American Health Care : A Plague on the Sick and Infirm

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from The Seattle Times.

Reform coming to a vote:
The Black Death and health care in America

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / March 17, 2010

In October of 1347 a ship docked in Messina, Sicily, after picking up cargo at the Black Sea port of Sarai. Many of the crew were found dead and most of those alive were near death.

The Black Death had arrived in Europe and was subsequently to spread throughout the continent, killing thousands.

We in the United States may be facing a similar crisis when we look at the estimated 45,000 deaths a year due to a lack of health insurance — and the great likelihood that these deaths will increase exponentially in years to come, as our health care system continues to fail and poverty increases.

Complicit in the impending tragedy are the Republican Party and such Democratic religious zealots as Rep. Bart Stupak, who has been doing his best to kill any health care legislation if restrictions on the legal medical procedure of abortion are not included.

Joining in this assault on the health and well being of the American people is the representative from my local Congressional district, who takes his reactionary stance despite this area having the highest poverty rate in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The matter of caring for our sick, our disabled, and our elderly should not be confused with a centuries-long debate about the viability of a fetus. This controversy, which dates back to the 4th Century CE, has no relevance to the care of the impaired and destitute.

In 380 CE the Apostolic Constitutions allowed abortion if it was done early enough in pregnancy. On the other hand St. Hippolytus, St. Basil the Great, St. Ambrose, and St. John Crysotom taught that life begins at conception, while St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas felt that life in utero only begins with “animation” of a fetus, i.e. the time of “quickening.”

The discussion was terminated by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 when he as ultimate arbitrator prohibited all procedures that directly killed the fetus, even if done to save a woman’s life. Of course the papacy has frequently erred, condemning and excommunicating Galileo and Copernicus for example. Errors occur when we deal with theological abstractions rather than scientifically verifiable truths.

I am sure that those folks who feel that the earth is flat and was created 6,000 years ago, that the sun revolves around the earth, that the species did not evolve, and that climate change is a myth, will take exception. So be it; however, we are still facing the problem of creating a health care system in the United States that can compare with those in the rest of the Western world. Where are we with that debate?

For a non-parliamentarian the Kafkaesque maneuvering within the House and Senate can become totally incomprehensible. As our readers know, I am a strict believer in a single payer/universal system as proposed by Physicians for a National Health Plan. I also feel that the Senate bill is a terrible bit of legislation. I am a great admirer of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, and agree with his decision this week to vote for the legislation, if with great reluctance.

I, too, feel that I am forced into supporting the legislation, provided the final version finally puts the health insurance industry under anti-trust legislation, controls insurance costs and the rights of the insured, and provides the right of the individual states to enact their own health care plans, including single payer.

Ezra Klein quoted Sen. Bernie Sanders in The Washington Post: “Quite frankly we don’t have the votes for single payer. That is not much of a surprise, but right now we have language in the bill that says that states that want to go forward with single payer can do that.”

He is talking about the Waiver for State innovation, which allows states to go their own way if they have a plan that will achieve the goals of the bill at a lower cost. The health care bill will create a basic, near-universal system across the country. If individual states think they can do better, they’re welcome to try. And if they succeed, you can imagine those reforms spreading quickly to other states, too.

Happily there is proposed legislation in Pennsylvania designed to institute a single payer system, thus providing universal coverage and reducing costs for individuals, employers, and municipalities. At the same time it will provide malpractice relief for physicians, allow the physician to act as his/her own agent, and offer a long lacking sense of security for Pennsylvania residents. Our governor indicates he will sign it if passed, unlike the Republican governors in California and Connecticut who vetoed single payer bills.

As we enter the home stretch in the Washington debate I found a March 7 New York Times editorial to be very relevant. It provides a useful overview, especially addressing what might lie in store for us if passage fails.

The Springfield News Leader carried an interview with Andy Dalton about his recent trip to Canada where he visited several families and discussed the health care system. Their reactions were unanimously positive. One lady said, “I just don’t get it! Why wouldn’t you want health care for all of your citizens?”

He had a conversation with a primary care physician who had practiced in the United States and now practices in Canada and is affiliated with a large hospital. She feels the standard of care for patients is much higher in Canada than in the U.S. And her income is better in Canada as well.

Mr, Dalton asked about waiting time for specialist referrals and was informed that it might take 3-4 months for elective surgery, but that necessary or emergency treatment involved no delay. All her patients were extremely satisfied with their single payer system. Mr. Dalton adds that he personally is under a government sponsored system here in the United States, called Medicare, and that it works for him.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks was diagnosed with cancer while in Australia. Writing in the Daily Beast, she says that being diagnosed within Australia’s “socialized medicine system” saved her life.

I have discussed in prior Rag Blog postings the problems created by the Medicare Advantage programs. Philip Rucker further addresses this issue in an article entitled “The Hidden Costs of Medicare Advantage” in The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, returning to my analogy at the beginning of the article, the following comes from Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. During a subsequent smaller outbreak of the Black Death a Frenchman visiting in London warned the authorities that they must remove the rats from the city since they were the source the plague. The wise folks in control, realizing that the Frenchman was totally insane, banished him from the city — since he certainly should have been aware that the plague was carried by the “vapors.” After all, everyone had known this since the time of Galen.

This brings to mind the uninvited guest appearing on the pulpit in Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” and the reaction of the congregation. People do believe what they choose to believe, facts being irrelevant.

[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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Tom Keough : The Unionization of Starbucks and the Rape of Kati Moore

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

California teen girl sues Starbucks over sexual abuse

Seattle-based Starbucks is feeling the heat over an ex-worker’s accusations of sex abuse on the job. And an ABC News investigation has uncovered evidence that it’s part of a nationwide trend of young women being taken advantage of by older managers.

Beyond its strong coffee and steamed milk, Starbucks presents itself as a trusted corporate citizen. “It’s not the bricks and mortar that make Starbucks, it’s the human relations of our people and the experience,” says Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.

That family feeling is one of the reasons Katie Moore [in other sources her name is spelled “Kati”] says she applied to work at Starbucks when she turned 16… But within months, she says, her job as a barista at a Starbucks store in an Orange County, Calif., shopping center turned into something quite different…

In the case of Katie Moore at Starbucks, the supervisor, Tim Horton, pleaded guilty to having sex with a minor and spent four months in prison. But Katie Moore’s mother says Starbucks and places with high school employees need to do more. “You know, they have a responsibility to these teenagers,” says Joanna Moore…

Moore is now suing Starbucks, alleging [the] 24-year old supervisor essentially turned her into his sex toy, in a court case that has turned ugly as she claims Starbucks did little to protect her from him, and Starbucks claims it’s her own fault…

seattle pi / January 24, 2010

Organizing the baristas:
The IWW and the Starbucks Workers Union

By Tom Keough / The Rag Blog / March 16, 2010

I do cartoons for the Starbucks workers who are trying to unionize and get better working conditions. The Kati Moore rape case exemplifies the company’s total lack of care for an employee and automatic support for anything a manager does.

When I first heard that the majority at a New York City Starbucks announced that they wanted a union contract I was amazed. When I was growing up, almost everyone I knew had either worked at McDonalds at some time or had family working there. My father had tried organizing McDonalds workers in Connecticut when he worked there. The biggest problem seemed to be that no union wanted fast food workers.

I’ll never forget seeing the mothers of two of my friends, almost in tears, talking about how unfair it was that the men at Pratt and Whitney or Colts could have unions, but not them. McDonalds work is hot, greasy, hard, fast, exhausting work.

So I try to help the Starbucks Workers Union, which was organized by the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in the U.S. and Canada. There is a union organizing campaign well under way in Chile and efforts have started in Europe. In New Zealand all the fast food chain restaurants are owned by one man and the employees are all union.

The Starbucks workers face a number of unique problems. The company has a nationwide policy of no full time employment for non-management workers. This way they avoid having to pay benefits. Their U.S. employees also have no set schedules. A lawyer for Starbucks once said that this is to prevent part-time staffers from getting second jobs. If you work there you won’t know the next week’s schedule until two or three days before the week starts.

Starbucks boasts that they offer health insurance for their employees but they make it almost impossible to get or to keep. To have the option of buying this insurance you need to work an average of 20 hours per week for the three-month quarter. The employees have no say in how many hours they work. Some weeks they may work 45 hours and the next week only seven. So the health insurance is really only a public relations stunt to impress customers.

In the shops where the baristas have announced their desire to unionize, Starbucks has refused to recognize the union. BUT in those shops, improvements have suddenly occurred. The first shop to go union soon became the first Starbucks to give all employees a December holiday cash bonus. In other locations safety and other improvements were made. In the U.S. the union has taken the company to court and won every time, despite the company’s highly paid lawyers.

  • Go here to learn more about the IWW Starbucks Workers Union.
  • Go here to read the Starbucks Union’s Statement of Solidarity with barista Kati Moore who was sexually assaulted by her supervisor.

Cartoons by Tom Keough / The Rag Blog.

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Have a Heart : How to Expand the Organ Harvest

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

3D anaglyph of the human heart. Image from 3D-image.net.

Israel’s new approach:
Donor cards and organ transplants

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 16, 2010

For years now, doctors have been able to save lives and prolong lives by performing organ transplants. Hearts, livers, kidneys, lungs, etc. can be taken from those who’ve died and preserved long enough to replace defective organs in a person who needs a new organ to survive. This is a big step forward for medicine.

There is only one problem. The only source for these replacement organs is people who have authorized their organs to be harvested before they died, and this has created a serious shortage of available organs. There are waiting lists for every kind of organ transplant. It is hoped that someday medical science will be able to grow new organs (possibly from stem cells), but that is still a long way from happening.

In most Western nations, about 30% of the population have authorized the harvesting of their organs after death. This is not a bad percentage, but still leaves long lists of people who are waiting for organs. Some of them even die while waiting for an appropriate organ.

Medical professionals have been searching for a way to boost the quantity of available organs, and up until now there have only been two solutions — neither of which is free from ethical problems. And an unethical solution may well be worse than no solution at all.

First, is the buying and/or selling of organs. This distasteful method is not approved in any civilized country. This is because of a couple of thorny questions. Should the rich get preference in receiving available organs because they can outbid those poorer than they are? Should the poor be pressured into giving their organs (or those of their loved ones) because of their poverty? Any moral and ethical person would quickly answer no to both questions.

The second solution is for doctors to assume they have permission to harvest organs unless the donor had specifically left written instructions denying them that privilege. This also presents an ethical dilemma. Just because a person has not left a written denial does not mean he/she gave his/her permission.

It is not uncommon in modern society for someone to delay doing something he or she really intended to do until it was too late. Just look at the many people who die without leaving a will. You cannot assume that all of them meant not to leave a will. In fact, I’ll bet that many of them simply procrastinated too long and died unexpectedly. Making assumptions about what a person wanted is like walking through an ethical minefield — it could blow up on you at any time.

Israel is in an even worse position than most Western countries. That is because only about 10% of Israelis have authorized the harvesting of their organs after they die. This has made their waiting lists much longer than those of other developed countries, making it far more likely that a patient would die while waiting for a suitable organ.

Israel was in bad need of a way to boost organ donations, and because they are a very religious nation, neither of the two ethically-suspect solutions would be appropriate for them to use. What were they to do? Simply urging the public to sign donor cards had only gotten them to 10%, and further government pleas were unlikely to significantly improve upon that.

The Israeli government has devised a new solution that’s never been tried before — it’s simple, ingenious, and devoid of the ethical problems attached to other solutions. They have passed a law that gives priority for organ transplants to those who signed donor cards before they became ill. These people would be put ahead of those who had not signed donor cards if they needed a transplant.

They have not yet implemented the new law, and it might not work for some reason unknown now, but I think it’s a good idea. Why shouldn’t those willing to give be the first to get? And it’s fair to everyone — black or white, rich or poor, male or female, young or old, religious or atheist. Anyone can (and should) sign a donor card. I believe this simple law will significantly increase the number of donors and save many lives.

There are those who say this would not be a big advantage, because soon the list of those waiting who had signed donor cards would be very long. I don’t buy this argument. Even if the list is long, we must remember there will be a lot more available organs. Therefore those waiting will not have to wait as long as they do now to get their transplant. I believe the law will provide a good chance to save a lot of lives that are now being lost.

The United States, Canada, and Europe should watch closely to see what happens when Israel implements the new law. If it significantly increases the number of donors and the number of lives saved, then it should be implemented in other developed nations.

Someday in the future, we might not have the need for human donors of organs. Maybe science will find a way to create new organs by harvesting them from the dead. But until then, the goal should be to save lives. I believe Israel’s new law will do that.

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

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Posted on March 16, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

We talk with the folks who made the film and run the venue — with live performance from Shake Russell, one of the artists who helped to make it famous

For the Sake of the Song:

We talk with the folks who made the film and run the venue — with live performance from Shake Russell, one of the artists who helped to make it famous


For The Sake Of The Song: The Story of Anderson Fair is the compelling saga of one of Texas’ and America’s unsung cultural treasures. This film explores the significant role Houston’s Anderson Fair has played in preserving an American musical tradition and how a devoted family of artists, volunteers, and patrons transformed a politically subversive little coffee house and restaurant into a unique American music institution.

Today, Anderson Fair is one of the oldest folk and acoustic music venues in continuous operation in the United States. What began as a little neighborhood restaurant where local musicians played for tips and free-thinkers gathered to “talk about things that might get them arrested somewhere else” quickly evolved into a songwriting sanctuary, cultivating a multitude of local and regional artists and attracting performers from all over the world.

Filmmakers Bruce Bryant and Jim Barham weave together a musical and visual tapestry of five generations of artists, volunteers, and patrons who have lived the story and graced the stage of this hallowed hall. In addition to intimate interviews with a who’s who of Americana and Texas music, the film also features new and never before seen archival footage of performances by Vince Bell, Guy Clark, Slaid Cleaves, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Steven Fromholz, Nanci Griffith, Carolyn Hester, Robert Earl Keen, Lyle Lovett, Eric Taylor, Dave Van Ronk, Townes Van Zandt, and Lucinda Williams.

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Posted on March 16, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2010

For years now, doctors have been able to save lives and prolong lives by performing organ transplants. Hearts, livers, kidneys, lungs, etc. can be taken from those who’ve died and preserved long enough to replace defective organs in a person who needs a new organ to survive. This is a big step forward for medicine.

There is only one problem. The only source for these replacement organs is people who have authorized their organs to be harvested before they died, and this has created a serious shortage of available organs. There are waiting lists for every kind of organ transplant. It is hoped that someday medical science will be able to grow new organs (possibly from stem cells), but that is still a long way from happening.

In most Western nations, about 30% of the population have authorized the harvesting of their organs after death. This is not a bad percentage, but still leaves long lists of people who are waiting for organs. Some of them even die while waiting for an appropriate organ.

Medical professionals have been searching for a way to boost the quantity of available organs, and up until now there have only been two solutions — neither of which is free from ethical problems. And an unethical solution may well be worse than no solution at all.

First, is the buying and/or selling of organs. This distasteful method is not approved in any civilized country. This is because of a couple of thorny questions. Should the rich get preference in receiving available organs because they can outbid those poorer than they are? Should the poor be pressured into giving their organs (or those of their loved ones) because of their poverty? Any moral and ethical person would quickly answer no to both questions.

The second solution is for doctors to assume they have permission to harvest organs unless the donor had specifically left written instructions denying them that privilege. This also presents an ethical dilemma. Just because a person has not left a written denial does not mean he/she gave his/her permission.

It is not uncommon in modern society for someone to delay doing something he or she really intended to do until it was too late. Just look at the many people who die without leaving a will. You cannot assume that all of them meant not to leave a will. In fact, I’ll bet that many of them simply procrastinated too long and died unexpectedly. Making assumptions about what a person wanted is like walking through an ethical minefield — it could blow up on you at any time.

Israel is in an even worse position than most Western countries. That is because only about 10% of Israelis have authorized the harvesting of their organs after they die. This has made their waiting lists much longer than those of other developed countries, making it far more likely that a patient would die while waiting for a suitable organ.

Israel was in bad need of a way to boost organ donations, and because they are a very religious nation, neither of the two ethically-suspect solutions would be appropriate for them to use. What were they to do? Simply urging the public to sign donor cards had only gotten them to 10%, and further government pleas were unlikely to significantly improve upon that.

The Israeli government has devised a new solution that’s never been tried before — it’s simple, ingenious, and devoid of the ethical problems attached to other solutions. They have passed a law that gives priority for organ transplants to those who signed donor cards before they became ill. These people would be put ahead of those who had not signed donor cards if they needed a transplant.

They have not yet implemented the new law, and it might not work for some reason unknown now, but I think it’s a good idea. Why shouldn’t those willing to give be the first to get? And it’s fair to everyone — black or white, rich or poor, male or female, young or old, religious or atheist. Anyone can (and should) sign a donor card. I believe this simple law will significantly increase the number of donors and save many lives.

There are those who say this would not be a big advantage, because soon the list of those waiting who had signed donor cards would be very long. I don’t buy this argument. Even if the list is long, we must remember there will be a lot more available organs. Therefore those waiting will not have to wait as long as they do now to get their transplant. I believe the law will provide a good chance to save a lot of lives that are now being lost.

The United States, Canada, and Europe should watch closely to see what happens when Israel implements the new law. If it significantly increases the number of donors and the number of lives saved, then it should be implemented in other developed nations.

Someday in the future, we might not have the need for human donors of organs. Maybe science will find a way to create new organs by harvesting them from the dead. But until then, the goal should be to save lives. I believe Israel’s new law will do that.

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

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Women’s Health : Heard About the H-Word Lately?

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

“Beautiful Inside” by Angela Elkins. The digitally-enhanced images were taken from a video of a laparoscopy, recorded during exploratory surgery performed on the artist. Angela, who was hysterectomized at the age of 24, says of the photoshopped images, “Everyone seems to be repulsed by the sight of our insides, our blood, what fills our skin. So I took these images and made them beautiful.” The images include views of her ovaries and uterus prior to the hysterectomy.

This work is part of an exhibit of Elkins’ works entitled U-tear-us Out, at Watkins College of Art and Design in Nashville. The exhibit addresses the issue of women and hysterectomies through sculpture and digital images. The works can be seen here, on the HERS Foundation website.

Hysterectomies and women’s health:
Heard about the H-word recently?

By Barbara Peyton / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2010

If you haven’t heard about the H-word recently, you soon will.

I’m talking about hysterectomy and female castration (removal of the ovaries) which takes place in 73 percent of all hysterectomies.

I might have been one of the thousands of women given a needless hysterectomy each year had I not received counseling 10 years ago from the HERS Foundation, the only independent, international organization dedicated to the issue of hysterectomy.

After all, eight Houston gynecologists had tried to convince me that because my fibroids were so large I would need a hysterectomy. Yet, I was not bleeding excessively and felt just fine. I just could not understand why I needed to go to the hospital for major surgery.

Not one of the doctors I visited for second, third, fourth… opinions had told me I had any other alternative. Fortunately, the internet led me to the HERS Foundation, to its incredible resources and its wonderful leader Nora Coffey who personally counseled me.

She later referred me to a compassionate board certified OB-GYN who read my images and pretty much told me that if I got off HRT and gave it some time, my fibroids might shrink all by themselves. I thought I’d give that a try and a decade later, am happy to report I’m doing fine.

On Saturday, April 23, Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) will deliver the keynote address at the HERS Foundation’s 28th Hysterectomy Conference in New York.

Maloney’s book Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, details the ongoing struggle women encounter on a number of fronts, including equal pay, politics, and health care.

Maloney is one of several prominent speakers who will discuss the impact of hysterectomies on women’s lives. Others will focus on alternatives to hysterectomy for common symptoms and conditions, including ovarian cysts, fibroids, endometriosis, hyperplasia, prolapse, HPV, pelvic pain, and obstetric hemorrhage. Another speaker will talk about legislation regarding informed consent. And, still others will address legal issues including establishing damages and medical malpractice.

I encourage men and women to become better acquainted with the advocacy work of the HERS Foundation and if possible to attend their conference. At the very least, you must read their FACT sheet which will blow you away with the devastating consequences of hysterectomies.

And, if you are someone who has been told you need one, you will be happy to learn that 98 percent of women HERS has referred to board-certified gynecologists after being told they needed hysterectomies, have discovered that, in fact, they did not need one. Time well spent.

  • To learn more about the 28th HERS Hysterectomy Conference, go here.
  • For facts about hysterectomy alternatives and aftereffects, go here.

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Posted on March 16, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

I do cartoons for the Starbucks workers who are trying to unionize and get better working conditions. This rape case shows the total lack of care for an employee and automatic defense of anything a manager does. I think more people need to hear about the struggles of average people and the way our corporate masters use all kinds of extremely expensive methods to get their way.

When I first heard that the majority at a NYC Starbucks announced that they wanted a union contract I was amazed. When I was growing up, almost everyone I knew had either worked at McDonalds at some time or had family working there. My father had tried organizing McDonalds workers in Connecticut when he worked there. The biggest problem seemed to be that no union wanted fast food workers. I’ll never forget seeing the mothers of two of my friends, almost in tears, talking about how unfair it was that the men at Pratt and Whitney, or Colts could have unions but not them. McDonalds work is hot, greasy, hard, fast exhausting work.

So I try to help the Starbucks Workers Union, which is an IWW union in the US. and Canada. There is a union organizing campaign well under way in Chile and efforts have started in Europe. In New Zealand all the fast food chain restaurants are owned by one man and the employees are all union.

The Starbuck’s workers face severa unique problems. The company has a nationwide policy of no full time employment for non-management workers. This way they avoid having to pay benefits. Their U.S. employees also have no set schedules. A lawyer for Starbucks once said that this is to prevent the part-time staff from getting another job. If you work there you won’t know the next wee’s schedule until two or three days before the week starts.

Starbucks boasts that they offer health insurance for their employees but they make it almost impossible to get or to keep. To have the option of buying this insurance you need to work an average of 20 hours per week for the three-month quarter. The employees have no say in how many hours they work. Some weeks they may work 45 hours and the next week only seven. So the health insurance is really only a public relations stunt to impress customers.

In the shops where the baristas have announced their desire to unionize, Starbucks has refused to recognize the union. BUT in those shops, improvements have suddenly occurred. The first shop to go union soon became the first Starbucks to give all employees a December holiday cash bonus. In other locations safety and other improvements were made. In the U.S. the union has taken the company to court and won every time so far. The company spends large amounts of money on their lawyers in these cases.


Type rest of the post here

Source /

Source

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Marc Estrin : Happy Birthday, Albert Einstein

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALBERT

(Albert Einstein was born on March 14th, 1879.)

Blanchot : “La réponse est le malheur de la question.” (The answer is the misfortune of the question.)

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

Sometimes I ask myself how it came about that I happened to be the one to discover the theory of relativity. The reason is, I think, that the normal adult never stops to think about space and time. Whatever thinking he or she did about these things will already have been done as a small child. It, on the other hand, was so slow to develop that I only began thinking about space and time when I was already grown up. Naturally I then went more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

There exists a remarkable photograph of Einstein and Marie Curie standing together on a naked, blasted heath, both dressed in black — he in a cape, she in a hooded cloak. They look like allegorical figures from an early Bergman film — set eternally there for us to ponder their meaning, their relationship to one another, their relationship to us.

I’d been carrying that mysterious image around for a long time when I came upon a poem by Adrienne Rich which explained it to me:

Today I was reading about Marie Curie

She must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified.
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her
finger ends
till she could no longer hold a test tube or a
pencil

She died a famous woman denying her wounds
denying her wounds came from the same source
as her power.

Einstein, too, suffered from radiation sickness. Einstein, too, denied. Two kinds of radiation sickness, actually. Sickness over his unintended contribution — in theory and in practice — to the deaths of so many and the poisoning of the planet. And sickness about from-radiation-born physics, a disease within the whole swing of science which left him behind, an oddball, a hermit, a naysaying party pooper, a pathetic, has-been, once-important old man.

His wounds came from the same source as his power. The power to imagine an entirely other view of the world, of the universe, the view of someone who rides on a light beam. The power of the light-beam-rider to see the light also enabled him to envision a world without war, a world beyond nations, beyond power, greed and corruption. One can’t see these visions without being seriously wounded. One can’t be wounded without denying.

“God does not play at dice,” he said. Events in the world must have a cause, in spite of what the quantum mechanics were saying. At its deepest level the universe must be orderly, not random. If he could only find this statement which would describe it. “Forget it,” said the mechanics.

He wouldn’t forget it. His eyes were glued on the universe and the possibility of penetrating to the ultimate core where all secrets would be resolved and understood as the emanation of a single law. This law, the unified field theory, would be for him the name of God. He could never name the Name. His wounds came from the same source as his power. He could never name the Name

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifested in the laws of the Universe — a spirit vastly superior to that of humanity, and one in the face of which we, with our modest powers, must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

MOSES AND ARON

He could never name the name of God. It is a remarkable coincidence that just at the time Einstein was leaving the physics community, beginning his retreat into the desert of his solitary vision quest, another German seeker was articulating something very similar. Let’s switch our eyes over to the power and wounds of Arnold Schoenberg, the great revolutionary who broke open a millennium of Western tradition to lead music into uncharted territory. Between 1923 in 1928 he worked on his largest, most ambitious and shattering work, his opera, Moses and Aron. This piece is a radical and comprehensive act of the imagination, an attempted human song in the face of the unspeakable immensity of God.

At the opening of the first act, Moses hears the wordless voice of God, and understands that it is einziger, ewiger, everywhere, invisible and inconceivable. Standing in relation to such a God, he cannot sing, he is almost dumb, he can express himself only in a halting, halfway manner, using a vocal technique of Schoenberg’s called Sprechstimme — half singing, half speaking, limited, frustrated, fallen. The voice from the burning Bush instructs him to prophesy the name of the eternal God. But he resists. He is too simple, he cannot speak, he cannot express the infinite.

No prob. Aron, his brother, sizes up the situation, and is ready for the job. He has a beautiful tenor voice, sight-sings well, and although describing the infinite God is a difficult task, he’ll give it a shot. Granted, it may be only an approximation, but it’s close enough for church work, and besides, the people need an image to hang onto, or they just won’t buy the whole business.

The opera concerns the conflict between Moses and Aron over trying to enclose the boundless in a finite image. Like Einstein.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

I do not believe in a personal God. If something is in me which can be called religious, it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

THE RETREAT FROM THE WORD

A nine-year-old asked me the other day “What did Einstein do?” I found it hard to describe. If he had invented the steam engine or discovered penicillin, or the charge on the electron, I could’ve explained more easily. But just try telling a child what Einstein did — it ain’t easy. And that is in large part because what he did is not in English. It’s not in German either. As his futile search dragged on, it was conducted more and more in the language of mathematical symbols, unrepresented by the tongue.

This was new, but not, perhaps, inappropriate. New because until relatively recently, our Judeo-Christian culture bore witness to the belief that all truth and realness — with the exception of a small, clear margin at the very top — could be housed inside the walls of spoken language. Until the 17th century, the predominant bias and content of the natural sciences were descriptive. But with the invention of analytic geometry and the theory of algebraic functions, with the development of calculus, mathematics transcended being an instrument to characterize certain aspects of nature, and became its own independent language, one of progressive untranslated ability. Mathematical forms and meanings have receded from spoken language at an ever accelerating pace. For no dictionaries to relate the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary higher mathematics to ordinary speech. One cannot even paraphrase.

This was the world in which Einstein ended. No more railroad cars and flashing lights of special relativity. Gone were the elevators of general relativity. Just pages and pages of reiterative tensor equations. The small, queer margin at the top. No song; beyond speech; never expressible even in its own terms. Einstein. Moses. The Unspeakable, Unreachable Absolute Idea of God.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at this scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to fashion a godlike being in our own image — a personage who makes demands of us and to take some interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither will nor goal, but only sheer being.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

THE TRIAL OF ALBERT EINSTEIN

PROSECUTOR
Is it not true that your discoveries of mass and energy equivalence led directly to the production of atomic weapons?

EINSTEIN
(Shakes his head vehemently)

PROSECUTOR
Is it not true that you wrote a series of letters to President Roosevelt recommending that the United States develop an atomic bomb?

EINSTEIN
(Thinks, then shakes his head decisively)

GEORGE GAMOW
When Einstein accepted a consulting ship with the Bureau of Ordinance he said he would be unable to travel to Washington regularly, and that someone from the Division of High Explosives would have to come up to meet him at Princeton. I was selected to carry out the job. And so, on every other Friday, I took a morning train to Princeton, carrying a briefcase packed with secret Navy projects. Einstein would meet me in his study at home, and we would go through all the proposals one by one. He approved practically all of them, saying, “Oh, yes, very interesting, very, very ingenious,” and the next day the admiral in charge was quite happy with Einstein’s comments.

EINSTEIN (screams out)
I have never worked in the field of applied science, let alone for the military! I condemn the military mentality of our time just as you do! I have been a pacifist all my life, and I regard Gandhi as the only truly great political figure of our time!
(Pause, quietly…)
I just served as a mailbox. They brought me a letter and all I had to do was sign…

AUDIENCE APPLAUSE FOR FAMOUS SPEAKER EINSTEIN

EINSTEIN
Our time is distinguished by wonderful achievements in the fields of scientific understanding and technical application. But let us not forget that knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. What humanity owes to Buddha, Moses and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the inquiring and constructive mind. What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and the joy in living.

APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our ways of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. A new way of thinking is essential if humanity is to survive and move toward higher levels.

HUGE APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
The big political doings of our time are so disheartening that one feels quite alone. It is as if people had lost the passion for justice and dignity and no longer treasured what better generations have won by extraordinary sacrifice. The foundation of all human value is morality. To have recognized this clearly in primitive times is the unique greatness of our Moses. In contrast, look at the people today…

POLITE APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
(Yelling)
It is easier to change the nature of plutonium than people’s evil spirit!
(He looks at the clappers, who do not respond)
People grow cold faster than the planet they inhabit.
(He looks for God)
Mine eyes fail with looking upward.
(Pause)
Three great powers rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.

SILENCE
THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

People like you and me, though mortal like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live. What I mean is that we never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we are born.

THE JEWISH QUEST FOR THE ABSOLUTE

Aron puts forth a comprehensible image so that Israel may live and not fall into despair. Moses loves an idea, an absolute vision, relentless in its purity. He would make of Israel the hollow, tormented vessel of an inconceivable presence.

Here, in George Steiner’s imagination (in The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.), is Hitler’s self-defense after he was captured as an old man in the Brazilian jungle:

“There had to be a solution, a FINAL solution. For what is the Jew if he is not a long cancer of unrest? Gentlemen I beg your attention. Was there ever a crueler invention, a contrivance more calculated to harrow human existence, than that of a non-impotent, all seeing, yet invisible, impalpable, inconceivable God?… the Jew emptied the world by setting his God apart. No image. No concrete embodiment. No imagining even. A blank emptier than the desert. Yet with a terrible nearness. Spying on our every misdeed, searching out the heart of our heart for motive… the Jew mocks those who have pictures of their God. HIS God is purer than any other. And because His inconceivable, unimaginable presence and develops us, we must obey every jot and tittle of the Law. We must bottle up our rages in desires, chastise the flesh and walk bent in the rain. You call me a tyrant, and enslaver. What tyranny, what enslavement has been more oppressive, has branded the skin and soul of man more deeply than the sick fantasies of the Jew? You are not God killers, but GOD makers. And that is infinitely worse. The Jew invented conscience and left humanity guilty serfs.

“But that was only the first piece of blackmail. There was worse to come. The white-faced Nazarene. Gentleman, I find it difficult to contain myself. But the facts speak for themselves. What did that epileptic rabbi ask of us? That we renounce the world, that we leave mother and father behind, that we offer the other cheek when slapped, that we render good for evil, that we love our neighbor as ourselves, no, far better, for self-love is an evil thing to be overcome. Oh grand castration! Note the cunning of it. Demand of human beings more than they can give, demand that they give up their stained, selfish humanity in the name of a higher ideal, and you will make of them cripples, hypocrites, mendicants for salvation. The Nazarene said that his kingdom, his purities were not of this world. Lies, honeyed lies. It was here on earth that he founded his slave-church. It was men and women, creatures of flesh, he abandoned to the blackmail of hell, of eternal punishment. What were our camps compared to THAT? What can be crueler than the Jew’s addiction to the ideal?

“First the invisible but all seeing, the unattainable but all demanding God of Sinai. Second the terrible sweetness of Christ. Had the Jew not done enough to sicken man? No, gentlemen, there is a third act to our story.

“‘Sacrifice yourself for the good of your fellow man. Relinquish your possessions so that there may be equality for all. So that justice may be achieved on earth. So that history may be fulfilled and society be purged of all imperfection.’ Do you recognize that sermon, gentlemen? Rabbi Marx. Was there ever a greater promise? ‘The classless society, to each according to his needs, brotherhood for all humanity, the earth made a garden again, a rational Eden.’ In the name of which promise tyranny, torture, war, extermination were a necessity, a historical necessity! It is no accident that Marx and his minions were Jews, that the congregations of Bolshevism — Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, the whole fanatic, murderous pack — were of Israel. Look at them: prophets, martyrs, smashers of images drunk with the terror of the absolute. It was only a step, gentleman, a small inevitable step, from Sinai to Nazareth, from Nazareth to the covenant of Marxism. The Jew had grown impatient. Let the kingdom of justice come here and now, next Monday morning. Let us have a secular messiah instead. But with a long beard and his bowels full of vengeance.

“You are not humanity’s conscience, Jew. You are only its bad conscience. And we shall vomit you so we may live and have peace.”

The Nazis set a price of 50,000 marks on Albert Einstein’s head.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

The physicists walked away from Einstein to follow Schrodinger’s cat. The old man was left alone on his deathbed, pad and pencil in hand.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

God does not play at dice.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

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

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Duh! Glenn Beck Discovers Springsteen’s a Pinko

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Glenn Beck finally listens to
‘Born in the USA’ — and freaks

By Jason Linkins / March 12, 2010

You wouldn’t think this was possible, but Glenn Beck had apparently never actually sat down and listened to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA,” never heard the lyrics, never formed a familiarity with the song’s storied history in American politics, until this week, I guess? Anyway, now that he’s heard that the song isn’t some glorious tongue-bath to American exceptionalism, he’s denouncing it on the radio. Per Lindsay Beyerstein:

Twenty-six years after the release of Bruce Springsteen’s hit song, “Born in The USA,” conservative talk show host/performance artist Glenn Beck finally got around to listening to the lyrics.

Beck was shocked, shocked to discover that for all these years he’d been rocking out to a song about a bitter down-and-out Vietnam vet who has been kicked to the curb by the aforementioned USA.

Via Spencer Ackerman , here’s what Beck had to say about it:

BECK: You get filled with patriotic pride, and then you find out that Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ is anti-American. ‘Born down in a dead man’s town/ the first kick I took is when I hit the ground/ you end up like a dog that’s been beat too much/ so you spend half your life just covering up…’ [He reads the entire lyrics in an incredulous tone of voice; manages to mispronounce ‘Khe Sanh’]

Hmm. Yeah! [crosstalk] … It’s time for us to wake up out of our dream state. Out of the propaganda… This is the thing that people who come from the Soviet bloc or Cuba, they’re all saying, ‘How do you guys not hear this? How are you not seeing this?’ Well, because we don’t ever expect it.

All of this gives me the opportunity to bring up one thing that’s always puzzled me about Beck: his love of the band Muse. Beck follows Muse on Twitter , and he took the stage at CPAC to the tune of their recent hit, “Uprising.” Here’s the video, you can hear the song pretty clearly:

Don’t get me wrong, Muse is awesome. But what’s weird about Beck’s embrace of Muse is that their lead singer, Matthew Bellamy, is a 9/11 “Truther.”

From Spin Magazine, August, 2009:

“When I was younger, my mother communicated with ghosts,” says Bellamy as the limo snakes its way to Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and the posed and dissected cadavers that constitute the “Bodies” exhibit. “She and my dad would invite friends over to use a Ouija board and talk with spirits. I was allowed to watch. I imagine my interest in the unknown started then.”

That curiosity about what lies beyond has never gone away, and it has taken a particularly sinister turn. “I’ve always been quite interested in conspiracy theory, and I still am,” says the slight Bellamy, dressed for the macabre occasion in a light-blue striped button-down shirt, black slacks, and black loafers, his brown hair styled in the irregular thatch favored by Brit rockers since 1965. “But I’ve learned to be careful in talking about this stuff. People take my curiosity as evidence of belief. I think as I get older, I’ll become more and more interested in pursuing verifiable lines of thinking rather than blurting out my opinions.”

Until then:

On 9/11: “There is evidence that suggests the powers that be knew of the attacks beforehand and let them happen. There’s a video on YouTube called Loose Change that explains it.”

I hate to take Bellamy’s “curiosity as evidence of belief,” but he’s been
talking up 9/11 as an “inside job” for a long time.

Music is just music. But Beck very recently torched Texas gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina for espousing these same “Truther” beliefs, so it’s sort of funny to see him making allowances for Muse, while assailing The Boss for being un-American for that time he thought we should take better care of our veterans.

Source / Huffington Post

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John Ross in Obamalandia : Death Waltz Across Texas

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

John Ross. Photo from Con Carlitos.

Loose in Obamalandia:
Death waltz across Texas
(With apologies to Ernest Tubbs)

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2010

I.

Paranoia stalks the skies. At LAX, flying towards Texas, I am pulled out of the line and the TSA goon swabs my hands for explosives. I figure it must be my kaffiya but a friend who flies into L.A. the next day from Puerto Rico is ordered to remove her skirt. She has to chase down her carry-ons in her tights.

Airports have become deep ponds of fear and loathing in Obama’s America ever since the Nigerian Unabomber almost pulled off his Christmas Day caper. I am putting myself on my own no-fly list.

This is not to say that terrorists are not prepared to assault us from the friendly skies. The morning after I touched down in Austin, a native-born terrorista of the Christian Caucasian persuasion flies a small plane into the local IRS offices 9-11 style, killing himself and one government worker. Joe Stack had a longstanding beef with the revenooers and has since become a martyr for the Glenn Beck vigilantes. Wesley Snipes is probably not going to be invited to Michelle’s White House cultural klatches anytime soon.

Altar for Raul R. Salinas (1934-2008). Photo by Jane Madrigal / San Antonio Current photostream / Flickr.

II.

Two years nearly to the day that Raul R. Salinas, the Xicano warrior-poeta, passed on to the Great Beyond, I read at Resistencia, the bookstore-cultural center he grew in south Austin. Before the reading, Rene shows clips of the last time Raul and I and Roberto Vargas, the fine Nicaraguan/La Mision compa, read at Resistencia. Raul blows a poem from the grave for Lester Young and he is Prez himself, the slow blue notes surging out of the bell of his voice.

I read a poem that I had just penned on the flight in (writing poems on commercial flights may soon be a federal felony), “Remission” (I have liver cancer): “I am in remission / I am on a mission / To wake up the brain-dead and dying…”

The Journalism Department at the University of Texas houses me in a cheese box motel that seems to be run by the Corrections Corporation of America. I talk to the brain-dead and dying in one of Bob Jensen’s classes. “You don’t have a career in journalism,” I warn them, “you have a responsibility to seek out the truth. To tell the stories with which you have been entrusted. To protect those who have told you their stories.

“You must go to the place where it happened. They will not like you there but you will learn much from their anger. Write it all down right away in your head. Do not let the details leak out no matter how badly they beat you…”

Some in the audience squirmed. Rigor mortis has not yet set in.

III.

I eschew the big box bookstores that are committing commercial genocide on the independents. Mostly I work anarchist enclaves with names like Monkeywrench and Sedition, tiny emporiums of subversion in Austin and Houston. At the University of Houston, I spoke about impending revolution in a class on the Mexican revolution taught by John Mason Hart, the maestro of Mexican anarchism. The usually brain-dead students seemed measurably animated. “I am in remission / I am on a mission / to raise the corpses of comatose students…”

IV.

David Carlson, a professor of radical history with a vault of fascinating minutiae running all ’round his brain, and his partner Deirdre, drove me down to the Rio Grande Valley. David first saw me reading Subcomandante Marcos’s latest communiqué from my dim laptop to a roomful of anarchos at the Black Cat Café, a slimy vegan soup kitchen, in a driving rain storm in Seattle circa 1995 and invited me to speak at the UT-Pan American campus — the university, which graduates 800 members of the Migra a year and through which David avows the CIA washes oodles of greenbacks, did not invite me but we rented a room and I spread my verbal curare anyway to a handful of the undead.

The signs along the highway on the way south told the story of today’s Texas: GUNS! MEAT! PAWN! The paranoia amped up the closer we came to the border. Motorists are stopped and frisked at surprise checkpoints and the nether parts of their vehicles probed in a not-very successful campaign to stop the bales of USD bills and displays of machine guns from pipelining into Mexico. At one point, David’s mobile was penetrated by mysterious red and blue rays radiating from roadside sensors. There were no UFOs hovering overhead so I assume this electronic pat-down was your Homeland Security at work. Why do I keep getting the chilly sensation that this is no country for old men?

The border wall at the Hidalgo Pump House and World Birding Center.Photo from swarthmore.edu.

V.

We went to visit the Wall where Hidalgo Texas fronts up Reynosa Tamaulipas across the bends of the Rio Grande (it’s called the Rio Bravo on the Other Side.) In Hidalgo, the Separation Wall is built around a restored pump house and bird sanctuary and resembles one of Richard Serra’s hideous installations. The aluminum cylinders that form the wall have enough room between them to allow a snake to squiggle through but the jabalis and other mid-sized mammals whose habitat this is are caged up north and south of this man-made North American monstrosity.

Down here where even dogs and their fleas are subject to deportation (the fleas were born here), everyone carries two sets of picture I.D. and flies multiple Stars & Stripes from their front porches.

The pinnacle of my sojourn in the Valley was an evening at the Narciso Martinez Cultural Center in San Benito. Narciso Martinez was one of the original maestros of the TexMex School of conjunto accordionistics and his instruments — ornate squeezeboxes — are on display at the center. The afternoon we parked in San Benito, Pfc. Adriana Alvarez who had fallen in Iraq (no cause of death was revealed in the Valley Morning Star story) was buried out of a local chapel. A hundred mourners were on hand, many of them representing local public safety agencies and Adriana was made an honorary member of the San Benito Police Department.

The gig at the Narciso Martinez was a joy. Irma Guadarrama, still the most beautiful woman in south Texas, warbled two handmade songs and my energies were choogling. Rogelio Nunez, a mainstay of the Center, also directs the fortunes of Project Libertad, which has stood up to the Migra and defended newly arrived indocumentados for decades. Rogelio offered me a three month writer-in-residence at the crumbling Stonewall Jackson Hotel in San Benito. Being a connoisseur of fleabag hotels. I just might take him up on it.

VI.

At the other end of Texas, El Paso is trapped in the crossfire between two wars: the bloodcurdling drug war right across the river in Juarez, and the U.S. war on the world out at Fort Bliss where soldiers freshly flown home from Iraq and Afghanistan and now Pakistan and all the other Last Stans, strangle their wives in their sleep, apparently hallucinating that they are the enemy.

The daily body count over in Juarez outpaces the kill count in the besieged Taliban stronghold of Marjah. At every presentation, hands shoot up to probe my opinions on the drug violence. Sometimes I refuse to answer.

The U.S. skew on Mexico has become synonymous with severed heads, the slaughter of innocents, naked castrated men dangling from freeway overpasses with signs pinned to their chests paying obeisance to Santa Muerte. Mexico is so much more than this macabre Gran Guignol, it is a civilization and a political crucible where the fightback of El Pueblo should be an inspiration to brain dead and dying gavachos.

At UTEP (University of Texas – El Paso) attendance is plummeting because students from Juarez can no longer traverse the big river. I spoke about prospects for a new Mexican revolution – the old one exploded in Ciudad Juarez an even hundred years ago – seeking to measure the objective conditions which are overripe for fresh uprising and the dearth of social forces that could ignite a new one. The audience listened for a while but inevitably the questions about the glut of gore spilled daily across the river took over.

Ironically, El Paso is flourishing in the wake of all the killing (over a thousand in 2009.) Restaurateurs and retailers have packed up and moved their inventories to the Texas side and the city is enjoying a real estate boom as the exodus of middle and upper classes seeking to escape the carnage crests.

Felipe Calderon’s ill-advised drug war drowns out all other news. Even Las Muertas, the hundreds of women raped and slain in Juarez since 1993, has disappeared from public attentions. The untimely passing of Esther Garcia, the mother of the mothers of the murdered and disappeared, has only compounded the silence.

Lee and Bobby Byrd / Cinco Puntos Press.

Driving through El Paso en route to Las Cruces, Bobby Byrd, the patriarch of the Byrd clan whose Cinco Puntos Press is a beacon of culture in this high desert wasteland, is on his cell phone – gabbing while driving is still legal in Texas as several near side-swipes by distracted chauffeurs underscored. Bobby is hobnobbing with Reyes Tejirina whose takeover of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in a land grant dispute back in 1967 is now enshrined in southwest school textbooks. Reyes, now a doddering elder who preaches The Protocols of Zion, wants Bobby to drive him to the airport when he flies up to Chicago for an appearance with Minister Farrakhan.

El Paso, of all tank towns, now has its very own Holocaust Museum financed by local Zionist moneybags. As we drift past the shuttered stacks and smelters of ASARCO (Bobby’s daughter and a member of the El Paso City Council, led the battle to squelch the reopening of this death trap), the elder Byrd muses on this unlikely turn of events. “The real El Paso holocaust is buried out there in the Smeltertown cemetery.”

We cross the state line into New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment and private prisons, a saga to be reviewed in the next installment of this quixotic journey through the underbelly of Obama’s America

[John Ross, who contributes to The Rag Blog from Mexico, made appearances in Texas in mid-March as part a book tour for his new cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (“gritty and pulsating” — New York Post). He continues to, in his words, “slog across Obama’s America,” and will be in Madison, Wisconsin; Traverse City and Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Chicago (Heartland Café, March 31st) during the final two weeks of March. Consult johnross@igc.org or www.nationbooks.org for local dates.]

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Realm of the Census : Partisan Fundraising Fracas

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Bunch of partisan baloney?
GOP census knockoff and Dem rejoinder

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / March 12, 2010

‘Breaking News: House Bans GOP FAKE Census Surveys’

The headline on the email sent by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, DCCC, forwarded to me the evening of March 11, 2009, by a family friend, certainly caught my attention. Fake census surveys mailed out by the Republicans? The Dynamic Democrats lead a charge and the house bans such underhanded things in a 416-0 vote?

The breathless email began:

Executive Director Jon Vogel just sent this message to DCCC supporters:

Friend — The House of Representatives voted today 416-0 to ban misleading fundraising (sic) letters disguised as 2010 Census forms.

Our Republican counterparts at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC) recently sent out deceptive political fundraising (sic) letters that looked like U.S. Census letters so they could fill their campaign accounts with cash from a misleading and deceptive fake census letter, leaving taxpayers like us to foot the bill!

I had not seen or heard anything on the evening news about this “breaking news” so I checked out the latest on The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor and a couple of others’ web sites. Nothing.

But something didn’t whoof right. I finally found a short AP dispatch about a House Resolution submitted a month ago, February 9, 2009, by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, “To protect the integrity of the constitutionally-mandated United States census and prohibit deceptive mail practices that attempt to exploit the decennial census.” Seems the Republicans mailed out a right leaning poll recently with boxes to check for answers and the word “census” was used instead of “poll” and appeared on a page.

The breaking news was that “The legislation passed the House 416-0, after two Republicans who sit on the House panel overseeing the census, Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Jason Chaffetz of Utah, agreed to co-sponsor the measure.”

This particular legislation, a page and a half resolution, H.R. 4621, is titled, “To protect the integrity of the constitutionally-mandated United States census and prohibit deceptive mail practices that attempt to exploit the decennial census.”

The short title as passed in the house is, “Prevent Deceptive Census Look Alike Mailings Act.” The real title should be “To stop the GOP fundraisers from sending out loaded right-leaning questionnaires using the word ‘census’ for their slanted poll.” This kind of subterfuge could confuse really dumb folks, or really mad folks who might think it is a census form and send money back with it to help fill up the Repug coffers. Sounds like Tea Party logic to me.

So, wow! The House bans these repugnant fake GOP census surveys according to this DCCC Email? In spite of the DCCC newsletter headline, nothing is banned at all. All that has happened so far is a regular sausage-grinder vote.

This short resolution was one in a stack of other resolutions agreeing unanimously to fearlessly support God, Country and even the Census. The vote came, “On a motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill, as amended. Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays (2/3 required).” And Varooooom! It passed… like wind in an Aristophanes play.

The Library of Congress web site is a great place to follow the traffic jam of tough, detailed proposed laws as well as apple pie proclamations, resolutions and bills as they inch forward like marbles in a twisted tube.

The “Prevent Deceptive Census Look Alike Mailings Act” passed the House at 2:09 P.M., March 10th. The following day it was, “received in the Senate and read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs” where it will certainly be rushed through by Senators in a huge show of bipartisanship.

In these tough times, finally a resolution to be remembered. A gutsy move to protect the census is now getting underway. Certainly it will zip right out of committee and the winning Senate vote will come on the very day a flight of pigs swoops over that august chamber.

Quick review:

Democrats tore themselves away from getting a health care bill passed and cobbling together 216 votes needed to do that and instead went to bat to stop the possibility of anyone misrepresenting the Census form with evil intent.

They got not just 216 votes but 416 votes to protect the census. The DCCC email newsletter concluded,

Republicans once again made clear they will do anything for campaign cash. The news of these fake Census surveys comes on the heels of the leaked outrageously offensive RNC presentation which showed they planned to use fear through socialist imagery to win the elections next November. You have my assurance that the DCCC will never send anything like this to you, our valued supporters, or to any American taxpayer.

Please take this time to forward this information to your friends and family to warn and make sure they are filling out their official US Census form.”

I thought Orrin Hatch’s Republican Senate Committee email newsletters asking for money were loopy, but the Dems have him beat. The DCCC could have also told us that if a poll comes from the Republicans with their letterhead and logos on the top of the page, on the envelope and below the closing signature it is not a census form, even if the word “census” can be found somewhere on the page.

Another sure check of a legit census form is that it does not have a box to check with how much money you are sending back with it and no elephant or donkey designs on it either.

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

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Posted on March 12, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister. Even though many in the Congressional fight for health care reform are primarily driven by personal political agendas (read: abortion and Rep. Bart Stupak), it appears that some form of legislation may actually be passed. But will it be worth the paper it’s written on?

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