Decade of Deceit : Our Leaders and their Lies

Posted on January 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


A catalog of calumny:
The Decade of Deceit

Lie: a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive.

By Sid Eschenbach / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2010

Bookended by two lies, George Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” and Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In,” the first decade of the 21st century should go down in history as the decade when we all, collectively and individually, occasionally from the left and generally from the right, repeatedly admired the emperor’s new clothes — only to discover that, like the original meme, there was no reality behind the image.

It’s difficult to say whether this decade is remarkable for the scope and impact of the frauds perpetrated, or whether we are simply more aware of them, as the onions of information are peeled open by modern technologies that allow greater access and quicker diffusion than ever before. Whichever it is, the lies told in this first decade of the 21st century are whoppers, among which the following deserve special mention.

  • The lie of fair elections

How many deceptive or completely false ideologies, facts and policies did we fall for in the decade? Well, it started with the election of George Bush and the electoral coup perpetrated in Florida. Not only did he not win the election, but we were forced to accept an argument that it could and should be settled by the Supreme Court instead of an actual recount — a body that has acknowledged that it had no jurisdiction in the matter — and the decision of which is so fraught with problems that it is legally barred from being used in any other case in the future. Yet we, the American people, accepted the deceit.

Alan Dershowitz stated at the time:

“[T]he decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants. This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath.”

Well after the election, in 2001, a New York Times study showed that, had a full recount been adopted and had over-votes been tallied correctly in all of Florida, Gore would have picked up an additional 8,285 votes, far more than needed to win Florida and thus the national election.

With the ascension to the presidency of George Bush we should have learned that the United States is not Reagan’s “beacon on the hill” — an idealized country as we imagined it to be and were taught that it was in our high school civics classes.

Rather, and under certain conditions, that the fight for succession of power in the American republic is as crude and ruthless as in any other, determined not through the “free and fair” elections upon which we have constructed our virtuous self-image, but by the machinations of political and economic elites. It is an ugly truth, but those are the real colors of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Cartoon by Mr. Fish / truthdig.

  • The lie of ‘compassionate conservatism’

Yes, one might ask, what exactly would that be? The idea that these two historically contradictory concepts could be pandered to a public desperate to believe, to see the emperor’s new clothes where there are none, is silly enough in it’s own right. However, the real deceit was greater, for “compassionate conservatism” was in reality nothing more but a great deal less than the old concept of “noblesse oblige,” the idea that society’s most privileged would, out of their sense of entitled wealth, be kind and compassionate to those less fortunate and well beneath them.

Further, it’s part and parcel of another fantasy peddled to the gullible public, that “free” market economics better helped the poor than government social intervention. The reality is that it served and serves to sanctify greed, as it’s used as a prop for the selfish, a salve for those who only think of themselves in their frantic rush for riches — allowing them to believe that the battle for their personal success in fact helps the least among us.

In the same way, this salve allowed the political leadership to talk of helping the poor and socially handicapped, without really doing anything to help them at all other than pass the ball to the private sector to resolve more competently than, they asserted, government could.

Former President Clinton summed it up well when he said that the message of compassionate conservatism was: “I want to help you. I really do. But you know, I just can’t.” All up, it comprised the basis for George Bush’s appeal to a religious, conservative and ignorant poor while simultaneously energizing the richest, strongest, best educated and most privileged members of society — politically a very potent and entirely fraudulent marriage of conceptual and social opposites.

Like Professor Dershowitz did in the previous example, this deception was also pointed out — but to no avail, given the public’s manifest desire to believe in the emperor’s new clothes. One commentator, Joe Conason, wrote in 2003 that “so far, being a ‘compassionate conservative’ appears to mean nothing very different from being a hardhearted, stingy, old-fashioned conservative.”

All this, of course, fell on the deaf ears of a faithful religious public that, in furtherance of their need to feel good about themselves, believed that there actually was such a thing as “compassionate conservatism” and that they were a part of it. The historical facts, unfortunately, have proven otherwise.

The fact that it was a transparently duplicitous political ploy used to convert the selfish rich and the religious poor to the Republican cause was demonstrated in 2001, when after the events of September the 11, it was rarely if ever mentioned.

  • The lie of Iraq

“I cannot tell you everything that we know. But what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling. What you will see is an accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior. The facts on Iraq’s behavior demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort — no effort — to disarm as required by the international community. Indeed, the facts and Iraq’s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.”

With these words describing the supposed “facts” about Iraq from (a later repentant) Secretary of State Colin Powell began the aggressive selling of a particularly heinous lie, the justification to invade a nation as a necessary and moral act.

It is the ultimate irony that a combination of fear and ego drove Saddam Hussein to facilitate this crime through his own perfidy, hiding the fact that he didn’t possess any weapons of mass destruction at all, that he was not nearly as powerful as he wanted others to believe — and thus wasn’t particularly more or less dangerous than any other unstable megalomaniac in any part of the world.

This fact, however, doesn’t dismiss a simple and core truth — recently admitted by then British Prime Minister Tony Blair — that had WMD not been available as an argument to justify invasion, he simply would have “deployed different arguments” to justify an inevitable, pre-arranged and concerted military action.

This statement, the absolute height of arrogance and cynicism, is proof of what has been alleged from the beginning of this entire tragic endeavor; that lying and deceiving the people is a legitimate tactic because the ends justify the means: that getting rid of the Hussein regime was more important than the truth itself.

Unfortunately, Powell’s words were not the last, but among the first in a long parade of lies told to justify and explain the Iraq War:

  • “We believe that Saddam has reconstituted nuclear weapons,”
  • “Saddam supports and protects Al Qaida,”
  • “We will be greeted as liberators,”
  • “It will be paid for out of Iraqi oil monies,”
  • “It will only cost $50-$60 billion dollars,”
  • “Waterboarding is not torture,”
  • “The United States does not torture,”
  • “People in Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent,”
  • “Major combat operations are over.”

All these and many more lies were told — so many over so long a time that it became standard and accepted operating procedure to lie to the people “for their own good.” Never in modern American history have so many blatant lies been told in the name of national security, lies generally accepted as truth by an easily manipulated public, lies that lead to over 100,000 civilian Iraqi deaths, 35,000 American dead and wounded, and an expense to the nation of what will probably end up exceeding $2.5 trillion dollars — and lies that are still defended today by those guilty of telling them.

  • The lie of post-industrial prosperity

“Free trade lifts all boats,” said the Friedmanites. “Free trade (NAFTA) will cause a giant sucking sound as jobs go south,” said Ross Perot. Twenty years later, it’s clear that the second was the truth and the first was the lie, used again and again by the ersatz American capitalists as they moved manufacturing en masse to countries that provide relatively unprotected and low cost labor.

While they did this, Americans continued to believe the lie that it was just the “bad” jobs that were being outsourced, leaving the “high-paying creative jobs” to the highly paid and presumptively creative American workforce.

Of course, this is a fantasy closely related to any sightings of the emperor’s new clothes, and in the end whether the CEO’s believed it or not is irrelevant. The simple fact is that there is no known economic state of post-industrial prosperity. No nation has ever achieved it, and none ever will.

This lie is possibly more pernicious than others of the decade because, unlike the others, it’s entirely possible that the American political, financial and manufacturing leadership don’t really know that they’re telling a whopper. It’s unclear as to whether they understand the end result of a policy that exports jobs and imports goods, just as it’s unclear whether the industrialized nations will wake up before they are overwhelmed and marginalized by the newly industrialized states of China and India.

What is clear, however, is that until the U.S. and to a lesser degree the E.U. change their trade policies to protect their industrial sectors, there can and will be no real “recovery” based upon the jobs held by a large middle class.

Strangely, if this industrial “readjustment” continues and overcapacity continues to be an economic fact of life (and there is absolutely nothing emerging out of the Obama administration to suggest that it won’t), it matters little to the national economy whether the goods are imported or not, and the reason for this is efficiency.

In the face of the advantages enjoyed by goods produced in cheap labor and low regulatory environments, all surviving businesses in the high labor high regulatory environments will have one thing in common — extraordinarily high efficiencies. What that means to employment is that where there once were 100 workers, now there are 10 or less producing the same amount or more goods.

Normally, of course, increases in productivity are accompanied by increases in wages. But not in this case. Wages will stay flat OR FALL while productivity increases — not a particularly salubrious outcome for the industrialized nations. The reason for this, of course, is that in the absence of a policy that might level the playing fields between rich, industrialized and regulated economies and poor, developing and un-regulated economies demand it.

Unfortunately, given the wholesale adoption of the free trade lie, that is the best possible outcome for the industrialized nations — flat to sinking wages combined with high unemployment for the foreseeable future.

The Corporate Egregore: the corporation as legal entity. Image from Nowarchy.

  • The lie of free speech

At the core of all good lies is a kernel of truth, and the “truth” at the nexus of money and “free speech” has that element in spades. In a nation that treats corporations as individuals and gives them the same rights as individual citizens, the ability of corporations and groups of corporations to dominate the context, process, and outcomes of political discourse is unfettered. That is because of the legal “truth” — the fact that we consider their corporate rights as “individuals” to be equal to the rights of individual persons.

This dangerous conflation, of course, gives them an unrivaled advantage over real, human “individuals,” simply due to the huge financial advantages they enjoy. If we continue to ignore this problem, continue not to remedy this structural flaw that lies at the very heart of the American political and legal system, this abuse of the right to “free speech” will continue to distort, debase and corrupt the legislative system designed over 225 years ago by the founding fathers.

The recent health care debate is just the latest in a long line of corporate shaped policy outcomes paid for “fair and square” by donations from corporations to the men and women who write law in the halls of American democracy. The lie at the heart of the argument, of course, is that corporations are individuals and should enjoy the same rights of individuals — including the right of “free speech.”

In decision after decision, most recently in 2007 (Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc.), the courts have upheld corporate rights to participate in the political process based upon their first amendment rights — a canard at best, a farce at worst — but it is that legal obstacle that has, to date, successfully hobbled real campaign reform.

Among similar fantasies sold to a credulous public, the idea that restrictions on corporate financial intervention in the political process somehow threaten the foundations of the citizen’s right to free speech is as silly as the argument that banning automatic weapons is the first step to disarming the citizenry — but that is indeed the argument that is made, and with, at least in public, a straight face.

The healthcare debate may not have settled the debate over healthcare, but it should have settled any serious debate over who writes legislation in the modern version of the Great American Experiment, and it is not the legislator nor the citizen, but rather the best lobbyists that corporate “free speech” money can buy.

Art by R.S. Janes/ LTSaloon.

  • The lie of family values

It’s more than coincidental that those who preach most loudly about moral virtue are not only the most “virtue” challenged, but also have built into their system of beliefs a very convenient catch-all when they are found in their tawdry affairs: confession and redemption. Hypocrisy in any form is worthy of contempt, but to be able to “fall from grace” and find “redemption and forgiveness” so easily is the absolute nadir of disgusting irony.

President Clinton never made a case that he was a paragon of virtue, and yet his transgression was fodder for four years of “investigation” and then impeachment. Of course, those who pursued his scalp most vigorously always said “It’s not about the sex,” when, of course, it always was.

A short list of these hypocrites would include Newt Gingrich, Jim Bakker, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Bob Allen, Glen Murphy Jr., David Vitter, Helen Chenoweth, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, some 20 odd bishops and cardinals of the Catholic Church, Jimmy Swaggart and some two dozen other major evangelical figures — all men who lied as they preached, creating one more false narrative among many others in the decade of deceit. The recent (second) divorce of Carl Rove, long an advocate for “traditional marriage” and family values, is just more of the same duplicity, the “do as I say not as I do” talk show nonsense for which he is appropriately nicknamed “The Architect.”

One of the most valuable cultural values that emerged out of the Enlightenment is a value that was and is at the heart of Western Civilizations greatness: the belief that we all ultimately had to answer before our protestant god for our human errors. Whether one is religious or not, from a sociological point of view it’s easy to see the virtue of this belief, as — unlike with the Catholics (through confession and forgiveness) — it became much harder to say one thing and practice another.

Hypocrisy was controlled. One did what one said one believed and would do. Integrity became a virtue — and it is this virtue that we are in the process of collectively losing, a fact demonstrated by the parade of hypocritical “family values” politicians spouting “family values” while they practice another kind of value altogether.

  • The lie of financial security

A popular television commercial used to promote a Wall Street business with the slogan, “We make money the old fashioned way — we earn it!” Unfortunately, no one really knew how right they were, as it turned out that the “new fashioned way” was to create money out of thin air, through financial sleight of hand.

The recent near catastrophic collapse of the entire financial superstructure upon which the planet as a whole depends is nothing less than the logical outcome of the real world application of Milton Friedman economics. Mr. Friedman could not conceive of good government, legitimate taxation, or necessary regulations. On the other hand, he could not believe that the “market” could fail, that businesses could act against their own long-term interests, or that the efficient market hypothesis was wrong. Unfortunately, it turns out he was wrong on all counts, and September of 2008 proves the case.

Beyond the big time “legal” hustles of financial “blind’em with bullshit” wizardry, — the “legitimate” public scams of making governments pay you off to the tune of billion –, the decade also played host to some of the greatest and many of the lesser con men in the world of “private investment.”

Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford are just at the top of a pile of multi-billion dollar scam artists who preyed upon those desperate to be counted among the rich and famous, willing to entrust obvious liars with hundreds of billions of dollars in exchange for a few percent more on their “investments.”

In their case, the credulous paid for their own credulity. Unfortunately, the damage was not limited to just those individuals who had “skin in the game,” because society as a whole sustained a solid body blow, a strike to the heart of a social system based, in its ultimate expression, on trust.

When we stop trusting, we stop lending. When we stop trusting, we stop investing. We stop working to “get ahead” because it’s all seen as a sham — there is no ahead, but rather merely a series of chimeras created by a system built on deception — and this is not any way to run an economy. It remains to be seen if we have learned anything from this latest discovery that the financial wizard’s new clothes are no more credible than the emperor’s new clothes, but only time will tell. One thing is sure: when the citizenry stop believing in both their economic and their political systems, it’s serious and something serious will happen as a result.

Graphic by Mike Rosulek / mikero.com.

  • The lie of change we can believe in

Due to the realization by a great many people of the truth of the forgoing, a societal thirst for change emerged that came to be embodied by a senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. He was swept into power on the strength of a promise, that real change could be affected in the political, economic and social fabric of the American society. Unfortunately, this too is a lie.

This is a most interesting lie because it’s not like all the others, lies told in full knowledge of their value to deceive. The lie of “Change We Can Believe In” was not delivered to be a lie — it just turned out that way. In the process, it turned up a greater lie yet: that fundamental change through electoral outcomes is possible.

The healthcare battle stands as testament to the impossibility of significant change from electoral outcomes. The paralysis of government is all too easily achieved by those opposed to change. A transformative president’s demonstrable inability to change the quality and the outcomes of national dialogues in what was once the great American Experiment, the first government of the people, by the people and for the people, uncovers a startling truth: that what has become an American Empire has become so massive that the laws of political and economic inertia cannot be either quickly or easily overcome — even by a popular president pursuing policy changes backed by the majority of the people.

That may, as many argue, be the ultimate virtue of good governance; it’s inability to be easily or quickly swayed by individuals or groups, however strong. Stability, even for all the wrong reasons, can be seen as a virtue. However, the laws of evolution within nature are immutable: biology teaches us that for species to survive they must change, adapt… or die — and this is surely also true for social systems. If the American socio-political and economic system is unable to right itself, to review, learn and correct the errors of the last 30 years, it will quickly cease to be the dominant planetary culture. And that is not a lie; it is a fact.

The lies told by those who have dominated the public square over the past 10 years have not only brought the world to the edge of economic chaos, but continue to promote the polices that got us to that point in the first place. It remains to be seen if we have collectively learned anything over this decade that will allow us to THINK FOR OURSELVES, to say “The emperor has no clothes,” and thus begin to restructure society so that we can actually deliver on what is promised — not just continue to console ourselves by going along with those who want to believe what they are told, to see clothes where there are none, to accept the lies.

[Sidney Eschenbach, 61, lives and works in Guatemala. His thoughts regarding developmental economics and trade are based on decades of development work in Latin America at various levels, community, corporate and national.]

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BOOKS/ Jonah Raskin : Michael Pollan’s ‘Food Rules’

Posted on January 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


We can decide what we want to eat!
Michael Pollan: America’s new Food Czar

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 8, 2010

[Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, by Michael Pollan. (Penguin, Trade Paperback, December 29, 2009, 112 pp, $11.00.]

A few years ago, Berkeley, California, super chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame suggested that Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser run for president and vice president, respectively. That didn’t happen, of course, and who knows what might have occurred if they had campaigned for public office. Perhaps the American public would know more about industrial farming and about the fast food industry than it does now.

Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, has largely disappeared from view for the moment. But Pollan, who has written half-a-dozen books, is more visible than ever before. In fact, he seems to have taken it upon himself to become America’s new food czar. On The Daily Show the first week of January he was certainly acting like the food czar and repeated his familiar mantra to Jon Stewart. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” he said.

In his latest book, Food Rules, which has just been published in a mass market, paperback edition, he sets out 64 rules about eating and diet. Pollan probably has as much of a right as anyone else in America to tell eaters what to put into their bodies and what to avoid.

In Botany of Desire (2001), he described the fascinating history and evolution of four plants — apples, marijuana, tulips, and potatoes — and their integral connections to human wants and needs. In Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), he exposed the pernicious place of corn in agribusiness, and the noxious dependency on corn syrup. He also poked holes in the halo that Whole Foods, the nation-wide food chain, was trying to wear, as though it was a spiritual institution, not a business for profit.

Then, in In Defense of Food (2008), subtitled “An Eater’s Manifesto,” Pollan took on “nutritionism,” and what he calls “the Western Diet.” At the end of that book, he offered 23 suggestions about eating properly, such as “Avoid Food Products that Make Health Claims,” “Shop the Periphery of the Supermarket and Stay Out of the Middle,” and “Eat Mostly Plants, Especially Leaves.”

For his latest book, Food Rules (2010), he has taken his original two dozen suggestions, and boiled them down to their essence. He has also added 41 additional suggestions, such as “Serve a proper portion and don’t go back for seconds,” and stirred them all together to produce a small stew of a book. Food Rules is largely nifty packaging, or rather repackaging. It doesn’t add much that’s new. Pollan’s publisher, Penguin, has also distilled his 64 rules to 10, and has printed them on bookmarks available in stores.

It’s true that Pollan has a certain healthy sense of humor about his rules. “Food Rules” is after all a playful title, and on the last page the author urges readers and eaters to “Break the Rules Once In a While.” Still, Pollan seems to take himself much too seriously. Do Americans really need 64 rules? Probably not! Who is going to remember all 64 and abide by them? Not many people.

Moreover, Pollan doesn’t see that for nearly every one of his rules there are valid exceptions. Sometimes seconds are very much in order. Sometimes it even feels good to pig out at least once in a while. Granted, leaves — lettuce leaves and spinach leaves — are good for us. But so are root vegetables. Yams, carrots, turnips, and parsnips are wonderful, nutritious and tasty.

Rules, even food rules, have always been broken; perhaps they’re made to be broken. Pollan’s 64 rules surely will be broken time and again, and while some eaters no doubt appreciate guidelines, the American diet probably won’t really improve until Americans take charge of their own eating habits and don’t turn to so-called experts for advice. The country doesn’t need drug czars or food czars, whether they’re self-appointed or appointed to office by a president.

Pollan can be very astute about the food industry, but at times he can also be blind, as when he suggests that Americans “buy a freezer,” and also “pay more, eat less.” The trouble with those two suggestions is that increasingly Americans can’t afford to buy a freezer or to pay more for food.

More Americans are hungry today than they have been in the last decade. Hunger is afoot in the land. More Americans are also relying on food stamps. In the light of those hard realities, Pollan’s suggestions seem like they’re aimed at the middle and upper classes — and are meant for people who can afford freezers.

He’s certainly not as oblivious to hunger as the 18th-century person who said, “Let them eat cake.” (Historians say it probably wasn’t Marie Antoinette.) But sometimes Pollan’s food rules can seem silly, and oblivious to the needs and wants of hungry Americans dependent on food stamps for their very survival.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California (University of California Press).]

Find Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, by Michael Pollan on Amazon.com.

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Cancer Survival : Reform Opponents Play the Numbers Game

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic from DragonArtz Design.

Cancer survival and health care reform:
Selective statistics paint distorted picture

By Barbara O’Brien / The Rag Blog / January 7, 2010

One argument you may hear against health care reform concerns cancer survival rates. The United States has higher cancer survivor rates than countries with national health care systems, we’re told. Doesn’t this mean we should keep what we’ve got and not change it?

Certainly cancer survival rates are a critical issue for people suffering from the deadly lung mesothelioma cancer. So let’s look at this claim and see if there is any substance to it.

First, it’s important to understand that “cancer survival rate” doesn’t mean the rate of people who are cured of a cancer. The cancer survival rate is the percentage of people who survive a certain type of cancer for a specific amount of time, usually five years after diagnosis.

For example, according to the Mayo Clinic, the survivor rate of prostate cancer in the United States is 98 percent. This means that 98 percent of men diagnosed with prostate cancer are still alive five years later. However, this statistic does not tell us whether the men who have survived for five years still have cancer or what number of them may die from it eventually.

Misunderstanding of the term “survivor rate” sometimes is exploited to make misleading claims. For example, in 2007 a pharmaceutical company promoting a drug used to treat colon cancer released statistics showing superior survival rates for its drug over other treatments.

Some journalists who used this data in their reporting assumed it meant that the people who survived were cured of cancer, and they wrote that the drug “saved lives.” The drug did extend the lives of of patients, on average by a few months. However, the mortality rate for people who used this drug — meaning the rate of patients who died of the disease — was not improved.

But bloggers and editorial writers who oppose health care reform seized these stories about “saving lives,” noting that this wondrous drug was available in the United States for at least a year before it was in use in Great Britain. Further, Britain has lower cancer survival rates than the U.S. This proved, they said, the superiority of U.S. health care over “socialist” countries.

This is one way propagandists use data to argue that health care in the United States is superior to countries with government-funded health care systems. They selectively compare the most favorable data from the United States with data from the nations least successful at treating cancer. A favorite “comparison” country is Great Britain, whose underfunded National Health Service is struggling.

It is true that the United States compares very well in the area of cancer survival rates, but other countries with national health care systems have similar results.

For example, in 2008 the British medical journal Lancet Oncology published a widely hailed study comparing cancer survival rates in 31 countries. Called the CONCORD study, the researchers found that the United States has the highest survival rates for breast and prostate cancer.

However, Japan has the highest survival for colon and rectal cancers in men, and France has the highest survival for colon and rectal cancers in women. Canada and Australia also ranked relatively high for most cancers. The differences in the survival data for these “best” countries is very small, and is possibly caused by discrepancies in reporting of data and not the treatment result itself.

And it should be noted that Japan, France, Canada and Australia all have government-funded national health care systems. So, there is no reason to assume that changing the way health care is funded in the U.S. would reduce the quality of cancer care.

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Our Patriarchal History : The All-Conquering Cowboy

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Cowboys and Indians:
History’s relentless cattle drive

…the thing we know as ‘history’ is just the continuing mechanism of the Indo-European cowboys stealing the livestock, the culture, and whatever else they want from what’s left of the Goddess driven producers of plenty.

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / January 7, 2010

Out on the broad grasslands, the mounted cattle herders come into contact with the Stone Age foragers long tied to the land. Some of these indigenous people may have also adopted the horse as a form of transportation, but they do not domesticate other animals; they hunt and fish, do a little scratch agriculture and move on.

The tough cattle drivers are also nomadic, using great wagons to haul their lives about. The cow punchers are not part of the established farming settlements, though they borrow what they need from that culture and, of course, are known to steal cattle. The farmers are momma’s boys, Goddess worshippers, their harvests and livestock easy prey for the ruthless, sky God worshipping cowboys. Yes, this is a very old, familiar story.

But this old West show is really the story of Western humanity, still today acting out an endless range war.

The original horse-mounted cattle driving people were from the Steppes of Russia and the Ukraine. Their predatory activities, aimed at the pioneer matrilinial farming cultures operating from the Danube to the Dnieper river valleys circa 3800 BCE became what we know as ancient history which slowly evolved, eventually producing our modern culture.

The language of these original Russian cowboys, reconstructed as Indo-European, was the basis for most Western languages as well as Persian and Indian Sanskrit. Indo-European thought permeates our literatures and philosophies through the structure of their language. Their gods and mythologies led to our Western religious ideas. They were where we came from.

As the original all-conquering Patriarchs, everything about the Indo-Europeans, especially their birthplace, has been highly sought after by modern male competitors. Ever since the British discovered the Vedas and the common Indo-European language factor when they conquered parts of India in the 1700s. The Nazis searched for the legendary Hunza people in Tibet in the 1930s, hoping to find the long lost blue eyed, blonde haired proto German race. The skinheads in Idaho still cling to these ridiculous racist theories, calling themselves Aryans hardly noticing that the inhabitants of the Islamic Republic in Iran are doing the same thing. (Iranian = Aryan.)

Maybe — in the eyes of the male God — being part of the original all conquering European mantribe, the Indo-Euros, could be as good as, or even possibly trump, being one of the original Israelites, for whom He wrote the big Book. That seems to be the way the male mind works. If there is any legitimacy to the male dominant cultures we see in operation around the world, it must be through an original connection to the first male race, the one olde man God made His original covenant with. Primitive. To this day, extremely primitive.

But thanks to the studies of archeology and linguistics, we now know that instead of just one basic human principal and one basic unified human experience, there are actually three human types and three separate human histories.

The first human type was the forager. He and she traveled all over the world eating roots, wild fruits, and grains, trapping and killing animals, fishing for their food. These people were relatively easy to get along with. They had no basic responsibilities other than keeping up with the cycles of Nature. Labor was divided between the sexes on a fairly equal basis. Men hunted and fished, creating biodegradable technologies and personal clan animal loyalties to facilitate those activities. Women gathered wild foods, prepared meals, raised children and developed technologies like weaving, potmaking, knotting. People existed and evolved like this for 100,000s of years.

At some point, probably in the Middle East, agriculture was developed. Also certain animals were domesticated. Although it is probably safe to say these were female cultural innovations, being part of the gathering non-hunting part of the male/female labor divide, we can probably never be sure. What is known is that as early as 8000 BCE farmers, the second great human type, were operating in Anatolia (modern Turkey), moving into Greece and eventually, a few thousand years later, into the Balkan regions of Europe. If there ever was a Goddess worshipping culture among human beings, these inhabitants of Old Europe would have been it.

Images of female authority and bounty are everywhere in the archeological evidence. Although we assume they possessed no written language, they none the less used their knowledge of Nature and proto-science to create many new varieties of domesticated plants and animals. The same ones we use today to sustain us.

So farmers were very different from the foragers they had evolved from. Instead of the life free from all obligations except understanding Nature, the farmer had a slew of responsibilities. Just preserving seed grain and young livestock for future use or trade was an enormous shift in human behavior from the immediacy of hunting and gathering.

Maintaining foodstock genetic modification projects that spanned generations of husbanders and cultivators would seem impossible without written records, from our modern competitive points of view.

But then again, we have been trained through our languages to think like the male dominant Indo-European usurpers, the third type of people, not the original Goddess worshipping pioneer farmers.

The Indo-Euros were a hybrid. Their horse and cattle currency (the first) became our world of stocks and bonds. Their attempt to create a stable culture based on useful elements within the Goddess farming experience without surrendering their male dominance and male lineage projection is still the script to the movie we all get to act in every day.

There just has to be a way to be a successful ruthless competitor promotion driven materialist spiritual community service oriented family man (or its female equivalent). The proverbial square peg in the round hole. Got a bigger hammer?

If only we could find the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans, maybe then we’d come to understand what it was in their vision that set us on this course of endless animal sacrifice, male dominance, materialist competition, human warfare, and eco-destruction. The trouble is all we have left from the I-E is the language they bequeathed to us. And, of course, the way of thinking that goes with it. What we would find if we discovered the original “Aryan” homeland could only be that the Indo-Europeans and the male reverent way of thinking they passed on to us are the explanation for why we will always find it difficult to contemplate female origins for human culture.

What was it we were talking about? I got distracted while dreaming about Conan the Barbarian again. The hope for humanity is that we will finally stop worshipping the Cowboy and go back to worshipping the Cow. The male urge to strut and kill has a natural outlet. It is called hunting and it goes back just about as far as we do as a world presence.

But this has gone way beyond hunting, and the male domain is now the entire experiential base of humanity. The human female urge to nurture and protect no longer has a viable outlet. There are few if any surviving female lineages. We are all patrilieal cowboy predators now.

Yet are there still situations where the historic benefits of our original female enculturation remain apparent? A garden, or perhaps a kitchen or a school. The naked statue of Woman as Justice, still holding the scales outside the courthouse, the judges with their wigs and robes. Faint echoes.

The cowboy tries to straddle the impossible horse. The foreknowledge of the Matriarchs is now an endless field of plunder and exploitation. The farm is a factory that poisons the people, the animals and the land. Industries that derived from simple home technologies now strip the world of its resources and create endless piles of useless waste. The land, the air and the sea are all fished clean purely for the male ideal of perfect domination.

Population continues to peak as Patriarchs create people solely as possessions, even if they are ultimately unwanted and must be abandoned, incarcerated or exterminated. The ill advised biproducts of unadulterated human male animal success are everywhere.

Men refuse to agree. How can they? They are not designed to agree, only to compete for favor. So how can men and the women who think like them be satisfied controlling the species when they know, unconciously, what they do will ultimately crush Humanity?

When do we finally dare break free from the staring contest with Conan the Indo European and look at last at the Neolithic villages where the Motherlode of humanity’s wealth and knowledge was actually first unEarthed?

Look again at the terra cotta figurines of the large ancient women… now what do you see?

[Carl R. Hultberg’s grandfather, Rudi Blesh, was a noted jazz critic and music historian, and Carl was raised in that tradition. After spending many years as a music archivist and social activist in New York’s Greenwich Village, he now lives in an old abandoned foundry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where he runs the Ragtime Society.]

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And in this Corner : The Globalists Vs. the Pragmatists

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Globalist discourse’ on war and peace:
2010 will be year of ideological struggle

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / January 7, 2010

The year ends with the resurgence of what we might call “globalist discourse.” Globalist discourse is a set of ideas or theories about how the world works that justifies United States military and political intervention on a global scale.

Since the United States became a great power, it has sought to expand its influence, power, and economic presence everywhere. But during some periods the policy and the defenses of it (the discourse) have emphasized diplomacy, building relationships with allies, and even, from time to time, currying the favor of potential competitors for world domination.

This represents a kind of “pragmatic approach” to global influence. During other periods the United States has rejected diplomacy, demanded allied obedience, and engaged in bloody military adventures, the globalist approach.

The election of Barack Obama offered the hope to the peace movement, and large sectors of the public that the new administration would reinstate a more “pragmatic” approach to foreign policy. As has been stated by many, however, Obama’s newly announced counterinsurgency policy for Afghanistan and bold proclamation at the Nobel Peace prize awards ceremony that the world is an ugly place and therefore that wars are inevitable suggest that he may be tilting toward the more globalist, interventionist strain in United States policy.

Pressure to continue to move in the globalist direction increased as 2009 came to a close. First, spokespersons for war criticized the Obama administration for not understanding that the United States is in a perpetual global war against terrorists. Former Vice President Dick Cheney spoke for this view after the Christmas Day attempted terrorist attack on a commercial plane flight ending in Detroit. “We are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe.”

Cheney decried Obama’s reluctance to use the language of “war on terrorism.” Such language Cheney said “doesn’t fit with the view of the world he (Obama) brought with him to the Oval Office.” And, of course, what the Bush/Cheney team brought to the Oval Office, the former Vice President argued, was much preferred. It was the view that the United States, as the last remaining superpower, is constantly threatened by forces more diabolical than the former Soviet Union. 9/11 was just one manifestation of a global war of “Jihadists” who wish to destroy the U.S.

Unfortunately, rather than directly challenging the validity of this view, spokespersons from the Democratic Party, responded by saying that Obama in fact has said that the U.S. is at war. They reminded the public that in his inaugural address Obama proclaimed that; “Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” However, to provide some rationality to the response an adviser to the President for Homeland Security, John O. Brennan, indicated that U.S. policy is targeted at specific threats which are “…tangible-Al Qaeda, violent extremists, and terrorists- rather than at war with a tactic, terrorism.”

An additional byproduct of what may be called “the doctrine of perpetual violence” is the claim that military priorities trump all other policies. In this regard Cheney pointed out that the Obama perspective on the world does not fit the needs of national security because “…it doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.” Cheney implied that Obama is squandering energy, resources, and time on health care reform, global warming, jobs, education, and other vital needs at home rather than engaging what is needed to defeat “the terrorists.”

A parallel set of claims about threats to the United States was aired in a troubling December 31 broadcast segment on National Public Radio. In it, NPR foreign policy analyst Tom Gjelten, interviewed so-called experts who claimed that failure to stop the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan might lead to wider wars in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. These threats to regional stability were also threats to United States vital economic, political, and military interests.

Gjelten sited Jean-Louis Bruguiere who was identified as a European Union envoy on terrorism. Bruguiere suggested that an “arc of conflict” was emerging that increasingly encompassed Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia. He added that radical insurgent groups, which formerly operated only in their own countries now work in collaboration with their counterparts in other countries. If the insurgents win in Afghanistan, it will boost the prospects of radical insurgent victories in the other threatened regimes.

Paul Quinn-Judge, identified as the Central Asia Director for the International Crisis Group, referred to the importance of one insurgent group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is now operating with the Taliban in Afghanistan. “If the Taliban can consolidate themselves in northern Afghanistan, that’s already going to be an excellent jumping-off point for the IMU and for other Central Asian Islamists” which “…would be a very disturbing development for most of the countries of Central Asia.”

Gjelten then referred to David Sedney, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Central Asia, who in recent Senate hearings indicated that some supplies for the U.S. war on Afghanistan are brought via road and rail through Central Asia, the so-called Northern Distribution Network. He said that in “…the mindset of the Taliban and other Islamist movements, Central Asia is now part of the general theater of war.”

Whose “mindset” sees Central Asia as “now part of the general theater of war?” Is it really the Taliban? Or is it the globalists who see the world as part of “the general theater of war?”

While many Americans, perhaps most, dismiss the ravings of Dick Cheney, the threat of terrorism, the reminders of the horror of 9/11, the articulation of the view of the world that says nations and peoples are driven by the violent laws of the jungle have some resonance. Even greater weight is given to the “expert” laced analyses of hand-picked “experts” put on display with intellectual reverence by National Public Radio.

As 2010 dawns, the peace movement must begin to attack the fundamental premises of the globalist discourse. Wars are not inevitable. There is no global jihad. U.S. violence in the world generates equal and more threatening responses. And, finally, the whole globalist discourse celebrates and revels in massive violence, military waste, and dehumanization. Therefore as we select our political representatives, consume news and views about the world, and work for a better world, we must demand a discourse that is not wrapped in apocalyptic visions of human affairs.

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

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Ireland : ‘Blasphemy’ Now Against the Law

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Irish atheists fight back:
Dissing religion now a secular rap

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / January 6, 2010

On January 1st a new law took effect in Ireland — the so-called “Blasphemy Law.” This law makes it a criminal offense to make blasphemous statements regarding any religion. The penalty for this blasphemy is a fine of up to 25,000 euros (or about $35,000 in U.S. currency). The government said the new law was needed because the Irish Constitution only protected Christianity from blasphemy.

Obviously, Ireland is not big on “free speech” — at least as far as religion is concerned. This law would be considered to be an unconstitutional violation of free speech here in the United States, and that’s just how Irish atheists believe it should be in Ireland. This law could criminalize all Irish atheists for just stating their sincerely held beliefs, while the religious folks could say anything at all about atheism (no matter how mean, nasty or untrue their words were).

This really stacks the table against free thought and for religion. But the Irish atheists are already taking the first steps in fighting this new and unfair law. Atheist Ireland chairman Michael Nugent says, “This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas.”

Now some of you may think that as an American I really don’t have a dog in this fight. I disagree. As you can probably tell by my last name, my ancestry is mostly Irish (with a dash of Scot and Dutch thrown in). I have always been proud of that because those ancestors have never bent their knee to tyranny.

The Irish fought for many centuries for freedom and self-determination for their people, and many brave Irishmen gave their lives for this cause. How is it then that they now seek to criminalize and subjugate the beliefs of many of their own citizens? Are their religions really so weak that they cannot withstand the verbal and written words of honest Irishmen? Isn’t this just religious tyranny?

But there are still Irishmen who believe all Irishmen should have the right to say what they wish. The Irish atheists are fighting back. On the first day the new law went into effect, Atheist Ireland posted 25 blasphemous quotations on their website. The quotations are from famous people and “blaspheme” several religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism) and religion in general.

Actually it is only 24 “blasphemous” quotations, since one of the 25 actually denigrates atheism. They wanted to show their belief that all ideas should be subject to scrutiny and free speech — even their own.

They are, in effect, daring the government to arrest and charge them with blasphemy. And if this happens, they promise to fight it in the courts in the hope of getting the ridiculous law overturned. They are also scheduling public meetings across the country, where I’m sure they will be issuing more “blasphemous” statements.

I commend these brave Irishmen and wish them success in their endeavor. To see all of the 25 published statements, go to the site of Atheist Ireland. I am only printing one of the statements here because it is one of my favorite quotes — from the entertainer, atheist and Irish-American George Carlin, who said,

Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything that you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!

But he loves you. He loves you, and he needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, but somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

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

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‘TV Everywhere’ : Pulling the Plug on Web-Based Video?

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Say goodbye to free online television:
Comcast launches ‘TV Everywhere’

By Josh Silver / January 6, 2010

On Monday, public interest groups called on federal authorities to investigate a plan by the largest cable, satellite and phone companies that threatens the future of Web-based video. “TV Everywhere” gets programmers like TNT, TBS, and CBS to keep their content offline unless a viewer also pays for TV through a traditional company like Comcast or AT&T (phone companies are starting to offer TV service, too).

TV Everywhere is designed to protect the current cable TV subscription model and block competition from upstart online video ventures like Vuze, Roku and Hulu. Cleverly marketed as a consumer-friendly product, TV Everywhere is really a desperate bid by old media giants to crush the emerging market for online TV. Cable giant Comcast just became the first company to launch TV Everywhere under the brand “Fancast Xfinity,” and the other dominant cable, satellite, and phone companies have announced plans to follow suit.

At its core, TV Everywhere is about ensuring consumers don’t cancel their overpriced cable TV subscriptions that provide companies like Comcast with huge profits ($6.7 billion in 2008 alone). But the current scheme also prevents competition among existing TV distributors. Instead of being offered to all Americans, including those living in Cox, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable regions, Fancast Xfinity is only available in Comcast regions. The other distributors plan to follow Comcast’s lead, meaning that the incumbents will not compete with one another outside of their “traditional” regions.

Statements made by cable executives indicate that backroom deals are being cut without asking for permission by regulators — the kind of permission that the nation’s major newspapers recently sought before entering into discussions about a coordinated online “paywall.” So TV Everywhere not only threatens the Net’s potential to break open access and distribution of video content, it also appears to be an illegal collusion meant to block competition. Any way you slice it, it’s bad for consumers. On Monday, public interest groups
released a major report at the same time that they sent a letter to federal regulators requesting an antitrust investigation of TV Everywhere.

New online-only TV distributors and independent channels are excluded from TV Everywhere. The “principles” of the plan, which were published by Comcast and Time Warner (a content company distinct from Time Warner Cable), clearly state that TV Everywhere is meant only for cable operators, satellite companies and phone companies. By design, this plan would exclude new entrants and result in fewer choices and higher prices for consumers.

This deal threatens to stifle the freedom and innovation that are shaping our new media marketplace. The Internet is enabling people to watch video how and when they want it. The programs we watch on TV are increasingly available on your computer: on-demand through Hulu, Fancast and other streaming sites. And the online video you can see on YouTube, Miro, Fancast, Vimeo and other portals are available on televisions and portable devices.

Stranded at the airport, sitting in a coffee shop, on vacation or at work, we can view programs from basically anywhere. And thanks to the Internet’s open, neutral platform, anyone can create and share video, meaning we’re no longer confined to the programs that media executives choose to offer.

TV Everywhere represents a defining moment in the future of radio, television and other media. In one scenario, we break from history and achieve more consumer choice and an explosion of innovative content. We may need to pay for video online, or continue to watch advertisements, but we won’t be forced to buy a traditional cable TV subscription that we don’t want or need.

In another scenario, we allow the big cable, satellite and phone companies to use anti-competitive ventures like TV Everywhere to protect the status quo, and make the Internet more like cable television: where they, not you, pick and choose what you can watch, how and when you can watch it, and how much you pay for it.

The central tenet of TV Everywhere is that it can only exist through collusion among competitors. Our federal antitrust authorities and Congress must launch an immediate investigation.

The Internet offers an unparalleled opportunity to democratize the TV screen now controlled by a handful of powerful media companies. This revolution is televised — and we should be able to view it online, too. Antitrust authorities should start enforcing antitrust laws and protect the public interest.

[Josh Silver is the Executive Director of Free Press a national, nonpartisan organization that he co-founded with Robert McChesney and John Nichols in 2002 to engage citizens in media policy debates and create a more democratic and diverse media system.]

Source / The Huffington Post

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Colombia : Pablo Emilio Moncayo: A Pawn in Uribe’s Game

Posted on January 6, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Pablo Emilio Moncayo in 1996, 19 years old.

Colombia’s Uribe:
Playing politics with Pablo

Somewhere in the Amazon jungle tonight, Pablo sleeps chained to a tree stump, his release prevented by the government he served all these long years in order to continue the class warfare that U.S. taxpayers pay for.

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / January 6, 2010

CARTAGENA DE INDIES, Colombia — On 21 December 2009, Pablo Emilio Moncayo marked his 12th year as a captive of Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — Ejército del Pueblo (FARC or FARC-EP; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Peoples Army).

While President Uribe’s propaganda machine says that he was kidnapped, he was actually captured in battle in 1997. Pablo was a corporal in the Colombian Army (COLAR) then; he has been promoted to sergeant while a POW. Like all stories, Pablo’s began many years before he became a pawn in the decades old military/political class struggle between COLAR and FARC-EP.

Like many revolutionary armies, FARC-EP began as a rag-tag group of campesinos protecting an agrarian class displaced from their land by rich landowners. That was in the late 1950s. Because of the brutal opposition it met, the FARC had to become not just a defensive, protective force for the people, but an army with offensive capabilities. They declared themselves a belligerent army in 1964 and named themselves the FARC in 1966.

Pablo Moncayo was four years old in 1982, when the events that led to his current situation began to take shape.

At the Seventh Guerrilla Conference in 1982, work began to turn the FARC from a guerrilla organization into a rebel army (the “People’s Army”). FARC added ranks and badges to its uniforms, introduced a new inventory system for firearms and ammunition, and provided new weapons and technology for FARC militants.

In theory, a properly organized and trained guerrilla army would thus meet the international requirements for recognition of a “state of belligerence” as defined by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and later protocols. FARC considers that it lives up to this definition and argues that it has been accepted as a legitimate army, in particular during negotiations with successive Colombian governments.

FARC opponents and the government claim that the group’s practices of civilian kidnapping for ransom and taxing coca crop buyers make it an illegitimate army and point to a wide rejection of FARC positions in national surveys. Assassinations of opponents and forced displacements are inflicted on the general population by all forces involved in the Colombian civil war, making FARC’s belligerent status claim harder to accept. This is further complicated by the coca eradication efforts of the Colombian government that involve U.S. support and that have led to FARC being declared a terrorist organization by the U.S. government and the EU.

FARC maintains that it does not grow or process or transport Colombia’s main agricultural crop, cocaine. It admits that it taxes those who do. It taxes all commerce in the territory ceded to it by the former Pastrana government in a peace agreement, territory that the Uribe government is now trying to retake by force of arms.

Aware of these roadblocks to legitimacy, FARC one year ago released the last of its civilian hostages. Those captured in battle, however, are still held.

On December 21, 1997, COLAR was building a communications station in Patascoy, in the state of Nariño, close to the border of Putumayo, when the construction unit was attacked by the FARC. Twenty-two COLAR soldiers were killed and 19 were captured, among them Corporal Moncayo, almost as low as you can get on the military totem pole. FARC causalities were not reported.

In 2007, Pablo’s father, Gustavo Guillermo Moncayo Rincon, a teacher popularly known as “El caminante por la paz” (“the walker for peace”), walked 1,186 km from his hometown, Sandoná, in the department of Nariño, to the capital, Bogotá, seeking an agreement for the release of his son, who had by then been a prisoner of the guerrilla group for 10 years.

On June 17, 2007, Father’s Day in Colombia, Moncayo began walking from Sandoná accompanied by his daughter, along the Pan-American Highway, stopping in every town along the way to rest and to collect signatures for a petition to President Álvaro Uribe, asking him to conduct a prisoner exchange.

When he arrived in Cali, he was received by Governor Angelino Garzon, who offered him a place to stay. Days after, in Pereira, he was received by the mayor, who decorated him as a “citizen of honour.” He walked across the highest pass of the Andes, and on August 1, 2007, Moncayo walked the last stretch to the historic downtown of the capital city. When he arrived in the Plaza de Bolívar he was cheered by thousands of people. His arrival led to a public exchange of views in the press between him and Uribe, who blamed Pablo Moncayo’s long captivity on the FARC.

After this fruitless exchange, Moncayo said, “Sadly, our children, our loved ones, remain there in the jungle… We are in the middle of this political game between the government and the FARC.” He also criticized Uribe for “making empty offers to the guerrillas in exchange for the captives.”

According to the Washington Post, Fernando Londoño, a far-right former interior minister, criticized Moncayo in an opinion column for El Tiempo, the country’s main daily. (El Tiempo is owned and operated by the family of Colombia’s recent Minister of Defense, Juan Santos, and is a frequent source of government propaganda.) He accused Pablo Moncayo of being an “incompetent soldier,” and wrote that his father was spreading “Marxist venom through Colombia’s veins.”

Gustavo Moncayo continued to work for his son’s release, collecting petitions, visiting politicians, and talking with anyone who would listen. Early in 2009 his work seemed to pay off. An international outcry began to take hold and in April, responding to a call from Hugo Chavez, the president of neighboring Venezuela; President Rafael Correa of Ecuador; Senator Piedad Córdoba, known as the “peace senator”; Amnesty International; the Catholic church; and the International Red Cross, the FARC announced they would “unilaterally” free the soldier they had held hostage for over 11 years as they look for ways to start peace talks with the government.

It looked like Pablo was coming home. Senator Córdoba and the Red Cross were named as intermediaries. Still Uribe was reluctant and dragged his feet over arrangements, all the while keeping up a steady stream of vile and unhelpful statements.

Army corporal Pablo Emilio Moncayo, Age 31, October 9, 2009. Photo from Agencia EFE.

The FARC said it would unilaterally free Pablo Moncayo and turn him over to his father and the left-wing Córdoba, who has brokered hostage handovers in the past, and that it wanted the release to begin the start of peace talks with the government. Uribe responded by insisting that the rebels “first must cease bombing, kidnapping, and drug smuggling.” At every turn he seemed to be trying to derail Pablo’s release.

On December 22, 2009, he saw his chance to nix the deal once and for all. That was the day 10 heavily armed men in civilian clothes kidnapped and murdered the governor of the state of Caquetá, Luis Francisco Cuellar. Without any proof at all, Uribe immediately announced that the perpetrators were the FARC.

In his usual hate-filled rhetorical style the president announced that the assassination of Cuellar gives him great “pain” and “desperation.” Uribe said the crime was the work of the “same bandits who want to make the release of the hostages a show.” The president was referring to a statement that FARC made several months ago about their readiness to free two soldiers (including Pablo Moncayo), and return the remains of a policeman who died in captivity.

Uribe stated that he has done everything required by the FARC and therefore no longer believes in the promises of “these bandits,” insisting that the military will rescue the hostages.

But Uribe has not done anything FARC has asked. He refuses to take this release as an opening for peace talks. He would not even sign an agreement guaranteeing the safety of the people involved in the release, including the senator and Red Cross representatives.

In 2002, when peace talks were initiated; Uribe loosed paramilitary thugs who used the occasion to kill some FARC negotiators. He put an end to that peace process and insured more years of “dirty war” and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fill his and his cronies’ coffers.

The FARC website had this to say:

“Because Uribe and his gang did not sign the decree which guarantees security for guerrillas and guests, you can not believe anything. The only thing stopping this humanitarian act has its own name: Uribe Velez.” The website added, “The FARC knows that the Colombian oligarchy and its transitional form, Uribe, are tráfugas and not ‘a tantico to be trusted’.”

According to information obtained by ANNCOL, the FARC remains ready to fulfill its word, freeing the two soldiers and returning the remains of the policeman.

Meanwhile, Pablo Emilio Moncayo’s father, Gustavo Moncayo, charged that Uribe’s statements “continue to insist on preventing” the release of his son and asked him not to endanger the lives of the hostages with a military type rescue.

Uribe was not to be deterred by the father’s pleading. “The instruction is to rescue,” Uribe said. “I have asked all military and police efforts to rescue the other hostages that were retained from these bandits.”

Uribe got what he wanted. On December 24, the Red Cross announced it had suspended negotiations to release the hostages. A representative of the organization in Colombia (ICRC), Pascal Jequier, told the BBC that the decision was made after President Uribe ordered a military rescue of the governor of Caquetá, Luis Francisco Cuellar, and other hostages. Uribe issued the “rescue” order before Cuellar’s death was known, placing other POWs in danger.

“As long as the order is in force to act through military means to rescue the hostages, there will be no release sponsored by the ICRC,” Jequier said, adding that,”Efforts to seek the release of Corporal Pablo Emilio Moncayo and the soldier Joshua Daniel Calvo remain ‘frozen’ at the moment.”

Somewhere in the Amazon jungle tonight, Pablo sleeps chained to a tree stump, his release prevented by the government he served all these long years in order to continue the class warfare that U.S. taxpayers pay for.

“He’s only a pawn in their game.” — Bob Dylan

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U.S. Government : Six Decades of Spying on its Citizens

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


It’s a national tradition:
Spying on Americans

  • Part One: LBJ and Nixon

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / January 5, 2010

[This is the first installment of Sherman DeBrosse’s series about the U.S. government’s extensive and inglorious history of spying on its own people.]

Difficult as it is to understand, our government now has a number of detention facilities that could house hundreds of thousands of people. Some say they are to house undocumented immigrants, but one wonders. In recent years, government has also acquired the capability to monitor and store information about millions of telephone calls, faxes, and e-mails made by American citizens.

When we reflect that government has a history of spying on and harassing progressives and people who object to some of our wars, we cannot be blamed for wondering if the detention facilities and electronic surveillance capabilities are not there to be used on progressives.

Operation Chaos

In October, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established “Operation Chaos” in the CIA. Its role largely was to spy on American citizens who objected to the war in Vietnam. Of course, to one extent or another, the CIA has been spying on domestic dissidents since 1959. Chaos relied largely upon people from the Domestic Operations Division, and others were borrowed from European assignments.

The Domestic Operations Division was created sometime between 1962 and 1965, and its first head was Charles Tracy Barnes, a CIA veteran who had coordinated the agency’s activities duiring the 1954 Guatemalan coup and 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. It was located at 1750 Pennsylvania Avenue, not in Langley, VA.

From the beginning, Richard Helms was its driving force, and Helms removed Barnes when he became director in 1967. It is believed that under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney Domestic Operations was headquartered in Denver. The relocation might be related to the fact that NSA has significant storage facilities in the area for intercepted electronic communications of all kind.

The NSA has moved many of its personnel from Fort Meade to Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, where its National Resources Division has relocated. The Army’s new Northern Command (NORTHCOM) has its headquarters in Colorado, and it too has significant data storage and analysis facilities there. The CIA insists that the Domestic Operations Division only works within the United States to gather information about foreign governments.

From the beginning, Domestic Operations was comprised of old hands. The agency’s charter forbade domestic police and domestic surveillance operations, but this division had existed for some time. For a time, E. Howard Hunt was assigned to it. It occupied a full floor at 1750 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. A major objective was to infiltrate the New Left anti-war circles.

As is well known, the CIA pumped huge amounts of money into the National Students Association, and it infiltrated a number of other student organizations. Even before Johnson established Operation Chaos, the CIA was working with students. Gloria Steinem admitted working for the agency in the late 50s and early 60s. She said she never spied on other Americans, but some say that was only because she was never asked. The official report on Chaos says it began in 1967, so the previous material might be labeled “pre-Chaos.“


By 1967, the unit was pursuing dissidents, black militants, and congressmen. It was to learn all it could about campus anti-war militants and to disrupt their activities. The program was justified as an effort to predict violent activities against the United States government. It was claimed that there was possible foreign involvement in the peace activities, and this was also a basis for justifying the program and CIA activity in domestic matters.

The Pentagon joined the efforts directed against dissidents in 1968 when it established the Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning Operations. It established a “domestic war room” manned by 180 people in the basement of the Pentagon.

Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel from its Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) cooperated with the CIA’s Operation Chaos. Since 1950, the bureau had a database containing the names of thousands of Americans it considered suspicious and potentially subversive. Among them were teachers, doctors, scientists, lawyers — people from all walks of life.

The bureau had long been watching dissidents — defined as anyone differing from the thinking of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Not only was COINTELPRO devoted to keeping track of people considered political radicals, but the program also carried out an illicit campaign to disrupt and destroy peace and justice organizations. The bureau later admitted carrying out 2,218 COINTELPRO operations between 1956 and mid-1974. Eventually, the Senate’s Church Committee unearthed some of these activities and concluded that many security and law enforcement personnel considered themselves guardians of the status quo.

Operation Chaos continued under Richard Nixon, and national security advisor Henry Kissinger combed through these files. In June, 1970, President Nixon greatly ramped up the operation in a meeting with key figures, such as J. Edgar Hoover, NSA director Noel Gaylor, and Richard Helms.

The agents worked with police and college administrators to identify dissidents, and demonstrations were monitored. Agents also joined anti-war organizations. The FBI gave Chaos its reports on peace groups, amounting to about a thousand a month. The Domestic Operations Division had files on 13,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations. It also burglarized foreign embassies.

Local police departments were rewarded for assistance through gifts of high-grade equipment. By 1972, the CIA inspector general’s report reflected growing concern that the program had gone too far.

We also encountered general concern over what appeared to be a monitoring of the political views and activities of Americans not known to be or suspected of being involved in espionage… Stations were asked to report on the whereabouts and activities of prominent persons… whose comings and goings were not only in the public domain, but for whom allegations of subversion seemed sufficiently nebulous to raise renewed doubts as to the nature and legitimacy of the CHAOS program.

Properly we should be talking about the CIA’s Operation Chaos and the activities of the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program. These operations worked together to carry out the goals of Chaos, investigating all sorts of dissidents, including “restless youth,” “advocates of new lifestyles,” and the New Left. Over the life of the program, information on over 300,000 persons was shared with other law enforcement people, including the FBI. Deputy Director William Sullivan intended to tell the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he had opposed continuing COINTELPRO, but he died in a hunting accident before he could testify.

The CIA gathered the names of 300,000 people, and thousands of them were put on a watch list. The United States Army joined in the domestic surveillance program, using 1,500 agents in 350 offices, and created its own list. Army Intelligence spearheaded this effort, and many of its offices were on college campuses. The National Security Administration was also involved, but we know next to nothing about its activities.

Defenders of J. Edgar Hoover said he knew little about Operation Chaos, but a review of some remaining files show that the CIA was using many FBI files, most undigested. They simply pulled names out of them and put them in a master index. Many operatives from the agency’s covert division were used in the United States, sometimes dressed up as hippies. They resented doing this work, as did the leadership of the CIA. There was an effort to reduce this kind of activity, and even Hoover came to see that it could damage the FBI’s profile.

Richard Nixon pointing the way.

The Huston Plan

Richard Nixon greatly expanded the surveillance, and the FBI was ordered to keep track of the private lives of Nixon’s political opponents. When Nixon left office, investigators found hundreds of reports of electronic surveillance and break-ins. None of this was done with warrants. It was illegal, even though Nixon was on record as saying nothing a president does can be illegal.

Under Nixon the Interagency Committee on Intelligence was formed to coordinate domestic spying. It was temporarily chaired by J. Edgar Hoover, but Sullivan, the bureau’s No. 3 man, eventually was to chair it. The committee recommended more mail opening and black bag jobs. It was based on the Huston Plan, which is well known. Tom Charles Huston was a young White House assistant in charge of domestic intelligence.

But few realized it was implemented to some degree because the activities suggested by Tom Huston had been underway for some years. Huston knew about Operation Chaos and wanted to greatly expand the activity. But this occurred at a time when some within the CIA wanted an end to the illegal activity. House majority leader Hale Boggs had an idea of what was going on and denounced the FBI on the House floor for tapping the telephones of representatives and senators.

Under pressure from Attorney General John Mitchell, Nixon rescinded the Huston Plan, giving the appearance the plan was dead. One problem may have been that Huston was simply too young and made the proposal in too open a manner.

But another problem was that the FBI’s aging director had his own agenda and threw a wrench in the works. Hoover claimed to be concerned that there were so many intelligence break-ins that exposure was likely. He quickly fired Sullivan for cooperating too closely with other intelligence agencies.

In March, 1971, a “citizen’s’” break-in at the Media, PA, office of the FBI produced more than a thousand documents that exposed the COINTELPRO operation with its infiltration of student groups and spying on dissenters. Six weeks later, Hoover shut down COINTELPRO.

There was no longer a mechanism to coordinate spying, black bag jobs, etc., but these activities continued anyway. There was the less known Intelligence Evaluation Committee (IEC), also known as the Son of Huston Plan. White House Counsel John Dean organized it. It included people from NSA, DOD, and CIA and essentially adopted the Huston Plan, which appeared to have been officially rejected. G. Gordon Liddy attended in order to initiate investigation of “Pentagon Papers” leaks.

Clearly Operation Chaos established a major precedent for domestic spying. Evidence is beginning to surface about domestic surveillance of peace activists by the FBI during the administration of George W. Bush. The Progressive obtained records demonstrating that the bureau had at least two informers within the Iowa City peace and justice group. They provided very detailed information on its operatives, including information on their appearances, living arrangements, and the automobiles they drove.

We do not know to what extent the government spied on its citizens in the balance of the 1970s. The Pike and Church Commissions revealed some aspects of Operation Chaos, and Jimmy Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner to clean up the CIA. We do know that the Reagan administration, which took office in 1981, was interested in resuming the battle with so-called radicals.

Next installment: “Spying on Americans, Part Two: The Reagan Administration Acquires Promis Software.”

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

Also see:

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Apocalypse 2010 : Meltdown Under the American Bubble

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams.

Remembering 2010 (if we must):
Mass amnesia, the Rapture,
and the Palin-Bachmann nuptials

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2010

MEXICO CITY — Book-ended by mass amnesia under the American bubble, 2010 was yet another year to erase from living memory. Although Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams with the usual volcanoes blowing their stacks, earthquakes rearranging the landscape, flood and drought rampaging from one continent to the next, nuclear war raging in the Middle East, and serial economic calamities inducting a billion more sentient human beings into the starvation army, First World elites navigated through daily disaster delusionally convinced that everything was honky dory.

Children played happily with their Chinese mechanical hamsters until the batteries went dead and families gathered around home entertainment centers, even the millions of families who had been evicted from their homes. Neighbors exchanged pleasantries as they cruised empty super market aisles (most brand-name products were recalled because of suspect Chinese-induced E Coli contamination), oblivious of the unseen poor parboiled in their own sweat and tears far beyond American shores. Scientists attributed this massive indifference to the plight of the planet to the presence of toxic amounts of Ambien in the water systems of major U.S. cities.

The majority of U.S. citizens were not even aware of their failing memories and did not know what was missing. Still mass forgetfulness had grave political downsides. One example: no one could remember the name of the U.S. president when just a year ago, it was on the tips of everyone’s tongue. Indeed, no one could recall much of anything anymore. Even after the physical environment collapsed and the faithful were taken up in the Rapture, no one seemed to miss them.

The faithful were taken up in the rapture, but weren’t missed. Artist reconstruction.

The following month-by-month capsule of how the Apocalypse impaled Planet Earth on the Cross of Catastrophe was scraped together from the author’s pitiful scraps of memory before he slipped into total dementia.

JANUARY – The failure of climate change negotiations in Copenhagen (they will reconvene in December 2010 in Mexico City, the most monstrous megalopolis in the Americas) and the formation of a cartel of the world’s pollution leaders had immediate repercussions when Somali pirates captured an iceberg floating in the Red Sea.

In accordance with the U.S. Zero Tolerance For Pirates protocol, President What’s His Name stealth-bombed the dusky buccaneers who were towing the huge block of ice into port and so-called depleted uranium radiation liquefied it, triggering monumental flooding — all of Yemen and parts of east Africa remain underwater and the quat crop has been decimated for years to come, causing wide-spread depression on the Dark Continent.

Further north, global warming had a more fortuitous fallout when the melt-down of a thermo-nuclear power plant in the capital city of Nuuk converted the Greenland Ice Cap to boiling water and the Inuit Riviera caught fire as a hot tourist attraction

Back under the American Bubble, on the first year anniversary of his hope-saturated inauguration on the Capital Mall, 78% of those polled by the Pew Institute On Domestic Dementia could no longer remember the President’s name — 72% referred to him simply as “you know, that black guy.” Another 16% still had the President confused with Osama Bin Laden but 9% could correctly remember his first and last name although not at the same time.

On the other side of the political ledger, the words “Republican Party” had no name recognition for 81% of those who responded to the Pew poll. Alarmed pollsters hypothesized that the results were symptomatic of mass brainwashing, probably due to “something in the water.”

FEBRUARY – Whatever his name was, The President of the United States was confronted with his umpteenth international terrorist crisis when Taliban technicians, employing Sky Grabber technology on sale at Radio Shack for $26 Americano, seized control of an unmanned and unwomanned drone over North Waziristan and redirected it to Kabul where the rebels launched missile attacks against the seat of the puppet government, flattening President Karsai and his entire cabinet, which included three of the world’s most influential heroin dealers.

The obliteration of central authority quickly splintered the Afghan Crusade into a series of local mini-wars. Caught in the crossfire between feuding warlords, the U.S. death toll climbed to 502 for the month, topping even Iraq at the nadir of the illegal American invasion and occupation. Both the Nobel Peace Prize winning president and his Commander-in-Chief Stanley McChrystal extolled the high death toll as proof that the U.S. was winning the war and vowed to dispatch 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

When Taliban Sky Grabber gear hijacked two more drones and targeted Blackwater/Xe training facilities in the Great North Carolina swamp, Obama or Osama or whatever his name was closed down all Radio Shacks in the continental U.S.

Also under the bubble, cheap Chinese pork chops were deemed responsible for an outbreak of an inscrutable strain of Swine flu (“Swinear flu”) that convulsed the breadbasket of the country.

The majority of citizens weren’t aware of their failing memories. Image from TheTugboatComplex.

MARCH – A post-midnight coup March 11 in Quito, Ecuador, in which a junta of generals and admirals trained at the former School of the Americas overthrew and subsequently dismembered that tiny Andean country’s elected president, the economist Rafael Correa, was the latest violent “regime change” in Latin America.

Since the White House greenlighted the overthrow of right-wing leftist Mel Zelaya in Honduras in June 2009, 11 Latin countries have suffered “golpes de estado,” 10 of them this year (Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Bolivia, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay). The wave of coup d’etats is almost certainly being orchestrated by the U.S. South Command operating out of seven state-of-the art bases recently installed in Colombia.

In Paraguay, the U.S. 4th Fleet parked itself off the coast while military gorillas dethroned former liberationist bishop and father of 14, Fernando Lugo. Up until January 2010 Paraguay had no coastline but global warming has brought the Atlantic Ocean to that impoverished majority Indian nation’s doorstep.

Meanwhile in Mexico, scattered rebellion has broken out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. In early January, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation occupied sacred sites throughout the country including Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, Palenque in Chiapas, and Teotihuacan near Mexico City, calling upon ancient Mayan and Mexica deities to join their uprising.

Panicked by the prospect of declining tourist dollars, fraudulently elected president Felipe Calderon pulled 50,000 troops out of his failed war with the drug cartels that has now taken 25,000 Mexican lives, to dislodge the Zapatistas. The strategy backfired when the cartels seized statehouses in Sinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahua.

On March 18th, the 72nd anniversary of the nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum from the transnational Seven Sisters, President Calderon was found dangling from the rafters at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, an apparent suicide — however, an autopsy turned up a note apparently pinned to the inside of his tie with a single Mexican expletive inscribed: “RATERO!“

Further scandal erupted when photographs emerged of Calderon’s corpse, clad only in jockey shorts and plastered with bloody Mexican and U.S. bills, amulets, crucifixes, and rosaries in classic narco fashion, raising questions about the dead president’s cartel affiliations.

APRIL – Global warming was deemed responsible for the near-biblical migration of small, undocumented mammals abandoning a disintegrating Mexico for El Norte — badgers, gophers, skunks, coyotes, foxes, and bats had little trouble burrowing under the 1,000 kilometer-long Separation Wall between the two distant neighbor countries or flying over it. Hundreds of thousands of acres in the southwest were destroyed by the marauding illegals.

Rabid bat of the type that devoured a Minuteman in Lubbock.

When an anti-immigration Minuteman was devoured by rabid bats in Lubbock, Texas, crusading Mexican killer Lou Dobbs flew to the scene of the crime where he was confronted by several hundred indignant skunks that rendered his campaign for the White House permanently unviable. The stench caused frontrunner Sarah Palin to replace Dobbs on the ticket with hysterical TV paranoid Alex Jones of Austin, Texas.

Passions in the Middle East boiled over in April when Iranian patrol boats sunk a Liberian-flagged tanker carrying 176,000 gallons of Chinese-made flan to Spain. The sinking cargo soon gummed up the Straits of Hormuz through which the bulk of oil destined for Europe, the Americas, and China passes each day. Oil prices immediately shot up from a seasonal low of $50 USD to $250, deflating the dementia-driven euphoria on Wall Street. Acting on the self-interest of his Goldman Sachs advisors, the President floated multi-billion dollar bailouts.

MAY – After five months of testy reconciliation conferences between the House and the Senate during which Dennis Kucinich challenged Michelle Bachman to a duel and was shot dead on the House floor, the U.S. Congress announced that it had reached agreement on a compromise version of all but forgotten health care reform. Indeed all the health care reform provisions in the John Doe Omnibus Health Care Reform bill (named for a bus driver who had to sell both his kidneys in order to feed a starving puppy) had been stripped from the measure before it arrived at the White House for the first Afro-American president’s John Hancock.

Among the provisions of “John Doe”: renewed funding for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kerghizstan, and Uzbekistan (two Stans will be added every year though 2018); the criminalization of abortion; and the restitution of the universal mandatory death penalty.

A new Pew poll prepared by the Institute for Domestic Dementia indicated that many Americans (a whopping 77%) had forgotten all about health care reform by May.

Sabotaged by the flan crisis, the economy was again in freefall despite White House lies that the 2009 depression was officially over and the country was growing again. As jobless benefits dried up, many families in the lower socio-economic brackets were forced to reduce their daily caloric intake and unemployed carnivores threatened to eat the rich.

Fortunately, rolling black- and brown-outs as river flows slowed to a trickle due to global warming and shut down hydro-electric power plants, caused widespread refrigeration meltdowns and millions of tons of spoiled meat, fruit, and dairy products poured into dumps and landfills where hungry garbage pickers were eager to harvest the putrefying bonanza.

Also in May, the last U.S. daily print newspaper, Rudolf Murdoch’s New York Wall Street Times Journal Sporting News, closed up shop.

JUNE – Food riots became generalized in such depression-wracked formerly industrial cities as Detroit and Houston and Fox News Chief Albino Glenn Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots to arm themselves for self-defense — the average white North American family now owns 12 to 15 automatic weapons to hold off their equally heavily armed neighbors, according to the Pew Institute On Domestic Violence.

Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots coagulated around a doddering George H.W. Bush in Texas and Dick Cheney in the Wyoming-Colorado Theater to seize state armories and hold nominating conventions. With armed insurrection being urged on cable news channels, the first Afro-American President of the United States retreated to a hollowed-out mountain in Virginia to watch the NBA Finals.

The Finals themselves generated alarming news when it was reported that Kobe Bryant had been genetically engineered on a farm in Kansas once owned by assassinated late term abortionist George Tiller — it was not known if embryonic cells were employed in Kobe’s modifications. A federal raid on the “farm” led by General Jeff Novitsky (he won his stripes in the Barry Bonds genocide campaign) uncovered thousands of Kobe clones in various stages of assemblage.

In other sporting news, the World Cup Matches in South Africa had to be called off when starving rioters set stadiums aflame, roasting tens of thousands of first world hooligans.

Flood and drought raged from one continent to the next. Image from Worth1000.com.

JULY – Prodded by global broiling, temperatures all across the northern regions of the planet jumped three degrees Celsius in July, one degree higher than the acceptable limits imposed by the polluting nations at the Copenhagen conference. The summer heat was so intense that roadways buckled and bridge struts melted and infrastructure in the U.S. midwest collapsed. The overload on the electricity grid shut down air conditioning units in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia and sweltering senior citizens dropped like flies. So many old people expired during the month (123,000 according to the Pew Institute On One-Time Senior Citizens) that morgues overflowed and bodies were put out on the street each morning for the dead wagons to collect and carry off to common graves.

By mid-summer with the doomed president’s jobless recovery in full flower, 36% of all American families were living in their cars, according to the Pew Institute On Vehicular Gridlock, transforming the nation’s highway system into a coast-to-coast parking lot. Then cars began to commit suicide, blowing sky-high with no warning. Homeland Security blamed explosives sewn into drivers’ underwear for the plague of car bombings although some experts speculated that the automobile industry was just depressed.

AUGUST – The dog days extended into August with no relief in sight. Despite the intense heat, the Tea Bag Patriots were on the move, traveling mostly at night towards Washington D.C. for the much ballyhooed Palin-Bachman same sex nuptials set for later in the month despite Michelle’s pending indictment for gunning down a liberal congressperson on the House floor.

Sarah Palin announced her engagement to Michelle Bachman who had killed Dennis Kucinich in a duel on the floor of the House. Photo from jezebel.

As U.S. troops abandoned Iraq to its own explosive devices, the summer doldrums were punctured when a terrorist commando, the Universal Unitarian Salvation Squadron (UU’SS) thought to be affiliated with the Al Qaeda-Taliban Axis of Evil overran Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal near Islamabad demanding, among other items, that the United States get out of the Islamic world, Africa, and South and North America. Holed up in his Virginia mountain bunker, President Osama/Obama called for a diplomatic solution. The Palin-Bachman nuptials were called off, reportedly due to domestic dispute.

Diplomats shuttled in and out of Islamabad seeking solutions to this latest geo-political crisis. One no-show: Osama Bin Laden who had passed away many years before trundling his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass. A proposal offered by Tuvalo’s ambassador that Washington change places with his low-laying Pacific island nation was rejected by the United Nations Security Council on the grounds that moving the U.S. Capital would be an extravagance a bankrupt world could ill afford.

Feeling excluded from the international spotlight, Israel, with a go-ahead from the White House-in-exile, launched a nuclear attack on the Iranian holy city of Qum where the Ayatollahs were putting the finishing touches on their own minaret-tipped nuclear missiles. Mamoud Ahmadinejad, hanging on to power by the skin of his wolf-like teeth, ordered retaliation against the Zionists but his delivery system fell short of Tel Aviv and obliterated Syria and Jordan instead.

SEPTEMBER – By Labor Day weekend, the Tea Party Patriots were encamped on the White House lawn and demanding that the first Afro American President turn over the keys to the executive mansion for the on-again off-again Palin-Bachman nuptials.

The serial catastrophes that now included the incineration of vast swaths of the Middle East had an upside — Americans no longer worried much about global warming. Although world temperature readings had jumped another point, the calamity was no longer an issue on the 24-Hour news cycle or the Sunday morning talk shows. Despite the fact that humpback whales were beaching themselves in record numbers on whatever dry land they could find and birds had begun to fly backwards, a sign that the Apocalypse was in the pipeline, the general public seemed more preoccupied by Palin’s and Bachman’s never-ending domestic disputes.

Finally, fed up with the first Afro-American President’s stonewalling, the Tea Party Patriots broke into the White House and a troika — Sarah Palin, her sometimes lover Michelle Bachman, Dennis Kucinich’s assassin, and George H.W. Bush, now suffering terminal Alzheimer’s Disease — was sworn in. Glenn Beck was appointed Secretary of Defense and Alex Jones got State. Mel Gibson bought the movie rights.

OCTOBER – While the right-wing fanatics squabbled over power in Washington, most of the planet was either underwater or so radioactive that the land could no longer sustain life. Slowly falling ash blotted out the sun and in the feeble light no one could tell if it was dawn or dusk anymore. Water, although there was plenty of it, was undrinkable and the food chain tainted. Cannibals roamed the roads in packs. Indeed, outside of the Washington bubble, the earth had become a road show of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Inside his Virginia mountain, the former president tried to watch the World Series but he was too depressed.

NOVEMBER – All was not lost yet. Vulture Capitalists saw profit in the new holocaust and took steps to bolster their failing fortunes. Murdoch bought up what news was left and changed the channel. A new television season kicked in and sponsors returned. The slate was wiped clean: no more nuclear war, world hunger, mindless terrorism, and global warming. Ambian dosage was increased for all citizens.

The new shows looked a lot like the old shows but since no one could remember the old shows, reruns became the real thing. New generations were enchanted by Lucy and Desi and Ed Sullivan’s “Toast Of The Town” (“Gilligan’s Island” was submerged deep beneath the graying sea.)

Outside of the bubble, of course, the rainforest was on fire and 39% of all children were born with multiple deformities (the Pew Institute On Monstrous Deformations.) The cities of the world had been abandoned.

Here in Mexico City where 23 million people had once lived cheek by jowl you could spend a whole day without speaking to anyone. On the Day of the Dead, I walked out to where Chapultepec Park lay in ruins behind a curtain of toxic smoke. It was then that I saw my neighbors tramping north towards Mictlan, the direction of the dead, and I tried to stop them. “Wait!” I urged, “Stay! The U.N. Climate Conference will convene here in December and surely, the leaders will fix things up…” But my neighbors just kept marching towards Mictlan.

DECEMBER – Inside the bubble, the Holiday Season was in full swing. Americans went shopping for mechanical hamsters again, not remembering that it was last year’s toy to die for. They went to Church forgetting that God was dead and wagered on the Stock Market as if the bottom had not fallen out of the Big Board long ago. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny led parades and made patriotic, optimistic speeches and Santa promised to visit every home.

So the families went home, those who still had one, and set fire to their furniture and hung their stockings by a roaring hearth. They wrote letters to Santa and left out cookies and cocoa for the jolly old fruitcake but although he had promised, Santa Claus never showed up.

Indeed, he would never show up again. Late-breaking film from the Arctic Circle showed the old gentleman and his eight reindeer keeled over in their North Pole sweat lodge.

[John Ross will launch a three-month, coast-to-coast book tour with his latest and much-buzzed cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City in Fresno, California, this February 4. For further info and suggested venues (Chicago area and east coast dates are solicited) consult johnross@igc.org.]

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Health Care Reform : ‘This Won’t Hurt a Bit’

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon by Puckett from Stand Up For America.

Congress’ health care fix:
Cure worse than the disease?

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2010

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control of government.” — James Madison (With thanks to Steve Berry, The Paris Vendetta)

Christmas arrived with the much publicized terrorist “almost” incident in Detroit, thus giving Fox News and the Republicans another issue to distort and with which to further spread fear among the American public. This worked quite well for Bush/Cheney in 2001; however, perhaps, just perhaps, the American people will have a more mature, more sophisticated reaction to the present episode.

Chart from Firedoglake.

Firedoglake published an article that helps to put the situation into perspective. It charts selected causes of death in the United States for 2009 as follows:

  1. Lack of insurance 45,000
  2. Traffic related 43,000
  3. Unintentional falls 20,000
  4. Firearm homicide 12,000
  5. Swine flu 10,000
  6. Salmonella 1000
  7. Terrorism 16.

With that in mind we return to the ongoing discussion of health care reform, while asking if the pending legislation before Congress will indeed reduce those 45,000 deaths or whether it is, as it has been called by some, “The Health Insurance Enrichment Act.”

In recent days the progressive press has placed more and more attention on the bill’s potential encroachment upon our civil liberties through mandating that an individual be forced by fiat to purchase health insurance from American’s for profit insurance cartel.

An article on Firedoglake by emptywheel entitled “Health Care on the Road to Neo-Feudalism” tells us that “the bill, if it becomes law, would legally require a portion of Americans to pay more than 20% of the fruits of their labor to a private corporation in exchange for 70% of their health care costs.” The author continues,

Consider a family of four making $66,150 — a family at 300% of the poverty level and therefore, hypothetically, at least ‘subsidized.’ That family would be expected to pay $6482.70 (in today’s dollars) for premiums — or $540 a month. But the family could be required to pay $7973 for copays and so on. So if that family had a significant — but not catastrophic — medical event, it would be asked to pay the insurer almost 22% of its income to cover health care.

Senate Democrats are requiring middle class families to give the proceeds of a month of their work to a private corporation — one allowed to make 15% or maybe even 25% profit on the proceeds of their labor. It is one thing to require a citizen to pay taxes — to pay into the commons. It’s another thing to require taxpayers to pay a private corporation, and to have 25% of that go for paying for luxuries like private jets and gyms for the companies CEOs.

Previously on The Rag Blog I have suggested that legislation requiring Americans to buy from a private corporation is unconstitutional.. This question again arises in an article by Ellen Hodgson Brown, J.D. , published in Truthout. Ms. Brown is not a newcomer to the health care discussion; she is co-author of a Forbidden Medicine, Natures Pharmacy, and The Key To Ultimate Health.

Ms. Brown says:

The health reform bills now coming through Congress are not focused on how to make health care cheaper or more effective, how to eliminate waste and fraud or how to cut out expensive middlemen. As originally envisioned, the public option, would have pursued those goals. But the public option has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically watered down in the House bill.

Rather than focusing on making health care affordable, the bills focus on how to force people either to buy health insurance if they don’t have it, or to pay more for it if they do. If you don’t have health insurance and don’t purchase it, you will be subject to a hefty fine. And if you do purchase it, premiums, co-pays, co-insurance payments and deductibles are liable to keep health care cripplingly expensive. Most of the people who don’t have health care can’t afford to pay the deductibles, so they will never use the plans they have been forced to buy.

The author continues,

…compulsory health insurance is like compulsory selective military service (the draft), except that all our numbers have come up. The argument has been made that auto insurance is compulsory so why not health insurance? But the obvious response is that you can choose to drive a car. The only way to escape the vehicle we call a body is to give up the ghost.

Terrance Heath’s lengthy and well-written article at Campaign for America’s Future entitled “The Window or the Stairs: Kill the Mandate or Kill the Bill,” makes this point:

My take is that it is unconscionable to force people to buy a product from a private insurer that enjoys sanctioned monopoly status. It’d be forcing everyone to attend baseball games, but instead of watching the Yankees, they were forced to watch the Kansas City Royals. Or Washington Nationals. It would effectively be a tax — and a huge one — paid directly to a private industry.

Where are the civil libertarians regarding this issue? Where is the ACLU, of which I have been a member for years? Perhaps the ACLU had best forget complaining about total body scanning at our airports and redirect its attention to this much larger issue of personal rights. I prefer to be safe when flying, and did not object to a strip search by El-Al in London some 25-30 years ago. And I did not object to El-Al’s “profiling” that had nothing to do with race or ethnic background, nor to the extra stewards on the flights, well aware that these gentlemen were subtly armed, en route from Kennedy to Tel Aviv, or Tel Aviv to London.

Jane Hampshire in FireDogLake cites reasons that the Senate Bill is unfriendly to the Average American, including the fact that it will be paid for by taxes on the middle class insurance plan you have right now through your employer. It will cause the employers to cut back benefits and increase co-pays.

Many of the taxes to pay for the bill start now, but most Americans won’t see any benefits until 2014 when the program begins. It allows insurance companies to charge older people 300% more than others and grants monopolies to drug companies that keep generic versions of expensive biotech drugs from ever coming to market. It doesn’t allow importation of prescription drugs, which could save consumers $100 billion over 10 years. The cost of medical care will continue to rise, and insurance premiums for a family of four will rise an average of $1,000 a year.

We must remember that this legislation, especially the Senate version, is to a great extent the product of lobbyists for the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Common Cause, a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog group, blames a “toxic cocktail of insiders and money” for short-circuiting a government-run plan that would have competed with private insurers.

Health industry contributions to congressional candidates have more than doubled so far this decade, rising to $127 million in the 2008 election cycle from $56 million in the 2000 election, with disproportionate sums going to the party in power and to members of committees that oversee health care, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

If indeed this legislation passes without placing the health insurance industry under the Fair Trade Act, the entire exercise is a sham and a farce. There will be no restrictions on price fixing and collusion among the health insurance carriers. The idea that a few government regulators can control these predators is absurd. Each insurance giant will outmatch the regulators by a personnel ratio of at least 20:1 in defining methods to bypass the regulations and maintain their profits. One can imagine a high school football team playing the New England Patriots. The American public is once again being scammed by their corporate masters and their elected prostitutes.

There is nothing in this legislation that frees the physician to do his duty without interference from the insurance industry. Nothing to free the family doctor from overburdening paper work when he should have that time for seeing the sick. Health care will continue to be rationed to the consumer by the executives and stockholders of the health insurance cartel. The pharmaceutical industry will continue to overcharge the American public and to deprive many folks of lesser means of the medications which they need.

It is not a pretty picture. Our elective representatives have, without shame, taken their constituents to the cleaners.

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

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Stayin’ Alive : Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

“Tree of Life,” working design for Stoclet Frieze, Gustav Klimt, 1905/09.

Stayin’ Alive:
Towards a conscious self-health-care continuum

No system of medicine is static, and none has a monopoly on beneficial knowledge or tactics.

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2010

[Introducing a new periodic column by Rag Blogger Mariann G. Wizard, a professional science writer with a wide-ranging knowledge of natural health therapies. Readers may suggest topics for future columns, within the restrictions suggested below, in the Comments section of The Rag Blog.]

“Complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), in the U.S. and several other nations, refers to health practices that are not currently part of “mainstream” or “conventional” medicine. This flexible definition allows for therapies that accumulate enough scientific evidence — or generate enough patient demand! — to become part of mainstream practices.

In the US, for example, chiropractic, once the domain of energetic and sometimes kooky “bone crackers,” has benefited from the experience of practitioners, the development of comprehensive theory and standards of care, and the establishment of accredited colleges, and is now paid for by most insurance plans — the true test of a treatment’s acceptance! Acupuncture, as well, with demonstrable benefits in pain relief at minimum, has gained mainstream acceptability in the U.S. within very recent memory.

However, the current CAM definition is rather misleading, having been imposed by conventionally-trained and -biased authorities. It is more accurate to think of CAM as all health practices developed over the course of human history, everywhere in the world, before the discovery of microbes, and including many health practices developed since then outside of “Western” medical facilities.

CAM includes, for example, entire multi-modal systems of medicine, such as traditional Tibetan medicine, Ayurveda, naturopathy, and others, some with continuous documentation of use and development over thousands of years. It also includes more recent practices: e.g., aromatherapy, Reiki, and Essiac, each with its own ancient roots.

One difference between most CAM therapies and “conventional” medicine, often cited by CAM skeptics, is a frequent lack of scientific evidence for CAMs, or even “disproof” of their worth. These criticisms are worth a closer look. “Scientific evidence” is not always best acquired in a laboratory setting, and what works in rats doesn’t always have the same effects in people.

Studies are often designed, depending on funding sources, to demonstrate certain hypotheses; their design may not be fair to competitors. Media coverage tends to focus on negative results in science reporting, as it does in other news. For example, a number of studies have found the herb St. John’s wort as effective as prescription drugs in treating mild to moderate depression. However, the most media coverage occurred when the herb was found to be not-so-helpful for serious depression. No one had ever claimed it would be.

So-called “anecdotal evidence” of practitioners and patients provides support for many CAM modalities, and is often discounted by those who understand only randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trials. However, lack of clinical studies is another misleading negative. Such studies are most often funded by pharmaceutical companies, and are extremely costly. Unless a unique, patentable, reproducible compound has been isolated for testing, there is little incentive to fund research on common herbal remedies such as echinacea, ginger, and aloe vera, or even more novel dietary supplements like shark cartilage.

Acupuncture. Image from Phiya Kushi’s Blog.

For some therapies, problems in adequate blinding or other study design factors present substantial obstacles to randomized testing. Acupuncture, for example, is difficult to administer in placebo form. Cannabis medications also present problems in blinding, since experienced cannabis users have no difficulty in distinguishing the real thing from placebo no matter how it is administered; the effects speak for themselves. Different study designs often make it difficult to compare “apples-to-apples” — but this is as true with pharmaceutical drugs as well as with herbal compounds!

Nevertheless, credible research is being done around the world every day on CAMs. For over 10 years, I have reviewed peer-reviewed journal reports of such work for the American Botanical Council’s HerbClips®, and have reported occasionally for ABC’s peer reviewed journal, HerbalGram®, on regulatory and other matters.

During that time, I’ve also — somehow — gotten older, and have begun to experience some of the annoying pitfalls of that process, as well as of ordinary hard knocks and exposure to modern living. While I began my work with ABC without any particular prejudice for or against conventional medicine or CAMs, today, I believe that each has its uses, and its distinct limitations.

I haven’t accepted medical or other advice to “get used to” chronic pain and increasing disability any more than I’ve accepted war, injustice, disharmony, or exploitation. These may all be losing battles in the long run, but what are we doing that’s any more important?

A year or so ago on a rainy day, a homeless guy at the downtown library asked me why so many — pardon the expression, “older ladies in Austin” — were sporting, as I was, a knee or elbow athletic brace. I stopped and thought about it for a minute. “Because,” I finally said, “we are fighting death to the finish!”

No system of medicine is static, and none has a monopoly on beneficial knowledge or tactics. ABC’s knowledge base — including my own work — has been priceless in helping me assess CAM options for my use, and even for friends and family facing health concerns. Like a growing world majority, I now consciously combine CAM practices with conventional medical care in a personal health continuum, making the decisions that affect, literally, my life, for myself, like we used to say in Students for a Democratic Society. I consider myself a “health independent” in the same sense that some voters claim independence from major political parties!

The fact is that conventional medicine is very poor in its ability to treat chronic illnesses, and most CAMs are ineffective or unnecessarily slow in treating acute illnesses such as infections. The fact is that professional health care providers of any kind are becoming less accessible to many of us, and that the costs of health care seemed doomed to skyrocket. The smart thing to do, it seems to me, is to use whatever we can to stay healthy!

Meanwhile, there is a skill to assessing unfamiliar health practices, products, and practitioners that I believe can be applied whether these are “conventional” or CAM-related, and I propose to try to impart some of that skill to readers of The Rag Blog.

If you have questions or suggested topics related to natural health practices, please post them in the Comments section of this article! For the record, I will NOT attempt to diagnose any symptoms, diseases, or medical problems. I will NOT recommend specific products, practices, or practitioners, except as examples of alternatives to be considered. I will NOT answer any questions of an intimate nature, e.g., what to do if you have an erection lasting longer than four hours! If none of you slackers have any interesting questions, I will merely regale you with my own adventures in health care; Lord’a’mercy; we are getting old!

I WILL freely discuss health-protective measures such as diet, exercise, and stress relief. I WILL consult with and drag in health care practitioners, researchers, and patients of all kinds as needed, some of whom may let me quote them. I MAY prescribe familiarity with controversial theories, regulatory policies, and historical tirades; take as directed: always with a grain of salt. Your life and health are your most valuable possessions — guard them well!

Next week: “Osteoarthritis: it takes a village.”

“Bee’s Knees,” by tyrone_31 / photobucket.

Prevention tip of the week:
Save your knees now!

Everybody should do this mild exercise several times a week if at all possible! Especially if you have weak knees, or “bad knees run in the family,” if you’ve had any kind of knee surgery short of a replacement, or if you do any running or jumping, this is a great way to strengthen and protect the most complex joint in your body.

  1. Lie flat on your back on the floor, with feet more or less in line with your shoulders.
  2. Extend your arms comfortably from your shoulders, so that, seen from the ceiling, you make a sort of “t” shape.
  3. Pull your knees up and your feet towards your buttocks as far as you comfortably can, keeping your feet slightly separated and your feet flat on the floor. Seen from the side, you look a little like this: _/\__o
  4. Keeping your upper body flat on the floor, gently lower both bent knees as far as you comfortably can to the right side of your body. Your left hip will lift off the floor. Seen from the ceiling, your knees look like a double chevron: >>. Stretch a little tiny bit closer to the floor with both knees, and hold for 20 seconds.
  5. Return to position 3 and reverse, lowering knees to the left side: . Stretch and hold.
  6. Repeat twice, three times a week, for six months. If you feel the improvement, KEEP DOING IT AS LONG AS YOU CAN GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR AND GET UP AGAIN! Don’t do it in bed or lying on the couch; you may throw your back out, and I don’t want you blaming me for your sciatica!

Hint: If your low-side knee doesn’t go all the way flat to the floor, or the high-side knee doesn’t go parallel to the floor when you stretch to left or right, well, that is a goal you can set. Gently stretch as far as you can without discomfort; and next time go a millimeter further!

This stretch, unlike the bicycling motion often used in post-surgical knee rehab, strengthens muscles and ligaments along both sides of the kneecap that help keep the joint stable — if you’ve ever felt the sickening sideways lurch of thigh-bone or leg-bone pulling away from knee-bone, you know the importance of these supportive structures!

Thanks for this tip to Wendee Whitehead, Doctor of Chiropractic, Austin, Texas, whose exact words to me were, “Knees are totally fixable!” Keep yours strong and flexible with this simple, zero-impact move.

–mgw

The Rag Blog

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