Wanted in Rio : ‘Prophets of Ecology’

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Landslide in Mangueira shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after a 17 hour downpour that ended on April 6, 2010, resulting in death and devastation. Photo by Marcelo Sayao / EPA.

High water in Rio:
‘Prophets of ecology’ would save lives

By Leonardo Boff / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

RIO DE JANEIRO — Between April 5th and 8th the State of Rio de Janeiro (the city and other neighboring cities, especially Niteroi) experienced the worst flood in 48 years. There were high waters in main streets, landslides in the hillsides, and the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon rose one and a half meters, caused in part by the high tide that blocked the rain water from draining. Worst of all were the deaths of hundreds of people, who were buried alive by tons of earth, trees, rocks, and garbage.

There seem to be three principal causes for this tragedy, that from time to time envelops this city that is so enchanting for her scenery — combining sea, mountains, and jungle — and for her happy and welcoming population.

The first is the flood itself, which is typical of these subtropical areas. But with that is the added burden of global warming. The tragedy of Rio must be seen in the context of tragedies that have occurred in other parts of the country, with hurricanes and prolonged rains causing enormous landslides and hundreds of victims, and the city of Sao Paulo, that has been flooded for more than a month at a time, leaving whole neighborhoods constantly under water.

Some analysts talk of changes in the hydrologic cycles caused by the warming of the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, as is already happening in the Pacific. This scene will tend to repeat itself ever more frequently, and with ever greater intensity, as global warming worsens.

The climatic tragedy brought to light the social tragedy endured by the most needy populations. This is the second cause. There are more than 500 favelas (slums), dangling from the sides of the mountains that twist and turn around the city. They are not the cause of the landslides, as the governor said. The people live in these dangerous zones simply because they have nowhere else to go.

There is a noticeable general insensibility toward the poor, resulting from the elitism of our colonial and slavery tradition. The State is not organized to care for the whole population, but primarily for the well-to-do classes. There has never been a consistent public policy that included the favelas as part of the city and, consequently, developed them, guaranteeing them safe living spaces, drainage infrastructure, water and electricity, and, least of all, transportation.

There have always been poor policies towards the poor, who are the great majority of the population, and good policies for the rich. The consequence of this lack of attention is seen in the disasters that end up taking the lives of hundreds of people.

The third cause is what I would call the lack of “prophets of ecology.” Observing the flooded streets and avenues, all forms of garbage, bags filled with refuse, plastic bottles, wooden boxes, and even couches and wardrobes, could be seen floating in the water. This is to say, the population has not developed a minimum of ecological sensitivity, to take care of the garbage produced. That garbage blocked the sewers and other rainwater drains, which caused the sudden rise of the torrential waters and the slowness with which they receded.

Porto Alegre, in the State of Rio Grande del Sur, offers a good model. Under the guidance of Antonio Cecchin, a Marist Brother, who has been working for years in the poor areas that surround the city, hundreds of places to collect garbage were organized and created. He built some 20 large sheds near the center of the city, in the point of the Big Island of the Marineros, where the garbage is sorted, cleaned, and sold to different factories that reuse it.

That makes the garbage men and women conscious that their work helps keep the city clean, so that it can be a place where everyone can live happily. With pride the garbage people wrote in big letters, behind each of their little cars, their title of dignity: “Prophets of Ecology.”

They assumed as an ideal the words of Joshep Lutzenberger, one of our main ecologists: “One single garbage person does more for the environment in Brazil than the Secretary of the Environment himself.”

If there were such “prophets of the ecology” in the State of Río de Janeiro, the floods would not be as devastating and hundreds of lives would be saved.

Original in Portuguese; translated into Spanish by Servicios Koinonia; translated into English by Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.

[A Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, and author of more than 60 books, Leonardo Bofff lives in Jardim Araras, an ecological wilderness area in the municipality of Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Boff is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. A former Franciscan priest with a doctorate from the University of Munich, Boff was an early advocate of liberation theology. In 1991, after a series of clashes with the Vatican, Boff renounced his activities as a priest and “promoted himself to the state of laity.”]

Street scene in Rio: Hundreds may have died in the flooding caused by torrential rains. Photo by Antonio Lacerda / EPA.

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Bob Feldman : A People’s History of Afghanistan / 2

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Formal photograph taken in Gandamak, Afghanistan, in May 1879. Seated from left to right: British officers Mr. Jenkyns and Major Cavagnari, Amir Yaqub Khan (in the center), General Daoud Shah, and Habibullah Mustafi. Photo by John Burke (1843 – 1900) / British Library / Wikimedia Commons.

Part 2: 1876 to 1901
A People’s History of Afghanistan

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

[If you’re a Rag Blog reader who wonders how the Pentagon ended up getting stuck “waist deep in the Big Muddy” in Afghanistan (to paraphrase a 1960s Pete Seeger song) — and still can’t understand, “what are we fighting for?” (to paraphrase a 1960s Country Joe McDonald song) — this 15-part “People’s History of Afghanistan” might help you debate more effectively those folks who still don’t oppose the planned June 2010 U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan? For “Part I: 1838-1876,” go here].

The Democratic Obama Administration’s Pentagon spent nearly a billion dollars in 2009 on the Afghan War contracts it awarded for construction projects that were mostly on U.S. military bases across Afghanistan. Yet most U.S. taxpayers still probably know little about the 19th-century history of people in Afghanistan or about the wars that were fought in Afghanistan during the 19th century.

After occupying Quetta in Baluchistan in 1876 and converting it into a military base, UK imperialism, for example, launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War by again invading Afghanistan. The UK government then replaced Sher Ali Khan as Afghanistan’s king by putting Sher Ali’s son, Yaqub Khan, on the Afghan throne. Yaqub Khan was then forced by the UK government to sign the Treaty of Gandamak in May 1879.

As a result of the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak, the feudalist monarchical regime agreed to let the UK government control Afghanistan ’s foreign affairs and establish UK diplomatic missions in Kabul and other Afghan cities. It also gave the British control of large areas of Afghanistan west of the Indus River in exchange for the UK government agreeing to now pay the new Afghan king, Yaqub Khan, an annual subsidy of 60,000 British pounds per year.

But, naturally, most Afghans who lived in Kabul did not support the terms of the May 1879 Treaty of Gandamak and were against giving the UK government so much special influence in Afghanistan . So in September 1879 the UK government’s diplomatic representative in Kabul was murdered “by mutinous Afghan soldiers who had been assigned to protect him,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam.

In retaliation, a British general named Roberts moved his troops into Kabul on October 12, 1879, and forced Yaqub Khan to abdicate. Then General Roberts “became the virtual ruler of Kabul, instigating a rule of terror that was bitterly resisted” until “the British forces found themselves under siege,” by Afghan resistance fighters, according to the same book.

But after being defeated in open battle by Afghan resistance fighters on July 27, 1880, at Maiwand, near the Afghan city of Kandahar , UK troops were finally withdrawn from Afghanistan in April 1881, thus ending the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

Yet before withdrawing its troops, the UK government began supporting an Afghan feudal warlord, Abdur Rahman Khan, after Rahman had marched on Kabul and declared himself the new Afghan king in Charikar on July 20, 1880. In this way, the UK government insured that Afghanistan would continue to be a British protectorate whose foreign policy would be controlled by the UK government, instead of being a fully independent state.

Known as the “Iron Amir,” Afghan King Abdur Rahman ruled over people in Afghanistan in a repressive way. Afghanistan: A Modern History described how this British imperialist-backed monarch governed Afghanistan:

In almost continuous warfare during his 20-year reign, rebellions were punished by mass executions, or deportations, such as the forced resettlement of thousands of Ghilzai Pashtun tribesmen… He established a ruthless police force to subjugate suspected opponents and uncooperative officials.

Not surprisingly, the UK government whose special interests he served provided Rahman’s repressive regime in Afghanistan with “substantial supplies of arms and ammunition,” according to the same book. And, like the previous 19th-century Afghan kings, Abdur Rahman also was paid an annual subsidy by the UK government during his reign of nearly 20 years.

Between 1.2 million and 1.85 million Indian rupees per year were paid to Rahman between 1882 and 1901 by the UK government; and Rahman used a portion of his annual subsidy from the British imperialists to fund his recruitment of the Afghan troops he required to continue to rule the people of Afghanistan in an undemocratic way.

Next: “A People’s History of Afghanistan — Part 3: 1901-1924″

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

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Social Forum Movement : ‘Another World is Possible’

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Mural from 2009 Kentucky Social Forum, promoting U.S. Social Forum, June 22-26, 2010, in Detroit.

Resistance to ‘globalization’:
The Social Forum movement

At the dawn of the new century, a new tradition, inspired by the hundreds of years of resistance, was launched… This disparate assembly shared one idea: ‘Another World is Possible.’

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

The history of resistance

Just as globalization today has its roots in five hundred years of trade and investment and in exploitation and capital accumulation, the global justice movements of our day also have their roots in the patterns of resistance since the beginning of capitalism.

In a recent article (“Long Before Seattle: Historical Resistance to Economic Globalization”) Zahara Heckscher points out that: “In virtually every society the Europeans invaded, people rose up to protest the cruelty of slavery, theft of land, and plunder of resources.” While many of the protests were local, provoked by singular transgressions, and were inwardly oriented (from destroying crops to committing suicide to fleeing), many were national in their mobilization or even international.

Heckscher provides examples of resistance movements against globalization that occurred well before “the Battle of Seattle” in 1999. For example, the Tupac Amaru II uprising in Peru (1780-1781) was a multi-class, multi-ethnic rebellion of 6,000 armed protestors who opposed the effort of the Spanish colonial government to impose tariff reductions to flood local markets with cheap Spanish goods, increase taxes, and in other ways force economic integration between the colony and the Spanish economy.

Heckscher also provided the example of nineteenth century cross-national campaigns to ban slavery. She described the social movements in Europe that vigorously opposed the brutal Belgium colonial administration of the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century. She reflected on the efforts of the First International Workingmen’s Association in Geneva to prohibit manufacturers from importing strikebreakers to replace striking workers. In the process workers from Europe and North America began to mobilize in solidarity against an increasingly cross-national capitalism.

Finally, in her brief survey she mentions the Anti-Imperialist Movement that opposed U.S. occupation and control of the Philippines after 1898.

Each of these movements addressed economic and political issues together. Each was a response to the globalization of a great power, usually in pursuit of economic exploitation. And each of these movements created a shared consciousness, a solidarity, among resisters across national boundaries. Perhaps we can say therefore that each of these movements represented a form of resistance to the globalization of capitalism.

Resistance to contemporary globalization

Ever since the emergence of the Bretton Woods system and the establishment of the power of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, peoples in poor countries have resisted the contracts their states entered into with global capitalism. Since the 1950s, workers and peasants have gone into the streets in countries as varied as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and India to protest the cancellation of programs providing food subsidies, low cost public transportation, free water and sanitation, and other public services.

In November 1999 in Seattle, the visibility of such protests assumed a new dimension as thousands of protestors, representing a variety of issues and groups, shut down the annual meeting of the World Trade Organization. In the North American public mind, the “anti-globalization movement” was born.

The New Internationalist, a magazine representing “the people, the ideas, the action in the fight for global justice” published a chronology of “some key moments of the global movement 1994-2001.” They symbolically identified the initiation of the current campaign for global justice with the public pronouncements of the indigenous Zapatista rebel movement in the southern Mexican province of Chiapas on January 1, 1994.

Their cry of “Ya Basta” (“Enough”) was in response to the fact that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)went into effect on that day. A significant part of the NAFTA program was to be the privatization of communally owned land in Mexico.

Additional “key moments” included protests against the World Trade Organization, formed in 1995, an international conference against neo-liberalism held in Chiapas, Mexico, mass mobilizations against the Asian Pacific Economic Community, workers in 21 countries protesting the sacking of Liverpool dock workers, and repeated mobilizations against meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, and other public manifestations of neo-liberal globalization.

Indians at the World Social Forum in Belem Brazil, January 28, 2009, discus the rights of indigenous peoples. Photo by Andre Penner / AP.

The World Social Forum

At the dawn of the new century, a new tradition, inspired by the hundreds of years of resistance, was launched. Ten thousand activists — representing 1,000 groups from 120 countries, industrial and agricultural workers, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, anti-globalization activists — met at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001. This disparate assembly shared one idea: “Another World is Possible.”

Naomi Klein reported on this first WSF highlighting its exuberant and chaotic character. Neither defining it as a strength nor a weakness, she pointed out the fact that “…what seemed to be emerging organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.”

Subsequent to the first WSF, the organizing committee prepared a “Charter of Principles” which included the following: providing an environment for open and democratic debate; becoming a permanent process of building alternatives, particularly building a “world process”; bringing together and linking civil society groups, NGOs, and social movements from all countries; and increasing “the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization” and introducing “onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices” that could create a “new world in solidarity.”

The U.S. Social Forum

Each year after, the WSF met in Brazil or India, or Kenya, or Venezuela. In 2007, a U.S. Social Forum was held in Atlanta, Georgia. Ten thousand people, mostly young and people of color attended the hundreds of panels and plenary sessions. Over 100 local and national groups displayed their literature and dialogued with conference participants.

As their call suggested: “The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression. The USSF will provide space to build relationships, learn from each other’s experiences, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, and bring renewed insight and inspiration.”

Now activists from nearly 100 organizations are preparing for the next U.S. Social Forum which will take place from June 22-26 in Detroit. It occurs in the midst of a global economic crisis, multiple wars, the rise of neo-fascist forces around the world, and efforts of the United States to forestall the rising global resistance to neoliberalism.

The National Planning Committee has indicated that the USSF will address movement building, organizing and outreach, and improving structure and programming of the USSF movement. Of particular relevance to 2010 are the following goals:

  • Strengthen and expand progressive infrastructure for long-term collaboration and work for fundamental change.
  • Disseminate effective models for democratic participation and movement building.
  • Shape and influence the public conversation in ways that convey momentum and hope.
  • Model diverse, representative movement building that is cross-cutting, democratic, and effectively integrates process and outcomes.
  • Continue to be a space in which grassroots lead, while being inclusive of other sectors. Develop a collective systemic understanding and analysis of the current economic and political moment.
  • Create a shared vision of the society and world that challenges poverty and exploitation, all forms of oppression, militarism and war, and environmental destruction.
  • Articulate and practice concrete internationalism through consciousness of today’s global context and the power of radical movements in the Global South, and awareness of our power in coming from the U.S. and our responsibility to the broader international movement.
  • Identify convergences that have already happened.
  • Work toward greater convergence between working class struggles and progressive movements.
  • Build on the strengths and convergences of the 2007 USSF.
  • Further develop Black, Immigrant and Indigenous Nations’ solidarity.

The goals and vision of the U.S. Social Forum are truly ambitious. It is unclear how the Social Forum movement can create enough ideological commonality, organizational structure, leadership sensitivity to its grassroots base, and global solidarity to make another world possible. It is clear that the Social Forum movement is part of a long history of resistance and struggle against capitalism, and as such is as necessary now as at any time in history.

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

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Stealing Beauty : Protesting Israeli Cosmetics Made in Occupied Palestine

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Austin protest:
Ahava cosmetics produced
In illegal Israeli settlements

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

More than 30 people carried picket signs in front of the Gateway Shopping Center in Austin on Saturday, April 24, urging shoppers to boycott ULTA Beauty for refusing to take Ahava Dead Sea cosmetics off their shelves.

The Austin protests, which began the previous week at the Sunset Valley ULTA store, are part of an international campaign to call attention to resources taken from illegal Israeli settlements. The UN has declared the Israeli settlements in Palestine to be a violation of international law and Ahava violates the fourth Geneva Convention by exploiting Palestine’s natural resources.

More on the boycott campaign can be found at www.StolenBeauty.org.

Demonstrators protest ULTA Beauty for selling Ahava cosmetics made in occupied Palestine. Photo by Cheryl Ellis / The Rag Blog.

Bernice Hecker, a member of the Interfaith Community for Palestinian Rights, said:

We’ve joined this international campaign to call attention to the illegal Israeli settlements and the theft of Palestinian resources. By telling shoppers to boycott ULTA, we are calling attention both to the occupation and to the fact that Ahava is marked as “made in Israel” when it is really made in occupied Palestine.

The boycott efforts have been organized by the Interfaith Community for Palestinian Rights, CodePink, and the UT Palestinian Solidarity Committee. Members of the groups have approached the managers of four ULTA stores and asked them to remove Ahava products but they refused.

On April 17 the groups held an in-store action at Sunset Valley ULTA followed by a picket on the sidewalk of the shopping center. On April 24 there was a brief in-store action at the Gateway Ulta with a picket line on the sidewalk. These actions were in response to ULTA’s refusal to remove these illegal products from their stores.

Pink Police at Austin’s ULTA Beauty:

BDS Austin Activism – Ahava Protest from PSC UT Austin on Vimeo.

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Lethal Denial : Chernobyl and the Climate Bill

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Composite photo. Image by Vivo (Ben) / Village of Joy.

After the explosion at Reactor 4 [at Chernobyl] the people of Pripyat flocked to the railway bridge just outside the city to get a good view of the reactor to see what had happened.

Initially, everyone was told that the radiation level was minimal and that they were safe. Little did they know that much of the radiation had been blown onto this bridge in a huge spike.

They saw beautiful rainbow coloured flames of the burning graphite nuclear core, whose flames were higher than the smoke stack itself. All of them are dead now — they were exposed to levels of over 500 roentgens, which is a fatal dose.

— Village of Joy

For the ecology and the economy:
Chernobyl demands a REAL climate bill

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

This week 24 years ago, untold quantities of lethal radiation began pouring into the atmosphere from the catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl Unit 4. Nearly a million people have died because of it.

And on this horrific anniversary we have now seen the stumble of a very bad climate bill. The events are directly related.

Chernobyl’s death toll has been bitterly debated.

But after nearly a quarter-century of industry denial, the New York Academy of Sciences has published, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, the definitive catalog and analysis. Drawing on some 5,000 studies, three Russian scientists have placed the ultimate death toll at 985,000.

The authors include Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the president of Russia; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist who was, at the time of the accident, director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The book has been edited by Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist expert in the health impacts of radioactivity.

As Karl Grossman has shown, Chernobyl’s death toll stretches worldwide. Its apocalyptic cloud blanketed Europe and blew across the northern tier of the United States. Sheep in Scotland and milk in New England were heavily contaminated, along with countless square miles of land and sea.

Ohio’s Davis-Besse may have come within a fraction of an inch of such a disaster, and has again been found with potentially apocalyptic structural flaws. Michigan’s Fermi I and the infamous Three Mile Island Unit 2 did melt.

Now the brand new Toshiba-Westinghouse AP-1000 design has been deemed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as unable to withstand earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes, and has turned up with a critical generic flaw that could cause it to explode.

Which is where the climate bill comes in.

Widespread reports of what it contained were to be clarified with its planned introduction on Chernobyl Day. But co-sponsor Lindsay Graham (R-SC) abruptly withdrew, apparently amidst partisan wrangling over immigration.

By all accounts this bill included a fossil industry wish-list, with big money for “clean coal,” off-shore drilling, a disembowelment of the EPA, and much more. With oil fires raging at sea and miners being buried in the coal fields, how this bill would actually solve the climate crisis remains unclear.

What WAS clear was subsidies that John Kerry (D-MA) said would put taxpayers on the hook for at least a dozen new reactors, and possibly far more.

The details are temporarily moot, but the portent is not.

It’s precisely that dangerously deficient AP-1000 design that the Obama Administration wants to fund first, for construction in Georgia. America’s leaky fleet of 104 aging clunkers meanwhile staggers toward disaster at places like Vermont Yankee and New York’s Indian Point, Ohio’s Davis-Besse, and California’s Diablo Canyon.

Chernobyl exploded in a remote backwater of an impoverished region. But by official accounts from Ukraine and Belarus, it did $500 billion in damage just there. Nowhere in the U.S. would the property damage be remotely that small. The near-million death toll would be a mere fraction of how many would die here.

Nothing in any known draft of this now-in-limbo climate bill demands private insurance against such a catastrophe. Nor does it have a solution for what to do with 60,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste, or thousands more yet to come.

Nor does it begin to answer the reality that every cent thrown down the reactor rat-hole could quickly save far more energy than such a reactor could produce — if it ever did come on line after the seven-to-ten years it would take to license and build such a boondoggle.

No sane attempt to save the global ecology could ever include more money for precisely the most dangerous, destructive, dirty, and deficit-ridden energy technology ever devised.

Let’s hope this bill’s yank away from Chernobyl Day will take it to the desperately needed safe haven of a Solartopian plan built around renewables, conservation and efficiency.

Neither the planetary ecology nor the U.S. economy can afford anything less.

Nothing else would deserve the label “Climate Bill.”

[Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, is at www.harveywasserman.com . He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this was also published.]

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Larry Ray : Killing and Dying in Vietraqistan

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.

Vietraqistan:
One, two, three, four…
What are we fighting for?

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” — General Stanley McChrystal, Senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, March 27, 2010.

”The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” — Gen. William Westmoreland, South Vietnam, from Oscar-winning 1974 Vietnam documentary, Hearts and Minds.

While outrage in the United States over our endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has retreated into the background noise of immediate domestic economic and political concerns, outrage in the Middle East over civilians killed by U.S. forces is alive and seething. American troops continue to mistakenly shoot, bomb, kill, and maim a steady stream of innocent folks trying to go about their daily lives. It has been going on so long it rarely even makes the evening news here at home.

First, a review of the numbers …

We have had troops fighting and dying in Iraq for an incredible eight years, and in Afghanistan for an even more incredible 10 years. Hannibal crossed the Alps and defeated the Romans in not much more time. . . using elephants. To date we have not really defeated anything to speak of and the troop casualty count, including coalition forces in both wars, is reported to be 6,500 combat arena deaths. The price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 is spinning toward one trillion dollars. . . $986,284,900,000 as of this post.

The Iraq Body Count Project as of this writing, reports 95,888-104,595 non-combatant civilian deaths since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Estimates of total Afghan civilian deaths as a direct result of the war since the U.S. invasion in 2001 are estimated at 10,172-12,969. Folks continue to argue over totals, but civilian casualties have been outrageously high and unacceptable.

The accepted figure for U.S. military troop deaths in the Vietnam war is 58,236. South Vietnam U.S. forces killed an estimated 90,000 South Vietnamese civilians from extensive use of fire power (artillery, carpet bombings, small weapons). Another 1,500 were killed in various massacres as detailed in Rummel’s “Statistics of Democide.”

The politics of dying…

In Texas we always called a pointless fight, argument, or defense of the indefensible a “skunk-pissing contest.” A colorful argot meaning no one wins and both risk smelling really bad, figuratively or literally.

Politics is rife with these contests. And the really bad smell has too often sadly been the smell of death. Pure politics, not a palpable threat of invasion or attack on America by a rogue nation, is at the heart of the political reasons for our wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Their origins, accomplishments and civilian death tolls could collectively be called “Vietraqistan.”

The alleged cold war “domino effect” and Lyndon Johnson’s trumped up claim of a U.S. Navy Destroyer being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin was used to justify our massive troop presence in South Vietnam and sustained bombing of North Vietnam.

Looking back, a cold-war commie menace threat with red hordes taking over all of Southeast Asia if America didn’t “win” in South Vietnam is far-fetched. But no more so than America’s hastened military posse sent to Afghanistan to locate and capture Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden after the 9/11 hijacked airliner attacks. After Bin Laden slipped away the hunting expedition turned into a decade-long on-again, off-again American military war presence in this ancient Muslim country.

I will not even address the reeking politics of America being led into an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, a nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the USA. Instead, drop by The Center for Public Integrity for a line-by-line documentation of the more than 935 false statements used by the Bush administration to lead our nation to war there.

Why does any of this matter right now?

It matters because ignoring or forgetting what America has lost in lives, treasure, and international reputation is both irresponsible and dangerous. A decade of our troops kicking in the doors of people’s homes, terrorizing whole families and treating the “ragheads” with little respect, has done us great harm. Young, motivated Muslims easily believe America is actively involved in a war on Islam. These potential Islamic terrorists share with members of the armed, angry citizen militias being formed right here in the USA the idea that they are being personally attacked and must fight back.

The idea that we could win hearts and minds by bombing and blasting away at centuries of ideology, traditions, sectarian hatreds, and deeply embedded Islamic faith is stunningly misguided. Political expediency has let one year become 10 years with ever changing justifications for not pulling out and coming home.

It quickly became clear after we entered Iraq that the touted weapons of mass destruction never existed. But we had blown the country’s infrastructure to smithereens and had to come up with new justifications for being there in the middle of the huge deadly mess we had made. No WMD’s, so let’s create a model American styled Iraqi democracy, a showplace for the Middle East.

Our costly eight year presence in Iraq has succeeded in eliminating a dictator and his two psychopathic sons, but Americans are not heroes there. Eight years on and there is still limited electrical service, and raw sewerage still floods poorer quarters of Baghdad. They just want us to go away, just like they did in Vietnam. We might have all troops out by New Year’s eve, 2011. Or not.

Afghanistan is an even sorrier mess. Its name dates from about 982 AD and the modern day country has been in a constant state of civil war since the early 1970’s, intensified by foreign occupations by the Soviets in 1979 and the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 that overthrew the Taliban government. . . for a while.

Bloody coups, power struggles and tribal warlords determining unstable transfers of power have always been the norm in Afghanistan. It has been governed by just about every known form of government for the past century. We have been stuck there for 10 long, dusty and deadly years.

After several touted “plans” for U.S. success in Afghanistan over the years, former special forces commander General Stanley McChrystal recently became Senior American and NATO commander with a plan to have U.S. troops undertake a mission of nation building and establishing trust among the far-flung tribes who have seen all this many times before. Again, politically bogged down, the spanking new mission is “to win hearts and minds.”

Instead, we continue to regularly kill Afghan civilians especially as we press into Pakistan to bomb and launch missile attacks across the ill-defined Pakistani-Afghanistan border. We also regularly call in air strikes and wipe out the wrong houses killing women, children, and the elderly. Going rate is said to be around $2,500 a family that we pay for our targeting mistakes. This perceived repeated brutality is easily interpreted as America waging war against Islam.

“Why the hell do we keep doing that?” we ask back here at home. “Why have we always done that?” is a better question.

U.S. Army WWII and Korean war combat historian, S.L.A. “Slam” Marshall used oral history recorded interviews to get the gut reactions of troops in combat and under fire. In his latter years what he observed about troops in Vietnam equally applies to young Americans fighting today:

…The American fighter can outwit, out-move and out-game anyone thus far thrown against him. Their main gripe is that the enemy is loath to come out of hiding. Their aggressiveness arises from pride in unit. The bond with their buddies. A wish to get the job over…

And that is it in a nutshell. Since no one is coming over the walls back home trying to conquer the USA, the motivation to carry out “the mission” in some far-flung place varies but it always involves a tit-for-tat payback for every American killed, be it by a sniper or a roadside bomb. When in doubt, fueled with adrenaline, the answer is to kill the raghead, (or the gook, or the kraut or the whatever). The sergeant will sort it out later.

I spent a year out in the boonies with combat units all over South Vietnam as a civilian correspondent in 1966-67. When young Americans are sent to strange, inhospitable countries where they can neither read nor speak the native languages, winning hearts and minds is not at the top of the list. It ain’t hearts and minds when the rounds are incoming, or when the laundry lady or friendly local interpreter blows up half your unit. In Vietraqistan our troops on the ground, or in the air, will always try to kill someone before they kill them. That’s just the way it is.

Where does all this take us?

Vietnam finished out its civil war of nationalism as soon as we left and in a few years it moved toward reunification of North and South. Today we are proud to have full diplomatic, economic, and trade relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. True to Buddhist tradition, the Vietnamese hold no deep hatred for America or Americans.

But our invasion and extended presence in these two Middle Eastern countries has served to validate the widely held belief that America is waging open war against Islam. The longer we stay and the more the civilian casualty toll rises, the more Muslims, especially young people, fiercely believe we are waging war against the dominant religion in the Middle East.

If this seems to us a far fetched thing for anyone to believe, consider that we have killed, conservatively, some 120,000 non combatants, including women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Here at home civilian anti-government and conspiracy-based militias now number some 300, doubling since last year according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many of these folks think President Obama is building concentration camps where fine loyal Americans like them will be locked up.

Distrust, ignorance, and anger usually starts a skunk-pissing contest. It can take a long time for the air to clear.

We may not have the time required for that before another dramatic and deadly domestic terrorist attack upon American soil. The question is, will it come from Islamic zealots, or from another equally mad and militia-motivated Timothy McVeigh?

How long does it take to learn the lessons from Vietraqistan?

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Tim Wise : Imagine if the Tea Party Were Black

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Imagine if these guys were black. Demonstrators carried weapons at a “Restore the Constitution” rally on the Potomac in Arlington, VA, April 19. Photos (top) by Bob Barnard / Fox 5 / New York, and (below) by Win McNamee / Getty Images.

Changing Places:
What if they had been black?

By Tim Wise / April 25, 2010

Imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color.

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure — the ones who are driving the action — we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead.

The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

  • Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters — the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government?

    Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

  • Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

  • Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

  • Imagine that a prominent mainstream black political commentator had long employed an overt bigot as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in black separatist conferences, and once assaulted a white person while calling them by a racial slur.

    When that prominent black commentator and his sister — who also works for the organization — defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network?

    Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Pat Buchanan employed as Executive Director of his group, America’s Cause, a blatant racist who did all these things, or at least their white equivalents: attending white separatist conferences and attacking a black woman while calling her the n-word.

  • Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough — “living fossils” as he called them — “so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

    After all, these are things that Rush Limbaugh has said, about Barack Obama’s administration, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois, in which two black kids beat up a white kid, and about liberals, generally.

  • Imagine that a black pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a white president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Pastor Stan Craig said recently at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, South Carolina.

  • Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?”

    After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Michael Savage, predicting white revolution in the face of multiculturalism, or said by Savage about Muslims and liberals, respectively. And it was Congressman Culbertson, from Texas, who praised Savage in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.

  • Imagine a black political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS building did wrong was not blowing up Fox News instead. This is, after all, what Anne Coulter said about Tim McVeigh, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up The New York Times.

  • Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”

  • Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.

    • In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color.

    How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?

    To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic.

    Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.

    And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

    Game Over.

    [Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S. Wise has spoken in 48 states, on over 400 college campuses, and to community groups around the nation. Wise has provided anti-racism training to teachers nationwide, and has trained physicians and medical industry professionals on how to combat racial inequities in health care. His latest book is called Between Barack and a Hard Place.]

    Source / Ephphatha Poetry

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    Life During Wartime : A Tool in Arizona

    Posted on April 26, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

    Political cartoon by Joshua Brown / Historians Against the War / The Rag Blog

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    Culture Got a Boo-Boo? : Put a Band-Aid® on It

    Posted on April 24, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

    Health care system black and blue?
    Cover it up with a Bacon Strip!

    By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2010

    When was the last time you saw a white band-aid? White — as in the color of adhesive tape. Actually, when was the last time you saw adhesive tape?

    It was a good, simple idea Earle Dickson had back in 1920 — to attach a dressing to a cloth that didn’t have to be wrapped and tied — usually one-handed, or with the help of teeth. Add sterility to the cotton, and you have a perfect little gizmo — protecting a small wound from dirt and germs, reducing the likelihood of its reopening, and maintaining a moist environment for the migration of new skin cells.

    The evolution of the band-aid gives us a metaphorical glimpse into the dynamics of the American cultural/political system.

    At the beginning of the ebullient Fifties, along with chrome, fins, and anti-Communism, came the first decorative band-aids. Stars and Strips® on plastic. Conspicuous consumption. Be proud you were wounded. Then the corporations — all with their ®s attached — moved in with Super-, Spider-, and Bat-man, then Barbie and Ken, and now Rug-Rats, Smiley Faces, and Sponge Bob. Band-aids were no longer wound care, but fashion accessories for toddlers.

    Enter the current deadly combination of irony and infantilization, and the grown-ups followed hard upon with unicorn, Jesus, and bacon strip band-aids at four to five times the generic price.

    That was one very American direction — as Max Bialystock says in The Producers, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!”

    Parallel evolution: for the more decorous among us, or young urban professionals not wanting proletarian-looking hands, the Sixties saw the spreading use of disguise: transparent band-aids, to which was added the patina of political correctness, since “flesh colored” might be any color flesh (if you ignore the white, colorblind rectangle under it).

    Now we have special shapes for knuckle and fingertip, though only God, and perhaps Johnson&Johnson knows which is to be used where. We have giant band-aids for knee scrapes, and the stirring of high-tech medicalization with the introduction of home-use gel-impregnated burn dressings.

    Let’s apply these categories to the recent difficult birth and passage of the health reform bill, an Obama accomplishment commonly seen as a band-aid.

    So we have this wound in America called disastrous health care — at least for the vast majority. The simple, practical, white-adhesive tape band-aid would have been to adopt any variation on the national health care systems used worldwide by advanced industrial countries not afflicted with exceptionalism. That would still be a band-aid because it would largely address disease post-facto, and not the physical and mental pollution and economic causes behind it. Nevertheless, it would have been straight-forward, still practical.

    Conspicuous consumption, corporate profit. What would we do without them? The President and his party are trying hard to pass a health reform bill. The president and his party are battling. The stars and stripes are unfurled on both sides. The president and his party have passed a health reform bill! Yea! Boo! And corporate Scooby-doo. If you’ve passed it, flaunt it.

    At the same time — disguise, and the opacity of CNN transparency. (The opacity is the white rectangle covering the wound.) Let the many colors of wounded flesh show through. Discarded children and cancer victims, the poor, the old, most of the currently uninsured. Under the white rectangle, Big Pharma and the insurance companies.

    In Germany, Band-Aids® are called “plasters” — and they are white. “Germans also have universal, national health care.”

    [Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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    SPORT / No One is Illegal : Boycott the Diamondbacks

    Posted on April 24, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

    Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick: his family gave $1,023,527 to the Republicans. Photo by Brian Smale. Original graphic from Fortune. Satirical enhancement by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.

    Echoes of Apartheid:
    Boycott the Arizona Diamondbacks

    By Dave Zirin / April 24, 2010

    Gonna find a way
    Make the state pay
    Lookin’ for the day
    Hard as it seems
    This ain’t no damn dream
    Gotta know what I mean
    It’s team against team

    — Public Enemy, By the Time I Get to Arizona

    This will be the last column I write about the Arizona Diamondbacks in the foreseeable future. For me, they do not exist. They will continue to not exist in my mind as long as the horribly named “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” remains law in Arizona. This law has brought echoes of apartheid to the state.

    One Democratic lawmaker has said that it has made Arizona a “laughingstock” but it’s difficult to find an ounce of humor in this kind of venal legislation. The law makes it a crime to walk the streets without clutching your passport, green card, visa, or state I.D.

    It not only empowers but absolutely requires cops to demand paperwork if they so much as suspect a person of being undocumented. A citizen can, in fact, sue any police officer they see not harassing suspected immigrants. The bill would also make it a class one misdemeanor for anyone to “pick up passengers for work” if their vehicle blocks traffic. And it makes a second violation of any aspect of the law a felony.

    In response, Representative Raul Grijalva, who’s from Arizona itself, has called for a national boycott against the state, saying, “Do not vacation and or retire there.” He got so many hateful threats this week that he had to close his Arizona offices at noon on Friday.

    Many of us aren’t in either the imminent vacation or retirement mode. We do, however, live in baseball cities where the Arizona Diamondbacks come to play.

    When they arrive in my hometown in D.C., my back will be turned, and my television will be off. This is not merely because they happen to be the team from Arizona. The D-backs organization is a primary funder of the state Republican Party, which has been driving the measure through the legislature.

    As the official Arizona Diamondbacks boycott call states, “In 2010, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s third highest Contributor was the [executives of the] Arizona Diamondbacks, who gave $121,600; furthermore, they also contributed $129,500, which ranked as the eighteenth highest contribution to the Republican Party Committee.”

    The team’s big boss, Ken Kendrick, and his family members, E. G. Kendrick Sr. and Randy Kendrick, made contributions to the Republicans totaling a staggering $1,023,527. The Kendricks follow in the footsteps of team founder and former owner Jerry Colangelo. Colangelo, along with other baseball executives and ex-players, launched a group called Battin’ 1000: a national campaign that uses baseball memorabilia to raise funds for a Campus for Life, the largest anti-choice student network in the country.

    Colangelo was also deputy chair of Bush/Cheney 2004 in Arizona, and his deep pockets created what was called the Presidential Prayer Team — a private evangelical group that claims to have signed up more than 1 million people to drop to their knees and pray daily for Bush.

    Under Colangelo, John McCain also owned a piece of the team. The former maverick said before the bill’s passage that he “understood” why it was being passed because “the drivers of cars with illegals in it [that] are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.”

    This is who the Arizona Diamondback executives are. This is the tradition they stand in.

    The Diamondbacks’ owners have every right to their politics, and if we policed the political proclivities of every owner’s box there might not be anyone left to root for (except for the Green Bay Packers, who don’t have an owner’s box). But this is different. The law is an open invitation to racial profiling and harassment. The boycott call is coming from inside the state.

    If the owners of the Diamondbacks want to underwrite an ugly edge of bigotry, we should raise our collective sporting fists against them. A boycott is also an expression of solidarity with Diamondback players such as Juan Guitterez, Gerardo Parra, and Rodrigo Lopez. They shouldn’t be put in a position where they’re cheered on the playing field and then asked for their papers when the uniform comes off.

    [Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .]

    Source / The Progressive

    Graphic by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.

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    Sound and Fury Dept. : Karl Rove at UT-Austin

    Posted on April 24, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

    Heidi Turpin (left) and Fran Hanlon, members of CodePink’s “Pink Police,” express their intentions, April 19, 2010, on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, prior to an appearance by Republican strategist Karl Rove. Photo by Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog.

    Karl Rove ignites audience at UT

    Both applause and jeering remarks frequently interrupted leading Republican political strategist Karl Rove during his speech at an event hosted by College Republicans at the Texas Union Ballroom on Monday night. …

    Protestors from women’s peace organization Code Pink; grassroots justice group We Are Change; and UT Chicano civil rights group MEChA lined the back of the room with signs accusing Rove of war crimes, and many individuals in the audience yelled comments and insults at Rove throughout the course of the evening. …

    A total of nine protestors were removed from the ballroom. Two were arrested, and seven were cited for criminal trespassing, UTPD spokeswoman Rhonda Weldon said. …

    Rove did not ignore the protestors, referring to them as “malcontents” and telling several to “shut up and sit down.”

    — The Daily Texan / April 20, 2010

    [According to The Raw Story, one of those arrested for shouting at Rove was Aaron Dykes, an associate of libertarian radio talker and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. (Also see Infowars.)]

    Protesters spoil Republican pep rally:
    Bush man Rove stirs up UT crowd

    By Susan Cook / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2010

    Returning to the University of Texas two years ago to finish up my old government degree — so I could then study sustainable design in UT’s School of Architecture — has been a a real gift. I now get an admittedly outsider’s glimpse into the world as seen by a privileged segment of our younger citizens. I am exposed to the latest technologies, the newest and hippest musical styles, the widespread angst and apathy I see as a national epidemic — and last week, I got to see Karl Rove.


    The previous week a brightly-colored flyer with Karl’s face had caught my eye. Copies of it were posted on the bulletin boards that line the halls of the University. There he was amid the offers to study in Mexico, find a Spanish tutor, and join the Islamic students for a talk about the misconceptions swirling around what it means to be a Muslim. There was his big, fat, round visage with that iconic smirk.

    The “architect of the Bush administration” was to speak on campus the next Monday, April 19. “Hosted by the Texas College Republicans,” the flyer said, although I was to find out the hard way that they were only the titular hosts of this Republican Big Deal — after I fired off a Letter to the Editor in the Daily Texan‘s Firing Line the next day. My letter questioned whether — in this climate of educational budget cuts and employee layoffs at the University — forking over the bucks to pay for enough security to keep CodePink’s Pink Police’s handcuffs off of this man might not be the best possible way to put my hefty tuition to use.

    The response to my letter was swift and vociferous. Not only was I an ill-informed dimwit who hadn’t the intellectual skills to research and find out that the on-campus Young Republicans were (in theory) footing the bill for everything, but I was a disgrace to government majors everywhere due to my obvious connection to unpatriotic terrorists — and I was a “freak/fringe” lefty to boot.

    I was a pretty sorry excuse for a student and might not even be worthy of calling myself an American anymore. One writer suggested I be burned in effigy, another, using the name “Ann Coulter,” advised that I should move to Canada where I would be happier. Thank you, Ann.

    The College Republicans and their supporters had a field day with me, taking obvious glee in hurling insults in my general direction and painting me with every available slur reserved for their favorite target: liberals.

    Came the day of the actual appearance of Karl Rove and — in addition to figuring out what to wear, whether to have a beer first at the Cactus Cafe, and where to find the mobility-impaired entrance to the event — I had to decide if I wanted to get arrested. Or not. I decided that my impending graduation from UT, 40 long years in the making, was not going to be spoiled by Karl Rove, so it was a “not.”

    Image from page one of the UT-Austin student newspaper, The Daily Texan, April 20, 2010.

    The room was filled with Old Republicans whose generous donations, as I was to find out, were the real source of funding for Rove’s appearance. The first several rows of the Union Ballroom were occupied before the hoi polloi were even allowed in the room; these were the same folks who would later gather for a Meet and Greet with the Great Liar himself at a catered reception down the hall. The silver-hairs were a dead giveaway that this was only nominally a speech for students. This was a Republican pep rally.

    As Karl Rove lied his way through an incredibly detailed account of why Obama’s health care bill was the world’s biggest failure and an affront to physicians and patients (and taxpayers) everywhere, I realized that this was a very boring man. He was a symbol of what the Bush Administration had brought to us and what smart, motivated people can accomplish when they put their minds to it. We can have wars-without-end, tax breaks for the wealthy, corporatized everything, and act snooty — all at the same time.

    Some lackey from the UT administration got up at the first outburst from a protester in the audience and announced that each ne’er-do-well would be given “three warnings” to pipe down and then would be escorted from the room, perhaps to be arrested. I thought at the time, “how generous, how civilized of them,” but this policy was abandoned after the first unsanctioned speaker was led from the hall and after that one merely had to say something out loud and the UTPD came and got you.

    Nice pose, Karl. Rove speaks in Austin to pep rally peppered with malcontents. Photo by Corey Leamon / The Rag Blog.

    One by one, as Rove droned on, NINE people were taken from the room for merely speaking out loud. However, if you said something that Rove liked, you got to stay. I did notice that.

    Rove had a lie to answer every accusation that came up during the Q&A period following his mind-numbingly dull speech. My favorite: We invaded Iraq to prevent an arms race between Iran and Iraq. News to me.

    When questioned about WMD or his involvement with outing CIA operative Valerie Plame, he immediately countered with how many other people were also wrong — or did the same thing he did. Hide among the guilty and it is hard to pick out just one person to blame the crime on. He was not blameless, he was just not the only one. Bush didn’t lie about WMD in Iraq — because Kennedy, Pelosi, and Kerry did, too. He didn’t out Plame — because Armitage and Novak did, too.

    When I left the hall after the event was finally over, I had the option, as it turned out, to sneak into the Meet and Greet since the mobility-impaired exit/entrance was the same door where they were collecting tickets to the catered event in the Santa Rita Room down the hall. When asked for my ticket by the cop, I simply informed him that this was my proper exit route and he let me through ticketless.

    As I waited for my elevator to flee the massed Republican horde in the Rove reception line, I had to once again ponder whether I should risk arrest or at least embarrassment by posing as one of the faithful. (I looked a lot like them; I had not worn my Che t-shirt that night, opting instead for a nice jacket and clean black slacks and shirt.)

    But once again I decided not to get in trouble. Not tonight. Not for Karl Rove.

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    Eric Jasinski : Treating PTSD With Jail Time

    Posted on April 24, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

    Spc. Eric Jasinski.

    Went AWOL seeking help for PTSD:
    Eric Jasinski released from Texas jail

    By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 23, 2010

    Eric Jasinski is being released from the Bell County Jail in Belton, Texas, tomorrow morning, April 24. He will have served 25 days of a 30-day sentence.

    Jasinski, 23, who is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, went AWOL in 2009 to seek help for his PTSD. His story was reported on by Dahr Jamail in The Rag Blog.

    Eric Jasinski enlisted in the Army in 2005, and deployed to Iraq in October 2006 as an intelligence analyst. He collected intelligence used to direct air strikes. After his return to the U.S., Jasinski suffered from severe PTSD resulting from what he did and saw in Iraq. He felt remorse and guilt for the way he contributed to loss of life. He went through a divorce and had friends killed and maimed in combat.

    He tried to get treatment for PTSD and finish out his military contract. “In late 2008,” Jasinski said, ”they stop-lossed me [an involuntary extension of contract], and that pushed me over the edge. They were going to send me back to Iraq.” Jasinski went AWOL until December 11, 2009, when he turned himself in to authorities at Fort Hood.

    The Army scheduled a Summary Court Martial for March 31. Jasinski was sentenced to 30 days in the Bell County Jail. Laura Barrett, Jasinski’s mother, told the Temple Herald Telegram, “This has been a total outrage. I cannot believe my son who is diagnosed with PTSD from his deployment to Iraq would be sent to jail.”

    James Branum, Jasinski’s civilian defense attorney, submitted a clemency request asking that Jasinski be released on mental health grounds or transferred to the psych ward at Darnall Army Medical Center to complete his sentence. The Army did not respond. With Jasinki’s permission, Branum shared a letter written from the Bell County Jail by Jasinski.

    Branum said, “We, as Americans, need to see how combat vets are treated today. Eric is in jail because he has PTSD and was denied the care he needed. His ‘desertion’ was an act of desperation, the act of a soldier who had no other options.”

    Here is part of what Eric Jasinski wrote from the Bell County Jail in Belton, Texas. We publish it as he wrote it:

    When I am taken out of jail back to Fort Hood for any appointments I am led around in handcuffs and ankle shackles in front of crowds of soldiers… which is overwhelming on my mind. My guilt from treating prisoners in Iraq sub-human and I did things to them and watched my unit do cruel actions against prisoners, so being humiliated like that forces me to fall into the dark spiral of guilt. I now know what it feels like to have no rights and have people stare and judge based on your shackles and I feel even more like a monster cause I used to do this to Iraqi people.

    Even worse is the fact that this boils down to the military failing to treat my PTSD but I am being punished for it… I feel as if I am being a threat to others or myself and still the Army mental health professional blow me off just like in 2009 when I felt like I had no choice but to go AWOL, since I received a 5 minute mental evaluation and was stop-lossed despite my PTSD, and was told that they could do nothing for me. The insufficient mental evaluation from a doctor I had never seen before, combined with the insufficient actions by the doctor on 9 April show the Army is not trying to make progress…

    I have tried to “do the right thing” as those in the Army say and all they do in return is destroy me even more mentally and publicly say that they are going to look out for me while behind closed doors the exact opposite is happening… I have been tossed in the trash just like the brave and honorable resisters of Vietnam. The machine never stops and it never changes.

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