Republicans : Choosing Wall Street Over Main Street

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic from USA Today.

The Republicans and financial regulation:
Choosing Wall Street over Main Street

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2010

It’s no secret to anyone what kicked off the current recession in America. It was the financial industry and Wall Street that were so greedy that they were willing to throw the entire country under the bus as long as they could keep making their fees and bonuses. They were so concerned with making their own money they even put their own companies at risk to make a fast buck.

Of course, this couldn’t go on forever. Wall Street had convinced Americans that rules were in place that would prevent a financial meltdown like what happened in 1929 and led to the Great Depression. To hear them talk, land and housing values would keep rising forever, the stock market could not bottom out and lose billions of dollars, and the financial industry was too big and smart to fail. None of that was true.

Their greed finally caught up with them. Some companies folded (like Lehman Bros.) and others would have folded if they hadn’t been bailed out by Republican President George Bush creating a $700 billion bailout to keep them afloat. This huge failure by Wall Street banks, brokerages and insurance companies led us into the worst recession since the 1930s. Over 12 million jobs were lost and the economy’s failure was felt in every state and city throughout the country.

After the $700 billion of taxpayer money was pumped into Wall Street, they are now back to their old ways. The stock market is going up, outrageous salaries and bonuses are being paid to the executives, and we are probably well on our way to another financial meltdown in the future because nothing has been changed. And that seems to be the way Wall Street wants it, because they’re pumping over a million dollars a day into lobbying against any changes or new regulations.

But the American people know better. They know that changes on Wall Street must be made and the financial industry must be more closely regulated, because they have shown that they are clearly incapable of controlling their own greed or policing their own industry. This is even true of the teabaggers. While it is true that they are unhappy with government, they are equally unhappy with Wall Street and unhappy that while the financial companies have recovered, ordinary Americans are still mired in the recession.

That’s why I am so puzzled that congressional Republicans are now siding with Wall Street against the ordinary citizens on Main Street. President Obama is trying to get some new regulations passed to rein in some of the most egregious abuses on Wall Street. I think he should do even more than he is proposing, but his proposals will make a good start and bring at least a modicum of sanity back to Wall Street.

But the president may be unable to get his new financial regulations through Congress. This is because the Republicans have decided they are against any reform of Wall Street. That should tell any observer where most of that lobbyist money is going.

Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and one of those pushing for new regulations on the financial industry. However, he has received a letter from the Senate Minority Leader (who receives more funds from Wall Street than any other senator) telling him that the Republicans have 41 votes to oppose regulating the financial industry. In fact, he claims they can even prevent Democrats from debating financial reform.

I think the Republicans, while they may be filling their campaign coffers off of Wall Street, are making a big mistake. They are underestimating the rage that the average American feels toward Wall Street and the financial giants. Maybe they think the next election will be fought over health care reform, and they can keep the public’s mind off of Wall Street and our jobless economy caused by Wall Street. They are wrong.

The health care reform is old news, and the more people learn about it, the more they will like it — or at least accept it. The next election will be fought over the economy, and the bill that will be freshest in the minds of voters will be the effort to regulate Wall Street and rein in some of their greed. They are not going to be happy with the protectors of Wall Street.

I think the Republicans are giving the Democrats a great campaign issue. I hope the Republicans continue their efforts to protect Wall Street greed, because it gives Democrats an issue to pound them on. Democrats should repeat over and over again that it is the Republican Party that opposes financial reform. They should make it clear that the Republicans are the ones blocking help for ordinary Americans and acting to protect the rich Wall Street corporations. The issue for Democrats should be simple:

THE REPUBLICANS HAVE CHOSEN WALL STREET OVER MAIN STREET!!!

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

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Posted on April 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

If we look at the world as a whole, we see that almost nothing functions as it should. The Earth is ill. As human beings, because we are also Earth — human, comes from humus — we likewise feel ourselves ill in a certain way.

It seems evident that we cannot continue on this path, because it would lead us to the abyss. We have been so senseless over the last generations that we have made a principle of self-destruction, to which we must add the irreversible global warming. This is not a Hollywood fantasy. Both terrified and perplexed, we ask ourselves: how has it come to this? How are we going to escape this dead-end global situation? What can each person do to help?

First, we must understand the structuring axis of world-society, which is the main culprit for this dangerous itinerary. It is the type of economy we have built, with the culture that goes along with it, one of private accumulation, and non-solidarian consumerism, the price of which is the sacking of nature. Everything has been turned into merchandise for competitive exchange. Within this dynamic only the strong win. The others loose; they either join as subaltern partners, or disappear. The result of this logic of competition, of everyone for him or herself, and of the lack of cooperation, is the incredible transfer of wealth to the few strong ones, the big consortiums, at the price of general impoverishment.

We must recognize that for centuries, this competitive exchange has been able to accommodate everyone, more or less, under its umbrella. It created thousands of facilities for human existence. But now, as the 2008 economic financial crisis made clear, the possibilities of this type of economy are ending. The great majority of countries and people find themselves excluded. Brazil herself is little more than a subaltern partner of the big ones, who is relegated to the role of exporter of raw material, rather than a producer of technological innovations that would give her the means to mold her own future. We still have not totally de-colonized ourselves.

Either we change, or the Earth is in danger. Where can we find the articulating principle of a different form of living together, of a new dream for the future? In moments of total and structural crisis we must consult the original source of everything: Nature. Nature teaches us what the sciences of the Earth and of life have been telling us for a long time: the basic law of the universe is not competition, that divides and excludes, but cooperation, that adds and includes. All the energies, all the elements, all living beings, from bacteria to the more complex beings are interdependent. A net of connections involves them everywhere, making them cooperative and solidarian beings, which is the main component of the socialist project. Thanks to this network we have arrived to where we are, and we may yet have a future ahead of us.

This information accepted, we are in condition to formulate a way out for our societies. We must consciously make cooperation a personal and collective project, something that was not seen in Copenhagen in the COP-15 on climate. Instead of competitive exchange, where only one wins and everyone else loses, we must strengthen the complimentary and cooperative exchange, the great ideal of «good living» (sumak kawsay) of the people of the Andes, in which everyone wins because everyone participates. We must accept what the brilliant mind of mathematics Nobel laureate John Nesh formulated: the principle of win-win, through which everyone, dialoguing and yielding, ends up benefiting, with no losers.

To live together humanly, we invented economics, politics, culture, ethics and religion. But we have denaturalized these «sacred» realities, poisoning them with competition and individualism, thus destroying the social fabric.

The new social centrality and the new necessary and saving rationality are founded on cooperation, pathos, in the profound sense of belonging, of familiarity, hospitality and of brotherhood and sisterhood with all beings. If we do not make that conversion, we must prepare for the worst.

Type rest of the post here

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Republican Jujitsu : Protecting Wall Street from the People

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon by L.M. Glackens, 1911 / Puck / Library of Congress.

Republican Jujitsu:
Protecting Wall Street
From accountability and reform

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / April 21, 2010

We are reading about two firms that sold securities to the unsuspecting public while betting against those same securities in order to line their pockets with ill gotten profits. Then we are told this is not illegal unless they didn’t tell us they were doing it somewhere in the fine print of a prospectus. In such an atmosphere, it should be tough for Republicans to block finance and banking reform.

According to the pundits, the Republicans’ opposition to financial reform — and protection of their Wall Street allies — might cause them problems with their growing Tea Bagger wing that is so angry with the banks.

But not to worry.

The attack on the Dodd Bill

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and ranking Finance Committee member Richard Shelby approached the microphones wearing the smile of the cats that had swallowed the canaries. We’ve seen it before. In McConnell’s case, the pussy cat smile replaced his usual simper. They were smiling because political genius Frank Luntz had given them another strategy guaranteed to serve special interests while painting the hapless Democrats into another corner.

McConnell announced that the Senate Republicans were opposing the Dodd Bill because it was “another bank bailout.” It was marvelous political and verbal jujitsu because the fact is that the Dodd Bill would reign in Wall Street, and the GOP approach is a sure setup for more bailouts. No wonder they were smiling. It’s tragically funny because it could be another big success for the GOP and another blow to ordinary folks.

Later, one of the Kentuckian’s aides told the press that the minority leader had not seen the rumored Luntz memorandum. Sure! The minority leader ever so deftly (if somewhat indirectly) admitted that he had been huddled with Wall Street bankers plotting ways to derail the Dodd Bill. McConnell said it was just like talking to a few Kentucky bankers and owners of mom and pop stores on Main Street. It was probably just coincidental that, as the deal with the bankers was cemented, money cascaded into the nine most important Republican senate campaigns.

The Dodd Bill provides a process for the orderly dismantling of failed banks, using a $50 billion fund provided by banks — not the federal government. The fund and government supervision are needed to provide for quick, orderly liquidations so that another financial system meltdown can be averted. The amount set to be included in the fund is probably on the low side, and the House bill calls for a healthier amount. The Dodd bill does not provide for government-operated banks; it looks to orderly bankruptcies.

Republicans complain about government “takeovers,” because the term has resonance with so many ill-informed voters. No government takeovers are envisioned in the Senate Finance Committee legislation. Those who follow such things would add that it was all the yammering about “government takeovers” that forced the government in 2008 and 2009 to bail out the banks on their own terms. The Republicans are using a playbook that works all too well.

There is some question if McConnell can keep his 41 troops in lockstep. One called him a “control freak,” and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire admitted the claims that the Dodd Bill is a bailout bill could be “a little over the top.” Nevertheless, Susan Collins of Maine signaled she may stay in line. The “hell no!” strategy will probably help Bob Bennett of Utah and John McCain of Arizona weather tough primary challenges.

Republicans set the scene for more bailouts

The Republican alternative practically guarantees endless bailouts down the road. This has been Republican policy since Ronald Reagan gave Wall Street a huge gift in the form of Brady Bonds.

The GOP alternative scraps the Dodd provisions for orderly bank shutdowns and calls for immediately using ordinary bankruptcy proceedings. There would be no $50 billion emergency fund to cushion the shock to the financial system. Without it, there is the strong probability of meltdowns.

The Republican alternative would also strip away new regulations and the new commission entrusted with looking for signs of financial system breakdown. In other words, the GOP proposal continues deregulation, strips away fail-safe mechanisms, and does not reduce the prospects of another 2008-like financial system collapse.

Here is the key: there is a provision that the federal government can intervene in an “emergency.” Without any substantial new protections in place and no bank-provided rescue fund, the federal government would again be obliged to hand over piles of taxpayer money to the banks and again accept bailout terms dictated by the banks.

The casino-like conditions that prevailed before 2008 exist again, and in fact are even worse. Just look at the huge rewards being given the Wall Street gamblers. Sooner or later, we will be facing another financial system breakdown. The Dodd Bill is very moderate and may not be enough to do more than scale back another catastrophe. The Republican bill, based on the belief that the policies in place in 2008 were essentially correct, would place all of us at great risk.

McConnell is busy getting 41 signatures on a filibuster threat, while others, like Orin Hatch, whine that the Democrats just will not negotiate. The fact is that Senator Dodd spent seven months bargaining with Finance Committee Republicans.

What happened was similar to the health care legislative process. Democrats surrendered one good provision after another in an effort to win a few Republican voters. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa played the role of the main Republican tease; then, in the end, he denounced the health care plan, and even a clause he wrote, calling it a provision for death panels.

This time, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee played that role on the Finance Committee, repeatedly assuring the Democrats they were very close to winning a little Republican support. In the end, Dodd got a badly watered down bill and not one Republican vote to report it out of committee.

Tea Bagger power shapes Republican strategy

There was a time when independents punished obstructionism, as well as governing parties that could not produce useful legislation. That was also a time when voters could see through sheer demagoguery and lies. It was a time when they would have been outraged that an attorney general in a northern state — like Pennsylvania — would try to destroy the health care act, using arguments developed by John C. Calhoun to defend slavery. George C. Wallace last used them to prevent school integration in Alabama.

These days hints of violence and secession are not uncommon in Tea Bagger ranks, and it is alarming that their ranks continue to swell. It is not just a small slice of wingnuts that have been activated. Two studies suggest that these people are better educated and more prosperous than the average American. They think too much has been done for the poor, and more of them than in any other group are convinced that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. They talk about smaller government but are determined to hang on to their Social Security and Medicare.

Republican strategists have informed their senators that continued obstruction — and encouragement of fanaticism — will bring the largest harvest in November. It is probably good advice for the Republicans but a poisonous prescription for American democracy.

For three decades, the Republicans have used wedge issues with great success. At first this succeeded in igniting the Religious Right, but soon well-schooled traditional country club Republicans were mouthing the same nonsense. In time they too began to actually believe it. (Days ago, Rupert Murdoch was on television repeating arguments that no intelligent person could hold. Maybe even he has come to believe all the toxic foolishness.)

Then came the “swiftboater” lies that turned around the election of 2004. In 2008, claims about “palling around with terrorists” made some Republican rallies resemble Klan assemblies, and there were threats of violence. It should have been no surprise when extremists showed up at Obama meetings and other gatherings with weapons. Would armed men have been able to get anywhere near George W. Bush or John McCain?

But if these militia types had been asked to leave, millions would have been convinced they would lose their weapons tomorrow. (Of course it didn’t matter, since they rushed to that conclusion anyway.) Then came the “birthers” and now the neo-Confederate “Tenthers.”

It was all part of the degradation of our political process and the infantization of a growing and powerful sector of the electorate. The forces leading to Tea Baggism have been at work for decades, although they accelerated greatly in 2004.

It is unlikely that this extreme form of right-wing populism will diminish anytime soon. For one thing, there is almost no prospect that all the jobs destroyed by George W. Bush’s “great recession” will return, even in a decade’s time. We hear that from sober, moderate economists.

For whatever reason, Republicans, and especially their Tea Bag wing, give Obama no credit for averting a depression or pulling us out of the great recession. Indeed, they blame the lost jobs on him. Tea Baggism is a bit like the Lost Cause mentality that followed the Civil War. People are rushing to embrace the ideas that created their problems in the first place. It’s hard to explain, but it is clearly happening.

Don’t look for the Tea Baggers or independents to check out what is really happening with the GOP and its plan to protect Wall Street. Tea Baggism is about taking back America from urbanites, minorities, and alleged “elites.” It never was about protecting the little guy from the bankers.

Already Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a self-anointed Tea Bagger, has joined McConnell in saying the Dodd Bill is another “bailout” and “takeover.” She has rushed to the barricades in defense of poor, beleaguered Wall Street. Look for other Tea Baggers, egged on by Dick Armey, to join her. Of course, those in the mainstream media simply repeat talking points and offer no real analysis or truth-telling as an antidote.

It will be interesting to see if all of the Tea Bag wing of the Republican Party fall into line. Some few like Max Pappas of Freedom Works may not. He has referred to the “Bush Wall Street bailout” and has noted the hypocrisy of mainstream Republicans talking about fiscal responsibility.

Becoming the party of “Hell No!”

It appears that the Republican leadership has decided it is best to go into the November elections as the party of “Hell no!” — following the advice of the ever-eloquent and persuasive Governor Sarah Palin.

Jon Kyl , the second ranking Republican senator, has indicated that there will be a filibuster if President Barrack Obama nominates a Supreme Court justice who opposes letting corporations spend as much as they want on political campaigns.

It is even likely that it will prove impossible to get 67 Senate votes for the new disarmament treaty. Arlen Specter, a former Republican, has already predicted that the treaty cannot be ratified.

Given the present condition of American politics and the state of the electorate, the Republican strategy promises to be highly effective. It is deliciously devilish; the Republicans scuttle effective regulations, save the banks from contributing to a bailout fund, and in turn guarantee endless bailouts without appearing to do so. It will be easy to paint the disarmament treaty as weakening America, and whatever nominee Barack Obama presents for the court can be depicted as too radical, not “mainstream” enough.

What are the Democrats to do?

Only the Supreme Being knows if the Democrats are capable of countering this
Republican jujitsu. Unless they figure out how to frame good counterarguments and learn to stay on message, they could take another big hit.

There is absolutely no evidence that the Democrats have learned anything about message creation and control. We can also expect the Democratic senators to accept damaging amendments from the floor and then be surprised when they garner very little or no Republican support.

The best alternative for the Democrats is to let the Republicans mount a real filibuster against banking and finance reform. Some citizens might actually come to understand that the GOP has become an irresponsible, obstructionist party.

For the moment, Democrats cannot expect to win back many reasonable moderates who will see that health care reform helps them or that Obama pulled us back from the brink of recession. Too much inflammatory rhetoric had gone out unanswered for that.

The best the Democrats can do is expose the Republicans as obstructionists and to sharply define the issues. Every time they speak they must remind voters that a return of the Republicans to power means restoration of the tax cut for the rich and repeal of health care reform.

They should repeatedly remind people how our economy and financial system almost tanked. Most of the lost jobs will not return by 2012. If the GOP regains actual or effective control of Congress, it should be set up for blame when the jobs do not come back in a torrent.

If passage of the Dodd Bill fails after a filibuster, Democrats need to divide the bill into parts and again force votes or filibusters. Reframe the consumer protection section along the lines Elizabeth Warren suggested and force a vote or filibuster.

It is hard to imagine how the GOP could vote against regulating derivatives, but Luntz, the magician, might well pull another rabbit out of his hat.

The biggest problem for Democrats in November 2010 will be reactivating their base. Many loyal Democrats were stunned by the ineptitude of party leaders in 2009 and by all the concessions to Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Given this situation, the Democrats need to change their pusillanimous game plan and start getting combative. Stop making concessions in advance. Even bring up a few improvements to labor law to slow the deterioration of the unions — or at least show they have friends on the Hill. At least add teeth and big fines to anti-collective bargaining practices that are already illegal.

The party might even do something to improve mine safety. They at least need to attach large fines to uncorrected mine safety violations.

Pundits are wed to old ideas, loath to recognize vast changes for the worse in our political process, and absolutely terrified of exposing political lies. Honest columns cost syndication and honest audio commentary reduces television time. The scribes and talking heads are still insisting that independents are likely to punish obstructionists. Maybe, but probably not, this time.

Nothing of the sort can happen as long as the Democrats are wed to the tactics of losers.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. A retired history professor, he also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

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VERSE / Larry Piltz : We’re Focused in Going Forward

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

“Piggy Banker.” Painting © Zina Saunders 2009.

We’re Focused In Going Forward (a song)

We’re focused in going forward
hoping we’re not moving backward
that our dreams are not shattered
and we’re doing things that matter

We have a laser-eye view
of what we surgically need to do
but first we synchronize our attitudes
to increase the odds we’re not that screwed

We’ll strategize our paradigm
to turn this tanker on a dime
then magnetize our money bomb
and incentivize remaining calm

Calm, calm, calm, calm
take a powder take a balm
calm, calm, calm, calm
serenity thy name is Rahm

I yearn to actionize my sweetheart deal
get skin in the game and watch it peel
to hybridize across the board
take a flier and pull the cord

I’ll morally hazard deep cramdowns
and turn the plunge team into clowns
creatively destroy the ranks
of dualistic zombie banks

I’ll deconstruct the stewardship
and ride risk-free the double dip
but why I do this I won’t tell
but two key words are soul and sell

soul, sell, soul, sell
I salivate at the first bell
soul, sell, soul, sell
it’s later that I go to hell

We’re focused in going forward
hoping we’re not ass backward
that our dreams were not hackered
by some spoiled rich cracker
we’re focused in going forward

Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog

Indian Cove
Austin, Texas
April 20, 2010

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Robert Jensen : Holding Ourselves Accountable

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Savage Chickens. Cartoons on Sticky Notes by Doug Savage.

Diversity dead-end:
Inclusiveness without accountability

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / April 20, 2010

After a recent talk on racism and other illegitimate hierarchies at a diversity conference in Dallas, I received a letter from one of the people who had attended that asked “why you feel it necessary to perpetuate and even exacerbate the divisiveness of language when addressing a group of people assembled to learn how to live better together and be more accepting of differences?” He suggested that by being so sharply critical, I was part of the problem not the solution.

Calls for diversity and inclusiveness from people with privilege (such as a white man with a professional job living in the United States) are meaningful only when we are willing to address the systems and structures of power in which inequality and discrimination are rooted. But because such a critique strikes many people as too radical, crafting a response to those who want to avoid that analysis is crucial to the struggle for progressive social change. Below is my letter to him.

Dear ____: Thanks for the note and the challenge to my presentation. It’s clear we disagree, and getting clearer about where we differ is important.

First, I disagree with your suggestion that we should not assess blame for existing patterns of racial inequality and injustice, though I would substitute the word “accountability” for “blame.” I can’t imagine how we could move forward on any question of injustice without holding those responsible for the injustice accountable, which means holding ourselves accountable. This reflects a basic moral principle — those who inflict injuries, or turn away when they see others inflicting injuries, must be accountable for their behavior.

To recognize the injustice, as you do, but then demand that we ignore the patterns at the root of the injustice in order to reach a state of inclusiveness is counterproductive. That simply allows people in positions of power and privilege to escape accountability, which inevitably places the political and psychological burdens on those with less power and privilege. That’s simply not fair.

So, if your suggestion lets white people off the hook and puts the burden on non-white people to cope with the ongoing manifestations of white supremacy, would it not be better for those of us who are white to be accountable? Is that not the base from which real social change becomes possible? I recognize that most white people don’t like that call for accountability, just as most men don’t like the call for accountability when it comes to sexism, for example. But the core values we claim to hold — dignity, solidarity, and equality — require that we not avoid that kind of honesty.

If we do this, as several people suggested in the conference session, many poor and working-class white people will point out that they don’t feel particularly privileged. That’s why we have to connect the struggle against white supremacy to the struggle against economic inequality in capitalism. To raise questions about injustice in our economy isn’t to foment class warfare, as some argue, but is rather to recognize that people with a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth tend to pursue policies to protect that state of affairs. The wealthy engage in class warfare on a daily basis, and hope that those on the bottom will acquiesce.

You suggest that that I “perpetuate and even exacerbate the divisiveness” but I think that misunderstands the nature of the problem. The divisiveness comes from the injustice, not from naming the injustice. People in the United States are divided by the inequality inherent in patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Naming those systems and the inequality they produce isn’t divisive but rather an attempt to understand the systems so that we can change them. Just as we need accountability we also need analysis to make it possible to move toward justice. How can problems be solved if causes are not identified and critiqued?

None of this has anything to do with stereotyping individuals. There is a difference between identifying patterns in how wealth and power are distributed in a society and making unsupported claims about individuals. In analyzing how unconscious and institutionalized racism operate, and then asking white people to be accountable, we are talking about how systems operate. I didn’t claim that all white people are overt racists, for example, but instead talked about how our society is white supremacist in material and ideological terms. That’s an analysis of systems, not stereotyping of individuals.

Finally, I think your hope for “a softening” of my heart misses the point. I don’t have a hard heart, if by that you mean I am bitter or hateful. The work I do is grounded in love, which leads to a rejection of injustice. My heart softened long ago when I began to look honestly at the extent of that injustice and my own complicity in it. To be “part of the solution,” as you urge, demands that we be honest about that injustice. I would challenge you to think about whether by ignoring these patterns of injustice you might be part of the problem.

I do take a bit of offense at one thing you wrote, the claim that I “find great satisfaction in stirring things up,” as if this is all some kind of game that I play for my personal pleasure. I have been actively involved for the past two decades in movements for justice involving sexism, racism, economic inequality, and the barbarism of war. There isn’t a day that I don’t feel a sense of profound grief about the pain that these systems cause.

The luck of the draw left me in a position of relative privilege, which means I escape virtually all of the suffering imposed by those systems. What satisfaction I find in this world comes from trying to be part of movements that struggle for something better. In those efforts, things inevitably get stirred up. I take no particular pleasure in that and wish it could be otherwise. But none of us get to choose the world into which we are born. All we get to choose is how we respond to it.

In my experience, the position you advocate is the one that is neither constructive nor practical. We cannot ignore the systems from which injustice emerges and expect injustice magically to disappear. I agree that our goal is inclusiveness — the recognition that we are one human family in which all have exactly the same standing — but I disagree that we can move toward that by turning away from the painful truths about the broken world in which we live.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); and The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing. Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can also be found online here.]

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Marc Estrin : Endgame (Sam-I’m-Not)

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Endgame. Image from Wired.

SAM-I’M-NOT

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / April 20, 2010

Endgame — that’s us. At every level, checkmate threatens — political, environmental, cultural. Samuel Beckett’s 104th birthday last week brought to mind a chapter I had written in The Education of Arnold Hitler. Arnold, new at Harvard, lands the part of Hamm in a university production of Beckett’s masterpiece, and along with it takes a Beckett class with Stanley Cavell. If you don’t know the play, here’s a good introduction — or a reminder if you do.

Arnold’s spring ‘70 semester consisted primarily of Endgame. His other courses — French, Biology, the History of American Fascism — faded into the background in the intensity of its dark light. Odd as Hamm was, it was easy to “get into” him, so many were the nodes of correspondence. That there was to be “no more pain-killer” was frightening, yet somehow bracing. It meshed with Nell’s observation that “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” And unhappiness seemed to be the name of the human game, as it was of Arnold’s. Hamm asks Clov if his father is dead.

(Clov raises the lid of Nagg’s bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: Doesn’t look like it.
(He closes the lid, straightens up.)
Hamm: What’s he doing?
(Clov raises the lid of Nagg’s bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: He’s crying.
(He closes the lid, straightens up.)
Hamm: Then he’s living.

Then he’s living. If he’s crying, he’s living. What a definition, Arnold thought. For all its weirdness, this may be the most realistic play ever written. “The end is in the beginning.” Surely that must be true. But what would that mean for him? A successful career as some kind of a star? Or the end as in the very beginning, when George né Hitler, accursed progenitor, fornicated between the one and a half legs of Anna Giardini, and created another neighing of the H-name. “Scoundrel!” Hamm cries, “Why did you engender me?”

Nagg: I didn’t know.
Hamm: What? What didn’t you know?
Nagg: That it’d be you.

But he did. George did know. He just didn’t think. And what is he thinking now, my once-father? Two short letters since I’ve been here. Four unanswered. Has he forgotten me?

“We let you cry. Then we moved out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace…

Arnold shuddered in recognition.

For all the joy and labor of nightly work, the highlight of the six weeks was a visit, late in the rehearsal schedule, by Stanley Cavell, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Professor of Philosophy, literary and film critic, and Ruby’s faculty advisor on the Endgame project — her senior thesis. Ruby, along with Ed Gould, her stage manager, took the night “off” to sit around at Cavell’s house with the cast — Arnold S. Held, Hugh Laffler, the physicist dwarf, and Ted Bair, Clov, a slight and wrinkled graduate student at the Divinity School, to discuss the play.

The initial discussion was somewhat diffuse. Cavell, served up some mean hot chocolate on the cold, late February night, and asked the students what they thought about the play. Ruby held back. She and her teacher had already been over her feelings — how Hamm’s highhanded cruelty, Clov’s inability to escape, and Nell and Nagg’s garbage cans reflect a world darkened by the shadow of Auschwitz. Arnold began to speak of the chess aspects, how Hamm’s tour of the stage and return to center is like a king imagining the boundaries of the pathetic nine-square territory he commands. Hugh observed that it was not only the chess pieces against each other, or against God, but Beckett forcing us to play the very game we play against the world all our lives — trying to understand — a game we are invariably fated to lose.

The group talked about the language of the play, the verbal surface of universal disrespect, the dialogue among people barely still human. Were the characters human? Cavell wanted to know. Ed, a biology major, remarked that of the genus Homo, all its species, with one exception, were extinct. If we had the others for comparison, he thought we might see what difference sapiens makes — whether these four qualified. If they did make it, they only barely did so, so mutilated were they by whatever catastrophe they had been through. Ruby felt that the characters were not recently destroyed, but were playing out, in especially visible ways, the eternal limitations of the race.

“All right,” Cavell said, but what does it all mean? What does it show? Where are we? None of this should affect your acting, but where are we?”

“In some kind of shelter,” said Hugh. “A bunker.”

“Maybe after an atomic war,” added Ed. “I’m sure Beckett still remembered those blackout nights during the bombings.”

“And — 1957? — what about duck and cover?” All the students laughed at the atomic attack drills they had done in elementary school.

“It’s possible,” said Cavell. Anything’s possible. That’s the maddening, wonderful thing about the play. No metaphor plays out; there are no neat interpretations that entirely fit. Beckett is a tease and a torturer, negating and contradicting any line you can seize upon. His denial of closure produces some very complex effects.”

“If you frustrate closure, you keep everything open,” Ted insisted. “That’s why I think it’s a fundamentally optimistic piece. Dr. Cavell, do you have Beckett’s Nobel Prize citation from last year? There’s something in there…”

Cavell pulled it from the shelf, and handed it to the young theologian.

“Here,” Ted said. “The Committee gave him the prize for his quote ‘combination of paradox and mystery, containing a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs farther into the depths of abhorrence, a courage of despair, a compassion that has to reach the utmost of suffering to discover that there are no bounds of charity.’”

“I think that’s the only way his sponsors could push it through,” said the dwarf. “You think they would offer a Nobel Prize in despair?”

Arnold listened wide-eyed and vulnerable.

“Wait,” said Cavell. “Let’s go back to the question of where the play takes place.”

“Professor Gilman thinks the shelter is the interior of Hamm’s — or someone’s skull — the two little windows, the greyishness, the id being served by the ego, the repression of memory.” Ruby had taken French lit from Gilman.

“What do you think?” asked Cavell.

“I don’t want to come down in any one place. Trish designed the set exactly as Beckett demanded — no more, no less. A bare interior, two small windows, etc. Non-committal.”

“Well, non-committal is appropriate, given Beckett’s infinite intentions. But I do want to share with you where I think it is and what I think is going on.”

Arnold took out a pad for notes — things that might help his characterization.

“Put that pad away. Nothing I say should affect the acting dynamic you’ve all already discovered. That’s why we had this session so late in the game.”

Cavell paused to refresh the hot chocolates.

“Beckett may want to be inscrutable, but the fact is that his explosion reverberates within the medium of Western culture. So whatever his intention, his work makes all sorts of things jiggle in the soup — and the thing that jiggles most for me is the tale of Noah in Genesis. What do tiny windows, telescopes, ladders and gaffs have in common?”

“They’re all ship-type objects.”

“Exactly. What ship is this? All right. I’ve already said. The Ark. What disaster has just happened?”

“The flood.”

“Where are we now in the world?”

“In the Ark.”

“No. Where is the Ark?”

“One window looks out on land, and the other on water.”

“So?”

“So we’re at some shore. Beached.”

“Who is beached? Who is Ham? One M.”

“One of Noah’s sons.”

“The one who saw him drunk and naked,” added the Divinity Schooler.

“Why did God make the flood?”

“To punish sinful humanity.”

“But what about Noah and his family?”

“They were the remnant — and the animals, too — from which all life was to spring again.”

“Where is Noah? Where is his wife?”

“In the cans?”

“Maybe. What was Noah’s curse on Ham after he saw his father naked?”

“He would have to be a servant to men.”

“No,” said Ted. “That’s what everybody thinks. But if you check, you’ll see that his curse was that Canaan — Ham’s son — would serve.”

“And who is Hamm’s son? Two Ms.”

“Maybe Clov.”

“And what does Clov do?”

“Serve.”

“OK then. A little loose, but a plausible set of reverberations. We’re in the Ark, beached, after the flood — with the destruction of the the entire world outside. Will you grant me this much, so far?”

“Sure,” said Arnold. The rest muttered in agreement.

“Now we get to the interesting part. In Genesis the Lord commanded Noah, father of Ham, to build an ark for pairs of all species to insure the continuance of creation. But here Hamm makes every effort to guarantee that his refuge will support no further life, not even fleas or rats. The play is about an effort to undo, to end something, and in particular to end a curse, the most ordinary curse of man — not so much that he was born and must die, but that he has to justify what comes between — that he is not a beast and not a god: in a word, that he is a man, and alone.

“‘Something is taking its course,’ Clov says.” Arnold didn’t quite know why he offered that. Cavell nodded.

“Something is taking its course. Hamm’s contribution — imitating God — is to see the end of all flesh. But God, unlike Hamm wanted to leave a remnant. Why?”

“Because he couldn’t bear not to be God!” asserted Ruby, the Jewish feminist.

“The answer is unclear,” said Cavell. “To Hamm, as well as to us. What does our Hamm think?”

“He can’t understand why he was chosen,” Arnold responded. “I can’t understand why I was chosen.”

The students took this as a simple donning of character, but Cavell seemed to sense otherwise. “God has reneged on his responsibility,” Arnold continued. “That’s what Hamm thinks.”

“Is that what you think?” asked Ted. The group waited. Arnold was silent.

“My feeling,” said the professor, “is that for Beckett what must end is the mutual dependence of God and the world: this world, animated by its God, must be brought to a conclusion. Hamm’s strategy is to paint the rainbow gray, to undo all covenants and to secure — once and for all — fruitlessness.”

“To perform man’s last disobedience,” Hugh the dwarf injected, taking off on Milton. “What a radical move!”

“To uncreate the world,” Arnold thought, “we’d have to become as gods. If we just stay human, we’ll go on hoping, go on waiting for redemption. What was pictured in Godot. This is really a step beyond.”

“Are you ready for such disobedience?” asked Cavell.

“Why not?” the production’s Clov asked. “It’s what my character says: ‘I can’t be punished any more.’”

Arnold wondered whether he had reached his own limit of punishment. As if in response, Ted, the theologian said,

“The main audience member is God. Beckett’s object is to show God not that he must intervene, or even bear witness to our pain, but that he owes it to us, to our suffering and our perfect faithfulness, to leave forever, to witness nothing more. Not to fulfill, but to dismantle all promises for which we await fulfillment. “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” now means Help me not to believe.” Even Cavell was impressed with Ted’s courageous leap of thought.

“Solitude, emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness, silence,” Ted continued, “ — these are not the givens of Beckett’s characters but their goal, Hamm’s heroic undertaking.”

“Hamm’s problem — my problem — is that where there’s life, there’s hope. I have to be able to kill hope. It’s only middle game.” Arnold seemed determined.

“You get the prize for suffering in this play,” said Ruby, oblivious to Arnold’s track. “What a curse to be singled out like that.”

Arnold: “The end of the world is threatened, redemption is promised — neither is carried through — and we’re left holding the bag. The real earth is blotted out, sealed away by this universal flood of meaning and hope — Splash, splash, splash, always in the same spot in my head. But only a life without hope, a life without meaning, without justification, without waiting…” Here he paused.

“Is free from the curse of God,” Hugh added softly.

Cavell got up and came back with more chocolate as the students stewed in this toxic brew. “How about a life without hot chocolate?” he asked, and quickly realized the inappropriateness of his levity. In self-castigation he sat down.

“Pascal said that all the evil in the world comes from our inability to sit quietly in a room.”

The remark floated in the silence like a pearl onion in hot chocolate — it didn’t quite fit, but it was the last thing everyone sucked on.

[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.]

Endgame. Photo by Donna Bister / The Rag Blog.

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Culture of Abuse : Police Harassment of New Orleans Transgenders

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

New Orleans cops are on the prowl for transgenders. Photo by Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune Archive.

Transgender community in New Orleans
Claims abuse and discrimination by police

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / April 20, 2010

New Orleans’ Black and transgender community members and advocates complain of rampant and systemic harassment and discrimination from the city’s police force, including sexual violence and arrest without cause. Activists hope that public outrage at recent revelations of widespread police violence and corruption offer an opportunity to make changes in police behavior and practice.

On a recent weekday evening, a group of transgender women met in the Midcity offices of Brotherhood Incorporated, an organization that provides healthcare and fights the spread of HIV and AIDS in low-income Black communities. When the conversation turned to the police, the mood in the room turned to outrage, as each woman had a story of harassment and abuse.

Tyra Fields, a health worker who facilitates the meeting, told a story of being arrested without cause one night as she walked into a gay bar. “They never give us a reason they are arresting us,” she says, explaining that being Black and transgendered is often enough reason for arrest, generally on prostitution-related charges.

A young and soft-spoken transgendered woman named Keyasia tells a story of being persecuted by police who followed her as she walked down the street, rushed into her apartment, and arrested her in her own home. “Within the last four or five months, I’ve been to jail eight or nine times,” says Keyasia. “All for something I didn’t do. Because I’m a homosexual, that means I’m a prostitute in their eyes.” Expressing the frustration in the room, she adds, “I want to go to the French Quarter and hang out and have cocktails just like everyone else. Why can’t I?”

Diamond Morgan, another of the women, says she has faced a pattern of harassment from police that begins, she says, “once they discover my transgender status.” She says she has been arrested and sexually assaulted by police and by employees of Orleans Parish Prison, who are part of New Orleans Office of Criminal Sheriff.

She details her own personal experience of assault, and those of friends, adding that Orleans Parish Prison is a site that many women she knows speaks of as especially abusive. She says that sexual assault of transgender women is common at the jail, and other women in the room agree.

Tracy Brassfield, a transgender sex worker activist also attending the meeting, has dedicated herself to fighting against discrimination. Originally from Florida, Brassfield moved to New Orleans because she fell in love with the city. “But when I got here,” she says, “I started running into problems with the police.”

These problems included what Brassfield calls deliberate harassment from officers who she says are targeting Black transgender women not because of any crime they’ve committed, but just because of who they are. “They say, you’re transgendered, you’re a fag, you’re a punk, you’re going to jail,” she says.

Brassfield decided to fight back and organize: “I was raised in an activist family,” she says. “I know my civil rights.” She has contacted local social justice and legal advocacy organizations such as Women With A Vision, Critical Resistance, the ACLU of Louisiana, and the Orleans Public Defenders, seeking allies in her struggle. She has also reached out in the community of transgender women. “My thing is put it out there, get it exposed,” she explains. “This is not just about me, this is about everyone.”

Patterns of violence

Both local and national attention is currently being directed on the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). In recent months, the city has been rocked by revelations of police murder and cover-ups, with the justice department and FBI investigating at least eight separate cases, and signs that the federal government is headed towards a takeover of the department. Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu is engaged in a national search for a new police chief, telling reporters that the department needs “a complete culture change.”

Although the current federal investigations have not looked into police treatment of the Black and transgender community, advocates hope that the justice department will also look into these complaints.

Members of the city’s larger gay community complain about unwarranted arrests and a criminalization of sexuality, with police specifically targeting bars in the gay community. “If a gay man wants consensual sex, the undercover officer lies and says money was offered,” says John Rawls, a gay civil rights attorney who has spent decades in New Orleans fighting on these issues.

Advocates and community members also say that once gay men transgender women are arrested for offering sex, they are more likely than others arrested in similar circumstances to be charged with a “crime against nature,” a felony charge. The law, which dates back to 1805, makes it a crime against nature to engage in “unnatural copulation” — a term New Orleans police and the district attorney’s office have interpreted to mean soliciting for anal or oral sex.

Those who are convicted under this law are issued longer jail sentences and forced to register as sex offenders. They must also carry a driver’s license with the label “sex offender” printed on it. The women’s health care organization Women With A Vision has recently formed a coalition with several advocacy and legal organizations to attempt to fight this use of the sex offender law.

Stories of abuse

Wendi Cooper, a Black and transgender health care worker, was charged under the law almost 10 years ago. Although Cooper only tried prostitution very briefly and has not tried it again since her arrest, she still faces harassment from the police. She is frequently stopped, and when they run her ID through the system and find out about the prostitution charge, they threaten to arrest her again or sometimes, she alleged, they demand sex.

“Police will see that I been to jail for the charge,” she said. “And then they’ll try to have me, forcefully, sexually… One I had sex with, because I didn’t want to go to jail.”

Thinking about her experiences with police over the years, Cooper got quiet. “Sometimes I just wanna do something out the ordinary, and just expose it, you know?” She sighed. “They hurt me, you know? And I just hope they do something about it.”

In response to the allegations of abuse, New Orleans Police Department spokesman Bob Young responded, “Persons are charged according to the crime they commit.” He encouraged anyone with complaints to come file them with the department, adding, “the NOPD has not received any complaints against plain clothes officers assigned to the vice squad.”

The New Orleans Office of Criminal Sheriff did not respond to requests for comment. However, a September 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found that, “conditions at OPP violate the constitutional rights of inmates.”

The DOJ went on to report; “Inmates confined at OPP are not adequately protected from harm, including physical harm from excessive use of force by staff.” And documented “a pattern and practice of unnecessary and inappropriate use of force by OPP correctional officers.”

This included “several examples where OPP officers openly engaged in abusive and retaliatory conduct, which resulted in serious injuries to prisoners. In some instances, the investigation found, the officers’ conduct was so flagrant it clearly constituted calculated abuse.”

Abuse starts at young age

Wesley Ware, a youth advocate at Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, says that harassment against those who are perceived as gay or gender noncomforming begins at a young age, and can include hostility from their parents, fellow students, and often from school staff.

According to Ware, this leads many of these youths to bring weapons to school to defend themselves. “Gay and bisexual boys and young men are four times more likely to carry a weapon to school,” he says. “Of homeless youth, 50% identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Of kids in youth detention, 13% are LGBT.”

Ware adds that many of these youth face an unsympathetic court, including judges who think that they will help “cure” gay youth by sending them to juvenile detention. “Ninety nine percent of the kids in youth detention in New Orleans are black,” adds Ware. “So obviously what were talking about is youth of color.”

“This community is facing systemic discrimination in pretty much every system they deal with,” says Emily Nepon, a staff member of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal organization that fights for transgender racial and economic justice. According to Nipon, women in this community deal with intersecting forms of oppression. “High levels of employment discrimination, housing discrimination, overpolicing, profiling that leads to higher incarceration rates, and higher levels of abuse within prisons.”

Mayor elect Mitch Landrieu calls criminal justice one of his signature issues. But will he be willing or able to change the culture of the New Orleans police? Advocates say change will not come easy. “You can do a million police trainings,” adds Nepon. “But in general, that doesn’t have an impact on rampant police homophobia.”

Many advocates believe federal oversight can make a difference in these patterns of police abuse. They are also pressing for an end to the use of the Crime Against Nature statute, as well as a general shift from charging people with nonviolent offenses. Attorney John Rawls, who is generally supportive of current Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, believes the DA understands that the current use of the sex offender statute invites discrimination.

However, adds Rawls, it will be hard to get his office to stop charging people under the statute. “People who hold powerful offices have many motives, and one of them is they love being powerful,” he says. “Prosecutors get their power from criminal statutes. The more statutes they have, the more ways they can prosecute someone, the more power they have.” If activists are going to challenge this power, they will need to utilize the current public outrage for far-reaching reforms, says Rawls.

Back at the meeting at the Brotherhood Incorporated offices, Brassfield urges women to stand up and fight back. “We need to document,” she says. “What you want to do is illustrate a pattern of harassment and abuse.” She hands out flyers and phone numbers for Women With A Vision, Critical Resistance, and a sympathetic lawyer. “We have to look out for each other,” she says. “I want to organize, just what we’re doing now. The girls got to stick together.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and audiences around the world have seen the television reports he’s produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now. Haymarket Press will release his new book, FLOODLINES: Stories of Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, this summer. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org.]

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Marion Delgado in Colombia : Don Mario’s War

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Don Mario: Colombian police escort Daniel Rendon Herrera at a Bogota airport after his April 2009 arrest. Photo by William Fernando Martinez / AP.

Colombia: Don Mario’s war

By his own account, [his] victims number somewhere around 9,000, but hey, who’s counting? He murdered so many Colombians that he can only guess in round numbers.

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / April 20

AT LARGE IN COLOMBIA — “Don Mario” was on TV during the week of March 21-26. He was making another appearance before Colombia’s Peace and Justice Commission. After Carlos Castaño, Don Mario (nee Daniel Rendon Herrera), is as big a “Mister Big” in the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia) as they come. At one time he controlled most of the cocaine transportation out of Colombia.

The Don swaggered across the TV’s flat screen and into the Commission’s hearing room. At 44 years, he looked good in his Armani suit and of course, his right sleeve was pulled up a little to display his Rolex watch. It is rumored that he wears a new one every day. He stacked 200 million Colombian pesos on the table, paused, turned to smile at the TV cameras, and sat down. La Plata was his down payment on restitution he is required to make to the families of his victims.

By his own account, those victims number somewhere around 9,000, but hey, who’s counting? He murdered so many Colombians that he can only guess in round numbers.

I have mentioned him several times in my dispatches over the last few months, but he was always a bit of a mythical figure. A leader of one of the most powerful AUC blocs, the Urabá or Urabeños, his name came up again and again in my research. The televised hearings, or more appropriately, “The Don Mario Show,” made me want to find out more about who he is and what he had done. I had a good source, Don Mario himself.

The Colombian government put a price on his head, five billion pesos (two and a half million U.S. dollars). Don Mario in turn offered a $1,000 reward for every killed policeman. While his AUC companeros were demobilized, or at least pretended to be, the Don stayed on the run. He was captured in April 2009. But Don Mario, legendary paramilitar, wasn’t finished.

He applied for the amnesty offered under the Peace and Justice Act. If he would make a full “confession” of his crimes, and make restitution to his victims, he would avoid prison in Colombia and be protected from extradition to the U.S. The U.S. Departments of Justice and State have twice requested his extradition, and have been twice refused by the Supreme Court of Colombia.

Don Mario began to tell his story in early November 2009 and, over five- and six-day-long weeks, has continued to confess through mid-March 2010. There are hundreds of pages of testimony, with no English translation yet. It’s a book, bigger than a book. It’s way too big to blog, so I have extracted his account of one time, in one place, with all the players, that tells the story of one part of Don Mario’s war. It’s his story, but some of it I got from Human Rights Watch, NACLA, and other NGO’s, from the UN Commission on Human Rights, and some from the stories filed with the Commission by the unwilling participants, the Colombian people. It was their war more than it was Don Mario’s

The time and place

In little more than a few months between late 2003 and early 2004, about 3,000 people, including civilians and combatants, were killed in Casanare, a Department, or state, in eastern Colombia rich with oilfields across rolling, fertile plains.

Two paramilitary factions, supposedly created to combat rebel guerrillas, fought each other for control of drug trafficking, oil royalties, and thousands of hectares of land in Casanare in a paranoiac, hellish war that left thousands of victims, a war still very much a secret even in Colombia.

In this chilling war of deceit, paranoia, and greed, even children paid the ultimate price.

Martin Llanos’ war in los llanos (plains) of Casanare

Very little is known of the war in Casanare. Several different factions of paramilitaries clashed not only with Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — Ejército del Pueblo (FARC or FARC-EP; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — Peoples Army) rebels, but among themselves.

Many paramilitaries who committed crimes in this Department never participated in the process of demobilization of the AUC. Many of the protagonists have died, or are fugitives.

Drug boss and paramilitary chief Hector Buitrago, alias “Martin Llanos,” refused to demobilize and is still wanted in connection with crimes committed by his group. Miguel Arroyave, alias “Archangel,” was later killed by his own men. Pedro Oliverio Guerrero Castillo, alias “Cuchillo,” went into hiding but was captured in March 2010.

The plains inhabitants, the Casanareños, witnessed a massacre in which even children were killed, as hundreds of civilians and paramilitaries clashed with each other.

In his testimony, as part of the Peace and Justice Law, Don Mario said the man responsible for the war was emerald trader Victor Carranza; however, Carranza’s motives for such scheming remain obscure.

“Carranza spoke with Miguel (Arroyave) about Martin (Llanos), and from there I realized that he was using Miguel to alienate Martin. I think he did the same with Martin,” said Don Mario. He said Carranza sowed discord between the two paramilitary leaders, telling each one that the other wanted to kill him.

The war was costly, not only for the population it ravaged, but on the pocketbooks of the combatants. According to Don Mario, within a month the Centaurs Bloc of the AUC spent about U.S. $7 million for the war. On one day of fighting, his men used 100,000 rounds of ammunition at a cost of U.S. $200,000, said the former paramilitary, chief financial officer of the Centaurs until mid-2004.

One combatant said the war with Llanos made Archangel distrust everyone, even his own men. Many were killed on “suspicion” alone.

Few in this region dare speak about the months-long massacre even now. What is agreed is that for decades illegal armed groups had fought for a slice of the pie in Casanare: oil, timber, agriculture, and illicit coca crops.

Emerald trader Victor Carranza. Photo from El Espectador.

The back story

The war in Casanare began about mid-1986, when Buitrago/Llanos organized a paramilitary group, the “Buitragueños,” to fight guerrillas. The group operated in Casanare, Meta, and part of the Ariari subregion, which irked Pirabán Manuel de Jesus, aka “Pirata,” and Guerrero/“Cuchillo” of the Centaurs.

One villager knowledgeable of the Buitragueños expansion said that Buitrago/Llanos joined with the Ramirez and Feliciano families, both large landowners, and began setting up cocaine processing labs in Monterrey and Tauramena Aguazul. They also began murdering people by the hundreds. Local cattle ranchers, big supporters of the AUC for protecting their grazing lands, gave the paramilitaries ranches from which to mount their operations.

Besides engaging in counterinsurgency against the guerrillas, Buitrago’s forces intimidated and forced entire villages to become complicit in covering up drug trafficking activities.

“They collected people in the parks, locked down students in their classes, and told people not to leave their houses because of alleged danger of subversive guerrilla activity, but the fact is they wanted people ‘locked away’ so they wouldn’t see the trucks loaded with paramilitaries or with chemicals to process the cocaine. It was all a big lie because the guerrilla presence wasn’t seen in Monterrey,” said a former Casanare municipal official.

The Buitragueños did not limit themselves to fabricating guerrilla threats. After 1995, they began a systematic campaign to seize land with oil fields and to evict farmers from exploration areas.

“From Monterrey to Tauramena Aguazul, they came to farms and cattle ranches. ‘Sign or die,’ they said to landowners regarding deeds and titles. Threats, or worse, were also offered to girls who did not succumb to advances. They were raped or banished if they did not sleep with them,” says a person who lived in the area.

The prosecutor and judges of Villavicencio finally launched a conspiracy investigation against Buitrago/Llanos, resulting in his incarceration. He later escaped.

While Buitrago/Llanos consolidated power south and north of Casanare, the Autodefensas Campesinas del Casanare (ACC), paramilitaries aligned with Carlos Castaño, began to move into parts of Guaviare and Meta Departments.

Castaño, a founder and one-time leader of the AUC who was later killed by his own men, came to Casanare with members of the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá (ACCU) and killed over 50 people near Meta in 1997.

The slaughter was supported by the ACC. But soon a feud developed between the Martin Llanos group and the Castaño paramilitaries. This deepened with the slaughter of 11 members of a judicial commission investigating a land dispute in October, 1997. That massacre, ordered by Llanos, offended Castaño.

By this time, Castaño forces had pushed into Casanare and Arauca Departments, clashing with FARC and Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN; the National Liberation Army) guerrillas.

With Castaño’s entrance into his turf, Llanos began to feel threatened.

Departamento de Casanare, Colombia. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

The war gets crazier

Ex-fighters said Llanos began to step up extortion, killing farmers to seize land, and exerting political pressure to remain in control of Casanare.

“Llanos was going crazy. He did not allow anyone within 30 feet of him, and if he suspected someone would turn him in, they would be tortured and later assassinated. Several youths were killed and returned to their families in black plastic bags. Dozens of his men were executed like this in Puerto Lopez, on mere suspicion,” said residents who saw the corpses.

Llanos’ paranoia drove him to kill people close to him, such as Victor Feliciano Alfonso; his wife, Martha Nelly Chavez; Juan Manuel Feliciano Chavez; and four other family members in February 2000. Only Victor Francisco Feliciano was left alive; he denied any family ties to drug trafficking.

Llanos began to lose control of the northern department, especially Yopal, where the population was caught in the crossfire.

In April 2001 about 15,000 people protested the violence. Traders, farmers, civilians, and politicians shook off their fear and called for an end to warfare under banners saying, “Our silence fills the graves of the plains with Casanareños.”

However, fighting intensified until an average of 10 people per week were being killed, although police recorded that in the first quarter of 2001 there were “only” 85 murders. Police statistics differ deeply from reports of the Ombudsman, according to whom, between 1997 and the first three months of 2001, there were 31 massacres, of which 12 were in Yopal in the first months of 2001.

During April 2001, 2,404 farmers were also displaced. Still, authorities described Casanare as “a haven of peace.”

In April, 2001, Martin Llanos called forced meetings of ordinary citizens, from taxi drivers to teachers, to try to influence electoral campaigns. In one meeting, 200 teachers came to Monterey, where the paramilitary leader declared, “Those who vote for the Democratic candidates or for Horacio Serpa should assume [there will be] consequences,” said one teacher who attended the meeting, now a refugee in Villavicencio.

“He came in a small helicopter they called ‘the wasp,’ greeted former classmates from the Joint Normal School in Monterrey, recalled their days as students, and even became remorseful. He spoke for about 15 minutes, turned, and left,” said the teacher.

The paramilitaries’ infighting in Casanare also produced divisions within the ACC’s southern and northern factions, the latter commanded by Luis Eduardo Ramirez Vargas, alias “HK”, killed by Bogotá police in December 2005.

The beginning of the end

Miguel Arroyave/“Archangel” shared power in the Centaurs Bloc with Carlos Castaño and his brother Vicente in early 2002. At that same time, Miguel Angel and Victor Manuel Mejia Munera shared power in the Arauca Vencedores Bloc. These groups eventually formed an alliance against Martin Llanos in Meta, Casanare, and Arauca.

Castaño’s forces did not know the terrain and at first took a beating from Llanos’ men.

Videos circulating in Monterrey, recorded by members of the ACC in the area, showed fighting between the two sides in rural areas of Mapiripan. The images revealed rotting bodies, abandoned military equipment, and machine gun crossfire between ragtag groups of terrified youths of African descent, in panicked, leaderless flight.

After these initial defeats, Castaño sent reinforcements from the Centaurs, Central Bolívar (BCB), and St. Martin Blocs, and quickly gained numerical superiority.

Llanos’ forces were reduced to 300. Castaño’s men pushed them north of Casanare.

According to some Monterrey survivors, the Colombian Air Force helped out with bombing raids. A former Centaurs commander said Miguel Arroyave had asked a senior air force officer to help stop Llanos.

Surrounded and demoralized, Llanos dug in near El Tropezón, a few miles from Puerto Lopez. There his forces took a stand until the air force bombings.

Decimated then, Llanos began “recruiting” in the capital districts of Ciudad Bolivar, Soacha, Kennedy, Bosa, and Suba, and in the Morichal district of Villavicencio. His remaining forces took 30 children by force there.

“People had to leave the sidewalks of Caribayona and El Pinal, because they tricked or forced children as young as 12 years old into their ranks,” said the mother of one of those children, who later rescued him from the mountains and fled to another city.

A fourteen-year-old member of the AUC in Medellín.Photo © 2002 Marcelo Salinas / Human Rights Watch.

The horror of teenagers inside the ACC

“Those caught crying were killed in front of others. And if someone fell asleep on watch, a worse fate fell upon them,” said the family of another minor arrested in a military action and sent to a reform institution.

Skirmishes between the competing paramilitaries lasted until early 2004. One battle in February that year lasted for five days at Caribayona, near Villanueva. In that confrontation, more than 140 paramilitaries from both sides were killed, and about 20 farmer-soldiers were killed near Villanueva during Archangel’s eventual retreat.

“In the combat zone, superiors asked their troops, some of them children, if they were tired. If they responded affirmatively, they were shot. So were the wounded that arrived in Puerto Lopez and Monterrey. They asked the nurses which paramilitaries had serious wounds. They were rounded up in a single place and then a fighter would toss in a grenade, or they were simply shot,” eyewitnesses testified.

Fighting continued between Villanueva, Monterrey, and Tauramena.

“Finally, Castaño’s men overtook the fighters loyal to Llanos, whom many said had made a pact with the devil. Prisoners were shoved into a corral, given only one meal a day, and every week one was beheaded. There were guys who painted their nails black and lined up to drink the blood of the victims,” said another woman whose daughter lived for a time with one of Llanos’ men.

In July 2004, the Colombian army secured El Tropezón and captured ACC fighters on the outskirts of Monterrey. The crows were fattened on those who fell in this battle.

In a single day in Puerto Lopez, 30 child soldiers died, and in Tauramena 20 others were killed near La Candelaria. Their bodies, pulled by tractors, were cast into the river Metada with their stomachs cut open so they would sink.

Fighting led to displacement of civilians in Las Delicias, El Yari, El Retorno, El Tranquero, and everywhere the forces of Llanos and Castaño met. About 30,000 people were forced to leave La Tronca de la Selva. Many protested because the Army did nothing to stop the violence.

When the end was near, Martin Llanos fled with a guard of 10 men and 70 children from Bogotá, Villavicencio, and around the region. The children were used as human shields to cover the paramilitary leader’s flight.

Days later, on September 26, the Colombian government said in a statement that 79 men of the ACC had been killed. Many fighters surrendered and others were captured, but Llanos, wounded, fled to Ecuador. He then moved on to Brazil, and later to the border between Colombia and Venezuela, from where he still sends threats and warnings of revenge to enemies in Monterrey.

Although hundreds of paramilitary units of the Casanare Centaurs demobilized, they have been replaced by resurgent groups and remnants of the Urabeños, Carlos Castaño’s original bloc that only pretended to demobilize. They now operate side by side, still protecting the cocaine trade, old wars forgotten…but not old war stories.

Don Mario is cleansed

Don Mario, who was paymaster of the Centaur Bloc and “inherited” the leadership when Castaño was murdered, checked his Rolex. He’d had enough storytelling for the day.

Despite his participation in the Casanare wars and the murder of 9,000 Colombians there and elsewhere, he has finished telling all of his stories, paid a paltry sum in restitution, and will now go free.

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Bay of Pigs Invasion : Blows up in Kennedy’s Face

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Cuban cigar: Bay of Pigs invasion blows up in JFK’s face. Cartoon by Leslie Gilbert Illingworth (1902-1979) / Illingworth Collection / National Library of Wales.

Decades of foreign policy folly:
Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion

The Bay of Pigs fiasco suggests that U.S. foreign policy decision-makers almost always misjudge the will of the people who would be subjected to military action.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 19, 2010

I was a student at the University of Illinois during the 1960-61 academic year. Like so many of my generation, I was modestly curious about the Cuban Revolution which had occurred a year earlier. I worked in the cloak room of the student union with two fellow students who were counterrevolutionary Cubans. We argued all the time about the revolution. If only Castro would hold elections they said, we would support whatever candidates prevailed.

I had read a short piece in The Nation during the fall of 1960 warning of a group of anti-Castro Cubans training for a military intervention. I had put that out of my mind until my fellow cloak room workers began to talk in February 1961 about “something (that) was going to happen.”

I also remembered going to a student organized panel on Cuba that included my cloak room colleagues and other counterrevolutionaries. There was one student (the panel had seven participants as I remember) who defended the revolution. It was clear that the defender of the revolution was not liked by the others.

I went to work on April 17, 1961, to discover that I would be covering the cloak room alone. It seems that one of my Cuban colleagues scheduled to work with me that day had gotten in his car and driven to Miami, apparently ready to join the second wave of what became known in the U. S. as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

On that day 1,400 anti-Castro Cubans invaded Cuba at a place known as Playa Giron. Days before air attacks on Cuban airfields were carried out by unmarked U.S. planes, but President Kennedy chose not to provide air support when the invasion occurred because the world would think the U.S. was behind the invasion.

The invasion, planning for which began in the Eisenhower Administration, was cooked up by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA argued that once an invading force landed on the island, the Cuban people would rise up to overthrow the new government. I personally experienced the folly of that assumption when I saw my cloak room Cuban friend return to work about three days later. By the time he reached Miami by car the invasion had been crushed. There was no spontaneous uprising.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of 49 years ago is commemorated every year in the municipalities of La Habana province. One report refers to this year’s celebration as marking “the first defeat of imperialism in the Americas.”

Historical research makes it clear that the United States was opposed to the revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara well before the revolutionaries marched into Havana in January 1959. When Eisenhower realized that Fulgencio Batista was vulnerable to defeat, the president desperately sought a replacement who would not threaten U.S. banking, tourist, and sugar interests on the island.

President Eisenhower, deeply troubled by Castro’s victory, refused to meet with the Cuban leader when he came to the United States in April 1959. Over the next two years U.S. and Cuban actions and reactions deepened the hostility between the superpower and the island nation. These included the opening of Cuban relations with the Soviet Union, the refusal of U.S. oil companies to refine Soviet oil, and the Cuban seizure of the refineries. Dramatically, the U.S. ended the purchase of Cuban sugar and Cuba responded by nationalizing U.S. banks and other businesses on the island.

In March 1960 Eisenhower directed the CIA to begin planning for an invasion of the island carried out by counterrevolutionary Cubans. The Eisenhower team had successfully ousted from power both Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemalan President Jacob Arbenz in 1954. He probably thought a move on Cuba could lead to a similar success.

When President Kennedy assumed office in 1961, the CIA presented the new president with the Bay of Pigs invasion plan. During the fall 1960 presidential campaign Kennedy had criticized his presidential opponent, Richard Nixon, for allowing Communism to come to Cuba. So JFK’s support of the invasion was no surprise.

When JFK brought the CIA plot to an early April meeting of the National Security Council, almost no one felt free to raise questions about the plot (even though State Department polls indicated the overwhelming support the revolution had among the Cuban people). The National Security Council endorsed the plot.

After the failure Fidel Castro declared Cuba a Socialist state and President Kennedy declared that the U.S. would not rest until the Cuban regime was ousted from power. Kennedy fully institutionalized the economic blockade against Cuba that still exists today.

Revisiting the Bay of Pigs invasion after 49 years suggests some historic features of U.S. foreign policy and decision-making style.

First, as admirably described by Stephen Kinzer in Overthrow, the United States had been engaging in efforts to undermine and overthrow independent governments around the world, and particularly in the Western Hemisphere, ever since it took Hawaii in the 1890s. In fact, the Cuban revolution of 1898 against Spanish colonialism was usurped by U.S. forces followed by a full-scale occupation of the country, then indirect economic and political domination, lasting until 1959. The U.S. imperial vision regarding Cuba goes as far back as the era of the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson, among others, had declared that Cuba ought to be part of the United States.

Second, as so many accounts of U.S./Cuban relations suggest, the interests of the Cuban people never figured in U.S. policy toward the island. The economic blockade and diplomatic embargo of the island has amounted to a 50 year effort to strangle, not only the regime, but the Cuban people. Others must be forced to sacrifice for the U.S. imperial agenda.

Finally, the Bay of Pigs fiasco suggests that U.S. foreign policy decision-makers almost always misjudge the will of the people who would be subjected to military action. Ruling classes, by their very nature, are unable to understand the interests, passions, and visions of the great masses of people. The director of the CIA and other members of the President’s inner circle were incapable of understanding that the Cuban people supported their revolution so they ignored State Department polling data.

The United States continues to make these mistakes virtually everywhere.

[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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Teabaggers Notwithstanding : Reform Mostly a Flop

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Sophisticated analysis of health care reform by Atlanta teabagger, Aug. 15, 2009. Photo by Joeff Davis / Creative Loafing.

Still not so good:
Reflecting on health care reform

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / April 19, 2010

After a period of relaxation and reflection my attention returned to the recent health care legislation.

Two recent TV programs stirred me up. First, a poll on MSNBC’s The Ed Show found that 96% of those responding feared that the irrational hate mongering by the right wing zealots and their militia associates would in the near future bring violence upon the United States

Second, PBS’s Frontline showed how the Obama administration acceded to the wishes and dictates of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries in crafting its ludicrous health care legislation

Ed’s poll results on MSNBC fit my own feelings about the obvious drift of our nation and the paradox of the teabaggers and their kin violently demonstrating against their own best interests, naively bending to the propaganda fueled with the financial support of Charles and David Koch, billionaire sons of Fred Koch, who in 1958 founded the John Birch Society.

This brings to mind words written at an earlier time, in another country:

“The art of leadership consists of consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up this attention… The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category. Tell big lies. Do not hesitate or stop for reservations. The masses are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional natures than consciously, and thus fall victims to the big lie rather than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

Vehemence persuades the masses — the louder the statement the more plausible it seems — and passion convinces them. The masses always respond to compelling force… Since they have only a poor acquaintance with abstract ideas their reactions lie more in the domain of the feelings, where the roots of their positive as well as their negative attitudes are implanted.” — Mein Kampf, 1923

I will not once again attempt to psychoanalyze the frightening antics of the Tea Party movement and their claque since this has been done so well in recent articles on The Rag Blog by Sherman DeBrosse (here and here) and by Harry Targ. I am always intrigued by the vitriolic rebuttals appearing in the comments following such articles written by the Faux News crowd, who are too cowardly to sign their names.

As to the health care legislation, which more aptly is a half-assed attempt at health insurance reform, rational folks keep wondering about the antipathy to this legislation from the Republican Party. This is difficult to comprehend, since it is a near mirror image of the extremely flawed Massachusetts health care legislation passed during the tenure of then Republican Governor Mitt Romney.

Why are the critics so paranoid about legislation that gave the health insurance industry exactly what they wanted: compulsory enrollment of all Americans in private, profit making, insurance plans, and no public option to provide competition to the private insurers.

Further, it guaranteed the continued profitability of the pharmaceutical industry through behind the scenes negotiations with the White House. In all 2000-plus pages of the legislation there is little that specifically deals with health care per se, as the hearings on the bill very carefully excluded the folks actually involved in the health care scenario — the patients and their physicians.

There could have been true health care reform if Congress had instead passed the30-page HR 676, the legislation proposed by the 17,000 member Physicians for a National Health Program and their hundreds of supporting professional and patient oriented organizations.

There is little to indicate that the health care legislation will make the United States once again a world leader in care of our sick and disabled. The British Medical Journal on March 30 published an article By David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler entitled “Obama’s reform: no cure for what ails us,” that was also published on the PNHP web site.

And even The Council on Foreign Relations published a critical piece by Senior Fellow for Global Health, Laurie A. Garrett, called “Health Care Reform: Global Impressions.”

It appears that the general public hasn’t the vaguest idea of what is included in the bill. The U.S. Census mailings were preceded, in what my opinion, was an unnecessary mailing telling me that I would be getting a census form. If the powers-that-be in Washington can fund such seemingly useless but clearly expensive mailing, why cant Health and Human Services underwrite a nationwide explaining in simple language the legislation and its benefits.

Perhaps such information would undercut the prevailing foolishness spewing from the propaganda machines of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Heritage Foundation, Faux News, and the like, that the legislation is “socialist,” and places bureaucrats between patients and their doctors. It appears that only the opponents of the Obama Administration are capable of providing the general public with information about such matters, even if it is inaccurate.

It is past time that the Democrats awaken and try and repair some of the damage done to their progressive base before the November elections.

The health care legislation does little or nothing to control costs of health care. (As a matter of fact, if Massachusetts is an example, health care costs will rise.)

Congress did not place the health insurance companies under the anti-trust law, nor did they enact mandatory health insurance price controls as are present in Germany or Switzerland where universal health insurance is provided by a regulated private insurance industry.

The current legislation does, in fact, do some positive things. It provides dependent coverage in individual and group health plans for young adults under aged 26. There is a prohibition on individual and group plans from imposing lifetime limits on the dollar value of benefits. It is required that health care plans offering individual health insurance policies must cover certain preventive services and immunizations.

It creates a temporary high-risk pool to cover people with preexisting conditions, with individuals and small groups buying coverage through state-based health insurance exchanges beginning in 2014. There is a minimal benefit in payment to primary care physicians; however, there is little included to induce medical school graduates to undertake primary care and thus slow down the increasing shortage of primary care physicians..

The law further prohibits private “Medicare Advantage” plans from charging enrollees more than original Medicare for certain services, including chemotherapy administration and skilled nursing care, but not until 2011. At the same time certain deductibles and coinsurance services will be eliminated as was recommended by the U.S. Preventive Task Force. No other benefits will come into effect until 2013 0r 2014. There will be gradual closure of the doughnut hole under Medicare Part D through 2020.

Meanwhile, it is worthy of note that, in Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh’s Highmark, Inc. (Blue Cross/Blue Shield) reported total revenues at $13.7 billion, up about $700 million over 2008. The region’s dominant health insurer also makes a point — as it does each year — to show that its net income margin of 1.4% is well below that of the nations largest insurers, such as Aetna, Cigna, and Well-Point.

The company’s surplus is now up to $3.4 billion, while total health insurance membership dropped slightly — from 4.8 million members to 4.7 million. Thus, it should be noted that many premiums increased 50% this year.

One of the more bizarre contentions about health care reform – and one that has stirred up paranoia – is the rumor that patients will be implanted with microchips. This has been thoroughly debunked.

I fear for my country. My ancestors have been here since the early 1700s. They settled in Western Pennsylvania and were active at the Battle of Bushy Run in the French and Indian War. They were prominent historically throughout the ensuing years, including the founding of Pershing Park outside of Latrobe, Pa, in honor of a cousin of my grandmother’s cousin Gen. John Pershing.

I came on board in 1921 and have witnessed nearly a century. Never have I been so apprehensive about my daughter’s and her husband’s future, and those of my grandson and his wife, as we view the increasing elimination of the middle class and the steady move toward a regime dominated by the far right.

We are hearing the voices of hate and intolerance, as we become ever more subservient to the international corporations. We are rapidly becoming a society in which the very rich dominate the very poor — who, in their misery, do not give a damn.

In short we approach the status of a Third World nation, with the haves totally dominating the have nots.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, lives in Erie, PA. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform.]

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Posted on April 18, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

See How Easily You Can Control Glucose Level to Prevent Diabetes

By Kristina V. Ridley / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2010

Our pancreas is affected by diabetes — specifically, Type 2. Our body contains glucose found in the blood stream, which it gets from the sugar in food. Our body uses the glucose, but only when it goes into our blood cells and the insulin released by our pancreas converts it. Insulin production and utilization is difficult for someone who lives with Type 2 diabetes. There is a lot of glucose in the body, but your cells cannot locate it.

When it comes to this medical condition, the American Diabetes Association plays a big role in amassing important information. Our country is considered to be an unhealthy one because 23.6 million of the populace has been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes has at least an indirect effect on 90 percent of the populace. Diabetic people (who are also somewhat overweight), unsurprisingly have relatives who also possess the same condition. The presence of too much glucose in your body could lead to irreparable damage to both the internal organs and the entire nervous system as well.

Living with diabetes

The easiest and the most efficient way to treat your Type 2 diabetes is through healthy living practices on a daily basis. Among these practices include eating healthy and engaging in exercise. These healthy practices, performed regularly, will have an enormous lasting and positive effect on you. To avoid health complications, many doctors recommend that you ensure that the glucose levels in your body are within the appropriate range.

The blood glucose level in your body can easily be monitored simply by using the finger prick test. Such a test is as good as an HbA1c test when it comes to checking and tracking your glucose fluctuations. With this test, it is possible to determine the levels of glycated hemoglobin in your body — and to know if the glucose levels are on the high side. The average level which diabetics maintain, as per the A1c test results, is at seven percent. A 40% reduction in the possibility of developing risks is possible if people simply ensure that their a1c levels are kept at seven percent.

Being overly controlled

One of these studies, conducted at the Lancet and Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, has found that people who have median levels may be at a far greater risk of death, especially for those taking insulin. However, other tests have indicated that A1c levels of 7 percent is still perfectly healthy. Matt Davies, An accredited Endocrinologist, has stated that maintaining a 7% A1c level is healthy according to recent studies, but that physicians should always take the individual patient’s history into account prior to planning treatment.

About the Author – Kristina V. Ridley writes on precision glucose meter , her personal hobby blog focused on helping people get free information to prevent diabetes and test blood glucose at home.

Type rest of the post here

Source /

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Harvey Wasserman : Will Climate Bill Nuke Earth Day?

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Art from 1946 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. “Plus 3 Seconds,” watercolor by Grant Powers, 1946 / Naval Historical Center.

Earth Day 2010:
Will climate bill be a nuclear bomb?

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2010

The Climate Bill is due on Earth Day.

By all accounts it will be a nuclear bomb.

It will be the ultimate challenge of the global grassroots green movement to transform it into something that can actually save the planet.

For the atomic power industry, the bill will cap a decade-long $640-million-plus virtual cleansing of its radioactive image.

It will have the Obama Administration and Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) embracing very substantial taxpayer subsidies for building new nuclear plants.

Ditto new offshore drilling and “clean coal.” The markers have been laid for a greenwashed business-as-usual approach toward pretending to deal with global climate change and the life-threatening pollution in which our corporate power structure is drowning us. All without actually threatening certain corporate profits.

From “An Inconvenient Truth” to Obama’s impending Earth Day address, the official emphasis is on each of us, as individuals. To be sure, we ALL must consume smarter, use less and recycle more. Since the first Earth Day, all these great green ideas have had an undeniable impact.

Some corporations have also learned that pollution is by definition a form of waste, and that to actually go green is to become more profitable.

But some technologies and fuel sources have proved simply unworkable on a survivable planet. Topping the list is atomic power.

Once sold as “too cheap to meter,” atomic reactors are too expensive to matter — except for massive taxpayer subsidies.

The first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957. Since then, the industry has failed to solve its radioactive waste problem, failed to find meaningful private liability insurance, and failed to find unsubsidized private financing for new reactors.

The handouts in the Climate Bill are sorry testimony to all that. But there’s more.

All reactors are indefensible targets for terror and error. As at Fermi, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island, the potential for disaster is apocalyptic.

All reactors kill nearby living things — human and otherwise — from “normal” radiation releases.

All reactors also emit substantial toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases in mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, transportation, waste storage, and other related operations.

Reactors in France, Alabama, and elsewhere which have been forced shut because they super-heat rivers and lakes — all in the name of “fighting global warming.”

Selling the falsehoods that atomic energy is “carbon free,” successful in France and can “fight climate change” has been dirty and expensive.

Along the way, the industry has hired a bevy of flacks with marginal green credentials.

But on Earth Day we’ll see its crowning achievement.

Already the Administration has pledged $8.33 billion in loan guarantees to fund a double-reactor project in Georgia. The designs have not yet been certified, the price tag is soaring, there’s bitter debate over where the cash will come from and what fees should be attached, and the state’s ratepayers are on the hook even if the plant never generates electricity.

But the Administration wants more than $50 billion in loan guarantees to repeat the process elsewhere. Kerry-Lieberman-Graham have toyed with even bigger subsidies, in various forms, ranging to $100 billion and more.

Offshore drilling and “clean coal” also seem poised for new handouts.

It’s not clear what the Earth gets in exchange. Cap and trade, once the centerpiece of the whole deal, is gone. A carbon tax does not seem to be on the table. There will certainly be subsidies for various Solartopian technologies, and a headline-grabbing “surprise” or two.

But exactly what the barons of fossil/nuke will offer to justify their massive cash infusions is not yet clear.

All that’s certain is that this Earth Day, the Climate Bill will jack the debate to a whole new level.

Given soaring global carbon levels and a wasteful, obsolete economic infrastructure in serious decline, we are clearly at the precipice.

The Administration, the Congress and the country will have to decide: will we continue to subsidize failed atomic technologies and catastrophic fossil mining and drilling whose corporate backers have apparently unlimited funds for lobbying and PR?

Or do we finally turn to the truly green technologies and ways of living that can save both our planet and our economy?

The final battle starts Thursday. The outcome is up to us.

[Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with The Last Energy War. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and senior editor of www.freepress.com, where this article also appears.]

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