Obama Administration: Continuing the Police State Mentality of BushCo

Posted on August 2, 2009 by RagBlog

This is nothing other than shameful. This administration continues to move away from the promise of a different future, but rather marches closer and closer to fascism. The police state holds no promise. Why does Barack Obama not see this?

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog


AP sources: Military-civilian terror prison eyed
By Lara Jakes / August 2, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison complex in the U.S. to house suspected terrorists, combining military and civilian detention facilities at a single maximum-security prison.

Several senior U.S. officials said the administration is eyeing a soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison in Michigan and the 134-year-old military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., as possible locations for a heavily guarded site to hold the 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters now jailed at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.

The officials outlined the plans — the latest effort to comply with President Barack Obama’s order to close the prison camp by Jan. 22, 2010, and satisfy congressional and public fears about incarcerating terror suspects on American soil — on condition of anonymity because the options are under review.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said Friday that no decisions have been made about the proposal. But the White House considers the courtroom-prison complex as the best among a series of bad options, an administration official said.

For months, government lawyers and senior officials at the Pentagon, Justice Department and the White House have struggled with how to close the internationally reviled U.S. Navy prison at Guantanamo.

Congress has blocked $80 million intended to bring the detainees to the United States. Lawmakers want the administration to say how it plans to make the moves without putting Americans at risk.

The facility would operate as a hybrid prison system jointly operated by the Justice Department, the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

The administration’s plan, according to three government officials, calls for:

  • Moving all the Guantanamo detainees to a single U.S. prison. The Justice Department has identified between 60 and 80 who could be prosecuted, either in military or federal criminal courts. The Pentagon would oversee the detainees who would face trial in military tribunals. The Bureau of Prisons, an arm of the Justice Department, would manage defendants in federal courts.
  • Building a court facility within the prison site where military or criminal defendants would be tried. Doing so would create a single venue for almost all the criminal defendants, ending the need to transport them elsewhere in the U.S. for trial.
  • Providing long-term holding cells for a small but still undetermined number of detainees who will not face trial because intelligence and counterterror officials conclude they are too dangerous to risk being freed.
  • Building immigration detention cells for detainees ordered released by courts but still behind bars because countries are unwilling to take them.

Each proposal, according to experts in constitutional and national security law, faces legal and logistics problems.

Scott Silliman, director of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, called the proposal “totally unprecedented” and said he doubts the plan would work without Congress’ involvement because new laws probably would be needed. Otherwise, “we gain nothing — all we do in create a Guantanamo in Kansas or wherever,” Silliman said.

“You’ve got very strict jurisdictional issues on venue of a federal court. Why would you bring courts from all over the country to one facility, rather than having them prosecuted in the district where the courts sit?”

Legal experts said civilian trials held inside the prison could face jury-selection dilemmas in rural areas because of the limited number of potential jurors available.

One solution, Silliman said, would be to bring jurors from elsewhere. But that step, one official said, could also compromise security by opening up the prison to outsiders.

It is unclear whether victims — particularly survivors of Sept. 11 victims — would be allowed into the courtroom to watch the trials. Victims and family members have no assumed right under current law to attend military commissions, although the Pentagon does allow them to attend hearings at Guantanamo under a random selection process. That right is automatic in civilian federal courthouses.

“They’ll have to sort it out,” said Douglas Beloof, a professor at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., and expert on crime victims’ rights. He said the new system “could create tension with victims who would protest.”

The officials said that another uncertainty remains how many Guantanamo detainees would end up housed in the hybrid prison.

As many as an estimated 170 of the detainees now at Guantanamo are unlikely to be prosecuted. Some are being held indefinitely because government officials do not want to take the chance of seeing them acquitted in a trial. The rest are considered candidates for release, but the U.S. cannot find foreign countries willing to take them. Almost all have yet to be charged with crimes.

Two senior U.S. officials said one option for the proposed hybrid prison would be to use the soon-to-be-shuttered Standish maximum-security state prison in northeast Michigan. The facility already has individual cells and ample security for detainees.

Getting the Standish prison ready for the detainees would be costly. One official estimated it would cost over $100 million for security and other building upgrades.

Several Michigan lawmakers, including Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin and Rep. Bart Stupak, both Democrats, have said they would be open to moving detainees to Michigan as long as there is broad local support.

But the political support is not unanimous. Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor next year, is against the idea.

Administration officials said the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth is under consideration because it is already a hardened high-security facility that could be further protected by the surrounding military base.

It’s not clear what would happen to the military’s inmates already being held there. Nearly half are members of the U.S. armed forces, and by law, cannot be housed with foreign prisoners.

Kansas’ GOP-dominated congressional delegation is dead set against moving Guantanamo detainees to Leavenworth. Residents told Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., at a town hall meeting in May that 95 percent of the local community opposes it.

Administration officials say they are determined to keep to his promise of closing Guantanamo in January as a worldwide example of America’s commitment to humane and just treatment of the detainees.

Glenn Sulmasy, an international law professor at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., said the prison-court complex will “be difficult, but it’s logical.”

“This is all based on Closing Gitmo by 2010, which seems to be a priority, and if we are going to do it, we have to step up to the plate and find solutions to the conundrum we’re facing,” said Sulmasy, who agrees with the administration’s efforts. “And this seems to be the most pragmatic way ahead.”

On the Net:

Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks
Standish, Mich., Maximum Correctional Facility

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press.

Source / AP / Google

The Rag Blog

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Joe Bageant: A Short History of the United States of Amnesia

Posted on August 1, 2009 by RagBlog


The Bastards Never Die
By Joe Bageant / July 31, 2009

A short history of why we eat oil, can’t smoke pot, and why assault weapons are so expensive in our hour of need

(With running commentary by THE SCREAMING MAN)

Well, for starters, the above title is a damned lie, since this little screed is not a history. It’s just rumination on the tilting point at which Americans started the slide into the deepest sort of cultivated consumer consciousness — which is to say our corporate managed engorgement and swinedom at the service of the rich.

Very rich families and corporatists, to whom, as in earlier articles, we shall refer to as “the bastards,” have always been with us. Even Tom Jefferson thought periodic revolution against wealth and authority was desirable to keep these bastards in check. Which implies that he figured they would inevitably get us by the throat down on the floor from time to time.

But the bastards scared the hell out of later presidents too. Abe Lincoln feared the large corporations born of business profiteering during the U.S. Civil War — the military industrial complex of the day — easily constituted the greatest threat to the American republic. Being president and all, he couldn’t call them what they were, and settled for the term “money power,” and predicted that, “money power will … work upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

And as everyone knows, Dwight Eisenhower famously feared the same military-industrial complex was busy taking over the nation. What we never hear about though, is that Eisenhower’s definition of the complex included among the bastards, not only the military defense industry corporations, but also right alongside them the news media and the university and private research establishments.

If nothing else can be said for the bastards, we must admit they do plan far ahead, (or seemed to anyway, before the latest meltdown) even if only to screw us blind, which is usually the case. Since the early robber baron era of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, just after the turn of the century, the bastards understood that the key to national domination was oil — creating an economic culture based on petroleum — and planned toward that end. Big corps such as E.I. DuPont had invested heavily in the oil industry since the turn of the century, and especially since the 1930s creating synthetic materials such as plastics, in which the public was decidedly uninterested in buying. Then World War II came along, creating big demand for synthetics such as nylon for parachutes, tires, tents, ropes. DuPont and similar bastards had drawn a royal flush.

SCREAMING MAN HERE!: RIGHT! IT’S THE ONLY SURE RACKET. ASK ICE MAN CHENEY. YOU MAKE STUFF, SELL IT TO THE PENTAGON MOB AND RAM THE PRICE CLEAR UP THEIR ASSES. THEN THEY BLOW THE STUFF UP, INCENERATE IT, AND COME BACK FOR MORE AT DOUBLE THE PRICE BECAUSE NOW THERE’S A SHORTAGE! FOR A FAST DEPENDABLE BUCK, YOU CAN’T BEAT INDUSTRIAL SCALE WARFARE WITH A GODDAMNED STICK!

(Ahem!)

Unfortunately all good things end, no matter how bloody profitable. But those super-expanded wartime corporations that had cranked out planes and tanks were not going to downsize just because we had run out of Dresdens to bomb. They intended to remain dominant and even expand. With the war drawing to a close, and with fewer burning jeep tires on the battlefields and fewer parachutes left dangling in the trees of Belgium, American citizens were going to have to eat the slack. The bastards would have to stuff’em fuller than a Christmas goose; make them eat petroleum based synthetics, if it came down to that. Which it eventually did of course, in the form of petrochemical agriculture, food dyes, etc.

SCREAMING MAN: YOU GOTTA A FUCKING PROBLEM WITH NUMBER TWO RED DYE OR SOMETHING, ASSHOLE? DON’T BULLSHIT THESE PEOPLE, YOU FLAMING OLD FRAUD! I’VE SEEN YOU EAT A WHOLE BOX OF PINK HO-HOS BEHIND A BOTTLE OF JAY DEE AND SOME COLUMBIAN BUD! AM I GONNA HAVE TO TAKE MY NEEDLE NOSED PLIERS TO YOUR LYING ASS?

Plastics, heralded as durable and everlasting (and today lamented for the same reason) eventually gobbled up nearly every other material market, in the from of jewelry, dashboards, dishes, clothing, napkin rings, perfume bottles, knickknacks, flooring and carpeting, resin building materials, vinyl raincoats and boots, molded furniture, radio sets … America was remade in the image of open chain hydrocarbons. That nine tenths of what was produced and marketed was unnecessary, and downright shitty did not go unnoticed by the American public, which had been deeply distrustful of plastics and synthetics from the time they were first ballyhooed at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. People were just not buying the sales job. But the combination of wartime shortage frustrations and massive industrial public relations delivered the one-two punch, and the consumer knuckled under. Or perhaps they were just worn down by industry PR, which enlisted the help of trusted figures such as Frank Capra and Walt Disney, among others, along with in-school industry propaganda for the next generation: “Our story of the miracle of plastics starts with an oil well in a faraway place by the Persian Gulf … “

AND IT GODDAMNED WELL IS GONNA END THERE TOO! IN ABOUT 15 MINUTES, IF IT HASN’T ALREADY! DOES ANYBODY REALIZE THE NUMBER OF SARAH PALIN BLOW-UP DOLLS SHIPPED TO THE TROOPS IN IRAQ? IF THAT’S THE KIND OF ARMY WE’RE SENDING TO KILL OFF THE PALM VERMIN, THEN WE’RE GONERS ALREADY!

As I was saying, the bastards not only created an economy by and for themselves, based on the black sticky stuff, they also built a civilization. From the tallest building right down to the petrochemical soaked dirt in which the food supply is grown, and all along the chain through processing and plastic packaging and distribution, The black stuff was cheap and it was plentiful, so long as the bastards were willing to buy off the top dog sheiks like ibn Saud, who would in turn keep the dusky peasantry in line through good old perennials such as beheadings and public stonings.

SCREAMING MAN MISSES THOSE POST 9/11 BEHEADING VIDEOS, DON’T YOU? IT WAS SO EASY TO TELL WHO AMERICA’S ENEMIES WERE THEN. BUT AT LEAST WE’VE STILL GOT BEN BERNANKE AND BILL GATES.

During the 1940s AND ’50S while ibn Saud was fathering some 60 children by 22 wives in Arabia and dishing out corporeal punishment to the far flung wretches of his kingdom, here at home the corporations were doing their own hit jobs on the this nation’s peasantry — the farmers. Petroleum based synthetics, with legislative help, wiped out one quarter of the domestic cotton market in the first few years following the war, along with flax for linen, and hemp fiber, replacing them with ugly but profitable synthetic nylon and polymer textiles. Not to mention replacement of literally hundreds of farm produced natural organic materials for medicines, cosmetics, milk by products such as casein for glues and paints, with synthetic petro-based commodities, all of which were mercilessly hammered into the populace as “miracles of modern science.”

Kings may croak, but cash lives forever

The fact that the bastards were corporate entities made them more powerful than any robber baron’s best wet dream, because their power and reach extended beyond human mortality. Deathless corporations and trusts replaced the mortal thieves such as Rockefeller and Morgan; and despite the advent of income taxes, capital continued to aggregate in the bastards’ coffers, particularly financial bastards, at what was seen then as an unimaginable scale. “Money for nothin’ and chicks for free …”

Powered entirely by balance sheets, and existing for the sole le purpose of wealth accumulation, parting with any assets was antithetical to their very purpose. Not to mention the logic of the wealth based stockholders. The majority of assets were held by elite, whose main accomplishment was then and still is coming from families that commandeered some substantial portion of the public medium of exchange in order to derive more wealth.

WHOA THERE FATSO! WHOSE FAMILY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HERE? PARIS HILTON’S? OR MAYBE ALICE WALTON’S? PARIS HILTON HAS EARNED EVERY JEWEL ENCRUSTED THONG IN HER CLOSET! FROM TUSH TO TITTIES, WE’VE SEEN EVERYTHING PARIS HILTON HAS TO OFFER. AND IT’S WORTH A FEW BILLION TO KEEP HER IN CIRCULATION. GIVES THE MEN OF THIS MISERABLE WORKHOUSE NATION SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN. SOMETHING TANGIBLE. SOMETHING THEY CAN ACTUALLY SEE AND WHACK OFF TO. HER DIRTY FLICK, “1 NIGHT IN PARIS” WAS A GIFT TO ALL MANKIND. LET THE LESBIANS FIND THEIR OWN PARIS HILTON … BUT ALICE WALTON? SCREAMING MAN WOULDN’T FUCK HER WITH YOUR WHANG, BUSTER! THAT MISERABLE DRUNKEN BITCH RAN DOWN AND KILLED A FIFTY YEAR OLD WOMAN IN TEXAS. WHAT’D SHE GET? A $925 FINE! SHE HAS 20 BILLION DOLLARS AND GETS OFF FOR LESS THAN A THOU. AND WHAT DOES ALICE GIVE US? CHINK MADE FLIPFLOPS AND GODDAMNED PLASTIC PATIO CHAIRS THAT BUCKLE LIKE OBAMA AT A BAILOUT PARTY! GIVE THE SCREAMING MAN PARIS HILTON ANY DAY. NOW, FATSO … YOU WERE SAYING?

Hell, I can’t remember. Oh yes, the bastards. Once you are born into the Royal Court of the Kingdom of Bastardy and are issued your caviar spoon, no further effort is required to amass capital. You simply keep on withholding capital from those who had create it — the working masses — keep captive the economic lifeblood upon which all others depend. Observe, for instance, the banking industry’s present refusal to unass any money for credit, despite the hundreds of billions handed to them as a taxpayers’ gift, a bailout AFTER they’d ripped off their shareholders and customers, and looted their own institutions from the inside.

UPSET ARE YOU, FATSO? LET THE SCREAMER TELL YOU HOW IT REALLY IS. IT WAS ALL AN ACT. THE FED WAS JUST PRINTING AND HANDING OUT WORTHLESS WALLPAPER — WHICH THE BANKING BASTARDS, WITH ALL DUE APLOMB, WILL PAY BACK IN KIND. THEN THE BASTARDS WILL BE DECLARED SOLVENT, FAT AND HEALTHY AS A BUNCH OF PARK BEARS. MEANWHILE, YOU GODDAMNED PEASANTS WILL CONTINUE TO ANGUISH OVER THE BAILOUTS LONG AFTER THE REAL RIP-OFF IS IN. THE ONE YOU NEVER SAW AND CAN’T EVEN WRAP YOUR SORRY POINTED FUCKING HEADS AROUND. THE REAL DOUGH IS SPREAD ACROSS DUBAI, MONACO, LONDON, AND FOR SAFETY’S SAKE, BEIJING. WHILE YOU ANGUISH, PATE OF UNBORN VEAL CALF IS BEING SERVED TO THE REAL BASTARDS UP ON THE 50th FLOOR. THEY POUR ANOTHER GLASS OF 1999 PERRIER-JOUET, AND CHORTLE AT THE DISMEMBERMENT OF A NO-TALENT HACK LIKE BERNIE MADOFF. THAT HAPLESS SMALLTIME JEW GREASEBALL WHO CAME INTO THE GAME WITH $5,000 IN PENNY STOCKS THAT HE BOUGHT WITH MONEY HE MADE INSTALLING SPRINKLERS. NEVER A REAL PLAYER LIKE US, EVEN WITH HIS BULLSHIT WALL STREET TITLES. JUST A DUMB FUCK FROM QUEENS WHO DIDN’T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT A SCAM. LET THE SERFS GNAW AT HIM. KEEPS ‘EM BUSY AND OUT OF OUR HAIR. LOOK, THEY’VE PULLED ONE OF HIS ARMS OUT OF ITS SOCKET. CHRIST, NOW THEY’VE RUINED LUNCH.”

THAT’S WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON, FATSO.

The bastards. Why have they lasted this long? Purely on their own merits, most American corporations probably would not have survived the 1930s. By then our wildly fluctuating economy was already demonstrating the folly of overly concentrated capital and power. What was needed, said the big players who’d wrecked the economy with their uncontrolled speculation and greed, was, lo and beshit, a controlled economy! One even more controlled by corporations. Problem was, the only entity capable of such control was the government. And unfortunately, the Constitution of the United States was founded on a separation of business and state to the same degree as that of church and state.

If the bastards were to run the economy, if Americans were going to be pistol whipped down the road to “prosperity through unprecedented consumption,” then government authority by Constitutional law would be necessary. As a 1937 shareholder’s report of the E.I. DuPont Company “the revenue-raising power of government [taxation] must be converted into “an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas” and a “social reorganization.” Uh oh! Just whose sudden new ideas? And what kind of social reorganization?

The report stated bluntly that to realize further extensive profit from its wartime investments, the U.S. government “must be the primary tool.” While their plans to use the government were put into the shareholder’s report, they were never publicly discussed.

FDR saves the bastards’ bacon

The chance to pull it off came ironically or maybe not so ironically, with Roosevelt’s New Deal. FDR was, contrary to the subsequent hagiography that has grown up around his grave, was first and foremost a capitalist and was determined to save capitalism. Given his affluent background and times, he, like everyone else, could not imagine anything but capitalism as the nation’s economic system. Yet nowhere in the Constitution is capitalism specified as America’s preferred economic system. His lifelong circle of friends and associates consisted entirely of the elites of family and corporate wealth, which meant that it also included some of his enemies. But together they created a host of “emergency legislation,” in much the same fashion as 911 let George W. Bush get away with so much under the excuse of a national threat. Even allowing for the resistance of some wealthy elites, FDR favored the bastards’ plans toward a thoroughly corporatized national economy.

The Supreme Court, however, a stickler for details such as the U.S. Constitution, did not see things Roosy’s way. It would take a rewriting of the U.S. Constitution for the government to crawl into bed with the corporations. So every piece of legislation FDR and his cohorts created got snagged in Supreme Court and just kept piling up.

The key for FDR and the Princes of Bastardy turned out to be taxation. To control society means to control individual behavior. The Constitution prohibits that, except for those few powers granted in the Constitution, such as the coinage of money or declaring war. Throughout the 1930s the public watched FDR and the corporatists duke it out with the Supreme Court. While the public was engaged in the debate over FDR’s threatened stacking of the court, FDR and the bastards managed to accomplish their agenda in controlling opposing social behavior — taxing it to death. The government is granted the power to tax by god! And the Roosevelt era saw the art of behavior modification through taxation perfected.

Now in changing American social behavior through taxation there are two rules. The first tax must be a very logical one. And the second must be one created of whole cloth, a manufactured one to counter a manufactured threat. So after the Supreme Court knuckled under to FDR’s threat to divide up the judicial limelight by appointing more justices, a more compliant court happily passed a $200 tax on machine guns — the equivalent of $3,000 today — the same tax, incidentally, that allowed the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division) and the FBI to invade the Branch Davidians at Waco. It was unconstitutional as hell. But the court understood public relations. What kind of deranged fucker needed a machine gun anyway? Well, there was There was John Dillinger (whose penis was 14 inches long, according to folk legend of the day, which was either threatening, or vastly intriguing, depending upon one’s sex or moral perspective on life). There was Seymour “Blue Jaws” Magoon, Bonnie and Clyde, Pittsburg Phil, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone, Bummy Davis. And if there was any further doubt, there was also the fact that the members of Murder Incorporated were Jewish, Italian or Irish. Ah ha! More proof to the then-majority Anglo Americans of naked immigrant depravity. So two hundred bucks per tommy gun it would be under the 1937 Machine Gun Tax Act.

The second tax the court upheld was the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Most Americans had never heard the word marijuana. The tax act had adopted a little known Mexican street term as a name in order to demonize it, and differentiate it from the thousands of acres of government hemp being grown for naval ropes, etc. Never mind that in the entire previous year only a couple of pounds of the stuff were seized by border police. A $200 an ounce tax had worked on machine guns, so a $200 tax per ounce was placed on hemp cultivation without permit, and no permits were issued. And so as an added bonus — or maybe intentionally — the synthetic fiber industry and the plastics industry saw its most threatening long term competitor, hemp, eliminated.

And for the first time in the history of the United States the bastards could use the government to tell farmers what seeds they could put into the earth. In short order by way of the New Deal, through various agricultural acts, corporatists, through government policy, had control over the land even though they did not own it. The chief competitors to industrial food giants and synthetics industry, the small farmer producers of thousands of natural goods and raw materials, were eventually taxed or regulated out of existence. At the same time, subsidies for big-time agri-biz producers started snowballing. A nation of consumers of synthetics was cultivated in the next generation. The result we see around us, obese Americans willingly wearing the bastards’ brands on acrylic clothing … and guzzling synthetic soft drinks, Americans who’ve never once considered that the pizza crusts they gnaw at start out with a grain crop called wheat.

Ten thousand years of agriculture was synthesized into money. The soil-to-city chain of small farms, villages, and towns to the great city markets was destroyed. Those ever more profitable compressed gobs of humanity in the cities and suburbs could be cultivated for maximum productivity and profit as the bastards increased their domination of the needs hierarchy. If you made a movie of this, swapping out the humans for some sort of large intelligent rodent or insect, and left everything else as it really is in American life, people would call it chilling science fiction.

Long story short: The bastards won.

This distillation of how they won, this little piece of feral scholarship, is sure to be disputed by hairsplitting pinheads in political science and history departments. The “Oh but …” crowd. Which is OK with me. Everybody needs a job, I suppose. But that’s the view from here in the cheap seats among the non-players, the fuckees in the great fuck-the-proles game of bastard politics and ever bigger money. Call this a pulp comic summary of post war history. It’s not a very damned funny history. Maybe that’s why we choose not to remember it. Here in the United States of Amnesia. We cannot retain what happened last week, much less history. But I’m trying here folks. I really am.

SCREAMING MAN: BULLSHIT FOLKS! DON’T BELIEVE A WORD FROM THIS GODDAMNED BEER SOAKED, REDNECK WHO CAN’T SPELL AND THINKS HE’S A GENIUS BECAUSE HE KNOWS HOW TO BRING UP WIKIPEDIA ON HIS BROWSER. IF AND WHEN HE’S SOBER ENOUGH. THE SCREAMING MAN HAS BEEN TRAPPED INSIDE BAGEANT’S BLOATED, DISEASED CARCASS FOR SIXTY TWO YEARS, AND THE SCREAMER CAN TELL YA THIS: IF BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE BAGEANT WOULDN’T HAVE ENOUGH POWER TO BLOW OFF A GOOD FART. YOU’VE JUST WASTED TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES OF COMPANY TIME. NOW GO TAKE UP SOMETHING USEFUL, LIKE NARCOTICS. FOR CHRISSAKE GET A LIFE!

Source / Joe Bageant

The Rag Blog

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Christianity: Happy, Happy Hypocrisy to Live By

Posted on August 1, 2009 by RagBlog


Christians Largely Mum on Torture
By Ray McGovern / July 31, 2009

Anyone harboring doubts that the institutional Church is riding shotgun for the system, even regarding heinous sin like torture, should be chastened by the results of a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.

Who but the cowardly crew leading the “Christian” churches can be held responsible for the fact that many of their flock believe torture of suspected terrorists is “justified?”

Those polled were white non-Hispanic Catholics, white Evangelicals, and white mainline Protestants. A majority (54 percent) of those who attend church regularly said torture could be “justified,” while a majority of those not attending church regularly responded that torture was rarely or never justified.

I am not a psychologist or sociologist. But I recall that one of the first things Hitler did on assuming power was to ensure there was a pastor in every Lutheran and Catholic parish in Germany. Why? Because he calculated, correctly, that here would be a force for stability for his regime.

Thus began another horrid chapter in the history of those professing to be followers of Jesus of Nazareth but had forgotten his repeated admonition, Do not be afraid.

A mere seven decades after the utter failure of church leaders in Germany, their current American counterparts have again yielded to fear, and have condoned evils like torture by their deafening silence.

What kinds of folks comprise this 54 percent? An informal “survey” of my friends suggests these are “my-country-first” people — like the fellow who recently gave me the finger when he saw my bumper sticker, which simply says “God bless the rest of the world too.”

They are people accustomed to hierarchy and comfortable being told what they should think and do to preserve “our way of life.”

They place a premium on nationalism, which they call patriotism, and on what the Germans call Ordnung. I suppose that this may be part of why they go to church on Sunday.

It’s a problem that has existed for almost 1,700 years, ever since 4th Century Christians jettisoned there heritage of non-violent resistance to war and threw in their lot with Constantine.

Subservience

Nowhere is the phenomenon of obeisance to hierarchical power highlighted more clearly than in the Grand Inquisitor story in Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who could plum the human heart as few others.

In the tale, Dostoevsky has Jesus joining the “tortured, suffering people” of Seville during the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Seville immediately jails and interrogates Jesus, telling him that the Church has “corrected” his big mistake.

Rather than donning “Caesar’s purple,” Jesus gave us freedom of conscience.

While it has been 130 years since he wrote Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky captures the trap into which so many American “believers” have fallen in forfeiting freedom through fear. His portrayal of Inquisition reality brings us to the brink of the moral precipice on which our country teeters today.

It is as though he knew what would be in store for us as fear was artificially stoked after the attacks of 9/11.

Here is how the cardinal ridicules Christ for imposing on humans the heavy burden of freedom of conscience:

“Didst thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? … We teach them that it’s not the free judgment of their hearts, but mystery which they must follow blindly, even against their conscience. … In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet [and] become obedient. … We shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. … We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated if it is done with our permission.”

Recently, prominent Baptist layman and distinguished senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, gave a hat-tip to the Inquisition. At a May 13 Senate hearing discussing interrogation techniques like waterboarding, Graham explained that, “One of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work.”

I was reminded of one of the things Gandhi said about Christians: “Everyone in the world knows that Jesus and his teachings were non-violent except Christians.”

And the reason that regular churchgoers don’t seem to know this is because the historical Jesus is not preached.

My guess is that those who go to church on Sunday expect a modicum of moral leadership. If the pastor is silent on torture, then torture must somehow be okay. How easy it is then to cede one’s conscience to an American-flag-draped pulpit.

Jesus (and Luther) Didn’t Really Mean It?

A progressive Lutheran pastor in Dallas asked me to give a talk to his parish on the issues I had been addressing in my writings. It struck me that since George W. Bush had moved into their neighborhood, I might ask the congregants how they thought they should relate to someone who had given written approval to torture.

I was too clever by half — actually, naïve. I would show them the “smoking gun” memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, which the Senate Armed Forces Committee has determined “opened the way” to all manner of detainee abuse, and then I would challenge them by quoting Martin Luther who, after all, was one of their guys.

I chose this passage cited by George Hunsinger in an essay he wrote in 1987 (appearing in his book Disruptive Grace):

“If,” wrote Martin Luther, “I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of Gods except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved and to be steady on all the battlefield, except there, is mere flight and disgrace if one flinches at that point.”

Hunsinger emphasizes that faithfulness to Jesus of Nazareth is always situational, that one can spout impeccably orthodox theological truths and still be “fatally disloyal.”

Genuine loyalty is proven where it counts — in the pitch of battle, where it really costs something. Writing 22 years ago, Hunsinger was already addressing what he called “an overwhelming spiritual collapse, in which we have lost touch with even minimal standards of morality.”

“The prevailing sense seems to be that, if the demands of biblical morality contradict the dictates of national security, so much the worse for biblical morality. … Dungeons … torture, and death are described as belonging to the free world. … War criminals in high places we honor. … Acts of aggression we celebrate as noble deeds. … of preemptive self-defense. Orwell has become our destiny. …

“The passive acquiescence of a Christian community which has lost its moral conscience in matters of state contributes substantially … to misery and oppression. … ‘Seek your own welfare above all else’ has become the maxim of the day.”

Hunsinger has earned the right to criticize those who confess Jesus of Nazareth “from the safety of some remote enclave, where confession may be true but costs nothing.”

He is professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, but was so aghast at U.S. practice of torture that he devoted untold time and energy to founding the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT).

Luther Not Popular in Dallas

I suggested to the gathering of Lutherans that Dallas, where the “decider” on torture is now their neighbor, might be where the battle rages for them. I had very few takers.

“But he kept us safe … isn’t it better to fight the terrorists over there than to fight them here?”

There was little appetite to listening to THAT Luther in that Lutheran church. The pastor shared with me later that he had encountered all manner of criticism for having invited someone disrespectful of George W. Bush.

Despite the turbulence I caused, the pastor thanked me for coming, but noted that “torture is not high on anyone’s agenda.”

In a brief thank-you note he wrote, “I believe that if the full scope of the nation’s use of torture comes to light, there may be need for churches to propose confession and repentance, as a positive witness for the rest of the world.”

Presbyterians: To their credit, the Presbyterians have been more outspoken — some of them at least.

In 2006, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) called on Congress to convene an independent investigative body to establish responsibility for the abuse of detainees and, if appropriate, to recommend the appointment of a special prosecutor.

The clerk of the General Assembly followed up on April 23, 2009, with an appeal to President Barack Obama to work with Congress to establish a non-partisan Commission of Inquiry to bring “an understanding of what happened, how it happened, and who was accountable,” adding”

“If those responsible are not held accountable, nothing beyond wishful thinking and admonitions exists to compel future leaders to resist the temptation to torture in times of fear or threat.”

Good for the Presbyterians, I thought. I led off a Sunday evening talk to a Dallas area Presbyterian congregation by complementing those assembled on the gutsy appeal of April 23. I was greeted by blank stares.

This congregation was no exception to the general rule that courageous statements at high official levels do not find their way into Sunday sermons, much less workshops. A disappointment, but hardly a surprise.

Methodists: The United Methodist General Board of Churches and Society, acknowledging the results of the Pew survey, is also supporting an independent inquiry into torture.

Top executive Jim Winkler has been very direct: “Shame, shame, shame on any Christian who could imagine there is any justification of torture against another human being. I cannot conceive in my wildest dreams of Jesus Christ giving any blessing to torture.”

It is another question, of course, as to whether Pew reaches the pews.

As for the Dallas Methodists, Southern Methodist University has shown itself eager to host George W. Bush’s presidential library and an independent institute to sponsor programs to “promote the vision of the president and celebrate” his presidency.

The protests of thousands of Methodists, including prominent alumni of SMU’s School of Theology pointing to the policy of torture, fell on the deaf ears of the Methodist bishops and trustees who blessed the enterprise.

Catholics: Sadly, the U.S. Catholic bishops cannot find their voice on torture. This is history repeating itself, for Hamlet-like Pope Pius XII kept trying to make up his mind on whether he should put the Church at some risk in Germany, while Jews and other minorities were been tortured and murdered.

In 1948, the French author/philosopher Albert Camus addressed a Dominican monastery of friars who had asked what an “unbeliever” thought about Christians in the light of their behavior during the 30s and 40s. Camus said:

“For a long time during those frightful years I waited for a great voice to speak up in Rome. I, an unbeliever? Precisely. For I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation. …

“It has been explained to me since that the condemnation was indeed voiced. But that it was in the style of encyclicals, which is not all that clear. The condemnation was voiced and it was not understood. Who could fail to see where the fault lies in this case?

“Christians should voice their condemnation loud and clear, in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest person. … They should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.”

And today? True to form, laudable statements and papers have been produced and placed in in-boxes in the bowels of the bishops’ bureaucracy, but they rarely find their way to the pulpit on Sunday.

I am a Catholic, and initially was happy to find, by a search of the bishops’ Web site that there is a Catholic Study Guide titled “Torture is a Moral Issue.” It was developed in collaboration with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the group Professor Hunsinger founded.

This was news to me. Had any of my Catholic friends heard of this? The answer from a representative sampling, including progressive parishes, was No.

So I called the bishops’ staff to inquire as to why the study guide on torture had not been published and made available to pastors to use in their preaching or workshops.

I was told that it was “not designed as a publication, because there was uncertainty as to how much demand there would be for such a study.”

A publishing run would not be cost effective unless it produced at least a thousand copies and this particular issue might not warrant that kind of run. (There are 70 million Catholics in this land.)

As for Pope Benedict XVI, he arrived here in April 2008, a week after media reports that the most senior officials of the Bush administration had met regularly at the White House to plan which torture techniques might be most appropriate for which high-value detainees. He said nothing.

All the more strange, it would seem, since Jesus of Nazareth, after all, was tortured to death. If the pope had an opinion on torture, he kept it to himself.

Mormons: What about the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints?

My small random sampling of the information available shows a strong propensity among Mormons toward Dostoevsky’s caricature of a strong, top-down authoritative church, but with the notable exception of at least one person who could, and did, think for herself — to her own peril.

The most prominent Mormon with torture connections is Jay Bybee, a devout Mormon with undergraduate and law degrees from Mormon-owned Brigham Young University.

As leader of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002, Bybee approved a memorandum indicating that interrogators could apply virtually any harsh techniques, so long as the pain involved was less than that accompanying “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or death.”

In my view, his memorandum must surely be the most shameful text ever to appear beneath Department of Justice letterhead. It was among the ones released by President Obama in mid-April, over the strong objections of many top officials.

A lively debate rages among Mormon lawyers over the morality of Bybee’s approval of harsh interrogation techniques. Dan Burke, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, was incensed to learn that a fellow Mormon could justify such actions.

“I cannot believe that the practice of torture is acceptable to anyone who claims to be a disciple of Jesus Christ,” said Burk.

Not so fast, say other Mormon lawyers — David Wenger of New York, for example.

“I would personally be uncomfortable writing a memo on how the administration could legally justify torture of people, but I don’t think it’s against the tenets of our faith,” Wenger told the Salt Lake Tribune.

“One might believe that the value of ready access to torture-obtained intelligence outweighed the negative,” said Wenger.

Yet another Mormon, a woman Army specialist named Alyssa Peterson, was clear on the morality of torture. She refused to take part in applying torture techniques approved by Bybee.

She walked away from an interrogation in the “cage,” where Iraqis were stripped naked in front of female soldiers, mocked and burned with cigarettes. Three days later, on Sept. 15, 2003, Peterson was found dead of a gunshot wound at Tal Afar base in Iraq. The Army said her death was a suicide.

It gets worse. The two faux-psychologists to whom the CIA turned to show them how to torture, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, are both Mormons, and were widely referred to by other U.S. interrogators as the “Mormon mafia.”

Add to the mix Robert Walpole, the CIA analyst who wove out of whole cloth what has been referred to as “The Whore of Babylon” — the worst National Intelligence Estimate in the history of U.S. intelligence.

“Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction” dated Oct. 1, 2002, was a deliberate — and successful — attempt to deceive Congress into authorizing war on Iraq.

In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former CIA Director George (slam-dunk) Tenet praises Walpole as a “brilliant analyst.” In a transparent attempt to defend Walpole against charges of being “hell bent on war,” Tenet insists that Walpole is “one of the most unlikely people to be accused of being a war hawk.”

Tenet notes that Walpole did not think an attack on Iraq justifiable – and Tenet adds that Walpole is a Mormon bishop. Did Tenet think that that should do it, as far as credibility was concerned? In any event, Walpole did what he was told in managing the production of the Estimate that paved the way to war.

I know there are many Mormons besides Alyssa Peterson with integrity. It remains a mystery to me why so many of the ones who gain prominence seem to lose their sense of right and wrong when they are asked by hierarchical authority to do things they know are wrong.

In sum, with respect to the Christian churches I believe author Chris Hedges summarizes the situation neatly, if sadly:

“The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions — whose texts are unequivocal about murder — to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.”

The Good News

Who would have thought we would have to turn to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to carry the moral ball on torture.

Adm. Mike Mullen has called his commanders on the carpet. He is reliably reported to have been so “appalled” and “disgusted” after viewing some of the abuse photos being kept under wraps by the Obama administration that he warned senior military officers on July 10: “We haven’t all absorbed or applied all the lessons of Abu Ghraib.”

Mullen ordered that more be done to halt detainee abuse. He is quoted as saying, “We’re better than this; and now we have to show it.”

Hopefully, Adm. Mullen will stay around long enough to start a thorough clean-up of the torture mess — at least in the military.

He has acted responsibly and with integrity on a number of issues; the country is lucky to have him in that very senior post. For it is clear that, as long as demagogues keep insisting that we are “at war” with global terrorists all manner of abuse can be heaped on “the enemy.”

It’s always the same “during wartime.” Here’s what one widely admired U.S. general had to say about the German enemy during WWII. It is an attitude about which we must be aware, so that we can guard against it:

“My God, I actually pity those poor bastards we’re going up against,” said General George Patton. “We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. …

“Don’t worry; I can assure you that you’ll do your duty. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly. When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend’s face, you’ll know what to do.”

Waiting for the Church?

Don’t wait for the churches to speak out against such violence. We have seen enough of their vacillation to know that, for us, this would be a cop-out.

Sad to say, the same challenge facing Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero before he was assassinated faces us. And we must have the courage and honesty to act, like him, in putting ourselves where the battle rages:

“A church that doesn’t provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed, what kind of gospel is that?”

We cannot avoid the challenge; it is up to us. We have to supply what is lacking in the institutional church.

There is hope. As St. Augustine warned 1,600 years ago:

“Hope has two children. The first is anger at the way things are. The second is courage to do something about it.”

With those two, well, yes we can.

[Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He worked in the analysis part of the CIA for 27 years, and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).]

Source / Consortium News

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Barack, Health Insurance, and Your Best Interests

Posted on August 1, 2009 by RagBlog


Top Ten Ways To Tell Your President & His Party Aren’t Fighting For Health Care For Everybody
By Bruce A. Dixon / July 29, 2009

With the corporate media relentlessly distorting the public discussion around health care reform, it time for some clear, bright lines to help us tell who is doing what to whom, and whether any of it leads to health care for all of us. Here are ten of them.

Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate were swept into office on a promise they would deliver affordable and accessible health care for all Americans. But the corporate media journalism limits the national health care conversation to what insurance companies, drug companies, for-profit health care professionals, their executives, lobbyists and politicians of both parties and other hirelings have to say. So it isn’t as easy as it ought to be to tell what the politicians are doing about accomplishing health care for everybody. Hence we offer these ten points. This is how you can tell whether your president and his party are fighting for the health care you deserve.

1. Their plan doesn’t cover the uninsured till at least 2013.

2013 isn’t “day one.” It’s not even after the midterm election. It’s clear after the president’s second term, if he gets one. Congress passed Medicare in 1965 and president Lyndon Johnson rolled out coverage for millions of seniors in eleven months, back in the days before they even had computers.

22,000 Americans now perish each year because they can’t get or can’t afford medical care, and this year three quarter million personal bankruptcies will be triggered by unpayable medical bills. Why this president and these Democrats are in such a hurry to pass health care now that doesn’t take effect till two elections down the road doesn’t make sense in any kind of good way.

2. Their “public option” isn’t Medicare, won’t bring costs down and will only cover about 10 million people.

The “public option” was sold to the American people as Medicare-scale plan open to anybody who wants in that would compete with the private insurers and drive their costs downward. But in their haste not to bite the hands that feed them millions in campaign contributions each hear, the president and his party have scaled the public option back from a Medicare-sized 130 million to a maximum of 10 million, too small to put cost pressure in private insurers. Worse still, the president and his party are playing bait-and-witch, not telling the public they have reduced the public option, to nearly nothing.

This remnant of a public option is not Medicare, as Howard Dean insists, and it will not lead to the sort of everybody-in-nobody-out health care system that most Americans, whenever they are surveyed say they want.

Some Senate and House Democrats want to ditch even the pretense of a “public option” in favor of something they’re calling a private insurance “co-op”, which as near as anybody can tell has the same relationship to an actual cooperative that clean coal has to actual coal.

3. The president and his party have already caved in to the drug companies on reimporting Canadian drugs, on negotiating drug prices downward and on generics.

This explains why Big Pharma, the same people who ran the devastating series of anti-reform “Harry and Louise” ads to spike the Clinton-era drive to fix health care are spending $100 million to run Obama ads using the president’s language about “bipartisan” solutions to health care reform.

4. The president and his party have received more money from private insurers and the for-profit health care industry than even Republicans, with the president alone taking $19 million in the 2008 election cycle alone, more than all his Repubican, Democratic and independent rivals combined.

Democratic senator Max Bacaus got $1.1 million in 2008. Democratic senators Harkin, Landreau and Rockerfeller each got over half a million, and Senator Durbin got just under half a million. Other Democratic senators got a little less. Four Democrats in the House, Rangel, Dinglell, Udall and Hoyer got over half a million apiece in 2008, with other Democrats not far behind.

Is there any wonder that the insurance companies, like the drug companies are also running “bipartisan health care reform” commercials using the president’s exact language?

5. The president’s plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue dogs too, will require families to purchase health insurance policies from private insurers.

This is something the policy wonks call an “individual mandate,” under which Individuals will be “mandated” to purchase affordable insurance, though companies would not be required to offer it. In Massachusetts, the prototype state for the Obama plan, a family with an income of $33,000 can be required to spend $9,000 in deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses before the insurance company is obligated to pay a dime. As in Massachusetts, public money is used to purchase private insurance for the very poorest citizens. With the revenues of insurance companies on the decline, individual mandate programs are a welcome bailout for the private insurance industry.

6. The president’s plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue dogs too, could force you to buy junk insurance.

Think about an insurance policy that costs a lot, but is full of loopholes, exceptions and steep deductibles and co-payments. That’s junk insurance, and for many it’s the only insurance companies offer. Even more pernicious is the widespread practice among insurance companies of “recission” in which claimants are routinely investigated and disqualified in the event that they finally make a claim. Insurance companies admit they do this to half of one percent of policies per year. That means if you hold a health insurance policy twenty years, you don;t have insurance – you have a ninety percent chance of having insurance.

7. The president’s plan, as well as those of Democratic “blue dogs” and Republicans, are to be funded in part with cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

Private insurance companies have always hated Medicare because it is far more efficient than they are. Medicare’s administrative expenses are under five percent, as compared with the one third of every health care dollar taken by the for-profit insurance companies for their advertising, bad investments, billing and denial machinery, executive salaries and bonuses. Private insurers have, over the years, purchased enough influence in Congress and previous White Houses to restrict Medicare’s payment rates and partially privatize it. But president Obama’s plan, perhaps the most friendly to Medicare and Medicaid, calls for over $300 billion in cuts to the programs that now provide medical care to those with the fewest options, while failing to guarantee that care will come from elsewhere. In Massachusetts right now, hospitals are turning away poor people they used to be able to provide care for because funding that used to go to those institutions is now plowed into the state’s “individual mandate” system.

8. The president, with the cooperation of corporate media and the Republicans is trying to make the argument about himself instead of a discussion on the merits of his policy.

The president and his critics are happy to talk about whether this will be “his Waterloo,” or his Dien Bien Phu, as if that matters more than the 22,000 Americans who die each year from lack of medical care, or the three quarter million who will go bankrupt because of unpayable medical bills. The concentration on whether the president looks good or bad takes up air, ink, and coverage time that might otherwise be spent explaining what is and isn’t in the various proposals, and why.

If the president were not afraid of his own supporters publicly examining the merits and demerits of his proposals, he would mobilize those 13 million emails and phone numbers collected during the campaign. The reason he has not sone so already is that most of his own supporters favor a Medicare-For-All single payer health care system, HR 676.

9. The president and his party, and the corporate media have spent more time and energy silencing and excluded the advocates of single payer health care, mostly the president’s own supporters, than they have fighting blue dogs and Republicans.

But no matter how diligently the spokespeople for single payer are excluded from media coverage and invitations to Obama’s policy forums and round tables, no matter how many times the White House cuts their questions from transcripts and video of public events, the calls, emails and letters keep pouring into Congress and the White House demanding the creation of a publicly funded, everybody-in-nobody-out system, a Medicare-for-All kind of single payer health care plan.

10. Despite the president’s own admission that only a single payer health care system will deliver what Americans want, he and the leaders of his party insist that Medicare For All, HR 676, us utterly off the table.

Before he became a presidential candidate, Barack Obama identified himself as a proponent of a single payer health care system. All we had to do, he told us, was elect a Democratic congress and senate, and a different president. Now that this has been done, he insists that “change” is just not possible, and we have to settle for less. The president continues to admit that only a single payer health care system will cover everybody, but insists that America just can’t handle that much change.

The truth is that Barack Obama campaigned as the candidate of change, and a health care system that covers everybody from day one with no exceptions is what people imagined they voted for when they swept him and an overwhelming number of Democrats into office.

A single payer Medicare-For-All system will eliminate 500,000 insurance company jobs and replace them with 3.2 million new jobs in health care for a net gain of 2.6 million new jobs according to a study by the National Nurses Organization. That’s as many jobs as the US economy lost in all of 2007. Single payer will create hundreds of billions in annual wages and local and state tax revenues for cash strapped cities and towns. It will lift the shadow of bankruptcy for medical reasons from two thirds of a million American families yearly. It’s what we deserve.

It’s what we voted for, and we won’t stop demanding it.

[Bruce Dixon is based in Atlanta GA and is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.]

Source / Black Agenda Report

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The ‘Double Consciousness’ of Race

Posted on August 1, 2009 by RagBlog

Graphic: Blair Kelly.

Meet the New Elite, Not Like the Old
By Helene Cooper / July 25, 2009

WASHINGTON — They are the children of 1969 — the year that America’s most prestigious universities began aggressively recruiting blacks and Latinos to their nearly all-white campuses.

No longer would Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia be the domain of the privileged. Instead, in response to the national soul-searching prompted by the civil rights movement, America’s premier colleges would try to become more representative of the population as a whole.

Forty years later, America is being led, to a striking extent, by a new elite, a cohort of the best and the brightest whose advancement was formed, at least in part, by affirmative action policies. From Barack and Michelle Obama (Columbia, Princeton, Harvard) to Eric Holder (Columbia) to Sonia Sotomayor (Princeton, Yale) to Valerie Jarrett (Michigan, Stanford), the country is now seeing, in full flower, the fruition of this wooing of minorities to institutions that for much of the nation’s history have groomed America’s leaders.

And yet the consequences of that change remain unresolved, as became clear on Friday, when Mr. Obama grappled a second time with the arrest of the Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home.

The incident, the president said, offered the potential to soothe longstanding distrust between minorities and police officers. But it also laid bare another reality, that the children of 1969, even those who now occupy niches at the top of society, regard their status as complicated, ambiguous and vulnerable.

“Whether I were black or white, I think that me commenting on this and hopefully contributing to constructive — as opposed to negative — understandings about the issue, is part of my portfolio,” Mr. Obama said.

It was a reminder that Mr. Obama, in addition to being the most powerful American, is also the fulfillment of the ideals embraced by Ivy League minority recruiters in 1969. Mr. Gates entered Yale that year, as one of 96 black freshmen. Today that number seems small. But there had been only six black students just three years before.

HARVARD Barack Obama. Photo: European Pressphoto Agency.

Mr. Gates belonged to the first affirmative action wave at top universities — a wave that continued into the 1970s and the 1980s. I was one of its beneficiaries. A black 17-year-old from Monrovia, Liberia, I was one of some 200 black freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1983.

My first roommate was a white student from Seagrove, N.C., whose SAT scores and grade-point average were higher than mine. Privately, I consoled myself that I had qualifications that she didn’t: I could name the capital of every country in Africa; countries she had never heard of. I knew where the Zambezi River emptied into the Indian Ocean. None of that had been on the SAT.

But every now and then I feared I was faking it, that my white classmates had something I didn’t. There were things they seemed to know instinctively, that I had to look up. I remember getting laughed at during a game of Pictionary when I couldn’t come up with the word for a giant bird landing on a lawn with a baby in its mouth.

My feelings of inadequacy were not unusual, said David L. Evans, the Saturn/Apollo electrical engineer hired by Harvard in 1969 to help lead its affirmative action program. When Mr. Evans visited public high schools in Arkansas in search of promising black students, he was met with skepticism. “Even people who didn’t have any mean-spiritedness would say to the students, ‘You going to be up there with the Kennedys?’ ” he recalled. “ ‘How do you think you can make it there?’ ”

There was anxiety, too, among the originators of race-based affirmative action programs. “The idealistic version of why these universities embraced racial affirmative action is that they said, ‘Hey, we’re in the business of training elites, it would be better for America if there were a diverse elite,’ ” said Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and author of “The Big Test,” a history of the SAT and the rise of America’s meritocracy. To its architects, the minority recruitment was the next phase for universities that for years had paved the way for whites, particularly the offspring of upper-class alumni, Mr. Lemann said.

“The cynical version of why they did this is they said, ‘We can’t control this country, it’s becoming too diverse, we need to socialize the brighter minorities and make them more like us.’ ”

In many ways, being molded into people “more like us” gave the children of 1969 an advantage denied most of their white counterparts. They learned to navigate within a second world. They also absorbed some of its ideas and values. And they paved the way for the next generation.

“We had to go through this phase of larger integration for Barack Obama to be possible,” Mr. Gates said in an interview a few days after his arrest. “It would have been impossible for Barack Obama to go from a historic black school to become president, at this time. The whole point is that a broad swath of America had to be able to identify with him.”

It also enabled Mr. Obama to run “the most race-blind campaign” of any black presidential candidate, said Gwen Ifill, the PBS news reporter whose book “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” examines the rise of African-Americans in politics.

Perhaps. But the children of 1969 dwell in a complex world. They retain an ethnic identity that includes its own complement of cultural, historical and psychological issues and considerations. This emerged at Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. And it emerged again last week, when Mr. Obama joked in the White House East Room that if he ran afoul of the police, “I’d get shot.” In saying this, he seemed to draw on the fears of black men across the United States, including those within the new power elite.

What Mr. Obama seemed to be demonstrating was what Mr. Lemann of Columbia calls a “double consciousness” that allows the children of 1969 to flow more easily between the world which their skin color bequeathed them and the world which their college degree opened up for them.

It’s the same double consciousness I acquired at U.N.C., though I didn’t think about it that way as a student. Sure, my white friends were learning a little more about black (and African) culture from me. But I was absorbing much more from them, since they surrounded me in such great number. At the time it seemed I had the advantage; I would leave college having gotten much more from my interactions with my white friends than they could possibly have gotten from me. And the principal thing I learned was how to make them feel at ease around me.

Except, of course, on those occasions when one can’t. Life outside the university doesn’t duplicate the conditions of university life.

“I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere I go,” Professor Gates said. “We — all of us in the crossover generation — have multiple identities, and being black trumps all of those other identities.”

On Friday Mr. Obama said he hoped Mr. Gates’s incident might become a “teachable moment.” It is a daunting task for the children of 1969: finding out whether the double consciousness they honed in the Ivy League can actually get this country to listen — and react — to race in a different way.

[Helene Cooper, a White House correspondent for The Times, is the author of “The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood.”]

Source / New York Times

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U.S. Military Spies on SDS, Peace Groups

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Former military whistleblower Christopher Pyle spoke to Amy Goodman about the recent revelation. (See video below.)

Obama’s Military Is Spying on U.S. Peace Groups

The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement

By Amy Goodman / July 31, 2009

Includes Democracy Now! follow-up Video.

Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.

The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn asked the city of Olympia for documents or e-mails about communications between the Olympia police and the military relating to anarchists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Industrial Workers of the World (Dunn’s union). Dunn received hundreds of documents. One e-mail contained reference to a “John J. Towery II,” who activists discovered was the same person as their fellow activist “John Jacob.”

Dunn told me: “John Jacob was actually a close friend of mine, so this week has been pretty difficult for me. He said he was an anarchist. He was really interested in SDS. He got involved with Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), with Iraq Vets Against the War. He was a kind person. He was a generous person. So it was really just a shock for me.”

“Jacob” told the activists he was a civilian employed at Fort Lewis Army Base and would share information about base activities that could help the PMR organize rallies and protests against public ports being used for troop and Stryker military vehicle deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2006, PMR activists have occasionally engaged in civil disobedience, blocking access to the port.

Larry Hildes, an attorney representing Washington activists, says the U.S. attorney prosecuting the cases against them, Brian Kipnis, specifically instructed the Army not to hand over any information about its intelligence-gathering activities, despite a court order to do so.

Which is why Dunn’s request to Olympia and the documents he obtained are so important.

The military is supposed to be barred from deploying on U.S. soil, or from spying on citizens. Christopher Pyle, now a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, was a military intelligence officer. He recalled: “In the 1960s, Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents [and some would watch] every demonstration of 20 people or more. They had a giant warehouse in Baltimore full of information on the law-abiding activities of American citizens, mainly protest politics.”

Pyle later investigated the spying for two congressional committees: “As a result of those investigations, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished, and all of its files were burned. Then the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to stop the warrantless surveillance of electronic communications.”

Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rush Holt, D-N.J., and others are pushing for a new, comprehensive investigation of all U.S. intelligence activities, of the scale of the Church Committee hearings, which exposed widespread spying on and disruption of legal domestic groups, attempts at assassination of foreign heads of state, and more.

Demands mount for information on and accountability for Vice President Dick Cheney’s alleged secret assassination squad, President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, and the CIA’s alleged misleading of Congress. But the spying in Olympia occurred well into the Obama administration (and may continue today). President Barack Obama supports retroactive immunity for telecom companies involved in the wiretapping, and has maintained Bush-era reliance on the state secrets privilege. Lee and Holt should take the information uncovered by Brendan Dunn and the Olympia activists and get the investigations started now.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America. She is the co-author of Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times, recently released in paperback. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.]

© 2009 Amy Goodman

Source / truthdig / originally broadcast July 28, 2009

Democracy Now! Follow-up on spying revelations:
Christopher Pyle interviewed

Also see Military spy outed in Olympia, WA antiwar/SDS/IWW groups / Twincities Indymedia / July 27, 2009

And Army spying could violate federal law by Jeremy Pawloski / The Olympian / July 30, 2009

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Honduras : Zelaya to Return With ‘Peaceful Popular Army’

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Zelaya crosses the border, which is marked by a chain. Photo from La Jornada, Mexico.

Strikes and military crackdown continue
President Manuel Zelaya defies compromise

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / July 31, 2009

Deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya announced on July 29 that within days he will return to Tegucigalpa, accompanied by a “peaceful popular army” of his followers, to resume the office of the presidency.

Zelaya said his reinstatement will be the result of a political agreement with some members of the coup government, mentioning specifically the armed forces. “Let there be no doubt,” he declared, “that at any moment young military officers affected by the coup will detain Romeo Vásquez Velásquez.” General Vásquez Velásquez, head of the joints chiefs of staff, was a central figure in the June 28 coup d’état.

A statement attributed to the Movimiento de Oficiales Superiores y Subalternos de las Fuerzas Armadas (Movement of Superior and Subordinate Officers of the Armed Forces) and distributed on July 29 by anti-coup organizations criticized Vásquez for politicizing the armed forces. “Politicians,” it declared, “in collusion with military commanders, have implicated the armed forces and have damaged the good reputation we had with the Honduran people.”

The statement claims a group of businessmen distributed 30 million lempiras, about 1.6 million dollars, among the country’s top military commanders prior to the coup. “We declare that the armed forces are not the gendarmes of any elite economic group,” the statement continued, “but that we are with the people because most of our members, officers and enlisted men as well, come from the people.”

Speaking to a group of supporters in Ocotal, Nicaragua, about 20 kilometers from the Honduran border, Zelaya said the popular army will be formed from the estimated 500 Hondurans who have made their way on foot through dense jungle to meet him in Nicaragua. Once back across the border, he said, they will be joined by other Hondurans opposed to the coup and, armed with “the weapons of intelligence and reason,” they will proceed to the capital of Tegucigalpa.

Zayala supporters at the border. Photo from Indymedia Honduras.

After an attempt to return to Honduras by air on July 5 was foiled by the military, Zelaya announced he would return by land and actually crossed the border for a brief stay on Friday, July 24. He was greeted by several thousand supporters who had defied and evaded military roadblocks in their effort to greet him. Despite stern warnings from the coup government that he would be arrested if he entered the country, Zelaya spoke briefly and calmly with a Honduran lieutenant colonel before returning to Nicaragua. Later reports in the pro-coup press denied rumors that the lieutenant colonel, Luis Recartes, had been jailed for speaking with Zelaya without arresting him.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Zelaya’s return to his country as reckless and urged him to seek a negotiated settlement through the ongoing efforts of Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, efforts which have failed so far and appear destined to fail again. The military has issued a statement of approval for Arias’ proposals and the legislature is expected to vote Monday on whether to accept them. But the proposals call for Zelaya to be reinstasted with severely limited powers, prohibiting specifically any attempt to write a new constitution or even to poll the citizenry on whether they want one, limits neither Zelaya nor the popular organizations behind him are prepared to accept. The legislature is divided on the question of amnesty for crimes allegedly committed by members of the Zelaya government in the days leading up to the coup.

The July 24 events came on the second day of strikes endorsed by all three of the country’s labor federations, which resulted in the occupation of a number of government buildings by public employees. In a strike by some members of the national police, including some in the anti-riot force, several police stations were reportedly locked by using handcuffs on the doors.

Teachers have been on a slowdown since the coup on June 28, working three days a week instead of the five demanded by authorities.

Union members block the highway. Photo from El Heraldo.

The military had set up road blocks at a number of points on the highway from Tegucigalpa to El Paraíso, near the Nicaraguan border, in anticipation of the crowds of anti-coup demonstrators expected to welcome Zelaya home. Some of the soldiers are said to have disobeyed orders by allowing demonstrators to proceed and many of the demonstrators evaded the roadblocks by walking long distances through dense jungle.

Some sources say as many as 3,000 were on hand when Zelaya crossed the border.

The military is reportedly not allowing demonstrators to leave and is denying access to food and water, although area residents have shared their meager resources. Many demonstrators are still in the El Paraíso area a week after the demonstrations began.

The coup government extended curfew hours in the border area several times until finally declaring an around-the-clock curfew, with all constitutional rights suspended, turning the curfew into a state of siege.

The police and military have been using teargas and rubber bullets against the anti-coup forces, beating many and arresting an unknown number. The body of one man, Pedro Magdiel Muñoz, was found near the demonstrations with more than 40 stab wounds and signs he had been tortured.

Among those arrested was Rafael Alegría, a prominent Honduran activist and one of the founders of Vía Campesina, an international campesino organization, who was detained briefly and released.

Among those seeking to greet Zelaya were his wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, and several other family members, who were eventually given permission to finish their journey thanks to a court order.

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

David Holmes Morris’ previous Rag Blog articles on Honduras are here.

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US Military: A Little Too Big for Its Britches

Posted on July 31, 2009 by RagBlog

National Guard (murderers) at Kent State in May 1970.

The Military Is Not the Police
July 29, 2009

It was disturbing to learn the other day just how close the last administration came to violating laws barring the military from engaging in law enforcement when President George W. Bush considered sending troops into a Buffalo suburb in 2002 to arrest terrorism suspects. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily a problem of the past. More needs to be done to ensure that the military is not illegally deployed in this country.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from law enforcement activities within the United States. If armed officers are going to knock on Americans’ doors, or arrest them in the streets, they should answer to civilian authorities.

Despite this bedrock principle, The Times’s Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston reported last week, top Bush administration officials, including (no surprise) Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that the president had the authority to use the military to round up a suspected terrorist cell known as the Lackawanna Six.

Mr. Cheney and others cited a legal memorandum co-written by John C. Yoo (author of the infamous torture memo), which made the baseless claim that the military can go after accused Al Qaeda terrorists on United States soil because it would be a matter of national security, not law enforcement.

The Lackawanna Six controversy is history, but there are troubling signs the military may be injecting itself today into law enforcement. The American Civil Liberties Union has been sounding the alarm about the proliferation of “fusion centers,” in which federal, state and local law enforcement cooperate on anti-terrorism work. According to the A.C.L.U., the lines have blurred, and the centers have involved military personnel in domestic law enforcement. Congress should investigate.

Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said Wednesday that fusion centers were not intended to have a military presence, and that she was not aware of ones that did. She promised greater transparency about what role, if any, the active military was playing.

Civil libertarians are also raising questions about a program known as the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and High-Yield Explosives Consequence Management Response Force. The Army says its aim is to have active-duty troops ready to back up local law enforcement in catastrophic situations, like an attack with a nuclear weapon. That could be legal, but the workings of these units are murky. Again, Congress should ensure that the military is not moving into prohibited areas.

Some of the military’s line-crossing seems ad hoc. Earlier this year, when a man in a small town in Alabama went on a shooting spree, Army troops reportedly went out on the streets to participate in the law enforcement effort. It is still unclear precisely what role they played. It is important that the military be thoroughly trained on what the law does and does not permit.

After the lack of respect for posse comitatus at the highest ranks of the previous administration, the Obama White House and Congress must ensure that the lines between military and law enforcement have been restored, clearly, and that they are respected.

Source / New York Times

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Leonard Peltier Hearing Brings Hope for Freedom

Posted on July 30, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Photos by Bill Hackwell / indybay.org.

Leonard Peltier could leave prison by August 18

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / July 30, 2009

For a formidable and growing global community of supporters, the prospect of Native American activist Leonard Peltier finally leaving prison inspires a longing that cuts to the depths of the soul.

So Peltier’s first parole hearing of the Obama Era — on Tuesday, July 28 — inspired hope of an intensity that will have a major impact on the new presidency. A decision must come from the Federal Parole Commission within three weeks. His attorney is calling for a surge of public support that would create an irresistible political climate for Leonard’s release.

The relationship between Peltier and those who have followed his case over the decades can be intensely personal. His imprisonment has come to stand not only for five centuries of unjust violence waged against Native Americans, but also for the inhumane theft of the life of a man who has handled his 33 years in jail with epic dignity, effectiveness and grace.

Peltier’s latest parole hearing convened at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he is currently held. According to Eric Seitz, Peltier’s Honolulu-based attorney, Peltier spoke for more than an hour “with great eloquence” about the nature of his case, his imprisonment and his plans for freedom. “The hearing officer seemed to listen carefully,” said Seitz. “We thought it went very well.”

The decision on Peltier’s parole will be made by the four sitting members of the Federal Parole Commission whose offices are in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Commissioners Isaac Fulwood, Jr., Cranston Mitchell, Edward Reilly and Patricia Cushware are all Bush appointees. One seat is vacant; Fulwood was elevated to the Chairman’s seat in May by President Obama.

According to Seitz, the hearing was taped by an officer charged with reporting to the Commissioners within 48 hours. The Commissioners are required to render a decision within 21 days — by August 18. Should they rule in his favor, Peltier could walk out of prison very soon after the decision is issued.

Should the Commssioners turn down his parole application, Seitz says the appeal would go to the federal district court in Harrisburg. The report of the hearing would become available to Peltier and the public.

Seitz said he spoke to the record for about 20 minutes on the legalities of the case. He said Peter Matthiessen, author of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, explained the history of the 1970s incidents that led to Peltier being accused of murdering two FBI agents. Crazy Horse is the definitive account of the origins of the case and of the climate of violence and repression imposed on the native community at the time of the killings. Seitz said Matthiessen emphasized “the many reasons to have misgivings about whether the system performed well and fairly in Leonard’s case.”

Mattheissen was joined by Dr.Thomas Fassett of the United Methodist Church, who testified, said Seitz, “to the negative impact of Peltier’s 33-year imprisonment on the world’s view of how the U.S. government treats its native population. Leonard’s case is viewed in the larger community both nationally & internationally as a major embarrassment…as a gross injustice…a black mark.”

The testimony was accompanied by thousands of letters, with signees including South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, US Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), and actor Robert Redford, whose film Incident at Ogalala is the definitive documentary.

Cynthia Maleterre of the Turtle Island Clan then outlined how Peltier could meet the requirements of parole in his home community in North Dakota. Restored to his Chippewa-Dakota homeland, Maleterre explained that Peltier would have housing, a job and be surrounded by family, including great-grandchildren he has never seen.

Seitz said testimony opposing parole came from a representative of the FBI, sent by Director Robert Mueller, a holdover Bush appointee, and from the former director of the Minnesota Bureau. Two sons of Jack Coler, one of the FBI agents killed in the Ogalala shoot-out, also argued against Peltier being freed, as did a former agent named Ed Woods.

Seitz said that all those opposing parole argued Peltier should spend the rest of his days in prison, and did not deserve a new trial.

But Seitz was “guardedly optimistic” about a favorable decision from the Parole Commission. He said that a “good rapport” had been established with the hearing officer, and that the new chair of the commission is generally held “in high esteem.”

President Barack Obama does have the power to grant clemency, but Seitz said prisoners apply only when all other avenues have been exhausted. Usually, says Seitz, “presidential pardons do not come until the Chief Executive is leaving office.”

Seitz says letters to the Parole Commission and to local newspapers, calls to Congressional Representatives (202-224-3121), talk show hosts and other forms of public pressure are now of the utmost importance. The hope, he says, lies in creating a “public environment favorable to release.”

As Leonard Peltier approaches his 65th year — having spent half his life in prison — every day is now critical to lifting this burden from our collective souls.

For more information go to www.leonardpeltier.net.

For background, see Harvey Wasserman : Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier Faces Parole Board by Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2009

And Leonard Peltier: In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Leonard Peltier (includes ‘Free Leonard Peltier’ by Dan Skye, and a Video from Chief Leonard Crow Dog) / The Rag Blog / July 1, 2009

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Health Care : True Reform Must Include Public Option

Posted on July 30, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Public Insurance Option is Necessary For True Reform

It’s becoming obvious that these Repubs and Blue Dogs have been bought off by the millions of dollars the lobbyists are throwing at them. To them, getting re-elected is far more important than providing health care for ordinary Americans.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / July 30, 2009

Republicans and “Blue Dog” Democrats keep telling us there is no need for a public health insurance option. They want us to believe the private insurance companies can solve all our health care problems (even though these are the very people who have caused those problems).

It’s gotten so bad that even Democratic leaders like Harry Reid (Senate Majority Leader) is now saying a bill could be passed without a public health insurance option. Some are even saying a co-op of private insurance companies could work just as well (even though they can’t tell us how these co-ops could work as well as a public option).

It’s becoming obvious that these Repubs and Blue Dogs have been bought off by the millions of dollars the lobbyists are throwing at them. To them, getting re-elected is far more important than providing health care for ordinary Americans. Otherwise, they would not be proposing as ridiculous a concept as co-ops for private insurance. A concept that amounts to little more than a gigantic payday for private insurance companies.

Let’s review just what private insurance companies have done for America’s citizens:

  • Left 55 million Americans without any health insurance at all, and this number keeps growing larger as more jobs disappear each month. Would a co-op system cover everyone? Doubtful.

  • Instituted a “recission” system, where the insurance company drops your policy when your health care becomes too expensive (and cuts into their profits).

  • Priced businesses out of the health insurance market when their employee’s medical claims get too high.

  • “Cherry-pick” only healthy people to cover with affordable insurance. Everyone else is either denied or the policy is priced so high they can’t afford it.

  • Rationed health care by refusing to pay for expensive treatments. Whether a person gets treatment is determined not by a doctor, but by an insurance company employee (whose bonus depends on how many medical claims he/she can deny).

  • Restricted the choice of a patient’s doctor or hospital to only those approved by the insurance company.

  • Make only partial payments for doctors, hospital care and medical tests and procedures. This leaves huge medical bills for the patient (who thought he/she had coverage).

  • Frustrating doctors, hospitals and labs by consistently making their payments months late.

  • Deny treatment because a procedure is not on their approved list of procedures (which usually means it costs too much).

  • Developed a system where profits are more important than patient care. (In a public option, there would be no profit — making the insurance cheaper).

  • Developed a system where there is 15-40% overhead costs that have nothing to do with medical care. (By comparison, the government program known as Medicare has only a 2% overhead).

  • Caused over 67% of the bankruptcies in America by leaving patients with huge medical bills.

I would like for the Repubs and Blue Dogs to explain to me how these for-profit private companies with huge overheads are going to solve all the problems they themselves created. The truth is they can’t explain it. That’s why they are resorting only to lies and scare tactics about public health insurance.

In the modern industrialized world, the United States is the only government that does not have a government-run single-payer health insurance system. Did you ever wonder why none of these countries have returned to a system of private insurance coverage? After all, the Repubs and Blue Dogs tell us government can’t do it as well as private business can.

The reason they haven’t gone back to a private plan is because, regardless of what the right wing says, there are some things the government does better than private companies (such as military defense, fire and rescue protection, police protection, road and bridge building and maintenance, etc.). Whether the Repubs and Blue Dogs like it or not, health care insurance is one of those things.

Don’t let them lie to you. They are far more interested in protecting the pocketbooks of their corporate masters, than in seeing you get the best health care available. A “reform” package without a public insurance option is nothing more than a continuance of the current broken system.

But it’s beginning to look like that might happen. Listen to what Majority Leader Harry Reid has to say, “It’s really premature for me to lay out what should be in this bill.” That’s not strong leadership. In fact, that’s no leadership at all. The Majority Leader should be putting his foot down right now and demanding the reform be real and actually fix our broken system. He should be demanding a public insurance option.

Tell your congressmen that any reform must include a public insurance option. If it doesn’t, it is not worthy of support.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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Friday : Feed the Blog!

Posted on July 30, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE

Photo and design by James Retherford / The Rag Blog

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Single-Payer Health Care: Some Reasons to Do It

Posted on July 30, 2009 by RagBlog


Health Care
By Hosea W. McAdoo M.D. / The Rag Blog / July 29, 2009

“The Americans will always do the right thing . . . After they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.” — Winston Churchill

PART I

After carefully following all the lies, partial truths, myths and wrong ideas I would like to offer some facts and my interpretation based on fifty years as a physician.

First I will try to list facts so you can judge my recommendations.

Our elected leaders have very little collective knowledge about health care and mainly listen to monied lobbyists rather than constituents.
I strongly encourage calling, emailing and writing your deciders; make them listen, that is your job and theirs in a Democracy. Having said that it does seem that they don’t listen to citizens, only to corporate cash.

The AMA is often cited as a voice for American physicians. Only about 19% of physicians belong to the AMA and many of these are retired or belong for the educational benefits. Most physicians genuinely put patient care first. After twenty four to thirty years of education some payback is fair. With the extreme delaying of gratification, few go into medicine purely for money. Most physicians put in fourteen or more hours a day and most work weekends as well. I say all this because about sixty percent of American physicians back a Single Payer system even though it may decrease their income.

Physicians are tired of caring for people who have had to delay care until a disease is too far gone for inexpensive treatment or a good outcome. They are tired of being hassled by 1300 different insurance companies and being paid late or not at all. They are tired of having long time patients moved to another physician because of a job change. They are tired of having the frustration of seeing someone, maybe for free, but not being able to get additional help the patient needs.

We talk of preventive care. Some recent glib TV ads suggest that medical care is only needed for those who smoke, are over weight or don’t eat right. And anyone else should either not be covered or pay a penalty. This is a fairy tale and spending some time in an ER will promptly reverse this thought. First, accidents can happen to anyone. Infectious diseases are no respecter of the fit or unfit. Type I diabetes, Rheumatoid arthritis, much coronary disease, and hypertension are either chronic conditions not caused by poor diet or it’s only one factor. Even if poor fitness was a primary cause, few people live the perfect life and this argument for insurance charges are higher for people who deviate from certain eating standards they should also be higher for football players, race car drivers, divers and those who jog alone at night or have to drive a lot for work.

In all the bizarre recent babble about health care several words and phrases keep coming up. How about “Socialized Medicine,” “care plan unique to America” or “it costs too much.” This is only because Single Payer is off the congressional table and all the new plans require the insertion of private health insurance between the patient and physician with a 30% commission coming off the top.

Some ads suggest one can only retain choice freedom by remaining with private health insurance. Is that what they mean when they give you a list of providers and tell you to choose one for primary care even if your personal physician is not on the list? Medicare is available from any willing provider.

Socialized medicine is what they have in the UK. There physicians are salaried and the hospitals are owned or contracted by the government. This is similar to our VA and military medical systems and was chosen by President Bush and Vice President Cheney during their administration. This system works in spite of problems and has better overall outcomes than does our private insurance system with 18% of the population left out.

The Single Payer is a system with one insurance company: the government. This is like the Canadian system, our Medicare and Medicaid. While Single Payer is unmentionable in the media and in Washington there is no shortage of howling about cost of the plans under consideration. The Republicans say that a small repeal of the Bush tax cuts on the ultra-wealthy is too much of a burden for them to do for their countrymen even as they are relatively under-taxed . The super-rich already have tax breaks that the average American never sees.

If someone mentioned a way to save 30% on all health care covered by insurance it should get attention. Well, it’s Single Payer. The private companies have a 30-33% overhead, Medicare a 3% and the Canadian system is 1.5%. Thirty cents of every dollar you give your insurance company is not giving you care. Ninety-seven cents of the Medicare dollar works for you. You can see where outrageous corporate salaries in the eight figure range drain your dollars. (blogs.webmd.com/mad-about-medicine/2007/08/ceo-compensation-who-said-healthcare-is.html)

PART II

A Single Payer system will:

  1. Cover all citizens.
  2. Allow freedom of choice of physician.
  3. Remove the wasted 30% of the health care dollar, the hassle to physicians, reduce wasted personnel who have to sort through insurance of 1300 insurance companies.
  4. Medicare pays fast with fewer hassles.
  5. With the extra 30% and collection of funds now going to health care no additional funds will be necessary to cover all with a good basic plan.

I’m sure you have heard the uninformed lately tell us that the American system is the best in the world. While the best we can do in research, education and care potentially can be as good as any country, it has to be averaged for all citizens; when this is done the US falls to 35th to 50thth place in the W.H.O. and other studies.

While those with money or the best insurance get excellent care, read Congress and the President, those with no or poor insurance drag the average down. The Single Payer system will give care to all, raising our overall level to compare with other first world countries. Having one payer will give some price control as Medicare does now.

Citizens must have access to screening procedures such as colonoscopy and mammograms because failure to detect these early cancers early can have devastating results and both diseases are curable with early detection.

The present plans to continue the use of health insurance companies will continue the waste of the first 30% of the health care dollar. Some in Congress suggested that we force all citizens to have private insurance giving the insurance companies another windfall from new clients, with some premiums paid by the government. This continues the welfare to the super rich and a drain on the Treasury.

One foolish Republican Congressman recently suggested that all, even the poor, be forced to purchase some basic kind of insurance. This will make the insurance companies happy, but the client’s inexpensive policy with a deductible of $10,000 will actually have no insurance value because they will not be able to meet the deductible and co-pay leaving them just as they were, but with more money in the pockets of the corporations that steal from the poor and give to the super-rich. This is a very Republican idea.

There are endless examples of the inefficiency of other country’s health care but ask these people for facts; have they talked with those citizens? Do they have an outcome analysis? Have they really looked at and compared with our system? One hears complaints about waiting. In the USA with money any visit or test is immediately available whether needed or not. This is rationing based on money. In Canada there are waits for elective procedures but immediate care for urgent conditions. Yes, it is rationing, but one based on medical need rather than money. There are some in this country who wait forever for any basic or preventative care.

Horror stories abound about delayed care in Canada or the UK but these are more illustrative of error by the primary physician than of the system. Physicians do make judgment errors here as well as in other countries. Watch the TV program, “Medical Mysteries on the Discovery Health network for our own examples of missed diagnosis, delayed treatment and poor care. A recently shown TV ad example discusses a delayed brain tumor in Canada treated promptly in the US. The “tumor” was actually a benign cyst and the ad very misleading. A few minutes on Google will document these falsehoods.

For some good recent discussions see:

Cost of Health Care Reform : Wails of Indignation from the Right and other “RAG BLOG” articles by Dr. Steven Keister and

“THE RAG BLOG”,The Health Care Stories for America Blog

To reach Dr. McAdoo, e-mail him at hwmcadoo@hotmail.com.

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