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Steve Weissman : Chinese Revolt Exposes Washington’s Folly
Chinese Revolt Exposes Washington’s Folly
Rebiya Kadeer, the fascinating woman at the center of the cock-up, would never be taken for a modern-day Mata Hari.
By Steve Weissman / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2009
As the People’s Republic of China brutally puts down unrest among the Uyghurs, a Turkic people in the Central Asian province of Xinjiang, the Obama administration is facing a diplomatic balls-up.
Like the neighboring Tibetan Buddhists, the Uighur Muslims have fought for centuries against their mistreatment by the Han Chinese, whose massive immigration into Xinjiang now threatens to swamp Uyghur culture and identity in its ancient homeland on the Silk Route. But, as much as one may sympathize with the Uyghurs, as I do, it hardly helps that their expatriate leaders turn out to be all too publicly on Washington’s payroll.
Just how will Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explain that to Beijing? Even more important: Did Mrs. Clinton even know that we were funding the Uyghur rebels? Did President Obama and his national security advisors? Or did they all leave key aspects of our foreign relations with China to Radio Free Asia, which the CIA created at the start of the Cold War, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which President Reagan created to handle CIA activities whose cover had been blown?
Rebiya Kadeer, the fascinating woman at the center of the cock-up, would never be taken for a modern-day Mata Hari. A grandmother in her sixties with a long graying braid down to her waist, she is a former laundress whose investments in real estate and department stores made her, in her own words, China’s richest woman. She now lives in exile in a northern Virginia suburb, thousands of miles away from Xinjiang, or East Turkestan, the historic name that Kadeer prefers to use.
The Chinese accuse Kadeer and her World Uighur Congress of using telephones and the Internet to “mastermind” the biggest threat to Beijing since the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. Taking a leaf out of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror,” the Chinese also claim that Kadeer works with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which the U.S. State Department has listed as a terrorist group.
Kadeer rejects both charges, but her skirts are hardly snow white. Like a government-in-exile, her World Uyghur Congress claims that it “represents the collective interests of the Uyghur people both in East Turkestan and abroad.” The group actively promotes the right of her people “to use peaceful, nonviolent, and democratic means to determine the political future of East Turkestan.”
Such a future would likely lead to complete independence, which the Chinese see as separatist and seditious. Kadeer herself denies being “a separatist,” but said just this month that China’s actions over six decades have forced every Uighur to want independence.
The problem for Washington is that our official National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds Kadeer’s activism. In 2008 alone, NED gave $146,000 to the World Uyghur Congress, $269,000 to the Uyghur American Association, which Kadeer also leads, and $134,805 to the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation, which Kadeer found in 2005 after serving nearly six years as a political prisoner in China.
NED makes no secret of its support for Kadeer, whom it celebrates as “the Mother of All Uyghurs.” Just last month, NED cosponsored a conference on East Turkestan, at which the group’s long-time president Carl Gershman gave a speech praising Kadeer and her work. A left-behind neocon, Gershman regularly uses his official position, however shadowy, to encourage on-going embarrassments for Beijing.
Washington’s Radio Free Asia (RFA) similarly engages in ad hoc foreign policy-making. On the Internet and in broadcasts in Uyghur and other languages, RFA features Kadeer and gives its audience detailed instructions on how to get around Beijing’s Internet blockage and radio jamming. Significantly, Beijing turned against Kadeer after her husband Sidik Rouzi left China and went to work for RFA.
Gershman’s NED and the RFA reach back to the Cold War, and their ideological zeal has remained part of the not-so-secret policy of previous administrations. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lobbied the Chinese to free Kadeer from prison in 1995, and President Bush met with her privately and publicly praised her at a conference “on democracy and security” in Prague in June 2007.
The all-too-obvious goal was to brand Kadeer as the Uyghur Dalai Lama. This should bring to mind the game nations play, as when President Bush first met with the Buddhist leader in Washington and then turned his back on Tibet at the opening ceremony of last year’s Olympics in Beijing.
Whatever individual Americans think of Rebiya Kadeer and her remarkable life story, what sense does it make to continue tying Washington to a breakaway movement in China? What will Obama and Clinton do if Kadeer’s efforts truly gain traction within China? And, pardon the obvious, how would our leaders respond if Beijing started putting its money and propaganda broadcasts behind Puerto Ricans, Texans, Alaskans, or Native Americans who wanted independence from the United States?
All this arises just a month after the Obama administration refused to allow 17 Uyghur detainees from Guantanamo from settling in the United States. American officials had long ago cleared them of being terrorists, but Obama sent them packing to Bermuda and Palau.
If, as he often says, the president wants America to lead by example, he should reverse his earlier policy and invite the Uyghur detainees to live in the U.S.A. Nothing would do more to promote our commitment to human rights and to removing the knee-jerk terrorist stigma from Muslims of all nations.
[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. For previous articles by Steve Weissman on The Rag Blog, go here.]
A Nuclear Burma? My Oh Myanmar
Nuclear weapons for Burma?
It will do no one any good, including the Burmese people, to allow these bloodthirsty nuts to get nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / July 22, 2009
Does the thought of North Korea having nuclear weapons and missles frighten you? Well, how about the thought of North Korea selling that technology to one of the bloodiest military dictatorships in the world — Burma. (I refuse to call it Myanmar because that’s what the military leaders in charge want us to do.)
That’s the rumor going around diplomatic circles, and it looks like the United States government is taking it seriously. Secretary of State Clinton says, “We know that there are also growing concerns about military cooperation between North Korea and Burma, which we take very seriously. It would be destabilising for the region. It would pose a direct threat to Burma’s neighbours.”
It certainly would destabilize the region. A country doesn’t develop nuclear missile technology to control its own population (besides they seem to be doing very well at that with the weapons they already have). The only real use for that technology is to threaten or attack other countries.
Do the military dictators in Burma harbor delusions of becoming the “big dog” in South and Southeast Asia? Do they want to use the threat of nuclear destruction to control the region? We already know this is a regime that has absolutely no respect for human life when it comes to getting what they want. These guys may actually be depraved enough to use nuclear weapons if they get them.
Frankly, the United States has too many friends in the area to allow Burma to become a nuclear nation. There are also several countries in the area that are unlikely to allow that to happen. I’m thinking of India and China, who won’t want to be put in the position of a possible nuclear war or intimidation from Burma. Either could take action on its own. So could Vietnam. They proved with Cambodia that they won’t let some nut destabilize the region.
What makes the U.S. government think Burma is trying to get nuclear weapon technology? There is no “smoking gun” evidence yet, but there are some worrying signs. First, the Burmese government has been doing business with Namchongang Trading Company (NCG). NCG is a North Korean company that trades in nuclear technology. It’s chief executive is a nuclear expert who was once North Korea’s delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The company also helped Syria build a nuclear reactor (which was destroyed by the Israelis).
Second, Burma has tried to get some suspicious high technology. David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security (which monitors nuclear proliferation), said, “This is hi-tech equipment, capable of making very high precision components. It has other end uses, but it’s hard to see why else Burma would be buying it.”
Third, a North Korean and two Japanese businessmen were arrested last month for trying to export a magnetometer to Burma. This is a necessary element in missile guidance systems.
Fourth, two years ago, Burma tried to buy the technology for a nuclear reactor from Russia. Russia bowed to international pressure and canceled the deal.
Fifth, the North Korean freighter (Kam Nong I), which had made trips in the past to Burma, turned around and went back to North Korea after it could not shake a U.S. Navy ship that was tailing it. South Korean Intelligence says “satellite images suggested the Kang Nam I was carrying equipment for a nuclear programme and Scud-type missiles.”
That’s plenty enough to bother me. It looks like it’s time to do something about the military dictators of Burma. It will do no one any good, including the Burmese people, to allow these bloodthirsty nuts to get nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]
Moral High Ground: Elusive for the US Government
I will take some issue with Professor Cole, insofar as he does not acknowledge the extent of the bad behaviour by the United States government over the years, regardless of the political party in control. He writes as though it is only the Bush/Cheney regime that tortured and violated the Geneva Conventions. He is wrong – every administration since the Geneva Conventions were adopted has bent the rules a little, or a lot, depending on political expediency. Let’s not pretend that the United States is the role model for the world. Other nations are aware that the US is actually the greatest terrorist threat, not these small extremist groups around the world.
Let’s be completely clear about the facts. And the first fact is that the US never had the moral high ground in this discussion.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
US Has Lost Moral High Ground on Treatment of Prisoners
By Juan Cole / July 22, 2009
The US military has, understandably and correctly, condemned the coerced video of a US soldier taken hostage by Taliban in Afghanistan.
But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney.
After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say substantial skepticism.
In fact, as I was reminded by a former ambassador, the Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Armitage gutting of US conformance with the Geneva Conventions really makes it difficult for Washington credibly to complain about the treatment of any of our captured soldiers. The Taliban could hold the soldier hostage forever if they follow the principle put forward by Sen. Lindsey Graham. They could (God forbid) put him in stress positions naked and threaten to release the pictures to his family, and they would have done nothing that Rumsfeld’s Pentagon had not done routinely and on a vast scale.
The US refusal to so much as investigate American officials implicated in torture and breaking international law also does not help us gain credibility on seeing to it that those who mistreat our troops are tried on those charges. We even have Dick Cheney defending waterboarding, for which Japanese generals were tried and executed after WW II. It is disgusting.
And huffing and puffing that the Taliban are not a government won’t get us very far either. They control 10 percent of the country.
You obey the Geneva Conventions and the rest of international law on the treatment of captives because it gives you the moral high ground with regard to the treatment of our troops. Not doing so endangers every single one of our men and women in uniform. The chickenhawks who called such international agreements ‘quaint’ and outmoded should be drafted and sent to the front.
What is really scary is that the shadowy set of secret military and intelligence teams charged by Cheney to break international law are continuing to do so despite President Obama’s orders to cease torture. Obama had better get a handle on this issue, because it could well blow up in his face, in fact, Cheney may intend it to do so. I think there are still people in the US government who take their cues from the latter rather than the former.
Source / Informed Comment
The Iqbal Decision and the Common Man
9/11 Case Could Bring Broad Shift on Civil Suits
By Adam Liptak / July 20, 2009
The most consequential decision of the Supreme Court’s last term got only a little attention when it landed in May. And what attention it got was for the wrong reason.
But the lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the decision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just the last two months.
“Iqbal is the most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal courts,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, an appellate lawyer with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington.
On its face, the Iqbal decision concerned the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that a Muslim man swept up on immigration charges could not sue two Bush administration officials for what he said was the terrible abuse he suffered in detention.
But something much deeper and broader was going on in the decision, something that may unsettle how civil litigation is conducted in the United States. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented from the decision, told a group of federal judges last month that the ruling was both important and dangerous. “In my view,” Justice Ginsburg said, “the court’s majority messed up the federal rules” governing civil litigation.
For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call “a short and plain statement of the claim” in a document called a complaint. Having filed such a bare-bones complaint, plaintiffs were entitled to force defendants to open their files and submit to questioning under oath.
This approach, particularly when coupled with the American requirement that each side pay its own lawyers no matter who wins, gave plaintiffs settlement leverage. Just by filing a lawsuit, a plaintiff could subject a defendant to great cost and inconvenience in the pre-trial fact-finding process called discovery.
Mark Herrmann, a corporate defense lawyer with Jones Day in Chicago, said the Iqbal decision will allow for the dismissal of cases that would otherwise have subjected defendants to millions of dollars in discovery costs. On the other hand, information about wrongdoing is often secret. Plaintiffs claiming they were the victims of employment discrimination, a defective product, an antitrust conspiracy or a policy of harsh treatment in detention may not know exactly who harmed them and how before filing suit. But plaintiffs can learn valuable information during discovery.
The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible.
“Determining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority, “requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense.”
Note those words: Plausible. Common sense.
The old world was mechanical. A lawsuit that mouthed the required words was off and running. As the Supreme Court said in 1957 in Conley v. Gibson, a lawsuit should be allowed to go forward “unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.” Things started to change two years ago, when the Supreme Court found a complaint in an antitrust suit implausible.
In the new world, after Iqbal, a lawsuit has to satisfy a skeptical judicial gatekeeper.
“It obviously licenses highly subjective judgments,” said Stephen B. Burbank, an authority on civil procedure at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “This is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor.”
Courts applying Iqbal have been busy. A federal judge in Connecticut dismissed a disability discrimination suit this month, saying that Iqbal required her to treat the plaintiff’s assertions as implausible. A few days later, the federal appeals court in New York dismissed a breach of contract and securities fraud suit after concluding that its account of the defendants’ asserted wrongdoing was too speculative.
The judge hearing the claims of the falsely accused Duke lacrosse players has asked for briefing on whether their lawsuit against Durham, N.C., can pass muster under Iqbal. But the judge considering a case against John C. Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer, said it could move forward despite Iqbal because the suit contained specific allegations about Mr. Yoo’s conduct in justifying the use of harsh interrogation methods.
In the Iqbal case itself, Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani Muslim who was working as a cable television installer on Long Island, said he was subjected to intrusive searches and vicious beatings after being arrested on identity fraud charges two months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Justice Kennedy said Mr. Iqbal’s suit against two officials had not cleared the plausibility bar. All Mr. Iqbal’s complaint plausibly suggested, Justice Kennedy wrote, “is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available.”
Justice David H. Souter, said the majority had adopted a crabbed view of plausibility and had in the process upended the civil litigation system.
In his dissent in Iqbal, Justice Souter wrote that judges should accept the accusations in a complaint as true “no matter how skeptical the court may be.”
“The sole exception to this rule,” Justice Souter continued, “lies with allegations that are sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it: claims about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel.”
But that is no longer the law. Under the Iqbal decision, federal judges will now decide at the very start of a litigation whether the plaintiff’s accusations ring true, and they will close the courthouse door if they do not.
Source / New York Times
Carter Says Goodbye to Southern Baptist Church
Jimmy Carter Leaves Church Over Treatment of Women
July 20, 2009
After more than 60 years together, Jimmy Carter has announced himself at odds with the Southern Baptist Church — and he’s decided it’s time they go their separate ways. Via Feministing, the former president called the decision “unavoidable” after church leaders prohibited women from being ordained and insisted women be “subservient to their husbands.” Said Carter in an essay in The Age:
At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.
And later:
The truth is that male religious leaders have had — and still have — an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.
After watching everyone from philandering politicians to Iran’s president taking a sudden look heavenwards when the roof starts to come down on them, it’s refreshing to see Carter calling out the role of religion in the mistreatment of women.
The question for Carter — and for others who find themselves at odds with leadership — is, when a group you’re deeply involved in starts to move away from your own core beliefs, do you stay and try to change from within or, at some point, do you have to look for the exit? Carter did give the former a shot — in recent years publicly criticizing and distancing himself from church leadership, while staying involved with his church. Now, he’s seeing if absence might do what presence did not.
Source / Politics Daily
Robert Jensen on Christina Nehring : Conflicting Visions of Romantic Love
Conflicting visions of romantic love:
A review of Christina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love
By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2009
[A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. By Christina Nehring. HarperCollins. 336 pp. $24.99.]
Cristina Nehring’s title marks the problem with her attempt to vindicate love and reclaim romance: Love needs no vindication, and we shouldn’t be eager to reclaim the vision of romance she offers — dark and dramatic, tortured and tragic, always a heroic individual endeavor. If humans are to survive and thrive in the 21st century, we will need a very different vision of love from Nehring’s.
Many, myself included, would agree with Nehring’s central point: There is something shallow and unfulfilling about the readily available, commodified sex so common in contemporary U.S. society, and something equally empty about the passionless paint-by-numbers relationships in which so many find themselves trapped.
The problem comes in her celebration of romance as constant, tumultuous, emotional struggle and tedious existential angst. Her prescription — to intensify the erotic charge in romance and sex by celebrating and intensifying the domination/subordination dynamic — is rooted in a misdiagnosis of the malady. Our warped sexual ethic derives directly from that dynamic, and we can’t save ourselves by deepening our attachment to patriarchy.
Perhaps the term patriarchy — the unequal share of power society accords to men and male concerns — may seem old-fashioned. It’s less commonly used than it once was to describe U.S. society, yet it remains useful: Men and male concerns still dominate the private and public spheres, and men’s violence enforces that domination in a rape culture. The very idea of domination can become “natural”: It can become accepted that society always will be hierarchical and that the best we can do is smooth off the rough edges and find our place.
Instead of eroticizing inequality, as Nehring suggests, there is no reason we can’t eroticize equality. Feminist movements have long argued for a cultural shift toward a sexuality based on an egalitarian spirit, which doesn’t rob us of passion but opens up new space for a different idea of passion.
Nehring regards feminism not as a social movement dedicated to the liberation that comes with the end of hierarchy and real equality, but rather as an impediment that mutes rather than enhances our emotional lives. She observes, correctly, that a woman’s reputation as a thinker can be tainted by “an erotically charged biography” in a way a man’s typically is not, but suggests that feminism, with its “antiromantic bias,” must share the blame along with patriarchy.
But let’s imagine a more radical feminism, one that rejects hierarchy and commits itself to real community — couldn’t that make possible a more meaningful kind of love? Nehring wants none of that political struggle; she insists on setting herself up as a heroic figure beyond politics who wants to lead us to a transcendental love and romance.
Although she draws most of her examples from literature, at the heart of Nehring’s book is a failure of imagination. After describing power discrepancies as having a “magnetic force,” as if they come from nature rather than human choices, she asserts that adult erotic relationships “thrive on inequalities of almost every ilk.” That is true enough in a patriarchal society, but such inequality is neither natural nor desirable. Nehring can’t seem to imagine life outside patriarchy’s hierarchy: “It is precisely equality that destroys our libidos, equality that bores men and women alike,” she writes. Trapped within such an ultimate victory of patriarchy, our imaginations atrophy and our choices narrow.
Nehring tries to package this capitulation as “transgression,” but it feels like empty macho posturing. “Real transgression takes guts,” she tells us, sounding like one of the guys in the locker room. This transgression transgresses nothing and, in fact, keeps us trapped. When the trap springs, the results are often brutal. Nehring offers us violent metaphors — “When we fall in love, we hand our partner a loaded gun” — but we should remember that the violence in relationships is often not metaphor but reality, with women most commonly the target.
On the book’s last page, Nehring reveals that she bears “the bodily scars of a loss or two in love,” including being “hospitalized by love.” No details are offered, and she is under no obligation to provide them. But throughout this book, Nehring’s own words contradict her thesis and hint that we should strive for something beyond her notion of love-as-heroic-quest. If such love is always tragic, maybe it’s time to reconstruct love and romance rooted in different values.
I suggest an alternative title: A Vindication of Love Grounded in Equality and Community: Reclaiming Life. Not as snappy, but it highlights key ideas that would help us sort out our emotional and erotic connection to others. Love is more than the meshing of bodies in sex. Love is more than the acceptance of conventional relationships. But striving for something more doesn’t have to mean glorifying domination and subordination, or accepting the brutality that flows from them.
There’s a sadness at the core of this book that tells us much about the ultimate emptiness of romance as Nehring envisions it. What we need is a new conception of love: we need to rethink the community within which love happens. What would love-as-the-eroticizing-of-equality look like in a society that was defined not by hierarchy but by justice? We may not know that from experience, but we can try to imagine it.
[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). This article was also posted at Philly.com. Robert Jensens articles on The Rag Blog are here.]
Find A Vindication of Love, by Chrintina Nehring on Amazon.com.
Posted in Rag Bloggers
Tagged Authors, Books, Feminism, Literary Criticism, Relationships
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Walter Cronkite and the Meltdown at Three Mile Island
Walter Cronkite, Three Mile Island and ‘Lamar’s Folly’ in the Climate Bill
The nation — the world — cannot afford more Three Mile Islands, especially now that Walter Cronkite is no longer around to report on them.
By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2009
Technicians who knew what was happening shook with terror as Cronkite opened his March 28, 1979, newscast with “the world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the Atomic Age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse…”
Cronkite went on to say that “experts” had [wrongly] ruled out the possibility of an explosion. In the ensuing weeks and years, he did not report what remains one of the most heavily censored secrets of the nuclear age — that significant radioactive fallout did escape from TMI, that it scattered randomly throughout the region, that it landed heavily on certain parts of the downwind population, and that human beings (as well as wild and farm animals) were killed and maimed in great numbers.
Cronkite was also not quite accurate in characterizing the TMI melt-down as potentially the worst reactor disaster in US history. On October 5, 1966, human error led to a coolant stoppage at the Fermi Fast Breeder Reactor in Monroe, Michigan, 45 miles south of Detroit. Highly volatile liquid sodium could have exploded, releasing apocalyptic quantities of radiation that would have quickly killed thousands of people and permanently poisoned most or all of the Great Lakes, the world’s largest bodies of fresh water. For a full month area law enforcement weighed the possibility of evacuating Detroit.
Like TMI, it’s not definitively known how much radiation was released at Fermi, where it went, or who was harmed. Experts still debate why these two accidents weren’t even worse, and how the nation barely avoided these radioactive mega-bullets.
There were innumerable technical differences between the two disasters. One was cost: Fermi became a $100 million pile of radioactive rubble, whereas TMI, thirteen years later, was priced at $900 million to build, and about $2 billion as a liability.
But thanks in part to Cronkite, there was also a gigantic gap in news coverage. Fermi got virtually none. I was Editorial Director of the University of Michigan Daily at the time, and Ann Arbor correspondent for Time Magazine and the United Press International. But neither I nor any of my fellow journalists — including at least one other wire service reporter — heard a peep about this accident, which stretched through the entire month of our senior year just 40 miles away, and could have killed us all.
I finally did learn about the Fermi catastrophe in 1974 — eight years later — while reading John G. Fuller’s We Almost Lost Detroit, published by the Reader’s Digest Press. In hair-raising detail, Fuller reported on the horrifying story of an entire industry’s incompetence, dishonor, fallout and cover-up.
In the ensuing five years, thousands of grassroots citizens marched on proposed reactor sites from Seabrook, New Hampshire to Diablo Canyon, California — as well as Middletown, Pennsylvania. The mass demonstrations and arrests spawned global news coverage that moved debate over atomic energy into the mainstream. It also prompted the Jane Fonda-Michael Douglas-Jack Lemon Hollywood thriller, The China Syndrome. With eerie accuracy, the movie predicted many technical aspects of what actually happened at TMI — most of which had been deemed “impossible” by the industry’s expensive “experts” and apologists. When it was released within hours of the actual accident, it helped blast coverage all the way to the lead of Cronkite’s CBS Evening News.
By 1979 the nuclear industry was — like today — on the financial ropes. Despite decades of expensive “too cheap to meter” media hype, the “Peaceful Atom” was absurdly expensive and technologically untenable. All orders placed prior to TMI would ultimately be cancelled for a combination of economic, technical and political reasons. It is no exaggeration to say the No Nukes movement helped cancel scores of reactors.
But the essential unworkability of atomic power is what prompted the citizen’s movement to stop it. Today’s industry has surmounted virtually none of its core challenges, starting with its complete 50-year failure to solve its radioactive waste problem, and carrying through its inability to secure private financing or liability insurance for new construction.
Today’s “renaissance” is built on the hope of huge government subsidies, collective public amnesia, and three decades of the Big Lie that “no one was harmed” by the massive, unmonitored radiation releases at TMI. To this day there has been no public hearing to compensate some 2400 central Pennsylvania families who by the early 1980s claimed bodily harm and death from the plant’s fallout.
None of that made it to Cronkite’s Evening News. Though he became an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, the true story of what happened to TMI’s downwinders has never cracked the corporate media.
Nor is it certain that the story of another meltdown today would be fully told. Before the mass No Nukes demonstrations and TMI, the networks might have claimed innocent ignorance. Cronkite had the integrity and clout to break through to the American heartland on that all-important first night.
Today’s nuke-powered Big Lie machine has never been more powerful. Though a few cable reporters might cover the story, only the internet could be counted to carry the load, with high-paid deniers swarming over every independent blog. A TMI-scale meltdown would instantly evoke a horde of media locusts intent on devouring all coverage and dismissing all health and safety concerns. Their ultimate goal: to protect the massive economic investments in a technology that has long-since become human history’s most expensive technological failure.
How effective they might be remains to hopefully never be seen.
But as you read this, the industry has again poured into Congress, this time targeting the Climate Bill. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has called for a “Sense of Congress” resolution to be attached to it that would endorse a doubling of the US reactor fleet — with 100 new plants — along with at least $50 billion in loan guarantees to make it happen. My next report will cover these efforts in greater detail.
But as the backroom horse-trading escalates, it is critical that calls start pouring into Congress. The nation — the world — cannot afford more Three Mile Islands, especially now that Walter Cronkite is no longer around to report on them.
[Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA is at www.solartopia.org. He is Senior Editor of www.freepress.org, where this article also appears.]
Walter Cronkite reports on Three Mile Island
Lifeguard on Duty : Swimming with the Investor Class
Whose Recovery?: Swimming with the Investor Class
‘Never was a rich man who didn’t get his money off a poor man’s back,’ is what Paul would say. Which is another way of claiming that all Real Value comes from labor.
By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2009
Another less-bad week is in the making for corporate earnings, housing sales, and unemployment trends — perhaps less bad enough to say that corporate capital is on the mend — less bad enough to keep the markets from driving the price of all things down. But if the weekly rate of less-badness holds steady at “only about” a half-million newly unemployed and half a dozen banks closed down we will be sliding that much closer to Real Hard Times.
This week may give us a chance to put some big questions onto the table about the way things work and the Real Meaning of the stresses we’re about to undergo, together. Let’s talk about the Real Market, shall we? And the Real Deal that we’re all in the process of cutting.
For five months I’ve been cramming market analysis the way I used to cram geometry the week before college boards. And for strictly educational purposes I have taken some advice from John Dewey by making my study “hands on” by putting a few hundred bucks into an online trading account. Thirty nine trades later, my portfolio is outperforming the dollar, so I haven’t lost any Real Money yet, but I’ve learned a few things.
Dewey was correct. What you learn is different depending on whether you are watching or participating. Put just a little money in an active market account and suddenly things go pop and start dancing all around you. Right away you lose your sense of what’s really up or down.
An abstract lesson that the market teaches you is the distinction between judgment and theory. You take or sell a position at so-and-so a price. That’s judgment. You base the decision on what? After your first few killer trades you begin to feel a gut-level desire for some theory that will help you to keep your head from spinning and your palms dry. Yes, a few hundred dollars means that much to me. So you have to go looking for market theory.
One of my early favorites in market theory was Investor’s Business Daily, because it identified a fairly consistent set of criteria for buying and selling, and then was considerate enough to remind me to breathe. IBD offers advice you would expect to hear from Ben Franklin. One rule that stuck with me is to never take more loss than eight percent.
Gradually I have become less interested in individual stocks and more interested in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) which allow me to make a little money from China or India while losing money in Real Estate or the Middle East. Websites such as Google Finance, MarketWatch, and stockta.com allow you to track stocks through online portfolios. Another nice free service is investmenttools.com. For a quick glance at overall trends, I also like the market overview page at stockcharts.com or some of the “view all funds” lists available at ETF providers such as iShares or PowerShares. Of course, the Wall Street Journal offers an excellent market data page.
In the hard times that are coming, newspapers will likely continue their downsizing and dispersion. But I don’t think this will affect investors very much. Outfits like Standard and Poors, Thomson-Reuters, Bloomberg, and Murdoch seem like they will be able to continue delivering robust information to premium customers. When you go looking for information that has cash value, you discover that the information sector is booking plenty of first class seats.
Plato’s Republic teaches that justice is a matter of everyone minding their own business, because each occupation has its urgencies. So let’s clear up first things first. Real Investing is a full-time occupation. If the market calls, you’d better be there to answer. Meanwhile, you’d better keep watching out. Once you get a taste for the daily risk of the market life you can see why so many people with Real Money still prefer to take out U.S. Treasury notes. When someone says China is buying U.S. bonds for chiefly political reasons please ask them where they’d find a less risky place for Real Big Money today.
Therefore, anyone who wants to make a national policy of retirement funding via personal market accounts is simply asking everyone to drop what they do best, because you cannot expect everyone to be an excellent investor on the side. Retirement funding is a craft unto itself. Besides, imagine your tax dollars going into someone else’s market bets.
There are three basic families of market theory. The first one is represented by Jim Cramer, the bouncing host of Mad Money. I like the guy, because there is something pleasing about anyone enjoying his work that much. Plus, if you actually have “skin in the game,” his daily presence on television is a kind of exorcism against the dread-mongering that fills so much market chatter. He didn’t succumb to the great “head and shoulders scare” of early July.
As for market scares in general, I started this story on a Friday evening when all was quiet. Now that I’m doing final revisions on Monday morning, I find myself thinking, who knows? A crash could come any day. Or a pop. Or a bomb somewhere. Or a bad number out of Korea. So as of this minute in time it appears that Cramer’s short-term bullishness has been vindicated. Right now, Cramer’s keel is still attached.
Cramer’s theoretical model is “fundamentals.” For the most part, he likes to buy stocks in individual companies. He likes to study the balance sheets, read the SEC docs, listen to the conference calls, and figure out if there is really a productive business priced at a bargain level. Sometimes he gets it wrong, but mostly he wraps his recommendations inside reasons that help you to think about the way the market is working. Like a good teacher, Cramer presents his own choices in ways that help you to think on your own. He offers a market theory.
Along with the other two families of market theory that I will discuss below, the “fundamentals” camp assumes the perspective of the investment class. Cramer can discourage wage raises for Wal-Mart workers because they would raise the price of goods for customers, which will drive down store sales, which will, you guessed it, hurt the stock price that investors need most. We’ll come back to this problem later.
Fundamental analysts such as Cramer, Peter Schiff, H.S. Dent, or Warren Buffett have market theories grounded in the study of earnings, demographics, economic, and yes, investment trends in the Real World.
The second family of theorists can be called “chart technicians.” What they study is the price and volume action as it can be pictured in hundreds of ways. The vintage form of technical analysis — the candlestick chart — is attributed to an 18th Century rice trader in Japan.
The classic school of modern-day chart technicians goes under the name of Dow Theory because it was founded by the first editor of the Wall Street Journal, Charles H. Dow, who became the Dow of Dow-Jones. In its classical form, Dow Theory compares the movements if two indexes, the Dow Industrials and the Dow Transportations, which according to Jack Schannep and the editors of thedowtheory.com, yields a buy or sell signal about once a year. To catch more short-term trends, all kinds of charting devices have been invented.
I think the most popular technical tool of the modern trader is the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence indicator or MACD (pronounced Mac-D). At the Wall Street Journal for example the MACD is a default feature of every dynamic chart, reflecting market movements into a graph that helps gauge probable short-term trends in price.
During the head-and-shoulders scare of early July, technical analysis dominated market chatter. Investors have plenty of fundamental reasons to worry about another downturn, so technical signals can really spook the herd. The head-and-shoulders pattern was a pure technical signal that things could get very bad quickly. It spooked me. As it turned out, either there was no head-and-shoulders or the pattern was more of a signal that something big was about to happen up OR down.
The head-and-shoulders pattern, if it was one, actually signaled a breakout or sudden uptrend — which is not the first opportunity I have missed (in the market as in life) because of caution poorly timed.
This week the technical question becomes whether the breakout has established a new floor for a short-term trading range. The fundamental school seems cautiously optimistic that data will continue to come in “less bad.” And many of the technical chart analysts — including the ones who spooked us before–seem to think we’re going to be trading a new level up, at least for the near term. Technical signals don’t take all the chaos out of the market, but they do help you to feel as if you are not gambling on absolute randomness.
The third great family of market theory, The Elliott Wave, could be placed under technical analysis as a subset of Dow Theory, but I’m going to place Elliott Wave Theory in its own camp, because it seems like another order of technical analysis altogether.
Once upon a time a fellow named Ralph Nelson Elliott became so ill that he did nothing but study stock charts. He came up with astonishing results. He found a wave with a complex construction in which advances were related systematically to declines. He theorized that each wave was a wave of waves in which the basic structure was repeated in fractal form. The closer you get to the shorter time frames the tinier the waves become.
The contemporary master of the Elliott Wave Theory is Robert Prechter, who does not offer much advice for free. If you want Prechter’s analysis in detail you will have to pay for it. I think of him as the modern-day Pythagoras. As a market trader, I’m paying for his opinion and glad about it.
Well let me qualify that. To know Prechter’s approach is to know a vision of the next decade that is not gladdening in outline. The long-term wave we seem to be on right now is the yin to that yang we were riding during the good times. If Elliott was correct about the underlying form of market waves, and if Prechter is correct in the application, then prices are really deep disclosures of a psychic life that buoys our collective consciousness. And no, dear reader, you are not reading a Pynchon novel just now.
The Elliott Wave school strikes me as Jungian in flavor, so it will be an acquired taste for most. Something about Jungian archetypes runs counter to mainstream thinking, so we shall soon see who teaches whom the greater lesson. For my part, the older I get the more sense Jung makes. And the Elliott Wave has a serious following among Real Investors.
Related to market theory is an emerging trend in “social investing.” A visit to the KLD website will give you the essential orientation to social consciousness as it has been monetized by the investment classes. Also, a brand new ETF trading under the ticker symbol JVS brings a new style of valuation to the American investor by way of principles mandated by Sharia Law. I have written a little more about these items under a project called abetterorder.com. I own some JVS.
Even with only a few hundred bucks in play these are the things you begin to learn as if your fortune depended upon it. The market is a game — and you want to win. Which brings us back to something that I promised to discuss — the perspective of the investing class. This is a class of folks that for the most part have saved money that they are trying to grow and protect. They appear to be very smart and decent people, even downright likeable. And they have some very practical experience in how the market game works and how to win it. But I used to have a neighbor named Paul who worked all his life for the city parks department.
“Never was a rich man who didn’t get his money off a poor man’s back,” is what Paul would say. Which is another way of claiming that all Real Value comes from labor. If we extend Paul’s intuition to the investment classes as such we might say that all great wealth is already a kind of redistribution.
On the one hand I wonder if Paul could have done better in the wealth department if he had applied his eighth-grade education and not assumed that investment potential belonged to other people. No doubt there are a billion people asking that question right about now. Better choices are always possible. Nobody can say they weren’t warned. So I can see how value belongs not only to those who produce it but also to those who treat it best.
Therefore, I can understand why so many smart investors take a hard line when it comes to the kind of respect we should pay for value. I can see why they have a passion for gold as a standard. A devotion to standards of valuation has allowed many of them to see clearly how our loose regards would steer us into the ditch we’re in. When you start watching your money closely in a trading market, these perspectives accrue practical value.
On the other hand, market trends are thoroughly social if not absolute manifestations of collective (un)consciousness. The problems of market cycles have dimensions that exceed the sum of individuals. As my neighbor Paul implied, strictly speaking there is no such thing as individual wealth. All wealth in some sense is held in trust. Likewise, individuals don’t create market cycles, it takes a market to go boom and bust.
I can understand why some of the great artists of the market are outraged by our social responses to market crisis. They call it socialism. Yet, no matter which family of theory you belong to — whether fundamental, technical, or E-wave — you are dealing directly with a social movement.
At some level each and every individual choice gets subsumed into a dynamic relation to other choices such that “the market” comes to exist with a life of its own. Every investor wants to know, what will the market do today? So there is something that troubles me about investor perspectives that seem to take for granted that “the market” is the only motive force worth respecting, as if the social reality of our lives could be so one-dimensional.
The investment-class perspective shows through when Cramer discourages higher wages at Wal-Mart. This is a perspective that overvalues existing savings to the detriment of new savings that could be made possible if “the market” were enabling more opportunity for all. If existing savings accounts were willing to take a little less return, perhaps new savings accounts could be more easily started downstream.
In the case of my old neighbor Paul, why shouldn’t a worker expect a social order in which every productive life is rewarded with decent wages, benefits, and pensions? But Frederick Douglass long ago advised Americans not to gnash our teeth at spectacles of unfairness. Struggle is the Real Cure.
As corporate capital rebuilds its structure from the current bust to the next boom, why shouldn’t some higher expectations of performance be costed in right now? I think I understand how these labor costs will make additional demands upon the structure of recovery, but if decent health benefits and pensions are made a universal condition of corporate earnings perhaps the regeneration of corporate health this time will help to raise up a new generation of investors who understand that money not budgeted toward labor’s livelihood is at risk of being gambled away.
Finally, I have an intuition that the bias of the investor class leads to a skewed desire for a gold standard, but I’m not altogether sure about this. It may be that my impression is colored by a context in which most of the talk about gold is by people who are thinking chiefly of wealth in individual terms. In five months of investing I too have gone from “gold, what’s it good for” to “give me thirty shares of silver trust please.” I’m up eleven dollars thanks to that call on SLV.
In thinking about gold, I have drawn the distinction made by San Francisco economist Henry George who talked about the difference between wealth for personal use and capital that is put back into new tools. The good people at Lew Rockwell point out that if I hold my personal wealth in a Real Bank it will be leveraged into Real Capital, therefore there is no Real Difference between wealth and capital. Yet even if this were also true for holdings in Real Gold, I think we can still distinguish between wealth and capital. But I’m willing to grant that Real Gold held by a Real Bank may be somewhat more productive than fear itself.
As for the assumption that Real Banks will take Real Savings and turn them into Real Capital, I think this is the problem. From what I understand, banks are not producing capital investments at any kind of usual rate. And they are not doing it because of the damage done by the great evil that Henry George warned against-land speculation. Therefore, the dramatic increase in American savings is not now being leveraged into new tools for American workers. The pressures of the current economy will keep labor compensation low on one side while disrupting on the other side the assumption that increased savings by labor should be leveraged into capital investment. Instead, Real Banks are gouging labor further on the debt front. Prechter has more to say about what has happened to Real Banks in his July newsletter.
Which brings us to the last word in successful investing, Warren Buffett. No doubt his influence has sometimes weighed down upon wages from time to time as he seeks to maximize earnings from Dairy Queen or Geico. Last week he admitted that he had to cut the jobs of 500 people. Yet Buffett says that it may be time to think about a second stimulus which would be a Real Stimulus this time. What interests me about Buffett’s position — all puns intended — is that he speaks as an exceptionally engaged investor who follows carefully how his wealth, and therefore his capital, has effects on precise productive labors.
If Buffett can stomach the idea of a stimulus then we should raise the question of costing into the new generation of investment a better life for labor in long-term salaries, benefits, and pensions. We are the workers upon whose labor the power of U.S. Treasury notes depends–and we have been valued in this crisis as worthy enough to carry the world’s savings accounts on our backs. Therefore cost us in at the full value of a whole life.
Maybe there is nothing that can be done about a future that is already written by the finger of God. Just save yourself if you can. But when it comes to the problems faced by the investor classes and their personal wealth preservation in this sick economy, at least Buffett still talks as if the investor classes are in the same boat with the rest of us and how we need to pull together and share some of the risks. While we’re at it, we should not be afraid to discuss the opportunities that this crisis holds out for labor. Discussing it today will be cheaper than discussing it tomorrow.
Based on what I’ve learned after five months as an active trader, I don’t think it’s a question of whether hard times are coming. The question is how can we best work on this social trauma individually AND together to address risks and opportunities system-wide? The thing that strikes me about Buffett’s position on the second stimulus is this. If the ship’s going down, Captain Buffett talks as if he’s prepared to go down with it. Any Real Captain would surely toss Real Gold overboard now in order to bring more Real Lives safely to port later.
[Greg Moses is author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence.]
Cost of Health Care Reform : Wails of Indignation from the Right
‘According to the logic of those now shedding crocodile tears, we ought, in order to remain truly American and truly free, retain the precious liberties of our people to be illiterate, to suffer accidents without indemnification, as well as to be sick without indemnification.’ — Irving Fisher, The Progressive, January, 1917
By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2009
In recent weeks we have been treated to wails of pain and indignation regarding the cost of government subsidized health care from our elected representatives. Most frequently the most plaintive cries are from those senators and representatives who show no compunction about large appropriations for foreign military adventures and who show total disregard for the taxpayers’ subsidies of executive salaries and bonuses.
Though I have previously addressed the matter of health care costs in brief, I feel it prudent to further explore the matter, something that is much overdue as Irving Fisher noted in the Progressive in January, 1917
“At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without universal health insurance. Health insurance is like elementary education. To function properly it must be universal and to be universal it must be obligatory. Certain interests which think they would be adversely affected by health insurance have made a specious plea that it is an un-American interference with liberty.
“According to the logic of those now shedding crocodile tears, we ought, in order to remain truly American and truly free, retain the precious liberties of our people to be illiterate, to suffer accidents without indemnification, as well as to be sick without indemnification. It is by the compelling hand of the law that society secures liberation from the evils of crime, vice, ignorance, accidents, unemployment, invalidity, and disease.”
We have previously noted that, in the interest of maintaining a financial base for a public health option, we must eliminate waste, and that the place to start is for Congress to eliminate the Bush era giveaway of Medicare trust funds to the insurance industry as so-called Medicare Advantage Plans. Second, we must get rid of the absurd Medicare Part D “prescription insurance,” which is basically a giveaway of Medicare money to the insurance cartels and pharmaceutical industry, and supplant it with a true prescription plan written to the taxpayers’ advantage, with a regulated choice of medications, at negotiated cost as is done by the Veterans Administration.
The costs of pharmaceuticals in the United States exceeds that of other nations, in the vast majority of instances, by a minimum of 50%. I have cancer of the prostate, as well as spinal stenosis, a matter which gives me an objective outlook on another matter that we will deal with presently. I can get medication from Canada for my cancer for $400 per 100 tablets, as opposed to $400 for 30 tablets in the United States.
The pharmaceutical industry in the United States spends more for advertising than it does for research, a fact which is well documented. Look at television, for instance, and note that almost every other ad is for a prescription or non-prescription drug. The United States is one of two industrialized nations that permit prescription drugs to be advertised on television. Congress must put a stop to this practice, which in turn increases the cost to the little old lady who cannot afford her blood pressure medication. Do we need to see ads for male impotence 5-6 times during a televised baseball game?
We next face the costs of medical care per se. A very though provoking, well written letter by Dr. Geoff Berg of Warren, Rhode Island, appears in the June 20, 2009 Economist, and I quote:
“Sir. Regarding your article on the future for health care reform in America, it is providers, not insurers, that are the problem… The heart of the matter is the perverse fee-for-service system that pays providers merely for delivering services but for creating services as well. The only way to curtail health-care spending is a meaningful way to scrap this fee-based system in favor of salaries with modest incentives for improved outcomes. The health care system is killing America. It would appear that those who are trying to affect a cure have neither an appropriate diagnosis nor an effective treatment.”
There is merit to Dr. Berg’s logic. although I totally disagree with his whitewashing of the insurance cartels, PHarma, and the manufacturers of medical equipment. There is much to be said for salaries (like at the Mayo Clinic for instance), for the physician population as a whole. Too many practitioners are overly busy, and cannot give a patient decent time to be heard. Perhaps this is due to avarice, but more likely it is caused by the HMO culture that demands that a physician (i.e., provider) see more and more patients, to increase the income of the HMO management.
This leads to over-testing, excessive use of X-ray and CT scanning, laboratory procedures, and consultations, rather than taking time for communication with and examination of the patient. The more tests the higher the cost of overall medical care. For instance, I have a friend who three days ago called her urologist to ask a simple question, and has not received a call back, in spite of being told twice by a nurse that “your chart is on his desk.” Now, if this was, indeed, something urgent, we could be discussing the matter of increasing malpractice insurance costs which frequently are a matter of miscommunication, or lack of communication, rather than bad practice per se.
Of course, this once again returns us to the inadequate supply of physicians in the United States in comparison to the European nations. Part of this problem goes back 50 or more years when certain institutions in the United States connived to prevent “training too many doctors.” This matter must be faced immediately by the Congress by passing legislation, as has been proposed by the American College of Physicians, for government subsidization of medical education for qualified candidates (internists and family practitioners) provided they will practice in an under-served area at fees commensurate with their training and professional needs. I might add, once again, that the idea of a Medical Academy similar to Annapolis or West Point should be considered. If the tax-payer can be asked to underwrite healing.
Finally, we come to a subject that is frequently avoided in the culture of the United States, the matter of end-of-life care. Let us start with a simple question. Has the reader and his family discussed the matter of terminal care; is he/she familiar with the matter of advance directives (i.e.living wills), or of providing a member of the family with power of attorney for end of life care? Is everyone well versed in hospice care to handle suffering from a terminal illness?
These subjects must be widely discussed in the development of a national health care program. I for one, desire a dignified death, free of machines such as artificial ventilation or kidney dialysis, and do not wish to be inflicted with tubes coming from every orifice. I want to be kept comfortable, free of pain, and to have the ability to face death without worrying about certain conservative politicians, who, in offering homage to the religious fundamentalist movement, would wish otherwise for me.
On July 18, Public Agenda noted that Medicare spending in the last two years of life ranges from, on an average, $93,842 for patients at the UCLA Medical Center to $53,432 at the Mayo Clinic. This is well documented in a July 18 article in USA Today. These are matters that the framers of any health care legislation should be considering. Thus, perhaps the President’s thinking in rushing through legislation prior to the recess must be reconsidered to allow further thoughtful consideration of important adjunct issues.
Once we begin to discuss “end of life” we may open a Pandora’s Box for the politicians who thrive on mythology and prejudice rather than reason and logic. I can see the entire matter of health care being converted to an opportunity for the purveyors of nay-saying to appear for long hours on C-span. I would suggest a White House conference consisting of two experts in bioethics, two physicians from the field of geriatrics, two leading members of the hospice movement, a Jesuit theologian, and a reform rabbi to meet and consider the matter at length. Professor Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, recently published a very thought-provoking article in The New York Times Magazine entitled “Why We Must Ration Health Care.”
As Paul Krugman noted on June 24 in the New York Times,
“Really bad news on the health care front. After making the case for a public option, and doing it well, Obama said this: ‘We have not drawn lines in the sand other than reform has to control costs and to provide relief to people who do not have health insurance or are uninsured. These are the broad parameters that we’ve discussed.’ There he goes again, gratuitously making a gift to the other side. My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn’t understand the issues, but his urge to compromise — his vision of himself as a politician that transcends the old partisan divisions — will lead him to negotiate with himself and give away too much.”
We need to learn more about this very complicated area of legislation. There is an abundance of information at Physicians for a National Health Program for those interested.
[Dr. Stephen R. Keister, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, lives in Erie, PA. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform. His previous articles on The Rag Blog can be found here.]
Honduras : The Stalemate Continues; Repression Steps Up
At the end of the meetings on July 19, [Costa Rican President Óscar] Arias asked for another 72 hours to work on ending the conflict by negotiation to avoid a bloodier resolution.
By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2009
The second round of talks on the political crisis in Honduras, like the first, has ended in a deadlock.
Meeting in San José, Costa Rica on Saturday and Sunday, July 18 and 19, a week after the first effort, representatives of deposed President Manuel Zelaya and de facto President Roberto Micheletti failed for the second time to agree on Zelaya’s return to Honduras and on the restoration of constitutional government.
The major point of disagreement concerned the first of seven proposals offered by Costa Rican President Óscar Arias calling for Zelaya to be returned to the presidency and to serve out his term, which will end next January 27. The golpista government has consistently refused to consider Zelaya’s reinstatement and Zelaya’s supporters have insisted his reinstatement is not negotiable.
In an arrangement made by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Arias acted as mediator between the two sides during both rounds of meetings.
Other points in Arias’ proposal included the establishment of a government of national reconciliation composed of representatives of the major political parties; general amnesty for all crimes committed in connection with the crisis; Zelaya’s renunciation of any effort to hold a popular referendum in a manner not specifically authorized by the constitution; moving the next national elections from November 29 to October 25 and changing the dates for campaigns accordingly; placing the armed forces under the command of the electoral tribunal a month before the elections; and formation of a committee of respected Hondurans and members of international bodies like the Organization of American States to insure the fulfillment of the terms of agreement.
Counterproposals offered by the de facto government differed primarily in calling for Zelaya to be tried for his alleged crimes against the constitution upon his return to Honduras. They also called for formation of a truth commission to investigate alleged corruption in the Zelaya government.
At the end of the meetings on July 19, Arias asked for another 72 hours to work on ending the conflict by negotiation to avoid a bloodier resolution. Arias pointed out that Honduran civilians and military alike have weapons. Hugo Chávez had warned of civil war if Zelaya were not reinstated. On July 14, Bastille Day, Zelaya had urged his supporters to practice their constitutional right to mount an insurrection to bring about his return to the presidency, thus following the example of the French revolutionaries. He called for peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience.
After his first attempt to return to Honduras by air on July 5 was defeated by the military, Zelaya pledged to return by other means, suggesting he would cross the border from Nicaragua to a secret location.
Clinton associates represent Coup
Several sources have reported that at the first meetings in San José, on July 9 and 10, Micheletti was represented not by the four attendees stipulated in the original plan but by six. The additional two were Bennett Ratcliff, a public relations specialist and lobbyist from San Diego, and his interpreter. Ratcliff is said to be friends with the Clintons and to have worked for Bill Clinton.
Venezuelan-U.S. journalist Eva Golinger writes that during the meetings Ratcliff was consulted on every point by the Micheletti team and that he supplied the list of conditions for negotiation which, she says, had been approved beforehand by Secretary Clinton. The conditions were that Zelaya could return to the presidency but not to power, acting as a mere figurehead; that he could not pursue plans to rewrite the constitution; that he must distance himself from Hugo Chávez; that he must govern jointly with the legislature and the coup regime; and that he must grant amnesty to those involved in the coup.
Another associate of the Clintons, Lanny Davis, has been hired by the Honduran branch of the rightist business group Consejo Empresarial de América Latina to lobby for the coup regime. In an appearance before the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House of Representatives on July 10 he claimed that “democracy and civil liberties are flourishing in Honduras.” Davis attended Yale Law School with the Clintons and was special counsel to Bill Clinton during his presidency. He was prominent in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Honduran activists have charged that rightist Cubans and Venezuelans in exile were involved in planning the coup. Robert Carmona-Borjas, a Venezuelan lawyer living in exile in the United States since his involvement in the coup of 2002 that briefly deposed Hugo Chávez, was thanked publicly at a pro-coup rally in Tegucigalpa shortly after Zelaya’s ouster and may in fact have been in attendance. Carmona-Borjas is co-founder of the Arcadia Foundation, a U.S.-based group claiming to be dedicated to eradicating corruption throughout Latin America but whose only specific known projects involve Hondutel, the state-owned Honduran telephone system that pro-coup Hondurans charge is run by corrupt associates of Zelaya. There has been talk of privatizing Hondutel.
Listed on the Arcadia web site until last September was the name of Otto Reich, the Cuban-born former undersecretary of state and ambassador to Venezuela who was involved in the Iran-Contra affair of the ‘80s. In a July 9 op-ed in the Miami Herald, Reich denied persistent rumors of his involvement in the Honduran coup.
In the meantime, the most ardently pro-coup newspaper of Honduras, El Heraldo, claims to have discovered a plot led by Hugo Chávez to destabilize the country through acts of sabotage and vandalism, to be carried out by Nicaraguans and by Honduran drug traffickers and gang members. The plot would include occupation of the country’s largest airport and the assassinations of leading political figures. The conspirators, El Heraldo says, would block all major thoroughfares, force hospitals to close and provoke widespread bloodshed and massacres by firing on demonstrators, blaming the deaths on the police and military.
Assassinations and clamp down on press
Repression against the opponents of the coup has intensified. In a preliminary report issued on July 15, the Comité de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH –- the Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras) said that the coup had resulted in 1046 arrests, most of them on charges of creating “escándalo público>,” or public disturbance, the charge traditionally lodged against demonstrators. It reported that 59 people had been beaten by the police or the military and three had been assassinated. The report charged that Battalion 316, the most notorious of Honduran death squads of the ‘80s, had been reactivated. It said the situation in the department, or state, of Colón was particularly serious, with many arrests, including the detention of minors and at least one U.S. citizen.
The report stated that the mayors of a number of municipalities had been subjected to death threats, persecution and searches and that the military had taken control of a number of municipal buildings.
The organization deplored the widespread persecution of the press and attacks on the freedom of information. A large number of Honduran journalists have been jailed and journalists with Telesur, a multinational satellite television news service, and Venezolana de Televisión have been harassed, detained and finally expelled from the country.
The report cited the case of José David Murillo Sánchez, whose 19-year-old son, Isis Obed Murillo, was shot to death at the Toncontín airport on July 5, the first death in demonstrations against the coup. Murillo, the father, was arrested as he left the COFADEH office on July 9 on charges dating from 2004. He had earlier talked with the prosecutor’s office and with Telesur about his son’s death. He is reportedly being held in isolation in a three-meter by three-meter cell.
In incidents widely thought to be political assassinations, two prominent members of the leftist Unificación Democrática party were shot to death on July 11. That afternoon Ramón García was pulled from a bus in the western department of Santa Barbara and killed, and later in the evening Roger Iván Bados was shot to death at his home near the northern city of San Pedro Sula. Both men were active in organizing demonstrations against the coup.
Activism against the coup continues unabated, however. In an effort to slow commerce, major highways are being blocked, with unions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala showing solidarity by blocking highways to and from Honduras on their sides of the border.
And several women’s organizations working together as Resistencia Feminista surrounded the headquarters of the Instituto Nacional de la Mujer (INAM) in Tegucigalpa on July 14 and 15 to protest the replacement of the director with a supporter of the coup. “This is a peaceful occupation of INAM,” said Gilda Rivera of the Centro de Derechos de las Mujeres, “as repudiation of the appointment of María Martha Díaz as minister. Our position as a women’s movement is that we won’t accept any official named by this usurping, fascist, golpista regime.”
[San Antonio native David Holmes Morris is an army veteran, a language major, a retired printer, a sometime journalist, and a gay liberationist.]
David Holmes Morris’ previous Rag Blog articles on Honduras are here.
