foot walls, high tech sensors, drones, blimps, spotter planes and rampant militarization have put a significant dent in the flow of cocaine across its porous southern border, drug use escalates exponentially south of that border. The reason: Colombian-Mexican cartels are now holding their loads longer in Mexico, waiting for the appropriate arrangements to be made to move the blow into El Norte.

Inevitably, the cocaine and to a lesser extent crystal meth and heroin (marijuana is readily available in the U.S., the world's largest producer of the weed) leak into the Mexican street where fierce competition for sales and consumption is out of control. As a result, over 13,000 lives have been lost since President Felipe Calderon went to war with the drug cartels in December 2006, many of them in turf battles over trans-shipment routes and retail sales in Mexican cities.

Moreover, in the three years of Calderon's drug war, which is being underwritten by $3,000,000,000 in Washington's Merida Initiative funds, the number of "addicts" on this side of the border has risen by 460,000 and now totals almost a million, according to the estimates provided by the National Council on Addictions, and first-time users have jumped from 3.5 million to 4.5 million -- some drug experts calculate that 10 million would be closer to the mark, depending on definitions of "user" and "addict." One dangerous corollary: the Mexican prison system is bursting apart at the seams and lethal violence is on the rise.

Among long-time observers of Mexican drug wars, there are some, this writer included, who suspect that Washington's militarization of the border and the consequent user boom here was a well-thought out strategy concocted by U.S. drug fighters to force its proxies in this distant neighbor nation to engage and confront the cartels. Viewed from this perspective, the thousands of dead on the ground here are simply cannon fodder in the U.S. War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon in 1969, officially declared by Ronald Reagan in 1985, and zealously executed by four U.S. presidents ever since. Barack Obama, a prohibitionist who likens Felipe Calderon to Al Capone's nemesis Elliot Ness, is only the latest puppet-master in this grotesque dance of death.

Partners in the Drug War: Presidents Calderon and Obama.
With jails exploding -- prison riots are reported at least once a week -- the Calderon administration has moved to tamp down dangerous overcrowding by "decriminalizing" the possession of small quantities of illicit drugs. This past August 21st, the Mexican president signed off on legislation that gives users and "addicts" (as health officers prefer to lump them) the option of treatment or prison if arrested with small amounts of drugs for personal use -- two grams of marijuana (about four skinny joints), a half gram of cocaine, 40 milligrams of meth amphetamines, and 10 milligrams of heroin. Instead of immediate imprisonment, the drugs will be confiscated and the user/addict booked and fingerprinted and their biometrics recorded in a national registry of "addicts."

Those pulled in are then released with the obligation of enrollment in government treatment programs that are still not operational. If the user/addict fails to show up for treatment or is arrested a third time, prison time is prescribed.

Those nabbed with larger amounts, calculated at a thousand times the minimum quantities, are automatically assigned to terminally overcrowded state prisons as "traffickers" -- "traffickers" arrested with any amount over the higher quantities are sent to maximum security federal penitentiaries as kingpins.

There is no middle ground in this schema notes science writer Javier Flores in the national daily La Jornada: one is either a user/addict or a narcotraficante.

The Mexican congress passed similar legislation in 2006 during the waning days of Vicente Fox's presidency but when the measure hit his desk, the red telephone rang and George W. Bush was on the line threatening grave repercussions if Fox did not veto the decrim bill - which, of course, he did.

What has decrim meant on the streets of Mexico City? A few weeks ago, my friend Xochi (not her real name), a street dealer who makes house calls, and this writer visited a sick friend -- Xochi brought along a bag of medicinal marijuana and I some cannabis cookies. The conversation turned to Calderon's recently promulgated decrim and we consulted our offerings to determine if we were users, "addicts," or kingpins. It goes without saying that we were criminally over the limit but fortunately the local gendarmes did not bust down the door.

According to Xochi, decrim is turning into a bonanza for Mexico City cops who have taken to carrying scales to weigh confiscated drugs and shaking down those "criminals" who exceed the decreed limits. Shaking down small-time users and dealers is nothing new in this the most corrupt, crime-ridden, and conflictive city in the western hemisphere. Indeed, crooked cops have been planting drugs on unwary citizens as long as cops have patrolled these mean streets. Long before decrim was a gleam in Calderon's eye, those "found" with drugs in their possession did not immediately go straight to jail if they could come up with the "mordida" (literally "bite" or bribe) to get the cops off their backs.

As poet Juan Pablo Garcia posited long ago in his 1985 Pacheco (marijuana user) Manifesto: "drugs don’t make us criminals but laws against drugs do."

Overwhelmed by millions of users, addicts, narcotraffickers, and kingpins, Calderon has turned to God for relief. Young people who use drugs do not have God in their (miserable) lives, he explained to Catholic bishops attending a family crisis conference last month, citing the recent death of pop idol Michael Jackson as an example -- although there is no evidence that Jacko did not believe in God or was even a user/addict (the official autopsy concluded that Michael was overdosed by a doctor with a lethal anesthetic.)

The president's hypothesis was promptly shot down on editorial and op-ed pages all over the country. Aside from increased availability in Mexico thanks to Washington's worldwide crusade against demon drugs, critics pinned the dramatic increase in users-"addicts" on a battered economy in which more than 2,000,000 workers have lost their jobs in the past year as a more pertinent explanation of the boom. With nearly a million young people entering the job market each year, Calderon, who once billed himself as "the president of employment," has floundered badly as a job creator. On the other hand, drug cropping and retail street dealing ("narcominudeo") provide gainful employment for millions of kids without jobs.

Prison riots are reported at least once a week. This one, in Tijuana on Sept. 18, 2009, left 19 killed and a dozen wounded.
In fact, there are multiple indicators that drug users, dealers, "addicts", and kingpins do have God in their (miserable) lives. "We, the Marijuanos, are Guadalupanos (devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe) not goddamn communist whores," Juan Pablo Garcia wrote in his Pacheco Manifesto. Narcotraficantes are celebrated for their devotion to their faith, buying Masses, hiring priests for baptisms and weddings and funerals and even building churches. Drug money -- "narco-limosnas" (drug alms) are a significant component of Church finances, concedes Bishop Carlos Aguiar Retes, president of the Mexican Bishops Conference (CEM.) For the Catholic Church, explains Aguascalientes bishop Ramon Godinez, turning illegitimate gains into good works is perfectly pardonable.

Although cocaine and meth (Mexico does not produce much heroin) are considered to be killer drugs, reefer madness is alive and kicking south of the border. Mexicans consume 357 tons of drugs annually, advances Secretary of Public Security Genero Garcia Luna, of which marijuana accounts for 343. Marijuana is considered a dangerous drug by crusaders like Garcia Luna and his boss Calderon and those who use it are considered "addicts" in need of "treatment" -- actually Mexican marijuana is typically punchless and low in THC content when compared to hot house-grown, high-potency strains in the U.S. where cannabis is considered to be medicinal in some states. What makes treatment propositions even more absurd is that there are no treatment centers to accommodate newly decriminalized pot smokers.

For hard-core addicts desperate to get off the crack pipe or the needle, public detox clinics have been stripped back to the bone. While wealthy user/"addicts" sign themselves into deluxe spas to detox, the poor have few options. Like every other public service the Calderon government is charged with providing, drug treatment has been privatized under the prevailing neoliberal economic model.

Evangelical churches run treatment programs in many working class colonies that force addicts to go cold turkey. Corporal punishment and the Word of God are means of coercion to get young people off drugs.

The drug gangs themselves run their own treatment programs for street dealers that get hooked on the goods they push according to one Ciudad Juarez pistolero Julio Cesar Aleman, a member of a hit squad known as "The Artists of Assassination," enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel, who are charged by federal authorities with a total of 45 killings -- 28 of them at two treatment homes in that Gran Guignol border city. La Linea (a rival drug gang) gets them off drugs, fattens them up, and sends them back out on the street to deal," he explained to police agents to justify the homicidal assaults.

Decriminalizing drugs in a country through which 80% of the U.S. cocaine supply passes (Drug Enforcement Administration estimates) changes little in Mexico so long as it borders the biggest drug market on the planet. Even as decrim takes root north of the border, more than 800,000 Americans were arrested for possession of marijuana in 2008 according to Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Institute. Legalization and not decrim is the only answer.

Drug reform is catching on in Latin America. In addition to Mexico's feeble and misplaced efforts at providing alternatives to incarceration, Argentina courts recently ruled that personal possession of marijuana is not criminal. In Colombia, decriminalization of small amounts of cocaine has been the law since the 1990s. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales champions the medicinal properties of the coca leaf, the source of powdered cocaine, and endorses the industrialization of the plant. At a 2008 drug policy conference in Brazil, former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo, the squarest Mexican president to ever administrate the affairs of this country, declared that the prohibitionist approach had failed.

So has decrim. The 10,000-ton monkey is not going to get off Mexico's back until drugs are legalized everywhere in the Americas, including the United States. As the godfather of Jamaican ganja reggae Peter Tosh croons "Doctors smoke it, nurses smoke it, even judges smoke it, and lawyers too: Legalize It! Don't Criticize It! Legalize It! Don't Criminalize It!"

Or decriminalize it either.

[John Ross will present his just-published (Nation Books) cult classic, the monstrous El Monstruo -- Dread & Redemption in Mexico City, Friday the 13th at Northtown Books in Arcata, CA (7 p.m.); Wednesday, Nov. 18th at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco's Mission District (7 PM); and Nov. 19th at UC-Berkeley's Center for Latino Policy Studies (3:30 PM.) Admission to all three events is gratis.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Surprise! : Betrayal in Honduras as 'Golpistas' Ignore Accord

Manuel Zelaya closes a window at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. Photo from AFP.
Celebration was premature;
United States expresses 'disappointment'

...negotiating with the golpistas for reinstatement of the democratically elected president is like negotiating with thieves for the return of stolen property.

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / November 8, 2009

See David Morris' translations of articles by Arturo Cano and Pablo Ordaz, Below.

Within a week of the signing of the agreement that was to end the four-month political crisis in Honduras, the de facto government has betrayed its purpose and the constitutional government has given it up as one last failed attempt to undo the coup d’état.

The Tegucigalpa/San José Accord, signed on October 29, was the result of three weeks of negotiation between representatives of de facto president Roberto Micheletti and democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. It appeared at first to solve the thorny issue of Zelaya’s restitution by approving it in principle and leaving final approval to the country’s unicameral legislature, thus confirming, symbolically at least, that Zelaya had been removed from office in a coup d’état and not as punishment for criminal acts, as the coup government had claimed.

But delaying resolution of the crisis until after the November 29 elections has been the golpistas’ plan all along and the congressional leadership was more than willing to further the plan. It decided to consult with the Supreme Court and several other institutions before calling a special session of the legislature to consider restitution, a process that could easily stall any action until the next president is elected three weeks from now. The Accord did not establish a deadline for restitution.

In the meantime, Micheletti ceremoniously fulfilled the letter of another provision of the Accord by forming, unilaterally, a government of “national unity and reconciliation” by the deadline established in the Accord. Zelaya refused to submit names for the new government because, he argued, the spirit, if not the letter, of the Accord called for him, as constitutional president, to preside over such a government. Zelaya calls Micheletti’s move crass manipulation, dismisses the Accord as a failure and calls for boycotting the elections and for protests in the streets to continue.

What is left unsaid in official circles is that negotiating with the golpistas for reinstatement of the democratically elected president is like negotiating with thieves for the return of stolen property.

Journalist Arturo Cano has been reporting on events in Honduras for La Jornada of Mexico City since the crisis began. The following is my translation of an article of his published on November 6. Following that is an article from El País of Madrid by Pablo Ordaz about ordinary people in Honduras struggling to survive in bad and worsening circumstances.

Zelaya declares that 'the Accord is now worthless'

TEGUCIGALPA, Nov. 6, 2009 -- The golpistas say everybody condemns them because nobody knows what was really going on in Honduras before June 28. Last week, when everybody thought they knew, as they celebrated the signing of an agreement that, according to news media all over the world, would end more than four months of crisis, it turned out that the golpistas were right: nobody knows what is going on in Honduras.

How else can we explain why, a week after the Tegucigalpa/San José Accord was signed, the United States feels “disappointed” and the Organization of American States “deplores” the “disruption” of compliance with the Accord?

From Washington, OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza urges Roberto Micheletti and Manuel Zelaya to reach an agreement on the government of “unity and reconciliation,” which “should be presided over, naturally, by the person the Honduran people elected to carry out the duties of the president of the republic.”

The Union of South American Nations demands the “immediate restitution” of Zelaya and the foreign ministers of Latin America and the Caribbean condemn golpista Micheletti’s unilateral appointment of a cabinet of “national unity.”

The de facto president doesn’t even lose his composure. Night falls in the midst of warnings of the “imminent” appointment of the new cabinet and of threats against anyone daring to organize a boycott of the electoral process.

In practical terms, the only opinion that matters to the de facto government is broadcast time and again on the official television channel: an interview with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, who says Zelaya’s restitution, or otherwise, is the “business of Hondurans.” News shows on the private channels also play it over and over again.

Micheletti appears on television with renewed vigor, happy, accompanied by all his officials, those who are leaving and those who are staying, since even his own office has leaked the names of the ministries in which there will be no change: the ministries of the presidency, foreign affairs, finance, agriculture, defense and security.

Twenty-three days before they are to occur, the elections are the topic of the headlines and of most of the space in all the news media. The golpista government and the media owners who support it don’t doubt that the United States will recognize the elections. By their priorities, the rest of the countries of the world are in a distant second place.

The zelayistas and all those who celebrated the Accord a week ago had placed their trust in the existence of “two Accords, one written and one understood,” Marvin Ponce of the Partido Unificación Democrática explained three days after the signing. “The businessmen and the politicians who orchestrated the coup accepted Zelaya’s restitution because otherwise they would be back at point zero. Now we’ll see whether there is the political will.”

Demonstrators supporting Manuel Zelaya shout slogans in Tegucigalpa, Nov. 2, 2009. Photo by Eduardo Verdugo / AP.
Congress received the document, which had been signed on October 30, on Monday, November 2. Its governing board, controlled by Micheletti’s congressmen, decided on its own to consult the Supreme Court and three other institutions. The justices didn’t receive the petition until Thursday the fifth. “We have acted with the greatest diligence,” says congressional chairman José Alfredo Saavedra.

“The measures agreed to in the Accord are clear and were endorsed freely by all the parties. I would hope that they will be implemented without further evasion in order to re-establish democracy, institutional legitimacy and harmony among Hondurans,” Insulza declared in a statement issued from the U.S. capital.

They don’t see it that way here. “I don’t know why they signed that. They left their flanks exposed,” says a leader of the resistance, his head bowed, his face revealing the mood of the zelayistas, still in the streets for the 131st day since the coup d’état.

The Frente de Resistencia meets again in front of Congress, which isn’t meeting, and then more than 500 people march to the area of the Brazilian embassy, where President Zelaya is in refuge.

“I don’t want Afghan elections for my country,” the constitutional leader tells Radio Globo. “I’m not willing to legitimize fraud or to legitimize the imposition of power or to whitewash this coup d’état.”

His followers in the streets radicalize the discourse: “It’s not a simple matter of not voting. Just as they took the ballot boxes from us (for the poll on the Constituent Assembly) on June 28, we must take the ballot boxes from them as well,” says indigenous leader Salvador Zúñiga.

Although some of the zelayistas, particularly those who are members of the Partido Liberal, hold to the idea of “not leaving the whole cake for the golpistas,” the more active organizations in the resistance have decided not to endorse “the electoral fraud.” From this day forward, “politicians are forbidden from entering our neighborhoods and communities and we are going to forbid them from setting up polling places,” Zúñiga says.

Zelaya, for his part, declares that “the Accord is now worthless” and he rejects it as a failure. His representatives nevertheless still hold meetings with OAS officials, although without much hope for a solution.

The president reaches out again to the continental community. “Let them reach the decisions they consider suitable,” he says of the members of the OAS.

But the voice that matters most sticks with the talks, which favor the golpistas. Ian Kelly, spokesman for the State Department, urges the parties to return to the negotiating table to work out their differences.

“A unilaterally decided government is not a government of unity,” he says of Micheletti’s move. “They have to sit down and start talking again. They need to stop making dire statements that the agreement is dead,” he blurts out against Zelaya. “We’re disappointed that both sides are not following this very clear path which has been laid out in this accord.”

He confirms for certain that Washington is giving technical assistance for the November 29 elections, which will continue as long as “the paties respect and implement this accord, step by step.”

And Pablo Ordaz, a correspondent in Tegucigalpa for the Madrid daily El País describes how the coup has changed the lives of one family. Below is my translation of his article for November 7.

Ángel David’s life, which hadn’t been good, began to get worse

Angel David and his mother show scar from police gunshot wound. Photo from El Pais.

TEGUCIGALPA, Nov. 5, 2009 -- Since before the coup, Ángel David has lived in this neighborhood in Tegucigalpa where the only green, level ground is in the cemetery, so the kids take advantage of a hole in the wall to play soccer or hide-and-seek among their grandparents’ graves. Ángel David’s outlook wasn’t very promising. He shared eight square meters in a wooden shanty with his father, an out-of-work gardener, his mother, newly pregnant with her fifth child, and his brothers, the oldest 16 and the youngest two. They hadn’t had a bathroom since the last storm washed it down the hill, but they did have electricity and a telephone, a good upbringing and miraculously clean clothes.

But the coup came along and Ángel David’s life, which hadn’t been good, began to get worse. His country, the second poorest in Latin America, became the object of sanctions by the international community and its 70 percent poor (40 percent getting by on less than a dollar a day) became even more helpless. Ángel David’s father found ever less work. His mother, ever less money to juggle. And he, ever fewer hours in school. As though that were not enough, on the days when Roberto Micheletti’s government declared a curfew, they all had to take off running for fear of the police. They got home on time every day, until September 21.

On that day a rumor spread throughout Honduras that President Manuel Zelaya had managed to return in secret to his country. To celebrate, his supporters called for rallies in different areas of Tegucigalpa and Ángel David’s father decided to attend the one in the February 21st Colonia, next to his own neighborhood. On the way home, as the hour of the curfew approached, they took a shortcut through an alley. They were startled by the noise of a motorcycle approaching them. They turned around. There were two policemen riding it. The one in back aimed at them.. Five shots were heard. Ángel David, 13 years old, fell to the ground. With a gunshot wound in his back.

A month and a half has gone by. The taxi driver makes his way into the June 23rd Colonia. The vehicle can hardly move along among the rocks -- the only paved street is long gone -- and for fear of the groups of boys hanging out on the corners. At a certain point we can’t go on by car. His mother, Nelly Rodríguez, invites us into her only room, which is orderly and clean, and proudly introduces her sons, who are well brought up and well dressed. Her account of what happened is exact and concise and it portrays with no embellishment the reality of Honduras since the coup. “My husband and my sons were walking along, and the police could see that there were two children, but even so they shot at them. The bullet injured his intestine, his colon, his spleen, his liver and part of his lung too. Show the gentleman the scar.”

Ángel David stands up obediently. He has the mark of the gunshot on his back and a large scar from the surgery. What did you feel at that moment? “Agony, sir.” And pain? “That too.” And did you lose consciousness? “Yes.” What is agony? “Thinking that you’re going to die.” And were you afraid? “Yes.” And did you cry? “No.”

Nelly Rodríguez continues her account. “They performed an emergency operation. He almost died. The operation lasted three hours and he was in a coma for about five days. Until finally he opened his eyes and began to talk to me. He had oxygen and many drugs that they gave him at the teaching hospital. But since they didn’t have all the drugs he needed, we had to buy them ourselves. They didn’t even have needles or adhesive tape or cotton. Not even plasma.”

What followed reveals the degree to which defenders of the coup have persecuted those who resist. “One day a public prosecutor came and told me, ‘Look, I work for the rights of minors and you are at risk of losing your children because it wasn’t the policeman who shot at him who is to blame for what happened to your son, it is you.’ She told me I was the guilty one.” Nelly begins to cry, a slow and quiet sobbing that is touching. The kids around her pay attention. “And she told me that while my son was in a coma, right there, by his bed. Yes. She told me the policeman wasn’t guilty, I was.” Nelly was threatened with the loss of her son until the organization COFADEH, which is concerned with the families of the detained and disappeared in Honduras, came to her assistance.

Ángel David’s story is one of hundreds of dramatic cases. According to UNICEF, “1,600 Hunduran children under the age of five have died since June 28, 2009, at the rate of 13 children a day.” Malnutrition and very poor attention to health conditions in the face of epidemics like haemorrhagic dengue are some of the causes. Every day, some 60 children are taken to the Tegucigalpa hospital afflicted with that disease. But there is no means of treating them. All of this in the midst of a wave of violence that leaves 14 dead every day and an endless number of illegal detentions.

It is true that life in Honduras before the coup was not good, but now it is worse. Right, Ángel David?

[San Antonio native David Holmes Morris is an army veteran, a language major, a retired printer, a sometime journalist, and a gay liberationist.]

• For previous Rag Blog coverage of Honduras, go here.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Through the Gate in '66 : Howling Wolf Au Go Go

Chester Arthur Burnett, aka Howling Wolf.
When I was sixteen:
Hitting the Village with my grandfather

Wolf sang every song to the pretty hippie boy sitting directly in front of me, who turned out to be Davy Jones of the Monkees.

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / November 8, 2009

When I was sixteen I made a fateful trip to New York City to visit my grandfather, Jazz critic Rudi Blesh. Rudi lived off the Bowery and in the Village he was in his element.

Guiding me out into the New York night he brought me to this brightly lit venue on Bleecker Street. As we entered the dark nightclub and went to the table an amplified voice from a little booth quietly announced Rudi’s entrance. The pianist on stage (Erroll Garner?) quickly segued into a little bit of Trad Jazz (Memories of You?) and a little Ragtime bit. Perhaps even a spotlight might have found us at the table.

At any rate, I was mortified and on pretense of finding the men’s room I slipped out of the club. It was 1966 man, what did I need to be listening to Jazz for?

Coming on a little hole in the wall I realized it was the Night Owl, no longer a real cafe, just a poster shop. Still a teenage band was working out right at eye level. It was probably James Taylor, Danny Kortchmar and the original Flying Machine but it wasn’t the Lovin’ Spoonful so I got out of there with my $5 intact before they hit me for a charge.

Across the street down a flight of stairs was the Cafe au Go Go. The shill at the door was looking to fill some tables. “How much you got?” I told him $3 and he motioned to a second row table. The first act was the Siegal Schwall Blues Band. Having heard the Butterfield unit I wasn’t too impressed. Still they tried hard. The next guy who stumbled onto the platform was none other than Tim Hardin. This was important for me and I was floored, despite the fact that it was a short set and Tim didn’t really seem totally awake.

Art D'Lugoff at the Village Gate. Photo by Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times.
The next act took some time to set up on the main stage. What I got to see and hear next was none other than Howling Wolf with his band. The man sat in a chair with his microphone and harmonicas singing while his sharkskin suited accompianists played flawless electric Blues dancing side to side in lockstep behind him. Wolf sang every song to the pretty hippie boy sitting directly in front of me, who turned out to be Davy Jones of the Monkees.

There really are no words to describe this set for me. Pulling out of the club hours later and returning to the East 4th Street pad I had to smooth things over after ditching Rudi. Telling him I’d seen Howling Wolf didn’t hurt.

The man who’d announced Rudi’s entrance at the Village Gate was owner Art D’Lugoff. The club closed a few years ago (it’s now a CVS drugstore). Art himself passed away this week. He was eighty five years old.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Matthew Hoh and Vietnamistan : Déjà vu all Over Again

A bright and shining lie:
Hoh's Afghanistan and John Paul Vann's Vietnam

By Richard Lee / The Rag Blog / November 8, 2009

I just got a copy of diplomat Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter from a friend in Canada. I don’t get a lot of news from up in the States and what few blips I do get are in Spanish. There was some reporting of the letter but with only a couple of quotes, mostly from the first and second paragraph. Mostly it just passed me by. I heard it was more thoroughly covered by what you call the “news” up in the states.

I read it through a couple of times; it had a familiar ring to it. Where had I heard this before? Oh yeah, then I remembered, it was in Neil Sheehan’s book, A Bright and Shining Lie, John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.

Their stories parallel and at the same time mirror each other. Like Hoh, Vann first went to Vietnam as a soldier, a Major who went there as an “advisor” for an ARVN Battalion in the upper Mekong delta. He served under General Paul Harkin the commander of MACV in 1962-63. Both later returned to the battle zone as civilian workers for the USG.

It became clear to Vann in that year that President Kennedy and the boys at the Pentagon were clearly on a wrong course. The strategy of attrition and the belief that the Diem government wanted to win against the communist could only lead to disaster.

Hoh cites the Afghani government as an alien body, “unknown and unwanted by its people.” Vann saw the same feelings in the people toward the government of Diem, who was also unknown and unwanted in Vietnam. Both Karzi and Diem wanted the war, not to win it and certainly not to lose it, but to have it and profit in power and wealth for themselves and their friends. It certainly was a stroke of good luck for each that they had the Americans to fight it for them.

In Afghanistan, Hoh writes that “from at least the end of King Zahir Shah’s reign (it) has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional.” In that other war the urban, catholic, educated and modern, from the end of the reign Bao Dai, was pitted against the rural, illiterate and traditional. A class war within the civil war.

John Vann’s war was sustained by the struggle against a corrupt and brutal army backed by foreign invaders who were totally ignorant of the history, culture and traditions of the people of Vietnam. Hoh finds the same conditions in Afghanistan. He writes, “The United States presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people.”

Both Hoh and Vann cite the same conditions:

• Glaring corruption and unabashed graft
• A president whose confidents and advisors comprise... war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law...
• A system of district and provincial leaders constituted of local power brokers, opportunist and strongmen allied to the United States solely for and limited by, the value of our USAID... contracts and whose own political and economic interests stand nothing to gain from any positive and genuine attempts at reconciliation.
  
• The… election process dominated by fraud...

Hoh’s resignation letter goes on to find his own analogies to that other war and like Vann he was always aware of the courage and skill of our own troops.

John Vann died in Vietnam in a helicopter crash, still trying to get the generals and politicians to heed their folly; Hoh resigned in a public way hoping the generals and politicians would heed the words of his letter and discover their current folly.

From me to Mr. Hoh: I’ve been there, don’t hold your breath.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / 'Eating Animals' : The Beef with Factory Farms

Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals:
A sweeping indictment of factory farms

...what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers.

By Jessica Roy / November 8, 2009

Jonathan Safran Foer is a strict vegetarian, but his most recent book, Eating Animals, is not a screed against meat. It is, rather, an indictment of the corrupt, large-scale factory farming that dominates the American meat market.

A journalistic work with a novelistic feel, the book is the result of three years investigating the U.S. meat industry, and it weaves together animal activist and farmer interviews with statistical research and even memoir to provide a sweeping account of Big Beef and its social, economical and environmental impact. Descriptions of animals suffering on the "kill floor" are enough to incite squirms from even non-animal lovers, but cruelty is not Foer's only grievance: There are health concerns and devastating environmental damage at issue as well.

Eating Animals may be Foer's first big swing at nonfiction, but primary themes hearken back to Foer's two critically polarizing novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Family folklore and ideas about the complexity of memory permeate each; Eating Animals begins with a section titled "Storytelling," about Foer's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and passionate carnivore). "The story of her relationship with food," he writes, "holds all of the other stories that could be told about her."

The book is not without controversy, of course. Food politics gets at the very heart of what it means to be American -- alas, human -- and the subject of how and if we eat meat stirs up intense feeling. Last week, Natalie Portman kicked up a tiny tempest when she wrote about Eating Animals in a column on Huffington Post, championing Foer's argument but adding her own painfully tone-deaf riff about rape. (The controversy took place after the Salon interview but when I reached him afterward via e-mail, Foer had this to say about Portman's column: "It was such a thoughtful and generous piece of writing. I felt gratefulness more than anything else.")

I met with Foer recently in a coffee shop near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he spoke about what's wrong with PETA, how he finally went so local he ditched Amazon -- and what Americans can do to help put an end to the evils of factory farms.


This is not a straightforward case for vegetarianism. What is this book making a case for?

It's an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it's a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force -- historically, it's unprecedented how destructive our farm system is -- has taken over America and is starting to take over the world.

And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn't require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices. I think there are a lot of different choices people can make that will lead to dismantling the system. It's not like everybody has to go vegetarian. There are plenty of people who feel like, for whatever reason, they just can't stop eating meat, but if they bought meat at the green market, from farmers they know by name, that's as effective a rebuttal.

What if you live in a city and you don't live near a farm? I'm sure there are tons of people like that in New York. What's your suggestion for them?

Well, in New York everybody is near a green market. Everybody is near a source of family-farmed meat. In fact, cities are frankly the best place to be in terms of that. But you ask a good question because there are a lot of times when you don't have a choice. Like, in a restaurant, you never have a choice, with the exception of -- maybe there's 10 restaurants in New York City. In restaurants people are often faced with this problem, like, "Well, I'm either going to have to leave my values at the door and just eat this stuff, or eat vegetarian." Those are the only two choices we have.

And then people think, what does it mean to care about something if you don't act on that care? Even if it makes things less convenient, even if it makes your meal less enjoyable -- which is totally possible. But we make decisions all the time guided by our values that make our lives less convenient and less enjoyable. We do them because they're things that matter more to us than a momentary pleasure, momentary comfort. I don't know why food would be an exception.

How has writing and researching this book changed the way you and your family eat?

We were vegetarians before, and we continue to be, and we're raising our kids vegetarian. One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it's made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It's very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor.

For example, I was not a huge advocate of buying things locally, not food but like books -- anything. I would buy books on Amazon all the time. But for whatever reason, the subject does not have anything to do with that, but the process of writing it made me much more concerned about buying things locally, supporting my neighborhood stores, it mattering that I know the person who's selling me something.

That's something that's great about food is that so much intersects there. Tolstoy famously said, "If there were no more slaughterhouses there would be no more battlefields." I don't think that's true, and I don't think all battlefields are bad, but what is true is that when you start to care about food and think about the animals and how we raise them, it encourages you to have lots of other thoughts.

This is your first nonfiction book.

Well, it's my first and my last. I don't think I'll ever do it again. It's not something that interests me. I felt a little bit like dressing up for Halloween. Although, my interests at the end of the day were never really journalistic and it always did feel personal. And the themes that this book falls back on are the themes that my novels fall back on, like, how are lessons transmitted through generations and families, how do our decisions matter, how do they influence others?

So, part of what inspired me to write about this was not that I cared about it so much but that nobody was writing about it. There are a lot of things I care about, but great people are writing about them. And there hasn't really been a mainstream book about meat, despite the fact that it's everything. I mean, if it isn't the biggest, most important issue in our country right now, it's up there.

Did any specific authors or works influence your book?

Many. Of course, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer. I mean if any of them had written the thing that I wanted to read, I wouldn't have had to write my book. See, Pollan is wonderful, but he doesn't really get into meat too deeply; he sort of goes up to the edge of it and then stops. The same with Schlosser. Peter Singer writes about meat very directly, but in a way that I feel doesn't include enough of the messiness of being a person in the world and having cravings, having personal history, having family. Reason has something to do with our food decisions, but not a lot. Most food decisions are made out of emotions or psychology or impulse, and so I wanted a book that included those things.

What were some of the most surprising or disturbing things you found in your research?

The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It's a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people's exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they're the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it's still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned.

These things are not as shocking and don't work as well in a video, but they're something to be concerned with much more because they're happening to billions and billions of animals every year. It's the way that the notion that an animal is a thing has been systematized and it's part of the business model and that everyone thinks this way. That was the most surprising thing.

You also talk about your dog George, and consider why people will eat farm animals but not dogs. Can you elaborate on that?

The book in the beginning sort of presents two approaches. One is philosophical -- is it right or isn't it right? Why do we do this at all? And the other is practical. I side with the practical. I mean, the book moves in the direction of the practical because in a way the philosophical questions are irrelevant. "Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?" That's how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn't even matter.

The truth is I actually don't know what I think about that question. What I know is that it's wrong to do it the way that we're doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that's right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis. So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that's bad; I mean, those things are bad. And that conversation preempts the philosophical conversation.

Your grandmother was a huge influence on your concept of food, and you also say she's an unapologetic meat eater. How did she react to the book?



I don't think she's read it yet. I think she will agree with a lot of what I said. I don't think she's going to change. I think she's past changing. But I've had pretty frank conversations with her about what's right and what's wrong, and she'll agree -- as will everybody, by the way. There's not a reader of this interview who will say it's right to make animals suffer unnecessarily.

So then it becomes a question of what is suffering to different people and what is necessary to different people. And people can have all kinds of different, very respectable differences of opinion on this question, but I've spoken to my grandmother about why this might be wrong and she doesn't disagree. It's sad. She said in a very upfront way, "I don't think about it, I'm not going to think about it."

For someone like my grandmother -- frankly, for a lot of people -- I don't really push it. I think for people who are still forming their habits, like high school students or college students, that kind of willed ignorance is lame at best and something much worse because they're most able to change. They're the ones who are ultimately going to have to foot the bill of factory farming and are more required to do the uncomfortable thinking that a 90-year-old doesn't.

Can you talk a little bit about America's obsession with food?

There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That's it. It doesn't taste good, it's not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it's cheap.

But the thing is that it's not cheap. It's cheap at the cash register, and it's sold as cheap -- that's the defense for factory farming, "Look, we're making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist." But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it's the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying.

And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness -- companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that's so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.

Aside from getting green meat and eating locally, what are things that both vegetarians and meat eaters can do to help the transition from factory farms to something better?

First of all, they just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time. I think this issue is frankly more important than our conversation about the environment, because it is the No. 1 cause of global warning. The World Watch just released a report that showed that they thought animal agriculture was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, but it turns out it's 51 percent. So to talk about the environment and not talk about this is not to talk about the environment.

This conversation has to be totally mainstreamed. There has to be a consensus behind it that factory farming is bad and we're not going to support it and we're done with it. And it has to be unacceptable either to pretend these problems don't exist or not to actively engage with them. I'm not saying everybody has to reach the same conclusions, but they do have to agree on the common enemy.

Source / Salon

Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

American Health Care : Monster Run Amok

Cartoon by RS Janes / LTSaloon.
Once the envy of the world...
The American health care disgrace

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / November 7, 2009

Between 1910 and 1970 American medicine was the envy of the world. The giants of American culture were its physicians: William Osler. Howard Kelly, Harvey Cushing, Elliott Joslin, Charles and Will Mayo, W.W.G. Maclachlan, Jonas Salk, Alfred Sabin, to name a few. Mothers dreamed of their sons growing up to be physicians, who were considered on a par with clerics, or college professors.

From the 1970s on, many physicians ceased to be idealists who took care of the ill, regardless of ability to pay, and became content to make a decent living without idealizing money. Things have indeed changed. The physicians’ respect in the community has diminished to a point that is akin to that of the MBA, used-car salesman, or fundamentalist preacher. (My apologies to the used car salesman as I have several very honest, upright acquaintances in that area of business.)

The average American -- except those who are very well-to-do and count doctors among their golfing buddies -- think of medical care in terms of CT Scans, MRI machines, laboratories, and medical device purveyors. No longer, to most folks, is the doctor a friend and confidant.

With this surrender to the for-profit insurance industry the once proud, idealistic physician has morphed into the "provider,” paid and manipulated by the insurance executives. Happily, the current health care debate suggests that many idealistic physicians have survived -- as evidenced by the 60%-plus support among doctors for a government provided alternative to the insurance cartel's monopolistic rationing and manipulation of health care. My gratitude to Physicians for a National health Care Program and The American College of Physicians, with their thousands of dedicated members.

Currently the system of medical care in the United States is a blot on our international reputation. Most of those living in Western Europe, and many in the Third World, are baffled about how this great nation could countenance having 50 million individuals without regular medical care. And they wonder how we could allow 45,000 persons to die yearly for lack of insurance (according to a report from the American Journal of Public Health), and how we could have let 17,000 children die over the past two decades (according to a study released by the Johns Hopkins Children's Center).

They are confused why the richest country in the world needs to import physicians from the Third World to make up for the inadequacy of trained American physicians. (My thanks to the numerous very capable physicians from India that I have encountered, as well as many from Iran and other Middle Eastern nations.) Nowhere else in the world, save in the USA, do we see signs posted in malls announcing a spaghetti dinner at a fire house to help defray the costs of a child's brain tumor surgery.

And take this mind-boggling piece of information: according to The World Health Organization, only one of thirty companies producing H1N1 flue vaccine is based in the United States, that being Aviron/Wyeth/Lederle, which makes a nasal vaccine. Our main supplier is the U.S. branch of Sanofi Pasteur, a French company located in this country, Nearly all European nations have one or more companies producing the vaccine; Korea has three and China seven. When I retired in 1990 I recall that three U.S.-based companies were making influenza vaccine. I have been told that production was discontinued because of excessive unused inventory of the vaccine, which is dated, which diminished the profits of the manufacturer.

There are still many excellent if harried physicians remaining in the United States; however, getting into a physicians office on short notice has become a problem for most people. I am aware of a friend with a torn knee cartilage who was told that it would take six weeks to get an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon, while another older lady with digestive problems had to wait six weeks to have an esophagoscopy scheduled.

A third elderly acquaintance, with interstitial cystitis, has seen a urologist on three occasions, totaling approximately 20 minutes, was never examined, and on each occasion was prescribed antibiotics purely on the basis of a questionable, voided urine culture. Never did she receive an explanation of her condition, or its long term implications, or was cystoscopy suggested. I finally accessed her literature relative to the condition from the Mayo Clinic via Google.

Where I live, obtaining an appointment with a dermatologist may well take several months. Yet, the opponents of decent health care in the United States continue to spread the myth that ours is "the best system in the world" and that in other nations you can expect long waits to get an appointment -- which is most likely to be true only if you are seeking a specific physician at a major institution. Currently the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is in the forefront of the lies and deceit industry, joining the Health Insurance industry in promulgating ad after ad on television, and a large percentage of the unsophisticated American public tends to confuse this promotional material with factual information.

Last Thursday, Nov. 5, we saw a well choreographed demonstration in Washington, with thousands of the uninformed and misinformed brought in on busses and provided with placards which they frequently did not understand, and all this was paid for by institutions associated with the health insurance industry. In addition the mainstream TV programs continue to provide panels of talking heads to discuss health care, most of them provided by the conservative think tanks.

The other clever maneuver of the insurance industry is to incite the anti-abortion lobby and get them aligned against decent health care. These folks, who are interested primarily in ovocysts, and not in children once born, rail against decent health care as if the whole plan was devised as a scheme to provide abortions for the poor -- when the Hyde Amendment already makes it illegal to use federal funds to provide abortions. The opponents of decent care for all Americans are stooping to any ruse or deceit, as evidenced by the ads espousing Medicare Advantage as "good health care,” to influence the ill informed, culpable American public.

I write this on the eve of the intended House of Representatives vote on a bill for health care for all. Of course, we would hope that such bill would include the core features outlined by Health Care for America Now:

1. A public health insurance option for all established by the federal government,
2. One that is available to individuals and employers across the nation,
3. Not merely a panel of private plans (such as FEHBP, the health insurance available to federal employees), and not limited to low income individuals,
4. A government body, or independent entity established by government, sets policies and bears the risk for paying medical claims,
5. May hire insurance companies, where efficient and appropriate, to handle administrative functions such as paying claims,
6. Provides broad access to providers that meet defined participation standards,
7. Consults with providers and nonpartisan experts to establish provider rates and develop and implement payment system reforms that promote quality care, prevention, and good management for chronic care,
8. Operates separately from existing public programs such as Medicare, but may tap into their infrastructure (e.g. payment systems, claims processing, and appeals processes).

Further details cam be found here.

The next step, of course, is to try to inject some reason into the discussion in the Senate which appears at times to have abandoned any sense of logic. Take, for instance, the bizarre, suggestion that health care reform include coverage for "prayer treatment." Odd that we in the United States will even suggest the commercialization of prayer! Next, maybe we should claim airfare to Lourdes as a "medical expense" when we file our income tax deductions.

But, seriously, we keep hearing from Harry Reid that it will be difficult to get the 60 votes to pass a decent health care bill. This is undoubtedly true, if the Senate lies down and acts like a whipped dog. There is a solution under parliamentary rules and it’s called the “nuclear option.” Change to Senate Rules is discussed in detail on Wikipedia.

The key part reads as follows:

The nuclear option is used in response to a filibuster or other dilatory tactic. A senator makes a point of order calling for an immediate vote on the measure before the body, outlining what circumstances allow for this. The presiding officer of the Senate, usually the Vice President of the United States or the president pro tempore, makes a parliamentary ruling upholding the senator/s point of order. The Constitution is cited at this point, since otherwise the presiding officer is bound by precedent. A supporter of the filibuster may challenge the ruling by asking, "Is the decision of the Chair to stand as the judgment of the Senate?" This is referred to as "appealing to the Chair." An opponent of the filibuster will then move to table the appeal. As tabling is non-debatable, a vote is held immediately.

A simple majority decides the issue. If the appeal is successfully tabled, then the presiding officer's ruling that the filibuster is unconstitutional is thereby upheld. Thus a simple majority is able to cut off debate, and the Senate moves to vote on the substantive issue under consideration. The effect of the nuclear option is not limited to the single question under consideration as it would be in a cloture vote. Rather, the nuclear option effects a change in the operational rules of the Senate, so that the filibuster or dilatory tactic would therefore be barred by the new precedent.

The proponents of decent healthcare-for-all face the Rubicon. We the public must exert enough pressure on our elected representatives, and upon President Obama, to offset the chicanery in the House and Senate, and to try with reason and compassion to counter the bribing of our elected officials, and the misinformation and outright lies deluging the public. Time is short, but this old man would like to finish his later days with head high, once again seeing our country as a leader in health care.

We would like to see our nation respected as a leader in ethics and morality, rather than being looked upon as a Third World nation when it comes to treating the sick and disadvantaged. Ours should be a nation based on doing what is correct and not one subservient to the fringe manipulated by the big corporations, the financial elite, and those who allow their ambition to overcome our traditions of kindness and charity as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes.

Dr. Richard Wolff, economist at The University of Massachusetts, says that our economic collapse -- which has gradually developed over the past 150 years and has accelerated since 1970 with wage stagnation, and excessive profits -- may take years to correct, if it can be corrected at all. But let us show the humanity, the sense of community, that we see in the Western European nations. Their epiphany occurred after World War II, when they moved beyond the devotion to self interest, to accumulated wealth at all costs, that is inherent in the doctrine of "private enterprise" and neoliberal economics.

Perhaps those folks who keep pretending that this is a “Christian Nation" should review the true meaning of their alleged faith. Perhaps it is time to cast out the money changers and show some compassion for our fellow man. Remember what Lyof Tolstoy wrote in 1893 in The Kingdom of God Is Within You:

The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save name: they are hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, ursurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.

Let good Americans stand for life and good health.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform. His writing appears regularly on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Real Unemployment Rate : Closing in on the Great Depression

Good times around the corner?
Real unemployment rate at 17.5 percent

This economic disaster was created by far too many years of Reagan-Bush-supply-side-trickle-down-union-busting-corporate-welfare-market-driven economic policy.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / November 7, 2009

Yes, I know the federal government says the unemployment rate is now 10.2% -- up from 9.8% after the country suffered a net loss of another 190,000 jobs in October. And that is a very scary figure in itself. After all, it shows nearly 16 million Americans are out of work.

But those are the "adjusted" figures the federal government uses to keep the American people from knowing just how bad unemployment really is in this country. When you add in the number of people who have given up trying to find a job and the people who have accepted part-time work because they can't find a full-time job, you get much closer to the REAL unemployment rate.

The sad fact is that the real unemployment rate is now at least 17.5%. That means more than one out of every six workers in this country cannot find a full-time job.

Folks, that's rapidly approaching the unemployment figures from the Great Depression, when the rate of unemployment climbed over 20%. And the government admits that the rate will continue to climb over the next several months (and probably longer). It is within the realm of possibility that we'll reach those Great Depression numbers.

What bothers me is that the government and private economic pundits are currently trying to convince Americans that better times are just around the corner. They tell us the recession is actually over (because one quarter of GDP showed some growth). Then they assure us that unemployment is just a lagging indicator and will turn around in a few months as the economy continues to grow.

I wish I could believe that, but I don't. All of the jobs were not lost due to the poor economy. Some of those jobs were cut so the companies could show a short-term gain and drive up their stocks -- making millions for executives and investors. Many other good-paying jobs have been shipped overseas where the companies can exploit low-wage workers. None of these jobs are coming back, regardless of how much the economy rebounds.


Around 70% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) figure depends on consumer buying in this country. With the job losses continuing to rise each month in this country, fewer people each month will have money to spend. Those who still are working will also close their pocketbooks even tighter because the tanking economy scares them.

Even when the economy does start producing jobs instead of losing them, what kind of jobs will they be? Will they be good-paying jobs with benefits, or minimum wage jobs with no benefits? There is no shame in flipping burgers, but you certainly can't buy food, make house payments and pay for a car with that kind of job.

Political pundits are now saying that if the economy and jobs don't turn around before the next election, it will be blamed on the Democrats because they are in power. That's probably true, even though it may be unfair.

Lest we forget, this mess wasn't created by the Democrats. This economic disaster was created by far too many years of Reagan-Bush-supply-side-trickle-down-union-busting-corporate-welfare-market-driven economic policy. The elder Bush was right when he called it "voodoo economics" (before he sold out and went along with it).

The truth is that the recession is not over. It won't be over until the economy starts producing good jobs. But fasten your seat belts, because that's a long way down a very bumpy road.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...