The Rag Blog

Larry Ray : Beneath Naples: The ‘Parallel City’

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Beneath Naples, Italy via Radio New Zealand!

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2009

The reach of the internet continues to amaze me. I have long had fascination with the “Parallel City” beneath Naples, Italy, since the early 1960’s when I lived there. Called the “sottosuolo,” it is a maze of giant cavities, tunnels, aqueducts, passageways, ancient Greek tombs, WWII air raid shelters and more.

Stationed in Naples many years ago, I became fascinated with the mysterious network below the city, which few locals knew much about at all. For many years I regularly returned to Naples to see friends and pursue exploration of the wonders below the city.

In recent years I have translated into English a wonderful website operated by my urban speleologist friends in Naples. The English Language version has resulted in a much wider knowledge of the marvels beneath the city including attracting the interest of regular visitors from around the world, National Geographic who did a great article with stunning photos, a travel article in The New York Times a couple of months ago, and a phone call a couple of weeks ago from Radio New Zealand wanting to do an interview with me for their popular “Nights” program.

That interview, broadcast August 3, down under in Kiwi-land, is available now in streaming form at the link below through the marvel of the internet. Imagine the improbability of Radio New Zealand interviewing an old guy in Gulfport, Mississippi, about a secret world beneath Naples, Italy!

I believe you will enjoy the interview. Chris Whitta, the program host, is personable and asked great questions. So take a few minutes and come enjoy the mysterious “Sottosuolo” of Naples. The podcast streaming link will remain available till August 10th, 2009.

Go here to listen to the interview.

You may also visit here to download the MP3 version of the interview.

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

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Internet Radio, Italy, Travel | 2 Comments

Health Care Reform and Mind Control

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The enactment of true universal health care hangs by a string.

We are faced with educating the 40% of the population who are grist for the propaganda mill.

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2009

In the 1950s and 1960s there was considerable academic research about mind control, largely sponsored by various agencies of the U.S. government. These studies were largely carried out by out by Dr. Ewen Cameron at McGill University and were deemed MKUltra and evolved into the Kubark Counterintelligence handbook. These studies are well documented by Naomi Klein in her excellent book The Shock Doctrine.

Concurrently Professor Stanley Milgram was involved in much more innocuous research at Stanford University. Milgram was a psychologist whose research proved conclusively that obedience to authority was so ingrained in the average U.S. citizen that they were prepared to do even lethal harm to others when instructed by those in authority to do so. This was in spite of the fact that before the trials were initiated the participants were asked if they felt capable of harming other human beings, and as a group they answered, “No.”

At one point Dr. Milgram wrote,

“With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and within limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.”

This brings us to the tea-bag gatherings blessed by the occupants of 133 C Street in Washington, D.C. Gatherings organized to misrepresent the concept of universal health care coverage for the approximately 50% of Americans who even now fail to understand that, unlike most civilized nations, the United States has not assumed the moral and ethical task of providing first class health care to its entire population.

Paradoxically, the majority of folks who do not have decent health care are under the influence of the insurance cartel and its political hangers-on and are being persuaded that health care reform will increase their taxes, which it will not, as tax increases are considered in current legislation only for the top 1.2% of earners. They are being persuaded that “bureaucrats” will manage their health care, even though under Medicare and the VA they do not have any managed care.

The Republican and Blue Dog Democrat politicians initially opposed the Medicare system and now would like to destroy it by enacting such plans as Medicare Advantage and Medicare Plan D prescription insurance. (I am always amazed how many of the elderly say, “I don’t want government medicine, I have Medicare.”) They will be told gross lies and distortions about the nature of of health care in Europe and Canada. We will see ongoing anti-health care ads on TV performed by professional actors.

On July 31, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls. For example, in one incident, right-wing protestors surrounded Rep .Tim Bishop (D-NY) and police officers had to escort him to his car for safety. The growing phenomenon is often marked by violence and absurdity. Recently, right wing demonstrators hung Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-Md) in effigy outside his office. Missing from the reporting of these stories is the fact that much of these protests are coordinated by public relation firms and lobbyists who have a stake in opposing President Obama’s reforms.

This activity appears to have been organized through a Political Action memo put out by the political right entitled “Rocking The Town Halls — Best Practices.” Details are included in this article. It would behoove any and all advocates for universal health care to be aware of these instructions. Adequate counter measures must be considered in advance.

The proponents of universal health care, whether single payer — which would be much more inclusive, more economical by far, and more easily administered — or the “public option,” must face this situation during the Congressional Recess. We are badly outnumbered; I would estimate that health care activists constitute only about 10% of the population. They are basically liberals who are guided by precepts of Christian doctrine, progressive Judaism, or by secular ethics and morality. They sincerely want what is best for the population as a whole, not for their own advantage, since I would estimate that most of the proponents already have decent health care. Many are motivated out of shame, knowing that our health care ranks 39th in the world.

One underlying problem in the liberal community is the fact that, though wishing well for others, they cannot agree among themselves. Most are well educated and tend to resist authority. Generally, we cannot set aside our idealism and communicate with the 50% who need to be educated. We sure as hell had better cooperate, set aside academic disputes, and unite, or we will surely lose. And the politicians must set aside this absurd foolishness about “bipartisanship” which appears a certain way of shooting ourselves in the foot.

Further, the political proponents of universal care must stop equivocating and state our position boldly. We must point out in large letters; “MEDICARE IS GOVERNMENT SPONSORED AND SUBSIDIZED MEDICINE” and it, with the Veterans Administration and military hospitals provide first class medical care.

We are faced with educating the 40% of the population who are grist for the propaganda mill. Many are totally divorced from reality. These are the folks who are waiting to be led, not by reason but by slogans and dogma. These are the folks who will turn out in droves at tea-bag rallies and campaign against their own best interests, the interests of their families, and their communities. I would suggest that any and all of the pro-health care community rush to the neighborhood bookstore and purchase a copy of Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer.

We will see all of the lackeys of the right wing, the present day equivalent of Germany’s 1930s brownshirts, let loose at discussion groups creating distraction for those who really want information. This will be augmented by The Republican Party, the prostituted Democratic Senators and the Blue Dog Congressmen, as well as by the NRA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the pharmaceutical Industry, the insurance cartels, the conservative media, and certain, minority members of the medical establishment.

It seems as if the vast majority of physicians recently have undergone an epiphany and now support universal health care. Perhaps they are tired of being serfs to their masters in the insurance industry or are sick of being called “providers” rather than physicians. This fact flies in the face of a recent statement by a Republican Congressman that all doctors are opposed to universal health care. Fact: in polls, 65-70% of physicians support universal care.

Two recent encouraging developments are the Mad As Hell Doctors Tour, organized by a group of physicians in Oregon — an automobile caravan to Washington supporting single payer health care. They call it “Mad as Hell. Health Care for People — not Profit.” More about them can be found here. Nancy Pelosi is said to have promised Congressman Weiner of New York that HR 676 would be introduced, debated, and voted on by the full House in September.

We still hear screams of indignation from the right regarding costs of universal health care, but an article by Professor Chalmers Johnson might help put that in perspective. Titled “Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire,” it is a well reasoned, lengthy article, well worth perusing. From the second paragraph: “According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas territories.

We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed forces, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.” I have read elsewhere that over 100 of these bases have 18 hole golf courses! And they say that the United States cannot afford universal health care !

Here’s another thing to keep in mind during August. The August 1 Washington Spectator reported that the Alexandria, Va. PR firm, Creative Response Concepts, coordinating the anti-health care movement, has a history of partisan advocacy that extends beyond its widely reported role in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack on Sen. John Kerry in 2004. It also coordinated the confirmation campaigns of Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. It worked to discredit the 60 Minutes story questioning George W, Bush’s service in the Air National Guard. CRC’s media campaigns are run by Pat Buchanan’s former communications director Mike Russell, who previously worked for the Christian Coalition, another DRC client.

One final thought from Professor Noam Chomsky:

“For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understanding the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling instruments.”

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Congress, Health Care Reform, Universal Health Care | 8 Comments

Bob Dylan : Texas Troubadour

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

More than iconic
Bob Dylan: Texas Troubadour

By Guy Schwartz / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2009

Bob Dylan was more than iconic Sunday night in The Woodlands outside Houston. He rocked and grooved!

It was a concert that I wasn’t too interested in, so I stayed home and kept overdubbing my way thru Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp’s set times. (Yeah — I missed Willie. So, sue me!)

But — Bob Dylan is an icon, one I hadn’t seen since 2004 in Amsterdam (and the best thing about that show was watching one of our party, Carolyn Wonderland, go backstage to meet with Bob at intermission), so I saddled up the Blue Scion, and drifted out to the Woodlands after dark.

I’d heard that Bob had taken to saying he was from Texas (in some European interviews). It seemed like more amusing Bobness with the press, but last night I found out that his reasons for making that statement were deeper than they initially appeared!

The band’s groove was deep! Musically, the history and home towns didn’t matter. On this tour, The Bob Dylan Show featured a great Texas roadhouse band.

Bob’s suit was black and his hat was white. The rest of the band wore all black with white sport coats.

And…

Every musician onstage played rhythm! The band’s groove was deep, I tell ya!

No solos except for a few from Bob!

Rearranging old classics into mostly Texas shuffles on this tour, the band played those as if they had all grown up on the Texas Gulf Coast. It felt good! Watching those fellas in their matching jackets and hats, I felt like I was 14 in 1966 again, sneaking out of the house and taking the old Dodge Dart to some faraway East Texas dance hall to see some space-aged Ernest Tubb and Texas Troubadours.

Bob’s still in Texas for a spell. He’s at Round Rock tonight.

Take advantage of it if you can.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Bob Dylan, Criticism, Houston, Music, Rock 'n Roll, Texas, Willie Nelson | 5 Comments

The Bankruptcy of Economic ‘Theory’ Based on the Celebration of Greed

Posted on August 4, 2009 by RagBlog

Just the Facts: Taxes, Debts, and National Prosperity

By Sid Eschenbach / The Rag Blog / August 3, 2009

For the past 30 years, conservative Republicans have been able to dominate the economic policy debate by controlling the framework of the argument, by building an economic ‘theory’ based on the celebration of greed, by selling the erroneous belief that that high taxes create low growth, and that low taxes create high growth. As no one, rich or poor wants to pay taxes, it was an easy sell. Unfortunately, if we didn’t suspect it’s legitimacy before, we confirmed the lie in September of 2008 when all the houses built on greed collapsed.

Amazingly, today, under a very different presidency than the Reagan presidency that started the disaster, we still hear Republicans advance the same ‘Atlas Shrugged’ narrative; that we’re overtaxed as a nation, that big government and high taxes stifle healthy economic growth, and that Obama’s financial recovery spending combined with health care spending will create big government and massive deficits that will bring hyperinflation and/or slavish indebtedness.

Just this week, after seeing evidence that the Obama Recovery Act has dramatically helped the local, state and national economies, we hear more from the party line: economist Randall Pozdena said the temporary boost will ‘hurt the economy in the long run because taxes will rise.’ “The question is, are you spending money productively?” said Pozdena, managing director of ECONorthwest, a consulting firm in Portland, Ore… as though buying flat-screen TV’s made in Korea was the highest, best and most productive use of capital.

Unfortunately for the nation, the Democrats don’t challenge the premise and continue to commit the fundamental error of fighting the battle on the opponent’s terms. Until they slay that dragon and redefine the conversation, neither the discussion nor the policies will evolve in a more prosperous direction. Therefore, a review of the actual economic record is urgently needed in order to escape from the Reagan framework and free policymakers and voters alike from a mistaken premise… and allow them to hold a real debate about the merits and the affordability of healthcare reform. Finding answers to the following five questions may help in this regard:

Are rates of taxation related statistically to rates of national economic growth?

Are U.S. taxes high by historic U.S. standards?

Does U.S. national debt represent a threat to the U.S. economy?

Is the U.S. government large or small by international standards?

What is the ‘proper’ size of government (or, is big government bad government)?

Are rates of taxation related statistically to rates of national economic growth?

Since the 1980’s, it has been advanced as economic fact that high tax rates create low growth rates, and that low tax rates create high growth rates. This theory of the relationship of taxes to growth is at the heart of neo-liberal economics, and has come to form a major pillar of conservative Republican politics. Over the past three decades it has been successfully used to brow-beat, mislead, fear-monger and usually defeat efforts to raise taxes at local, state and national levels in order to balance budgets and provide public services without going into debt. However, a review of the historical record shows there is absolutely no proof of any statistically significant relationship of that ‘fact’ being true over the past century of American history. Indeed, to the degree that there is a relationship at all, it appears to be the reverse; that higher taxes create higher growth, while lower taxes create lower growth.

The following chart shows the relationship between economic growth (net GDP growth year by year) and tax policy (as represented by the highest marginal rate) for every year from the first national income tax (1913) to the present. As can be seen, the first 30 years are entirely inconclusive regarding any relationship between taxation and growth, probably explained by the much bigger effects that World War I, the Great Depression and World War II had on the national economy during that period… and the wild swings in both taxation and growth produced by them.

Therefore, if there is a relationship at all we should see it from 1945 to the present, a relatively stable and consistent period of modern American History. The second graph (below) shows that period by itself, again with figures for each year of both net GDP and highest marginal rate of taxation.

According to neo-liberal theory, with the top marginal tax rate over 70% for the first 37 years of the post war period (and over 90% for 15 of those years), and the top marginal tax rate under 40% for the past 26 years, we should see very low growth rates for the first 37 years, and very high growth rates over the past 26 years… but we don’t. Indeed, to the degree that there is a relationship, it is just the reverse. The years of highest growth are in the 38 high tax years (6.04% average GDP growth), and the years of lowest growth are in the 26 low tax years (4.8% average GDP growth). The growth rate in the high tax years is 26% higher on average than the low tax years.

The statistical correlation, the ‘p’ value for the post war period to the present is ‘.14’. To put this result in medical terms, if a company ran tests on a drug to determine its effectiveness and came up with an equivalent p value, they wouldn’t even bother to present it to the FDA, as it would have demonstrated no statistical treatment efficacy. Furthermore, the stock value of the company that had produced those results would take a major hit… something that the Republican proponents of their economic ‘drug’ with a similar failed outcome took in the last elections, as the effectiveness of their ‘drug’ was finally revealed to the world.
In this case of the economic data, while it doesn’t prove statistically that high tax rates cause high growth, it doesn’t even pass a laugh test insofar as supporting the argument that high rates cause low growth and low rates cause high growth. In passing, it is also worthwhile to note that the extraordinarily high tax rates of the post-war period didn’t, as predicted by Ayn Rand, Arthur Laffer and President Reagan, discourage all the creative, intelligent, educated hard working people from working… something that most seemed to do all through the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Indeed, the period is marked by robust growth and unrivaled generalized prosperity.
The economic truth is that growth rates within an economy are the sum of many factors, a short listing of which would include labor policy, trade policy, educational levels, wars, political stability, social and entrepreneurial culture, tax policy, the quality of the legal system, transportation infrastructure, etc. What makes it worse is that the importance of these and other factors vary in importance over time and place, so it’s very difficult to attribute to any one of them a primal importance relative to growth… of the sort attributed to tax policy by the Republicans.

What the data shows very clearly is that over the length of the American experiment, there is NO statistical basis whatsoever to the argument that a high tax environment slows growth, or that a low tax environment spurs growth, and if Ronald Reagan ran a drug company, he’d now be bankrupt. More importantly, it means that anyone who advances that particular lie is just doing just that…. lying.

Are U.S. taxes high by historic standards?

Another of the mistaken premises neo-liberals have been successfully able to insert into discussions about public policy is that U.S. tax rates are ‘too high’… that Americans are ‘over-taxed’, that that ‘over-taxation’ threatens productivity (see above), and the solution to this supposed problem is to lower taxes and, not incidentally, shrink government. As can be seen in the following graph, American tax history can be divided into 8 major tax eras, the last of which being the one we are currently in, from 1987 – 2009. As can also be seen, the current maximum marginal tax rate of 34% is the second to lowest top rate ever paid by Americans, and by far the lowest of the past 80 years. So much for being overtaxes by historical standards.

It comes as a shock to many Americans that during the period generally considered by economists to be the most robust and prosperous of our history, the period from 1945 to 1980, Americans paid maximum rates that averaged over 70% and went over 90% for 15 years… or nearly three times as high as is paid today by the wealthiest Americans. Never bothered by facts standing in the way of a good theory, however, there is still constant carping that the U.S. is ‘overtaxed’ and that that is the reason we’re not as prosperous as we once were. It’s nothing but greed masquerading as reason, and its pure nonsense.

As regards the previous point, the argument that low taxes create high productivity, the following chart shows clearly the GDP growth rates over the postwar period. Keep in mind when looking at these rates that taxes after 1980 were much lower (50% lower) than before 1980. What does that say about the relationship between taxes and productivity?

Does U.S. national debt represent a threat to the U.S. economy?

We hear on a daily basis from Republicans that Obama’s spending on healthcare and the stimulus will ‘destroy’ the economy. While they’re sure it’ll get destroyed, they’re not sure exactly how… but they generally offer either of two scenarios; through hyperinflation or by ultrahigh taxes on our children and grandchildren (see the first question above to understand the independent absurdity of this ‘threat’), Could they be right, at least about hyperinflation? Is the current or forecast U.S. government debt really a systemic or socio-economic threat?

The following graph is helpful in understanding how far the U.S. actually is from such a threat… to the degree that it can even be taken at face value (the idea that the world’s largest and only internationally recognized trading currency would be subject to hyperinflation is absurd on it’s face… but again, that’s never stopped a Republican economic argument before.) The U.S. would have to run a deficit of over two trillion dollars a year for the next 10 or so years just to catch up to Japan… which not incidentally doesn’t appear to be doing so badly now with their 170% rate. In short, the argument is absurd, and Japan proves it if nothing else.

Is the U.S. government large or small by international standards?

This is not a question that would have mattered as much 40 years ago, but as the globe shrinks with advances in communication and transportation, relative national tax rates and total tax revenues become more important. The argument made by conservative Republicans is that if taxes are too high in the U.S., the highly mobile international businesses will simply move elsewhere, and that will hurt the domestic economy. As the following chart shows, the size of the total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP in the U.S. is among the lowest of all the industrialized nations. If the general assertion that higher taxation invariably produces lower growth were true, then all the countries shown below that have higher total tax burdens as a percent of GDP than the U.S. does (some nearly double) should be withering while those below the U.S…. Afghanistan for example, with its total tax burden of 6%… should be prospering. Of course, none of those predictions based upon the ‘high tax low growth’ theory are in fact true. Afghanistan is not prospering, and Germany is not withering. There is clearly something else at play here, but as long as the Republicans can frame the debate in the ‘high tax = low growth’ context, those other factors that lead to growth will be neither identified nor fortified.

What is the proper size of government?

The above chart clearly shows that economies can be successful, even thrive, at much higher tax burdens than currently set in the U.S. As that is the case, a question policy makers must ask (after they have freed themselves from the ‘high tax = low growth dogma’) is the fourth… what is the ‘proper’ size of government?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question other than that there are no simple answers… such as the ‘government bad, big government worse’ mantric nonsense peddled by ‘conservative’ Republicans. In government, as in much else, size is far less important than efficiency and goals. It should be obvious that a good big government is better than a bad small government… but thanks to Reagan, it’s not seen that way. There are many who still laugh at the joke he used to great effect: “Hello, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”. They don’t laugh when they call the police, and they don’t laugh when they drive on public highways; they don’t laugh as they send their children to free public schools or sleep safely in their homes at night, and they don’t laugh when they visit the majestic national parks or pick up their unemployment checks… but as no one wants to pay taxes, Reagan’s joke made it o.k. to scorn and belittle the very government that does and must do all those essential things.

This last graph, however, can give us an idea of what other successful countries spend on their governments, and shows the gap between what they spend and what is currently spent in the U.S. As shown, the U.S. currently spends about 28% of GDP on government, Germany about 40%, and the Danish spend 50%. In dollar terms, the actual amounts represented by the red (difference) sections in the German and Danish column equal, for the U.S. economy, an additional $1.7 trillion in spending if the U.S. were to spend at the Germans rate, and an additional $3.1 trillion if the U.S. were to spend at the rate of the Danish.

In other words, there is no economic reason whatsoever that the U.S. couldn’t easily provide healthcare AND balance the budget AND have a healthy economy if it so desired. The only reason it “can’t” be done is because opinion makers and policy writers are still thinking from inside the box that Ronald Reagan built and put them into: they are still thinking that more taxes will necessarily hurt the economy (FALSE), that we are overtaxed as a nation (FALSE), and that big government is necessarily bad government (FALSE).

In Review:

Are rates of taxation related statistically to rates of national economic growth? NO.

Are U.S. taxes high by historic U.S. standards? NO.

Does U.S. national debt represent a threat to the U.S. economy? NO.

Is the U.S. government large or small by international standards as a share of GDP? SMALL.

What is the ‘proper’ size of government (or, is big government bad government)? NO.

What all of this proves is that greed and power never go out of style, and the Republican economic theories are all about both. To the degree that the rich keep more money and deny funds to the government, they are able to control government and dominate political discourse. Unfortunately, their economic theories combined with their greed and desperate grasping at power brought the world to a standstill in September of 2008. However, nothing will change unless Democrats slay the premises that created the disaster and set economics… and the nation, on a sounder path.

[Sidney Eschenbach, 60, lives and works in Guatemala, Central America. His thoughts regarding developmental economics and trade are based on decades of development work in Latin America at various levels, community and corporate.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Economic Crisis, Economy, Politics | 1 Comment

Victor Agosto : Soldier of Conscience Faces Court Martial

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Victor Agosto speaks at Austin benefit for Under the Hood Cafe. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
Soldier of conscience to be court-martialed
SPC Victor Agosto refuses deployment and faces incarceration

August 4, 2009

SPC Victor Agosto, a soldier stationed with 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion, 69th Air Defense Artillery, Rear Detachment, is scheduled for court-martial on August 5 at Fort Hood, TX.

A victim of the highly unpopular stop/loss policy, SPC Agosto, whose contract was over at the end of June, was told that his next assignment would be deployment to Afghanistan. At the end of April, with support of local residents, Agosto went public with his intent to refuse the orders to Afghanistan, on the basis of the occupation being “immoral and unjust.”

Instead of going “underground” and trying to escape punishment from the Army, Agosto chose to remain at Fort Hood as a tangible symbol of GI resistance. Refusing all orders that directly support the war, he has found himself in an overwhelming struggle to maintain his honor and position. His court-martial will culminate with the sentencing portion of the trial, at which, it is believed that the Army will enforce the highest form of sentencing it can impose.

SPC Agosto’s attempt to raise awareness and support has not fallen on deaf ears, even in a military community; he has found supporters and friends who are willing to help. As the unit serves overseas, he continues to voice his dissent for an “unjust” war. There will be demonstrators present the day of his arraignment, located off-post due to military regulations concerning demonstrations on military posts.

Supporters are urged to gather to support Victor Agosto from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m., Wednesday, August 5th, at the Fort Hood East Gate in Killeen, Texas. SPC Agosto’s attorney, James Branum will be available for interviews and will read a public statement by Victor Agosto.

To learn more about Victor, go here.

For previous coverage of Victor Agosto on The Rag Blog, go here.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Afghanistan, Anti-War GIs, Fort Hood, Peace Movement, Texas, U.S. Military | 7 Comments

Peak Oil: Will It Be Sooner Than We Expect?

Posted on August 4, 2009 by RagBlog

Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast
By Steve Connor / August 3, 2009

Catastrophic shortfalls threaten economic recovery, says world’s top energy economist

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned.

Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries.

In an interview with The Independent, Dr Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.

But the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago. On top of this, there is a problem of chronic under-investment by oil-producing countries, a feature that is set to result in an “oil crunch” within the next five years which will jeopardise any hope of a recovery from the present global economic recession, he said.

In a stark warning to Britain and the other Western powers, Dr Birol said that the market power of the very few oil-producing countries that hold substantial reserves of oil – mostly in the Middle East – would increase rapidly as the oil crisis begins to grip after 2010.

“One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day,” Dr Birol said. “The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously,” he said.

“The market power of the very few oil-producing countries, mainly in the Middle East, will increase very quickly. They already have about 40 per cent share of the oil market and this will increase much more strongly in the future,” he said.

There is now a real risk of a crunch in the oil supply after next year when demand picks up because not enough is being done to build up new supplies of oil to compensate for the rapid decline in existing fields.

The IEA estimates that the decline in oil production in existing fields is now running at 6.7 per cent a year compared to the 3.7 per cent decline it had estimated in 2007, which it now acknowledges to be wrong.

“If we see a tightness of the markets, people in the street will see it in terms of higher prices, much higher than we see now. It will have an impact on the economy, definitely, especially if we see this tightness in the markets in the next few years,” Dr Birol said.

“It will be especially important because the global economy will still be very fragile, very vulnerable. Many people think there will be a recovery in a few years’ time but it will be a slow recovery and a fragile recovery and we will have the risk that the recovery will be strangled with higher oil prices,” he told The Independent.

In its first-ever assessment of the world’s major oil fields, the IEA concluded that the global energy system was at a crossroads and that consumption of oil was “patently unsustainable”, with expected demand far outstripping supply.

Oil production has already peaked in non-Opec countries and the era of cheap oil has come to an end, it warned.

In most fields, oil production has now peaked, which means that other sources of supply have to be found to meet existing demand.

Even if demand remained steady, the world would have to find the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias to maintain production, and six Saudi Arabias if it is to keep up with the expected increase in demand between now and 2030, Dr Birol said.

“It’s a big challenge in terms of the geology, in terms of the investment and in terms of the geopolitics. So this is a big risk and it’s mainly because of the rates of the declining oil fields,” he said.

“Many governments now are more and more aware that at least the day of cheap and easy oil is over… [however] I’m not very optimistic about governments being aware of the difficulties we may face in the oil supply,” he said.

Environmentalists fear that as supplies of conventional oil run out, governments will be forced to exploit even dirtier alternatives, such as the massive reserves of tar sands in Alberta, Canada, which would be immensely damaging to the environment because of the amount of energy needed to recover a barrel of tar-sand oil compared to the energy needed to collect the same amount of crude oil.

“Just because oil is running out faster than we have collectively assumed, does not mean the pressure is off on climate change,” said Jeremy Leggett, a former oil-industry consultant and now a green entrepreneur with Solar Century.

“Shell and others want to turn to tar, and extract oil from coal. But these are very carbon-intensive processes, and will deepen the climate problem,” Dr Leggett said.

“What we need to do is accelerate the mobilisation of renewables, energy efficiency and alternative transport.

“We have to do this for global warming reasons anyway, but the imminent energy crisis redoubles the imperative,” he said.

Oil: An unclear future

*Why is oil so important as an energy source?

Crude oil has been critical for economic development and the smooth functioning of almost every aspect of society. Agriculture and food production is heavily dependent on oil for fuel and fertilisers. In the US, for instance, it takes the direct and indirect use of about six barrels of oil to raise one beef steer. It is the basis of most transport systems. Oil is also crucial to the drugs and chemicals industries and is a strategic asset for the military.

*How are oil reserves estimated?

The amount of oil recoverable is always going to be an assessment subject to the vagaries of economics – which determines the price of the oil and whether it is worth the costs of pumping it out –and technology, which determines how easy it is to discover and recover. Probable reserves have a better than 50 per cent chance of getting oil out. Possible reserves have less than 50 per cent chance.

*Why is there such disagreement over oil reserves?

All numbers tend to be informed estimates. Different experts make different assumptions so it is under- standable that they can come to different conclusions. Some countries see the size of their oilfields as a national security issue and do not want to provide accurate information. Another problem concerns how fast oil production is declining in fields that are past their peak production. The rate of decline can vary from field to field and this affects calculations on the size of the reserves. A further factor is the expected size of future demand for oil.

*What is “peak oil” and when will it be reached?

This is the point when the maximum rate at which oil is extracted reaches a peak because of technical and geological constraints, with global production going into decline from then on. The UK Government, along with many other governments, has believed that peak oil will not occur until well into the 21st Century, at least not until after 2030. The International Energy Agency believes peak oil will come perhaps by 2020. But it also believes that we are heading for an even earlier “oil crunch” because demand after 2010 is likely to exceed dwindling supplies.

*With global warming, why should we be worried about peak oil?

There are large reserves of non-conventional oil, such as the tar sands of Canada. But this oil is dirty and will produce vast amounts of carbon dioxide which will make a nonsense of any climate change agreement. Another problem concerns how fast oil production is declining in fields that are past their peak production. The rate of decline can vary from field to field and this affects calculations on the size of the reserves. If we are not adequately prepared for peak oil, global warming could become far worse than expected.

Source / The Independent

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Capitalism, Global Warming, Oil Production, Peak Oil | 8 Comments

DC Madam : Sexual Extortion During Republican Rule

Posted on August 3, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who later died in what was called a suicide, is shown with her lawyer at federal court in Washingon in 2007.
The Sexual Extortion Scandal:
Sex and Politics Under Republican Rule

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / August 3, 2009

Sex and politics were inextricably linked in the D.C. Madame Case, but the mainstream media never got beyond surface events. Deborah Jeane Palfrey died May 1, 2008, in a shed behind her mother’s house. This is about all most people know for certain about her.

A little digging by the mainstream press or the Justice Department could well turn up information suggesting that Ms. Palfey served the interests of the intelligence community.

The official cause of death was that she had hanged herself, but there were claims that the FBI suppressed evidence that she had been murdered. It was said she killed herself rather than go to prison.

Palfrey, the notorious “DC Madam,” used her Pamela Martin Associates escort service as a cover for a call girl ring. A great deal of FBI effort went into bringing her to court and sentencing her to prison. She was indicted March 1, 2007, for employing more than 100 women for the purpose of prostitution. The feds neglected to seize her 46 pounds of business telephone records which were in California and then got restraining orders forbidding the release of the records.

Judge Gladys Kessler and marveled at why the government was determined to come down hard on this woman while moving heaven and earth to protect her customers. The judge then asked to be reassigned, and she was replaced by a judge who had been on the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court. The judge rejected her effort to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) .

Trying to defend herself, she probably sealed her own fate when she gave here telephone records to the ABC television network, whose Brian Ross began an investigation. The investigation ended quickly and abruptly and it was said that parent Disney bowed to pressure from Karl Rove and the White House. Ross said none of the clients were “newsworthy.” Palfrey also said her case had national security implications. Some said one of its prominent personalities had used the service. Senator David Vitter of Louisiana confessed to using the service. There was quite a bit of information that Richard Cheney was a client, sometimes using the name Bruce Chiles, when he ran Halliburton, but it could have been that he was simply hiring girls for customers.

Somehow, Palfrey got a lawyer from a firm tied to intelligence cases. A senior partner became a federal judge who was known for a “rocket docket” when it came to intelligence cases. There were e-mails in which her lawyer assured the prosecution he would call no defense witnesses.

Palfrey’s death was convenient because it seriously hindered a number of inquires. The most important was a long-standing probe into a D.C. sex ring that was probably employing her people. The ring was used to entertain politicians and channel money from defense and intelligence contracts to Republicans through Jack Abramoff and some of his friends. The sex ring could well have been the key to understanding the full dimensions of the K Street Strategy, a plan to force lobbyists to hire Republicans and milk as much money from them as possible. There were a few convictions, including that of Abramoff, for bribery and influence peddling, but much remains to be known.

The only serious inquiry into the sex ring was a long probe of the limousine service that brought the ladies of the night to the hotels. Telephone records showed that Palfrey talked to one of the men accused of bribery who held some of the sex parties, and there were calls to the service that transported the women. That service received $12 million in government contracts. San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, who was investigating the DC sex ring funded by the two contractors, was fired by the Bush Administration.

A subset of this inquiry should have involved exploring reports that children were also being employed for sex. Investigator Tom Flocco, who is sometimes very much on target, claims that good sources claimed the political sex rings had ties to deviant sex rings, and that they in turn were tied to a prominent right-wing policy council. After all, we know that two sex rings in the 1980s did this, and that a few child prostitutes were even given a late night tour of the White House.

The Palfrey inquiry to some extent also that served the staff of Maryland Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich. Ms. Palfrey said that some of her girls were used there. This ring seemed to be fueled with money generated by gambling interests. Tom DiBiagio, the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore, was fired by the Bush administration 2004 after he had uncovered a great deal of corruption. on Palfrey and the use of sex to corrupt people but was not interested in Palfrey. He was after the governor, Abramoff, three congressmen, and top staffers for several Republican Representatives and Senators. Brandy Britton, a former University of Maryland professor, a Palfrey employee, was charged with prostitution, and hanged herself.

At some point, Palfrey must have thought she would get off, as she took steps to purchase a home in Frankfurt, Germany, where Foggo had once worked. Some have speculated that she was getting ready to set up a similar operation for the agency in Germany. She was forced to return to the U.S. when Governor Ehrlich was facing re-election. Perhaps there was a fear that she kept a “black book.”

In 1990, Deborah was arrested for “pimping, pandering, and extortion” in connection with an escort service she ran in San Diego. With the help of CIA logistics officer Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, she was released in 1993. It has been reported that he ran sex extortion rings in other countries to ensnare politicians. He had also worked for Ambassador John Negroponte in Honduras during Reagan’s not-so-secret war in Central America. Jim Olson, a former station chief, noted that Foggo “failed to report a number of his contacts with foreign national women.”

Deborah established a new escort service in the District of Columbia in 1993, which employed a Naval Academy instructor, several other military personnel, a psychiatrist, and a number of highly educated professional women. Some add up the factual information and infer she was working for the CIA.

It is claimed by some that Foggo came to run the CIA’s sexual blackmail operations in the U.S. We know that he played cards at events where prostitutes were employed. He was indicted in 2007 for fraud involved in matters related to the bribery of California Republican Congressman Rusty Cunningham. Before the indictment, Director Porter Goss had promoted Foggo to the number three job in the agency. Foggo threatened to expose “sensitive programs” and the government dropped 27 of 28 counts against him. He could have received a 20 year sentence but got 37 months.

Wayne Madsen reports that some of those who played poker at these hotel parties watched videos of sex between prostitutes and targeted diplomats, politicians, and Bush administration officials. Sometimes present were Cunningham, Porter, Foggo, and Brant ‘Nine Fingers’ Bassett, a House Intelligence Committee staffer.

There is a long history of sexual blackmail in Washington going back at least to the ring jointly operated by Roy Cohn and the CIA. In the eighties, there were two well known rings that even received some coverage in the D.C. papers. Both of these had ties to the intelligence community. Later, we discovered there were at least two other smaller operations, one of which was revealed in Ed Rollins’ autobiography. These two latter operations seemed to have been focused on getting Republicans to vote for the legislation of certain lobbyists and did not appear to be tied to the intelligence community.

The three former rings benefitted special interests and the intelligence community. The Cohn operation seemed to be thoroughly bipartisan, while the two in the eighties and Hookergate were tied to one party. However, they appear to have been some Democratic targets.

With this much information at our disposal, one wonders why there was not one thorough MSM probe of the George W. Bush era sex ring financed by the two San Diego contractors and possibly Jack Abramoff. We also know that until 1976 hundreds of MSM journalists were on the CIA tab as part of Operation Mockingbird. Maybe there are more effective ways of muzzling journalists these days than cash payments.

This would be a good time to open a full investigation, but the present Justice Department does not seem friendly to snitches and whistleblowers.

Articles on previous DC sex rings have been posted here.

References

ABCNews.gocom (May 4, 2008)
Eric Lichtblau, “Former Prosecutor Says Departure was Pressured,” The New York Times (March 6, 2007)
“Karl Rove and CIA Foggo, DC Madam Palfrey ,” Democratic Underground (July 8, 2009)
“New World Order Advisor Resigns In Alleged D.C. Madam Prostitution Scandal,” LiveLeak.com (April 29, 2008)
Tom Flocco.Com ( October 5, 2006)
Wayne Madsen Report (May 3, 2008, April 21, 2009 July 21-22, 2009)

[A Plug for Sherm’s Book. Sherman DeBrosse spent seven years writing an analytical chronicle of what the Republicans have been up to since the 1970s. It discusses elements in the Republican coalition, their ideologies, strategies, informational and financial resources, and election shenanigans. Abuses of power by the Reagan and G. W. Bush administration and the Republican Congresses are detailed. The New Republican Coalition : Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go to here.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Political Scandal, Prostitution, Republican Party | 5 Comments

Derelict Auto Plants Growing in Numbers

Posted on August 2, 2009 by RagBlog

The NY Times writers generously call these derelict plants ‘white elephants.’ Perhaps ‘capitalism’s skeletal remains’ is more accurate.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

The Wixom Assembly Plant in Wixom, Mich., was one of Ford’s largest and oldest facilities, but it has been dormant since it closed in May 2007. Photo: Fabrizio Costantini/New York Times.
When Auto Plants Close, Only White Elephants Remain
By Bill Vlasic and Nick Bunkley / July 30, 2009

WIXOM, Mich. — The sheer size of the sites has inspired grand visions for redevelopment — a $1 billion football stadium, a huge Hollywood movie studio, even the world’s largest indoor tennis complex.

But for the communities saddled with a huge, empty auto plant, the reality is dismal.

Abandoned car factories, sprawling over hundreds of acres, often stand vacant for years awaiting demolition, environmental cleanup and a willing developer.

Since 2004, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have closed 22 major auto plants in the United States. Only eight of those have found buyers. And in the wake of the G.M. and Chrysler bankruptcies, another 16 plants will be shut by 2011.

The most optimistic redevelopment proposals, like a football stadium for the Atlanta Falcons or a movie studio in the small Michigan town of Wixom, a Detroit suburb, are long shots at best.

“The plants, whether they’re still standing or reoccupied, are always going to be a haunting reminder of what we were, what we’ve gone through, and where we still need to go,” said Representative Thaddeus McCotter, Republican of Michigan, whose district includes an old Ford plant in Wixom and a G.M. plant that will soon close.

Even sites in attractive locations are hard to sell in the weak economy. With so many companies being squeezed financially, there is a glut of available commercial real estate.

“Even if you only go back three or four years, it was easier than today,” said Phil Horlock, head of Ford’s land development division.

The loss to the local community when a plant closes goes well beyond jobs. Tax revenue evaporates and related businesses vanish.

Industry analysts estimate that each job in a plant helps create another five to seven jobs.

“Some of those are direct suppliers, but then there are places that workers spend money, like grocery stores, restaurants and day care,” said Kristin Dziczek of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Ford’s 4.7-million-square-foot Wixom factory, which closed in 2007, was the company’s largest assembly plant in the United States. More than six million cars were built there over 50 years.

At its peak in the late 1980s, the factory employed nearly 4,000. Now it’s an empty shell of rusting corrugated metal, surrounded by desolate parking lots and a barbed-wire fence.

The plant fronts an Interstate highway, and stretches almost a mile along Wixom Road. It once provided 40 percent of the town’s property taxes, but now accounts for less than 15 percent.

The town has about 13,000 residents, and relied heavily on the paychecks of plant workers.

“When it closed, a lot of businesses around us closed too,” said Moe Leon, owner of the Bullseye Sports Bar and Grill on Wixom Road. “We’re fighting night and day to stay above water.”

Last year, a team of executives from Warner Brothers toured the plant as a potential site for a new studio. Other developers have floated proposals for a hotel, an ice hockey arena and a business district devoted to green technology.

Ford officials said several ideas were under consideration, but there was no timetable for a sale.

Mr. Horlock said Ford had sold five large factories in the last five years. He said the company generally did not raze a plant, or begin to clean up any toxic wastes, until a deal was sealed.

The auto company sold one assembly plant, in Lorain, Ohio, to a developer who leases out space to small industrial firms. Honda, a competitor of Ford’s with two assembly plants in Ohio, recently started storing excess inventory of cars and minivans in the plant’s parking lots. But most closed plants languish.

After G.M. closed a factory in Doraville, Ga., last year, there was an initial rush of interest from developers. One of them suggested the site be used for a new stadium for the National Football League’s Falcons, but the team’s owners have so far shown little enthusiasm for that idea.

Luke Howe, an assistant to Doraville’s mayor, said other proposals for the 165-acre site range “from the ridiculous to the sublime,” and no developers had come forward with adequate financing.

“We knew it would be a lengthy process,” he said. “It just happened to fall during one of the worst economic times.”

But some factory sites have remained vacant through good times as well — a sign of just how difficult it is to create a second life for them.

G.M. demolished most of its giant Buick City manufacturing complex in Flint, Mich., a decade ago. The 200-acre property appeared to finally have a future as a transportation hub for long-haul trucks and rail cars, but G.M. could not complete a deal before filing for bankruptcy on June. 1.

The Flint site, along with dozens of other factories and properties, is part of the old G.M. that is still in bankruptcy and will most likely be sold, eventually, in the liquidation process. The company’s best assets were transferred to a new corporate entity that now operates as General Motors. Auto companies sell their old plants for a song, compared to what they put into them. The government in Oklahoma County, which covers much of Oklahoma City, for example, paid $55 million last year for a four-million-square-foot plant that will be leased to the United States Air Force to expand a nearby base. Just eight years ago, G.M. invested $700 million in the plant to modernize it.

Environmental problems can also hamper a sale. While every plant has different pollution issues, G.M.’s restructuring chief, Albert A. Koch, estimated in bankruptcy court that the company’s liabilities for all its closed sites was $530 million.

One old G.M. plant that has found a new life is in Linden, N.J. The company shut down the factory in 2005, demolished it two years ago, and sold it to a developer for a mixed-use project called Legacy Square.

The 104-acre site will be anchored by a Super Wal-Mart store, and ultimately will pay more taxes to the city than G.M. did.

But the 2,400 permanent jobs will fall far short of the 6,000 workers that G.M. once employed in the city.

“The United Auto Workers had very high-paying jobs there, and those will not be comparable to the jobs that are going to be in the shopping mall,” said Linden’s mayor, Richard J. Gerbounka.

But, he added, “We’re better off than having 104 acres of vacant property sitting there.”

The worst of the empty auto plants is located, perhaps fittingly, on the downtrodden east side of Detroit.

The 3.5-million-square-foot factory has been crumbling since the Packard Motor Car Company closed its doors more than 50 years ago. Trees grow on the plant’s roof, and chunks of concrete regularly fall from the bridge that connects two of its buildings.

Trespassers often explore its rotted interior, and photographs and videos of the ruins are easily found on the Internet.

Vandals have set fires several times this year in the piles of wooden pallets, tires and garbage that litter the complex. It is not unusual to see clouds of thick smoke pouring from the building on a summer evening.

Source / New York Times

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Automobile Industry, Capitalism | 3 Comments

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

Source / AP / Google

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Fascism, Obama Administration, Police State | 3 Comments

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

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged American Society, Capitalism, State Capitalism | 3 Comments

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

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged American Society, Existential Angst, Fascism, Public Morality, Torture | 1 Comment

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

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Health Care, Health Care Reform, Health Insurance, Obama Administration | Leave a comment

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