The Rag Blog

Why Did A.I.G. Pay Goldman Sachs $12.9 Billion?

Posted on March 18, 2009 by RagBlog

Hong Kong AIG building. Photo: Chow Meisy.
The Gift That Keeps on Giving
March 16, 2009

After four bailouts totaling some $170 billion, the American International Group has finally answered some of the questions about where the money went. Unfortunately, the answers have only succeeded in raising many more questions.

On Saturday, Americans learned that A.I.G. planned to pay $165 million in bonuses to executives and employees in the very division that caused the problems that led to the federal bailouts. Taxpayers have every right to be outraged, and President Obama was right to acknowledge that outrage on Monday, when he vowed to try to stop the payments.

Mr. Obama’s tough talk, however, contrasted with comments made by his top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, and by the Treasury Department. They had already expressed dismay but said that legally they could do nothing to stop the bonuses, which, in fact, had already mostly been paid on Friday.

It is frustrating enough for Americans to try to figure out which part of that mixed message reflects the administration’s true position. But the bigger issue is that the bonuses are something of a distraction. Seen by themselves, the payments are huge, but they are less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the money already committed to the A.I.G. bailout.

Which brings us to the second disclosure of recent days. It was common knowledge that most of the A.I.G. bailout money had been funneled to the company’s trading partners — banks and other financial firms that would have lost big if A.I.G. were allowed to fail. On Sunday, after much prodding by Congress and the public, A.I.G. finally released the partners’ identities, along with amounts paid thus far to make them whole.

The largest single recipient was Goldman Sachs ($12.9 billion). The amount — hardly chump change even by Wall Street standards — appears to contradict earlier assertions by Goldman that its exposure to risk from A.I.G. was “not material” and that its positions were offset by collateral or hedges. If so, why didn’t the hedges pay up instead of the American taxpayers?

Other recipients include 20 European banks that received a total of $58.8 billion and Merrill Lynch ($6.8 billion), Bank of America ($5.2 billion) and Citigroup ($2.3 billion).

Altogether, the disclosures account for $107.8 billion in A.I.G. bailout money. Which leaves us wondering about the rest of the money. Another $30 billion was added to the A.I.G. bailout pot this month and must be accounted for as soon as it is spent. That leaves some $32 billion unaccounted for. Where did it go?

Taxpayers also need to be told the precise nature of the banks’ dealings with A.I.G. Appearing on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, described A.I.G. as a company “that made all kinds of unconscionable bets.” Well, on the other side of those bets are the banks that received the bailout money. It is possible that one side of a bet is acting unconscionably and that another side is acting in good faith. But it’s also possible that both sides are trying to play an unseemly game to their own advantage.

Congress must investigate, and the new disclosures give them enough to get started. Untangling all the entanglements is not only essential to understanding how the system became so badly broken, but also to restoring faith in the government that it is up to the task of fixing it.

Source / New York Times

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Bank Bailouts, Corporate Corruption, Financial Crisis, Wall Street Bailout | Leave a comment

Economy : Long Shot Your Best Bet

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Getting Randomly Picked To Make Half-Court Shots Now Best Way To Earn Living

WASHINGTON — A new study released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Tuesday confirmed that the most dependable source of income for American workers in the current economic climate is to win a novelty contest in which one must successfully shoot a basketball from half-court.

“After factoring in the odds of your ticket number being called while attending a game, the median dollar value awarded, and the athletic ability of the average American citizen, and cross-referencing these data with employment forecasts and current job-security indices, we have determined that half-court shooting contests are currently the most effective way to support a family of four,” the report read in part. “While this may seem like dire news, keep in mind that the consolation prize for missing the shot usually includes a food item from the concession stand.”

The report cited several other possible methods of securing a livelihood, including 50-50 raffles, lotto scratch-offs, and inventing YouTube

Source / The Onion

Thanks to Tom Welsh / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Economic Crisis, Satire | 3 Comments

BOOKS / Van Jones’ ‘Green Collar Economy’

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Environmental activist Van Jones, author of Green Collar Economy.
A Review of ‘Green Collar Economy:
How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems’

‘The best answer to our ecological crisis also responds to our socio-economic crisis. The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities are not more police and prisons, but ecologically sound economic development. And that same path can lead us to a new green economy’ — Van Jones

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / March 17, 2009

[Rag Blog contributor Carl Davidson reviews ‘Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems’ by Van Jones (Harper-Collins, 2008). The book’s author, environmental activist Van Jones, was recently named an advisor to President Obama on green jobs.]

It’s time to link the newly insurgent U.S. Green Jobs movement with the worldwide efforts for the solidarity economy. Both are answering the call to fight the deepening global recession, and both face common adversaries in the failed “race to the bottom,” environment-be-damned policies of global neoliberalism.

That’s the imperative facing left-progressive organizers with connections to these two important grassroots movements. It’s even more important in the wake of the appointment of a key leader of one of these movements, Van Jones of “Green For All,” to a top environmental and urban policy post in the Obama administration.

Jones is a founder of an urban-based campaign focused on low-income young people, multinational and multicultural, that first developed as a progressive response to police repression, gang killings and all-round “criminalization of youth.” He saw the exclusion of this sector of the population from living-wage work and other opportunities as a key cause of the violence and destruction. Putting young people to work at low-to-medium skill levels retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency seemed like a no-brainer, so the demand for “Green Jobs, Not Jails” was raised.

The slogan found deep resonance as it spread across the country. Its all-round implications were spelled out in Jones’ widely acclaimed book, “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.” It spells out a string of ingenious, interconnected programs aimed at resolving the savage inequalities of structural unemployment and the global dangers of climate change rooted in carbon-based energies systems.

“Let’s be clear,” says Jones in the opening pages of his book, “The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun. Hundreds of thousands of green collar jobs will be weatherizing and energy-retrofitting every building in the United States.”

He doesn’t leave the matter there, but makes use of this picture to point out what’s “shovel ready,” to use the lingo of debate around stimulus spending. Green jobs span the entire range of occupations, with a special focus on high-tech manufacturing in emerging alternative energy industries.

“Green Collar Economy” was instantly a powerful voice in policy circles. It gained a wider and deeper significance in light of the financial crises that hit the fan soon after it reached the bookstores. Just as the voter revolt against Wall Street helped lift Obama to the Oval Office, so too was Van Jones’s urban policy monograph raised into a “What Is To Be Done” manifesto for deep structural reforms capable of busting the onset of a major depression.

“The best answer to our ecological crisis also responds to our socio-economic crisis,” Jones explains. “The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities are not more police and prisons, but ecologically sound economic development. And that same path can lead us to a new green economy.”

How does it connect with the solidarity economy? This parallel movement with even earlier roots is widely known throughout the Global South, especially Latin America, as well as Europe and Quebec. It has been comprised of a range of projects where social capital is partnered with worker, community, consumer and peasant cooperative ownership structures. These were designed to fight back against the economic devastation wrought by neoliberal IMF-imposed “solutions” that left people without a safety net or means of survival. People turned to each other at the grassroots in common efforts, hence the term “solidarity economy.”

Both the solidarity economy and the green economy are “value centered” schools of economic thought. They are in the classical tradition of political economy, which in turn is rooted in moral philosophy. They are not simply descriptive of supposedly objective economic processes, but are prescriptive. At full throttle, they are organizing principles for shaping the future, locally and globally, via local organization and mass mobilization. For its part, the solidarity economy stresses the values of cooperation and mutual aid, especially in governance structures of productive, consumer or financial units. The green economy emphasizes ongoing sustainability and harmony between people and the eco-system of which they are a part.

The solidarity economy is about how people relate to each other, while the green economy is about how people relate to their wider environment. Naturally, there is considerable overlap between the two. Both see the current order as destructive of people and planet, and are working to turn things around.

“Equal protection of all people, equal opportunity for all people, and reverence for all creation.” These are what Jones terms the “three pillars” of the new green global economy.

Neither economic vision is monolithic. Both schools of thought span a range of views, some of which are in contention. In the Green Jobs movement for instance there are debates on nuclear power and “clean coal,” and what role, if any, these might have in a low-carbon future. In the solidarity economy movement there are discussions on the place of markets and government, and whether cooperative structures can use either or both to their advantage. There is also debate over the importance of “high road” allies within the business community, “high road” meaning traditional business structures that bring wider community and environmental responsibility into their business plans, rather than simply short-term shareholder profit.

Where Van Jones’ approach to both the green and solidarity economies most compels our attention is that he starts where the need is greatest, the millions of unemployed and underemployed inner city youth. The structural crises of neoliberal capitalism has long ravaged this sector of our society through deindustrialization, environmental racism and a wrecking ball approach to schools in favor of more prisons. To borrow from Marx, these young people are bound with radical chains, and when they break them with the tools suggested in Green Collar Economy, they free not only themselves, but the rest of us are set in a positive direction as well.

“The green economy,” Jones explains, reflecting on Hurricane Katrina, “should not be just about reclaiming thrown-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not be just about recycling materials to give things a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance. Formerly incarcerated people deserve a second shot at life-and all obstacles to their being able to find that second chance in the green sector should be removed. Also, our urban youth deserve the opportunity to be part of something promising.”

Jones is a strategic thinker who gives definite answers to the question, “Who are our friends, who are our adversaries?” He narrows the target to speculative capital with roots in carbon-based energy industries and the militarism needed to secure their supplies. He seeks close allies in the wider working class of all nationalities, especially in the Blue-Green Alliance formed on the core partnership of the United Steelworkers with the Sierra Club. He also looks for allies among faith communities, environmentalists in the suburbs and rural populations suffering at the hands of anti-ecological agribusiness, offering a vision of wind farms and solar arrays for sustainable rural development. He sees the importance of cutting back defense spending and opposing unjust wars abroad.

Finally, he holds out a hand to green businesses in alternative energies, the current and future manufacturers of clean power:

“Our success and survival as a species are largely and directly tied to the new eco-entrepreneurs-and the success and survival of their enterprises. Since almost all of the needed eco-technologies are likely to come from the private sector, civic leaders and voters should do all that can be done to help green business leaders succeed.”

Jones is not talking just about mom and pop operations here, but an important and growing sector of productive capital. These will range from small upstarts to T. Boone Pickens-type investors wanting to create giant wind farms and large coastal arrays of wave generators, along with the manufacturing firms that build their equipment. Some on the left who want to see a clean renewable energy future will have to make adjustments in their “anti-corporate” strategies if they want to pursue this goal effectively with these high-road allies. Dan Swinney of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council explains his current project, the Chicago Green Manufacturing Network, as a case in point:

“CMRC is working with the Cleveland-based Great Lakes Wind Network/WireNET and the City of Chicago in building the capacity of local manufacturing companies to become the supply chain for the explosive wind turbine industry. Illinois and other states currently have ambitious Renewable Energy Portfolios that create a huge market for wind turbine companies and others in the renewable energy field. Currently the components for these companies are principally made by European and Asian suppliers. We will rise to the challenge of building the capacity of local companies to supply the high quality components for wind turbines and other renewable energy companies. This will be a means to diversify the markets for some of the 12,000 manufacturing companies in our region and an opportunity to create hundreds if not thousands of new permanent, full-time jobs in manufacturing.”

But Green Collar Economy’s core mass base remains a united Black and Latino community in close alliance with organized labor, the same engine of change that put Obama in the White House. And by asserting the interests and needs of that base, the green jobs and infrastructure proposals in Obama’s stimulus package serve to drive the entire recovery effort in a progressive direction.

“We want to build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty,” says Jones, “We want this green wave to lift all boats… In the wake of Katrina, we reject the idea of ‘free market’ evacuation plans. Families should not be left behind to drown because they lack a functioning car or credit card…In an age of floods, we reject the ideology that says we must let our neighbors ‘sink or swim’.”

The nature of the Green New Deal’s adversaries — the carbon-based energy speculators and the military industries defending them — is the key reason Jones’ strategy requires a massive mobilized base. The structural reforms needed to dislodge and displace them are going to require a great deal of popular power from below. The petroleum-coal industrial nexus alone is subsidized to the tune of $1 trillion annually, according to Congressman Robert Kennedy Jr. in his foreword to Jones’ book. Some are outright opposed to any “New Deal,” green or otherwise, as the GOP in Congress reveal with their votes against the Recovery Act. The Green Jobs components were often cited by the right as “pork” or “the road to socialism.” Others want to destroy the Green New Deal from within, via “greenwashing.” These are politicians who take their lead from some corporations that have become skilled at changing their ads to “green” but continue producing toxics and other waste from the polluter’s agenda.

Jones singles out Newt Gingrich, the GOP’s neoliberal-in-chief, as particularly devious: “He has skillfully used rising fuel prices to stoke public support for climate-destroying measures…Their new tactic is to spread confusion about the real solutions by deliberately blurring distinctions between themselves and the champions of genuine answers.” Jones has to take the battle into the government and electoral arenas. The resources of state power are required to bring the green economy to scale, even if it requires a gut-wrenching struggle with polluters who have a good number of politicians on their payrolls and with revenue streams long fused to the public trough.

The solidarity economy faces these battles as well. For the most part, it overlaps with the green economy at the grassroots. Its mission can be summarized as generating new wealth in a green way, but with a worker-community ownership or control component built into a project’s agenda from the start. As a major finance capitalist and former oilman who wants to invest in wind farms in a major way, T Boone Pickens is clearly part of the green economy, but not part of the solidarity economy. A wind farm on an Indian reservation cooperatively owned by the tribe and employing its members and selling power both locally and regionally would be very much part of the solidarity economy.

But the picture is more complex. “Stakeholder” solutions are not quite as clear-cut. For instance, GAMESA, a Spanish high-tech firm and a leading European manufacturer of wind turbines, recently opened a plant in Bucks County, PA. To do so, it formed stakeholder partnerships with the county and state governments, getting tax allowances and land-use easements to refit and old closed steel mill. The United Steel Workers union was brought in as a partner: 1000 new union jobs were created, hiring many of the unemployed steelworkers. The “solidarity” here is between high-road capital, the USW, local government and the unemployed of the area, but it’s a stretch for some who might want to reserve ‘solidarity’ strictly to cooperative ownership structures.

The stakeholder solidarity offers practical flexibility in the wider struggle to bring both movements to scale. Cooperative structures that evolve out of deeper structural reforms have the quality of altering the relations of power in production and local governance. Even if on a small scale, they can point to a future of wider economic democracy, acting as a bridge to new socialist relations.

In any case, a powerful high-road alliance opens the door to those on its left wing who want to take it farther. Van Jones himself has no problem with either form; his book celebrates the stakeholder green jobs alliances implemented by the Green Party mayor of Richmond, CA, as well as the Green Worker Cooperatives in building salvaging businesses in the South Bronx, NY.

At one point in his book, Jones uses a metaphor of two ships to sum up the current crossroads facing the American people, the Amistad and the Titanic. The latter carried the wealthy elite indulging in idle pleasures, and a proletarian crew labored below in an unsound structure. The former had been taken over by insurgent slaves, taken to safe harbor, but still lacked wider resources for the crew’s future. The folly of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic has long been a metaphor for doomed tinkering at reforms in a closed system. The Amistad, however, offers a more open future. Those familiar with the story know it involves further complex struggles, with new allies, high born and low, against a dying system. But it offers hope and change, both of which are in high regard these days.

[Carl Davidson is a member of the coordinating committee of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, and a national committee member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and currently is webmaster for ‘Progressives for Obama.’ He is co-author of ‘CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age,’ and co-editor of ‘Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet,’ both available at lulu.com. This article was also posted at SolidarityEconomy.net.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Books, Economic Reform, Environment, Green Jobs, Obama Administration, Van Jones | 4 Comments

Rag Blog Report : Mauricio Funes Wins in El Salvador

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Photos from the elections in El Salvador by Al / The Rag Blog.
Live from El Salvador

One team in San Martin actually was notified that an ARENA representative in a dark corner (pants down) was trying to smuggle out Actas and ballots… An FMLN activist had seen him struggling with his belt and made sure to help, revealing the envelopes he had stuffed in his pants.

By Al / The Rag Blog / March 17, 2009

[This is the third in a series of dispatches from a regular Rag Blog contributor who is writing under a pseudonym due to the sensitivity of the situation in El Salvador.]

I was in the small dusty town of Rosario de Moro where there were sixteen voting tables. Our group left our hotel in San Salvador and got to the voting site by 4:30 a.m. It was in a small school with a covered basketball court which meant that we were in the shade. The FMLN had an office across the street and they had mobilized and were ready for their work.

Each table had four official people sitting at it — two from the ARENA party and two from the Frente Faribundo Marti for National Liberation (FMLN). Then there were vigilantes (observers) in party vests — two for each party. Red vests for the FLMN and red white and blue for ARENA. We met two of the police officers and entered the site promptly at 5. Four international observers determined to stay the entire day until the Actas (final reports) were faxed and the papaletas (ballots) had been loaded onto trucks and taken into the Capitol by the police.

I’ll jump ahead now because for all the lack of technology, the votes got counted quickly with a lot of transparency. Each ballot shown to everyone at the table and put into the hands of a Party representative. There were checks and balances as each roster (padron) was counted and the corners torn off the ballots. Unused ballots were counted and stamped. We watched as the Actas (table results) were faxed to San Salvador, checking to make sure the verbal results we had gotten at each table had not been replaced.

This is why we were there to guard against fraud — against the 800 bused in Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, against the replacement of Actas and stolen ballots. DUI (ID cards) for dead people and bought votes.

There is much more to say.

But Mauricio Funes won the presidency and it was known by 6 p.m. (after the polls closed at 5) at my election site. The vice president is Salvador Sanchez Cerena, a former guerrillera in the struggle here. Everyone that speaks of this election says it is dedicated to the dead. To Oscar Romero assassinated as he gave mass in March, 1980. And to the people massacred.

It is a huge turning point. The 1992 UN brokered peace accords here resulted in an end to the civil war, but it has been the relentless organizing of the FLMN in every sector that has resulted in a people’s victory. The streets were filled with red shirts and red FLMN banners. Fireworks lit the sky. The man overseeing the polling place said to me: “Sometimes a party celebrates. This time the people celebrate.”

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged El Salvador, Free Elections, Latin America | Leave a comment

Seth Meyers: US SNL Government Propagandist

Posted on March 17, 2009 by RagBlog

Pop Goes the Culture: Live from New York … It’s the Same Old Propaganda
By Lord Baltimore / March 15, 2009

Studio 8H in New York City’s Rockefeller Center is not only the two-floor sound stage from which Saturday Night Live airs, but has also long been one of the most important stages for mainstream American political satire and comedic commentary over the past three decades. Whereas during its thirty-four year tenure, from Chevy Chase’s prat-falling Gerald Ford to Tina Fey’s brilliant impersonation of bimbo huntress Sarah Palin, SNL has successfully lampooned many American politicians, the show has long steered clear of challenging government propaganda or party-line talking points. Dubious ideologies of American imperialism and exceptionalism are not only often ignored but, at times, are even reinforced by the show’s writers, producing jokes that can easily be seen as, at best, ignorant and misinformed, and at worst, downright dogmatic and racist.

SNL‘s reinforcement of American political propaganda has never been more pronounced, offensive or unapologetic than under the helm of Seth Meyers, who succeeded Fey as the show’s head writer in 2006. Meyers clearly has a hard-on for Barack Obama (he donated $4000 to his campaign) and revitalized the show’s waning popularity by exposing the embarrassing absurdity of the Illinois Senator’s political opponents. More recently, Meyers has shown that the new President’s Congressional adversaries should face defenestration due to their dissent over his economic policies, at the devious bidding of Obama’s henchman Rahm Emanuel (a suggestion that I too subscribe to, as long as Rahm is then also thrown through a closed window, followed soon thereafter by the President himself).

What is clear is that real issues are never fair game with Meyers in charge, and each politics-related sketch seems to serve the purpose of revealing his own tired political perspective: Republicans are stupid and wrong, Democrats are well-intentioned, if at times silly, but the United States is always right and just. Regardless of this blinkered viewpoint, this format is often harmless and usually humorous.

Sometimes, however, the results are a bit more sinister.

Even though challenging the American status quo is off-limits to Meyers and his writing staff, they often revel in making fun of foreign countries and cultures, proving time and again that the American public, far from being able to stomach substantial satire and criticism of its own government’s policies, historical narratives and national mythologies, eats up racial stereotypes and dehumanizing generalizations like Big Macs, and is always hungry for more.

Nowhere is Meyers’ own voice heard more explicitly than on SNL‘s Weekend Update. The famous faux-news report segment, an SNL staple since its very first broadcast back in 1975 and obvious inspiration to shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, is arguably the funniest part of each episode and allows the SNL writers to deliver their own perspective and commentary in a much more direct forum, rather than through the prism of sketch comedy or subtle satire. Meyers, as Weekend Update anchorman, is playing himself and, thus, the audience is able to hear his views straight from the source.

As such, on the March 7, 2009 episode, Meyers had this to say:

“The Iranian government this week has demanded an apology from Hollywood saying the films 300 and The Wrestler were insulting to Iranians. Well how ’bout this Iran: you apologize for the hostage crisis, pursuing nuclear weapons, high gas prices, financing Hamas, denying the Holocaust, and setting fire to a Danish Embassy because of a couple cartoons, and then you’ll get your apology for The Wrestler.”

This little laugh-line got the biggest cheer and loudest applause of the evening from the audience and Meyers appeared to be pretty pleased with himself afterwards. But hey, it’s an entertainment show that is supposed to make people laugh, right? So what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that humor doesn’t work in a vacuum. Context is what makes situations and punchlines funny, and if a joke is based on a flawed, faulty, or completely false premise, it fails. The joke itself doesn’t need to rely on truth, but the context certainly does. The best humor pushes boundaries, challenges assumptions. The only way this particular gag could succeed is if all parties involved – from the writer to the audience – were ignorant of reality and held a strikingly demonized view of the Iranian people. And succeed it did.

This characterization (or caricaturization) of Iran is based wholly on American mainstream media propaganda and US – and Israeli – governmental talking points. The premise is that Iran has a lot more to apologize to America for than vice versa and, therefore, the idea of Iran demanding an apology from the US is patently absurd. It assumes that history began thirty years ago and that the United States, the world’s Super Empire, has been long victimized, threatened, and offended by a country nearly six times smaller than it, with less than a quarter the population, and which has a military budget that is literally one hundred times smaller than the US’.

Meyers’ glib delivery played to his audience’s own ignorance; his self-congratulatory smirk hid truths that every literate American should really know by now. The crowd hooted and hollered as Meyers claimed that it is Iran that hasn’t given the US a fair shake all these years and that this demand on Hollywood just goes one insult too far. Regardless of the fact that the American film industry has long demonized Middle Eastern Muslims, from Beau Geste to Ishtar to Iron Man, as aggressive, violent, irrational, barbaric terrorists hell bent on destroying the Western way of life for no particular reason, other than perhaps uncontrollable freedom-hating, apparently it’s Iran that owes us, not the other way around. In this one punchline, Meyers has revealed himself to be a know-nothing parrot, ripe for propagandistic ventriloquism.

Luckily for the Obama Administration, just like Bush’s before it, folks like Seth Meyers continue to repeat government talking points without the slightest hint of skepticism or reason. Meyers is all too eager to defend Barack against his detractors, who are often portrayed as petty and vindictive Republicans, and willfully regurgitates the same old nationalism and xenophobia – which has not slackened at all with Obama’s inauguration – with aplomb.

Granted, this should come as no surprise to SNL viewers, as Meyers has shown his true colors many times before on Weekend Update. On November 18, 2006 – right after the Democrats regained control over Congress, when anti-Bush sentiment was at its peak – Meyers delivered this quip:

“Christian and Muslim Britons joined forces yesterday to tell city officials to stop taking the Christianity out of Christmas, warning them that this simply fuels a backlash against Muslims. Also fueling a backlash against Muslims: terrorism.”

And then, only two months later, on January 20, 2007, repeated the punchline with a different set-up:

“Muslim groups are concerned that the new season of 24, which features Muslim terrorists setting off a nuclear explosive near Los Angeles will foster hate against them and create a climate of Islamophobia. Also creating a climate of Islamophobia: terrorism.”

It’s clear that Meyers’ own bigotry remains unabated and undeterred in this glorious post-racial American reconstruction era of Barack Obama.

So, why should Iran as a nation, or Iranians as a people, apologize to the United States or the American people? According to Mr. Meyers, an apology is owed for the “hostage crisis” during which Iranian students held 52 U.S. diplomats in the American embassy in Tehran for 444 days. Perhaps this would be a reasonable request if history began on November 4, 1979, the day the embassy was taken. But it didn’t.

Meyers’ entire joke hinges on deliberate misinformation and selective memory. The history that Meyers (in a way speaking for most Americans and echoing the oft-repeated rhetoric of the US government) ignores is as follows:

In 1953, the American government backed a CIA coup in Iran that overthrew the popular and democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, after the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, and installed a brutally repressive and violent dictatorship under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah ruled Iran, with constant US support and financial backing, for over 25 years, during which opposition to the tyrannical monarchy was countered and suppressed with imprisonment, torture, and execution by the Shah’s security agency and intelligence apparatus, SAVAK. SAVAK was trained and funded by both the US and Israel. When the people of Iran finally revolted and drove the Shah from the country in 1979, he found asylum in the United States. The United States has never issued any sort of apology for the 1953 coup, its support of dictatorship, or for its role in attempting to suppress the 1979 revolution.

In order to strike a blow to US influence in Iran, which had been profoundly powerful during the Shah’s reign, the American Embassy in Tehran was occupied by Iranian revolutionaries. Ever since, the American government has imposed harsh economic and financial sanctions on Iran.

The United States has also covertly supported many anti-Iranian organizations since 1979. Most notable is its cooperation and protection over the years of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition network that, in 1981, assassinated about 70 high ranking Iranian officials including cabinets members, elected parliamentarians, and the new Chief Justice when it bombed state headquarters.

For eight years, between 1980 and 1988, the United States supported Saddam Hussein’s expansionist war against Iran that cost over one million lives. During the war, Iraq used US-supplied chemical weapons on Iranian citizens.

On July 3, 1988, an Iranian A-300 Airbus passenger plane was shot down by the U.S. Navy warship, the USS Vincennes, in Iranian territorial waters. All 290 people on board Iranian Flight 655 were killed, having been blown out of the sky by two missiles. 66 of the passengers were children under 12. Although the U.S. military called the attack an “accident,” the crew of the USS Vincennes was awarded combat-action ribbons and its Commander was specifically commended with a medal for “heroic achievement.”

The U.S. Navy claimed that the crew of the USS Vincennes mistook the Iranian plane for an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, an excuse that hardly holds up to the most cursory scruntiny (see diagram to the left for a tragic laugh). Iran’s allegations that the warship was far too technologically advanced to make such a catastrophic mistake was dismissed by the American government. When questioned about the incident, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush barked, “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are!”

The United States military and government has never taken responsibility for this act of aggression and has never made an official apology to the Iranian people or government for the assault on its citizens.

Seth Meyers probably doesn’t know any of this, which is strange considering this information is very easy to come by, to fact check, and to confirm. One might reasonably assume that, being the head writer of one of the longest-running shows on television, Seth Meyers is literate. All he’d need to do is read.

Meyers also suggested that Iran apologize to the United States for “pursing nuclear weapons.” Despite the fact that there has never been any evidence of Iran’s quest for such weaponry (and extensive intelligence reporting to the contrary) and the Iranian government at all levels has constantly, consistently, and categorically denied any interest in militarizing their nuclear program on moral, rational, and religious grounds, and Iran’s nuclear energy program is wholly transparent, heavily monitored, and completely legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Meyers has decided to take Cheney’s word for it. Hey, it worked with Iraq, right?

Meyers also blamed Iran for high gas prices. Odd, considering that nothing has affected these prices more than American imperialism in the Middle East, notably its current occupation of Iran’s two neighbors. Also, Iran’s oil output is drastically below full production levels due to the years of heavy sanctions imposed upon the country by the United States. In addition, few things would improve Iran’s drilling and export capabilities more than a successful, functional nuclear energy program, which would provide much needed power domestically and free up oil and gas for shipment abroad.

Iran, as a country, is also blamed for denying the Holocaust. How an entire country can deny something is beyond me, but even if he meant President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad specifically, he’d be wrong. Ahmadinejad has never denied the Holocaust, but rather has questioned why the European genocide has been mythologized in order to justify the displacement of and violence against the Palestinian people. Ahmadinejad’s reasoning in 2005 was as follows:

“If the Europeans are telling the truth in their claim that they have killed six million Jews in the Holocaust during the World War II – which seems they are right in their claim because they insist on it and arrest and imprison those who oppose it, why the Palestinian nation should pay for the crime. Why have they come to the very heart of the Islamic world and are committing crimes against the dear Palestine using their bombs, rockets, missiles and sanctions…If you have committed the crimes so give a piece of your land somewhere in Europe or America and Canada or Alaska to them to set up their own state there.”

In February 2006, he spoke more directly about mythology and the stifling of criticism:

“Some Western governments, in particular the US, approve of the sacrilege on the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), while denial of the Myth of the Holocaust, based on which the Zionists have been exerting pressure upon other countries for the past 60 years and kill the innocent Palestinians, is considered as a crime.”

In an article for Kein Krieg!, writers Anneliese Fikentscher and Andreas Neumann analyze Ahmadinejad’s speeches and conclude that,

“What Ahmadinejad does is not denying the Holocaust. No! It is dealing out criticism against the mendacity of the imperialistic powers who use the Holocaust to muzzle critical voices and to achieve advantages concerning the legitimization of a planned war. This is criticism against the exploitation of the Holocaust…The assertion that Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust thus is wrong in more than one aspect. He does not deny the Holocaust, but speaks of denial itself. And he does not speak of denial of the Holocaust, but of denial of the Myth of Holocaust. This is something totally different. All in all he speaks of the exploitation of the Holocaust. The Myth of Holocaust, like it is made a subject of discussion by Ahmadinejad, is a myth that has been built up in conjunction with the Holocaust to – as he says – put pressure onto somebody. We might follow this train of thoughts or we might not. But we cannot equalize his thoughts with denial of the Holocaust.”

Meyers mentions Iran’s support for Hamas, the democratically elected representative of the Palestinian people in Gaza, as another thing Iran should apologize for. He does this less than two months after the Israeli military bombarded the Gaza Strip for three weeks, killing over 1,300 people, more than 400 of them children. Two new episodes of Saturday Night Live were aired during the massacre and, obviously, no mention was made whatsoever to Israeli aggression. But here, quite unprovoked, Meyers decides to trot out an absurd litany of complaints against Iran. Clearly, for Meyers, resistance to dehumanization, starvation, invasion, occupation, and ethnic cleansing and the support for that resistance is, quite simply, “terrorism.” I mean, hey, most Palestinians are Muslims after all and we know how Seth feels about those people.

Finally, a reference is made to the outrage expressed over the publication of cartoons disparaging to Islam in a Danish newspaper back in 2006. There were many protests, sometimes quite violent, all over the world in response to the offensive cartoons. In Iran, hundreds of protesters rioted outside the Danish Embassy in Tehran. Danish flags were burned, and the embassy gate and two trees caught fire as well. The crowd was forced back by Iranian police with the use of tear gas. So, when Meyers mentions this event, does he mean that the Iranian people owe the Danish people an apology, or does he mean that the Iranian government should apologize for using tear gas on its own citizens in its attempt to pacify a protest? Either way, how does a situation sparked by cartoons published in a Danish newspaper and the backlash Denmark received from it have to do with Iran apologizing to the United States? Is Copenhagen now an extension of Hollywood in Meyers’ opinion? What an odd thing for him to say.

Perhaps it wasn’t funny enough for Meyers to say that Iran might first want to consider asking for an apology from the United States for deeming it part of an “Axis of Evil” after spontaneous candlelight vigils were held in Iran for the victims of the the World Trade Center attacks and the Iranian government was instrumental in allowing the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001, or for rebuffing Iranian overtures made by both Presidents Khatami and Ahmadinejad to reopen full diplomatic relations between the two countries, or for violating Iranian airspace with predator drones and territorial waters in the Persian Gulf with battleships since 2003, or for raiding the Iranian Consulate General in Iraq and arresting five staff members, before demanding anything of Hollywood.

Meyers is not a journalist, he is a comedian and a writer. He is not expected to investigate and expose new truths to the American public at 12:05am on Sunday mornings; however, one might argue, it also isn’t his job to propagate lies and strengthen the already ridiculous misconceptions of his audience. In short, while he’s not Bill Moyers, he’s also not Larry the Cable Guy – at least he should try not to be.

The reason the American public doesn’t know anything about the world around it is because of people like Seth Meyers. Propaganda isn’t spread simply through White House press releases, shoddy Beltway reporting, and loud-mouthed punditry. Common beliefs need the constant support and encouragement from the mainstream, from outlets other than political media, in order to solidify themselves within the mindset of a community. Entertainers, more than most, shape public opinion and help stereotypes linger in the collective consciousness of their audience.

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Over six decades later, George W. Bush echoed this sentiment by explaining that, “In my line of work, you have to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in…to, kind of, catapult the propaganda.” By making and repeating jokes based on false premises, comedians like Meyers do the busy work of war criminals like Goebbels and Bush, thus making their job easier. He is now firmly in service of the Obama Administration and will continue to push the same aggressive agenda under the guise of entertainment.

Seth, you ignorant slut.

[Nima Shirazi was born and raised in Manhattan. He now lives in Brooklyn and writes the weblog Wide Asleep In America under the moniker Lord Baltimore. He can be reached at wideasleepinamerica@gmail.com.]

Source / Wide Asleep in America

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Existential Angst, Journalism, Mainstream Media, Propaganda | Leave a comment

More About MRSA and Agribusiness

Posted on March 17, 2009 by RagBlog

This is a follow-up to an article we posted a few days ago. The big news here is the potential connection between the development of debilitating (even deadly) antibiotic-resistant pathogens and the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Let’s press for more active research to determine if this might be true.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

A simple petri dish test revealed that by overlooking basic hygiene, a healthcare worker infected a quadriplegic Iraq war veteran with MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plagues hospitals. Photo: Source.
Pathogens in Our Pork
By Nicholas D. Kristof / March 14, 2009

We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.

Regardless of whether the bacteria came from the pigs or from humans who handled the meat, the results should sound an alarm bell, for MRSA already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.

MRSA (pronounced “mersa”) stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. People often get it from hospitals, but as I wrote in my last column, a new strain called ST398 is emerging and seems to find a reservoir in modern hog farms. Research by Peter Davies of the University of Minnesota suggests that 25 percent to 39 percent of American hogs carry MRSA.

Public health experts worry that pigs could pass on the infection by direct contact with their handlers, through their wastes leaking into ground water (one study has already found antibiotic-resistant bacteria entering ground water from hog farms), or through their meat, though there has been no proven case of someone getting it from eating pork. Thorough cooking will kill the bacteria, but people often use the same knife to cut raw meat and then to chop vegetables. Or they plop a pork chop on a plate, cook it and then contaminate it by putting it back on the original plate.

Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.

The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.

“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and unsanitary conditions?”

The answer is simple: politics.

Legislation to ban the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture has always been blocked by agribusiness interests. Louise Slaughter of New York, who is the sole microbiologist in the House of Representatives, said she planned to reintroduce the legislation this coming week.

“We’re losing the ability to treat humans,” she said. “We have misused one of the best scientific products we’ve had.”

That’s an almost universal view in the public health world. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared antibiotic resistance a “public health crisis” and recounts the story of Rebecca Lohsen, a 17-year-old New Jersey girl who died from MRSA in 2006. She came down with what she thought was a sore throat, endured months in the hospital, and finally died because the microbes were stronger than the drugs.

This will be an important test for President Obama and his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack. Traditionally, the Agriculture Department has functioned mostly as a protector of agribusiness interests, but Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack have both said all the right things about looking after eaters as well as producers.

So Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack, will you line up to curb the use of antibiotics in raising American livestock? That is evidence of an industrial farming system that is broken: for the sake of faster-growing hogs, we’re empowering microbes that endanger our food supply and threaten our lives.

Source / New York Times

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Food Contamination, Food Production, Health, Health Care | 2 Comments

Rachel Maddow and the Irresistible Rise of Sarcastic News

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Sarcastic Times. . .

For Rachel Maddow and the other ironic anchors, absurdity is serious stuff

What has caused sarcastic news to flower? For starters, today’s bloggers and YouTube snidesters see parody as information and information as parody.

By Alissa Quart

[The following article appears in the March/April, 2009 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.]

On a Wednesday night in December, Rachel Maddow, in a toreador-style black jacket, waits for her show to start. She types last-minute notes on her computer with the intensity of a graduate student. At the 30 Rock news television studio, with its red, white, and blue décor, late-night assistants running about, and two dozen television screens on all around her, Maddow seems in her element. And when the show begins, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is devoted to “Blago”–the thoroughly and hilariously embarrassing (and now former) Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Maddow asks the “awkward question,” as she puts it: Is Blago not well? She riffs a bit and then concludes, with a sarcastic smile, “Illinois, you are getting almost as fun to cover as Alaska!”

MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show made its debut in the fall of 2008 and by October had grabbed 1.89 million viewers, beating CNN’s Larry King Live in the over-twenty-five and under-fifty-four demographic for that whole month. Maddow’s mocking on-air demeanor reminds many people of what they liked most about college. But she’s not just clever: she’s a tough-minded Rhodes Scholar, former aids activist, and an out lesbian. Her very existence as an anchor on cable television defies a number of different common wisdoms.

That’s all remarkable unto itself. But to my mind, what really makes the show special is how it embodies the rise of what I think of as sarcasm news. More and more news programs are likely to go absurdist in the coming months and years. As faith in and loyalty to traditional anchors wither, one can even hear ironic Maddowian intonations creeping into the delivery of CNN’s not-so-funny anchor Campbell Brown on her new show.

Now, you may be thinking, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert perfected comedy news a while back, no? But Maddow marks a watershed for a different sort of news comedy. Stewart (and Craig Kilborn before him) was a comic first and foremost—when The Daily Show started, the news was the surprising part. Maddow’s show works the opposite way: the news is the thing and the humor is the surprise. Along with her precursor, the five-year-old Countdown With Keith Olbermann, these are two “real” news programs permeated by parody.

What has caused sarcastic news to flower? For starters, today’s bloggers and YouTube snidesters see parody as information and information as parody. This is not entirely a mistake. Now, the news-with-satire approach can seem like the only thing that makes sense, since at least these shows are in on their own jokes. Even politicians sometimes embrace the idea of themselves as caricatures. They show up on Saturday Night Live to rap, or to meet their comedy doubles. They import self-parody into their own campaigns, as in Hillary Clinton’s faux Sopranos video on YouTube.

Also, the proliferation of niche audiences spurs sophisticated and partisan humor because these smaller groups of viewers have very particular tastes, identities, and affinities. They are thus more likely to share a sense of what’s funny. Critical verbal humor is a very specific thing—one reason that American film comedies struggle for viewers overseas. Sarcastic ripostes call for sarcastic viewers who know how, and when, to laugh. Simply put, Maddow is joking to the converted.

Finally, we have a far more sophisticated audience today than in the past, one that sees more clearly behind the manipulations and stagecraft of its political leaders. Two decades ago, Reagan got away with his spin, and his spinster, Michael Deaver, was and still is considered an untainted spokesman. Karl Rove, on the other hand, is widely seen as a vile little prince of handling. Yet Deaver, if we remember, was as much a master manipulator as Rove was; he got Reagan, you’ll recall, to gin up fake remorse during the Iran-Contra affair. Both the comedy and the news coverage of our decade and decades past reflect each era’s understanding of public relations and doublespeak. Now, news parody is truly a tool with which to strike back at political PR.

Political caricatures have been an American staple since the Colonial period. In the late nineteenth century, these sorts of illustrations tended to be scathing social critiques. In the twentieth century, though, news parodies were a bit more milquetoast. This was true even thirty-three years ago, when Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” kicked off the modern form of news parody. Back then, of course, real anchors exuded TV’s version of gravitas and solidity. The SNL Update was just milking anchors’ self-seriousness for laughs.

In the 1990s and 2000s, this satirical mode built up a head of laughing gas with The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Air America’s Al Franken. Comic news has become so popular that it even saved the career of a louche pothead named Bill Maher, who in a few short years went from comic outlier to éminence gris.

According to Bill Wolff, executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show and vice president of msnbc’s primetime programming, nothing less than George W. Bush has paved the way for his programs, as well as the others. “The funnier side of the political spectrum is the one where your enemies are most ridiculous,” says Wolff.

Maybe, but I think it has more to do with a shift in how people like information conveyed. Bush perhaps accelerated the process. So many felt degraded by the Bush era that they wished to degrade him back, on television. And then there are liberals who are now recalling their long-forgotten weapon: wit. As Jackson Lears, a professor of American history at Rutgers University, says of Maddow and the rest, “After decades of being mocked for excessive earnestness, the Left is remembering what the [1960s] counterculture knew: flagrant lies demand absurdist responses; they deserve to be not merely refuted but laughed to scorn.”

Still, MSNBC’s Wolff admits his network has gone in this direction partly due to the success of its rival network, Fox. A decade ago, Fox was established and MSNBC was just starting to brand itself as a distinct network. After Olbermann’s show became a hit, one might hypothesize that msnbc thought it could go for broke by doubling down on Maddow.

Wolff ties the rise of Maddow and Olbermann to their ability to bring analysis to news audiences. “With information becoming cheap, the success of Rachel and Keith is because people want someone collating or commenting on information,” says Wolff.

A lot of Maddow’s success derives from her taste for the absurd. At one point during the night of my visit, I watched from the sidelines as she showed a Christmas ad made by the coal industry, starring pieces of coal with bulging eyes and green and red carol books. “Anthropomorphic lumps of carbon singing,” Maddow hooted. Three cameras swung around her, using the in-your-face-and-out-of-our-minds technique so beloved by Olbermann. She then went further into the comedy ether: “The earth’s rotation is slowing down . . . that’s fodder for your next existential crisis.”

Throughout her show, Maddow’s bookishness comes through her wit. Early in the fall, she had a field day with Sarah Palin’s penchant for falsehoods, but in a very particular way. On one show around the election, she called Palin “a prevaricating, mendacious truth-stretcher or whatever other thesaurus words we can come up with for lying, is just far less efficient than calling a lie a lie, and a liar a liar.” I realized that in order to find this fully funny, you had to like jokes about abusing the thesaurus.

In October, Maddow’s wit became the accidental subject of one of her shows: a tormented-looking David Frum complained on-air that her humor was juvenile. “Making jokes about it is part of the way that I am talking about it,” Maddow fired back. “I don’t necessarily agree with you on ‘grown up.’ I think there’s room for all sorts of different kinds of discourse, including satire, including teasing, including humor. There’s a lot of different ways to talk about stuff, and Americans absorb information in a lot of different ways.”

It was a standoff between a conservative who knew that his party had lost its sense of humor and an anchor utterly assured that satire was the transom for getting political information—and critique—to her audience.

I talked with Maddow after her show about her absurdist approach. “When Frum said I talked about things in an immature way, I am cool with that,” she said, as she gleefully removed her pancake makeup (which she appeared to despise). She then told me how she first found her ironic humor, in college, when she crashed an event called Conservative Coming Out Day, stole the group’s sign, and changed it to Sexually Frustrated Conservative Mud Wrestling Day. After graduation, she had more prosaic practice in comedy: her early jobs in commercial radio included writing a hot-tub-company jingle and dressing as an inflatable calculator.

Still standing in the show’s mirrored makeup room, she donned her signature horn rim glasses and said, “I realized I didn’t have to be afraid to be smart, and the audience can be there with me.”

Maddow, like so many others in the Obama age, is moving the mainstream in her semi-subversive direction. But before progressives pop open Prosecco, celebrating how they’ve finally taken over not only the White House and the Senate but also cable news with comedy, let’s pause to consider these shows’ future. Olbermann and Maddow’s audiences combined aren’t as big as Brian Williams’s, and their market share fell off along with everybody else’s after the election. Will the clever-comedy-news trend last? I think yes, mostly because I don’t believe that Obama is so radiant that he will defy parody, or that Bush and Palin alone created our taste for irony-laced news. Also, the Republicans, and their nutsy pundits, are not going away.

There are those who fret about whether news humor simply co-opts political life, acting as an escape valve that lets our civic energy dissipate. I agree with them that news satire like Saturday Night Live’s can serve as this kind of vent, ameliorating outrage with a laugh. But Maddow’s wit—and more obviously, Olbermann’s—is too pointed to just act as a kind of political-anger-management regimen.

As for those critics who fear that Maddow and Olbermann and the others have replaced thoughtful newsgathering with snickering, I can see their point. But I think they don’t need to worry so much. As I watched Maddow do her show in the studio that winter day, she struck me as a relatively trustworthy source for news.

She may look Chaplinesque, with her dark cap of hair and expressive black eyebrows set against pale skin, but her humor is, actually, pretty serious stuff. In fact, her take on the news is so gravely absurd it often makes the news seem even darker than it is. By calling attention to the malevolence and dishonesty around us, Maddow and the new ironic anchors have come up with one way to shake us out of our exhausted acceptance of it all.

Source / Columbia Journalism Review.

Thanks to Tom Cleaver / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Broadcast Media, Cable News, Humor, Rachel Maddow | 4 Comments

A Rush from the Past : The Hammering of ‘Jabber the Nut’

Posted on March 15, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog (with apologies to Jabba and friends).
Rush Limbaugh: The Hammering of ‘Jabber the Nut’

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2009

See Video from Rush Limbaugh’s 1990 TV talk show, Below.

Rush Limbaugh, during his brief and disastrous run as a TV talk show host in 1990, was hammered by his audience on one show to a point that he was forced to halt taping. Less than a minute after he started, his audience became so outraged at his mean spirited attacks on women that he literally couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Audience members repeatedly got in his face, refusing to be be intimidated by his bluster. Taping was stopped after the shouting, jeering audience ultimately reduced Rush to a red-faced mumbling wimp. Show producers finally were forced to clear the studio in order for Rush to be able to finish the segment.

With Rush challenging President Obama to debate him, the video clip below of a much younger Rush Limbaugh, shows how he actually holds up when he is not totally alone, unopposed, shouting into a microphone in his radio studio.

After the corpulent, “Jabber the Nut” shook like a ton of jelly speaking before the Conservative Political Action Committee a couple of weeks ago, it is delightful to see him hooted off his own stage before a real audience.

From the video archives, the “Hammering of Jabber the Nut” is presented below for your viewing pleasure . . . he makes it almost exactly one minute before the attack begins.

[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 Electronic Media, Right Wing Media, Rush Limbaugh, Video | 3 Comments

Austin : Eyewitness Accounts from Winter Soldiers for Peace

Posted on March 15, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan. Austin, Texas, Feb. 28, 2009. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
Winter Soldiers for Peace

After three more decades of aggressions upon foreign soils, brigades of Veterans for Peace (VFP) and Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) have been joined by Iraq Veterans against the War (IVAW). Testimonies today from this new generation of “boots on the ground veterans” will carry echoes blown in from Vietnam and Detroit ‘71.

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / March 14, 2009

AUSTIN — In the stone-walled sanctuary of Central Presbyterian Church, on Saturday, Feb. 28, three hundred faithful settle into pews as the dean of Austin peace activism, Fran Hanlon, previews how the rest of the weekend schedule has been planned for this Winter Soldier event.

Fran’s partner at the podium, Doug Zachary, is looking pleased already. The house is full. The program is printed. The act is together. A banner hanging large to stage left says “Winter Soldier” and Zachary with his whitening beard, angle-bent hat, and Palestinian scarf, is looking like a perfected instance of the eternal type.

Zachary has been a Winter Soldier for 37 years. In 1970 he won an honorable discharge after convincing the Marine Corps that he took the words of Jesus seriously. In 1971, as Zachary was seeking alternative paths through Texas, the Winter Soldier Movement was born in Detroit where 109 veterans of the War on Viet Nam turned out the truth of what they’d done as war criminals in a criminal war. Not many years later, of course, that war was ended.

After three more decades of aggressions upon foreign soils, brigades of Veterans for Peace (VFP) and Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) have been joined by Iraq Veterans against the War (IVAW). Testimonies today from this new generation of “boots on the ground veterans” will carry echoes blown in from Vietnam and Detroit ‘71.

A Winter Soldier, says Zachary, is “loyal, steadfast, faithful, resolute, conscientious, scrupulous, and unafraid of painstaking work.” On this last day of February, 2009, with north winds howling out back along San Jacinto Boulevard, Zachary is here to declare that the movement– in these “times that try men’s souls”–shall not quit resisting the ongoing “imperialist, racist, and anti-democratic” wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Zachary yields the podium to the chaplain of the Austin IVAW, Hart Viges, who will be moderating the first panel of speakers. Viges looks like a lanky pastor with his trimmed hair, spectacles, dark blazer, white shirt, and blue jeans, not to mention the mighty large cross hanging on the wall behind him.

“I’d like to give a quote from Rabbi Yeshua (Jesus)” says Viges. “He said, ‘Blessed are the ones who have undergone ordeals, for they have entered into life’.” After this refreshing translation of a beatitude the IVAW chaplain reminds us that even the things we will hear today can be transcended.

They Built Hanging Gardens without Strange Fruit

First to speak today is Dr. Dahlia S. Wasfi, M.D. whose grandparents include a Sunni Muslim, a Shia Muslim, and two Holocaust Jews. She therefore begins her story with a memory of the Abraham who once upon a time walked with Allah in Iraq. Dr. Wasfi’s cousins will sometimes boast that they walk the same ground as Abraham, but it has been hard ground lately. There was an 8-year war with Iran, a 42-day bombing of the First Gulf War, and of course the Shock and Awe campaign of 2003. In such a land it would be miraculous not to be living out some disorder of post-traumatic stress.

A film clip pulls us into the streets of Fallujah where two children carry small bags to a cemetery. A tiny grave marks the burial of a child’s arm. A grown man weeps. Another declares that “our enemy” is anyone who had any part in these killings. Clicking between slides, Dr. Wasfi shows us two more children from Iraq and Philadelphia joined together through an extended family that spans half the world and several religions. Shouldn’t we be working to build a world where these children can enjoy a common future of peace and prosperity?

Consider the example of Babylon. Dr. Wasfi presents a slide of what the Hanging Gardens must have looked like when they counted among the Seven Wonders. Do we seriously think that such a people from such a land actually need our outside assistance to figure out how to be great or to do great things? Well there is one thing the Iraqi people could use that we could give them, says Dr. Wasfi, and that is immediate and unconditional withdrawal.

HUMINT Unit

Winter Soldier testimony begins with Ronn Cantu, who steps to the podium with trim dark hair, a bare shadow of beard and mustache, dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt that identifies him as an Iraq Veteran Against the War. In 2003, he believed so strongly in “the war on terrorism” that he re-joined the Army after two years out. The Army sent him to Iraq once, then twice. So 2007 found him back in Iraq.

“During my second tour I served as a human intelligence collector,” says Cantu, looking over his notes. “A lot of people know that as an interrogator, but interrogation is only half of what a HUMINT DIR does. The other half is source operations where we look for Iraqi citizens to give us information willingly and thereby become sources.”

Cantu explains the method of “dual source reporting” which requires two written statements before a suspect can be detained. The database assigns each report a number, but the number does not reveal whether a second report comes from a second source. Two reports from a single source could therefore qualify as “dual source reporting.” Database numbers could also be entered without any real sources behind them.

One of his first assignments was to help round up four members of an IED cell. It seemed like a “success” but Cantu wondered: “Does a flock disperse when you detain the shepherd?” As a HUMINT operator, Cantu was working for the “new body count,” and under these circumstances his unit could do what’s ethical or please the masters. “We did the latter.”

From questionable database practices that could barely count to two, the operation soon degraded into detain first, dual source later. From one suspected “al Qaeda” mosque Cantu’s unit detained every male and then looked for reasons to keep them. Thirteen qualified.

“Then the worst thing happened,” said Cantu. “We accidentally caught somebody big.” Congratulations came sliding down the command chain. What was there to do but to repeat the whole method next week. By this time the people in the neighborhood were convinced that the Army had declared war against Islam. To show how that wasn’t true, the Army got the Iraqi police to handle the next mosque roundup. Since the neighborhood was Sunni and the police were Shia, the operation worked perfectly to divide and conquer.

When detainees were sent to confinement with boot-shaped bruises, missing teeth, or broken arms, military handlers got nervous and started rejecting them. Once again, Iraqi police could help with backup detention facilities. But when Cantu attempted to report questionable detention practices on the basis of seeing a man with an eye swollen shut he was asked: “Did you see him being tortured?” What he heard was: “If you didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.” When a Warrant Officer assured Cantu that he did not have to carry out duties he considered to be illegal and discomforting, he began to pull away.

Gitmo Grand Opening

Brandon Neely was born into a military family in Georgia and he turned to the military when he reached working age in Texas. He still keeps a military haircut that he wears today with his IVAW t-shirt. Like Cantu’s before him, Neely’s confessions have been made in previous venues. He opens by explaining how military guards sent to the Guantanamo Bay prison were never trained in the Geneva Conventions because they were taught that Gitmo was an exceptional place where the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply.

We’ve seen pictures of Gitmo prisoners arriving at Camp X-Ray, dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, knit orange caps, surgical masks, goggles, earmuffs, and gloves; hands strapped together. What we didn’t see was the first guy who hopped off the bus on one leg as he was screamed at to move it. Nor did we see how after he had hopped so many yards someone bothered to toss from the bus his prosthetic leg.

We’ve seen the cruel pictures from Iraq of naked prisoners piled on top of each other, but we haven’t seen the pileup that Neely describes when a bunch of Gitmo guards jumped on top of a prisoner who called one of them a bitch.

And we’ve heard the hype about the Gitmo prisoners being certified homicidal maniacs, but we haven’t heard how the first prisoner that Neely took charge of was trembling with all his might under a fear of everything he expected to experience when ordered to kneel. He was slow to get into that position because he believed it would be his last. What Neely reflexively took to be killer resistance was only one mortal’s attempt to steal an extra breath from this life, sucking it down from behind a surgical mask that he was convinced he would never be able to remove. From their separate places across the globe, two distraught men were ordered to collide at Gitmo, each brainwashed into thinking that he was meeting a killer of instant resort.

Wake Up Call

“He knew how to sleep as only the innocent and the dead could dig,” says Rooster Romriell, opening his testimony with a poem made from fragments of razor-edged memories. Long hair covering his right ear is mismatched by a buzz cut on the left side, as if to say once you get that military cut, it can never be outgrown. His black t-shirt declares an imperative: “Support GI Resistance.”

Rooster transports the sanctuary to a home in Sadr City where an American squad has just discovered an AK-47, which is a legal weapon to keep at home. We watch horrified as “an old woman with an infant in her arms” falls to the ground “weeping inconsolably” as two shots ring out. The bullets crash through an innocent man’s face. With a quivering chin, Rooster tells us that the woman still screams in his head at night when he’s trying to sleep.

Then comes the dump truck. American troops fire upon it and watch it burn. A man comes “waving a white cloth and yelling ‘baby, baby,’ trying to tell us that we were destroying nothing more than children and garbage.” Rooster’s flesh quivers again with the pain of a conscience that dares him not to cry on the spot. He exhales into the sanctuary and we barely breathe. He has more stories to tell.

“Obama claims that he wants to withdraw the troops from Iraq—at least he did prior to gaining the presidency—all the while saying that Iran is a constant threat, allowing troops to be increased in Afghanistan, turning his sights on Russia, claiming they were delivering nukes to the terrorists, and now he’s confronting China for currency manipulation and monetary policy. He’s calling for a civilian security force and mandatory service. We cannot allow a blind eye to be turned on these things. Obama is no friend to the veteran.” As Rooster withdraws from the podium, Cantu offers a handshake.

“Bring the Troops Home Now”

“I’m a little overwhelmed by some of the testimony that’s been shared with us today, as I imagine many of you are,” says the next speaker. Greg Foster is president of the Austin IVAW. He is a panelist during this part of the program. Later he will serve as moderator. His black t-shirt bears a familiar script: “We the People.” Picking up the general theme of the day, Foster declares that Winter Soldiers are responsible citizens.

“We know the reality of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Foster. The testimonies may be difficult to speak and difficult to hear, but the truth is important and it should be shared. The US owes compensation and reparations for damage done on foreign soil, but the country also needs to provide full benefits and adequate health care to “soldiers and Marines.”

Foster, like Rooster, spent time in Sadr City. He recalls fighting street by street to secure a zone of operation, then watching burned-out awnings replaced with fresh cloth. “I saw Sadr City slowly start to rebuild itself.” After his unit was transferred out, the new unit had to start all over again with another street-by-street battle to reassert the “hegemony” of American power. Says Foster: “When I say bring the troops home now, it’s not a slogan.”

The FOBulous Life

After a crowded and chattering intermission in the basement Fellowship Hall, the afternoon program resumes with two videos by Casey J. Porter. As far as Porter was concerned, one tour of duty in Iraq would have been enough. After returning from his first year in Iraq he joined the IVAW in 2007. Yet that same year he was “stop-lossed”– instead of getting out on schedule he was ordered back to Iraq. This time around, Porter posts short anti-war videos to his YouTube channel.

The first Porter film today is “The Deployment Game: Livin’ FOBulous,” a satirical presentation of Camp Taji, a forward operating base (FOB) north of Baghdad that boasts 29,000 square feet (count ‘em) of retail space, complete with comfort foods from back home (listed in order of appearance): Subway, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Seattle’s Best Coffee, Cinnabon, and Taco Bell.

Cut to a car salesman seated behind a laptop, discussing the price of a Mustang GT fully loaded with leathers, then to a segment about KBR–the corporation that announced 2007 revenues of $8.7 billion, down a hundred million dollars from 2006 because of “lower Iraq-related activities in the Government and Infrastructure business unit.” From a faucet in Iraq we watch a dingy yellow liquid fall into a sink and down a drain. If it’s not a picture of the clean water KBR is supposed to be providing, then it’s a perfect image of something.

“It’s going to take a lot of stuff to kind of fix this bruise that we put on the whole earth,” says a fully jacketed combat soldier in the Porter film Deconstructed. A hand-held camera follows soldiers through a home raid, lingers over a twig that a soldier uses to poke through human remains, records passing scenes of Iraqi life as viewed from a moving patrol vehicle, and occasionally shows a tender moment between an American GI and an Iraqi child. “Going out into these neighborhoods and really helping to reconstruct, we’re not you know,” says the GI. “I don’t see that happening. I don’t see a true reason for us being here.” The video has racked up 46,000 confirmed views.

A Woman in the War System

After “Deconstructed” comes an awkward pause, as if the fog of war leaked into the sanctuary upon images of IED dust. Greg Foster gets things back on track by introducing the first speaker of the second panel, Navy veteran Marie Combs. Although Combs has been featured at Winter Soldier events before, this is her first appearance since leaving the Navy two weeks ago. As a military translator, her experience begins at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where she learns how women in the military are treated to health care. At every visit to the doctor every woman is asked to take a pregnancy test. Apparently when it comes to women, pregnancy is the only “medical condition” that the system is prepared to see.

At a deployment base near Iraq, there is one woman physician, but she is frequently sent away on the medevac transport with women in labor. And wherever they are taken, stories come back that women are made to walk on days when they should qualify for transport, such as when they’ve just had a c-section or when they are visiting the hospital to nurse their infants. If war is something only real men do, then women soldiers also have war done to them, even though they wear the war’s uniform. Combs herself suffered from depression after the birth of her daughter, nor was it easy to find help for that.

“The more wars we start, the more countries we invade, it’s breaking all of us down,” warns Combs. She recalls a newscast where the war in Iraq was dubbed a “detour” that would soon be finished on our way back to a fresh start in Afghanistan. But how can we start this kind of thing again? “It’s hard to speak,” says Combs, “when nobody is listening. No one’s paying attention to war.” Now that Combs puts it that way, a kind of coherence emerges. Wherever terms of power are deployed by real men, the voice of peace counts precisely as the voice of a woman.

The Art of Peace

“I’d really like to speak about the strategies that I feel would really bring an end to this war quicker,” says Austin IVAW Chaplain Hart Viges, who has changed roles from moderator to panelist. “So I look to peace and try to find my definition of peace, and the best thing I can come up with (and I think there is influence from other sources) is that peace is conflict without violence. In this life that we live we cannot escape from conflict or the rubbing of parts or ideas. This is our life and it is the struggle. Buddha says that life is suffering, then so be it. So I go to war,” says Chaplain Viges, holding up a book. “Sun Tzu, The Art of War–this is a very important book that every peace activist should read and soak in. It may sound confusing, but really the same strategies that we apply to war can be applied to peace.”

Viges takes special interest in Sun Tzu’s advice that victory in war depends upon seizing something that the enemy holds dear. And so what do the makers of war need? They need people and money. But “if there’s no one to pull a trigger and if they don’t have any money to spend on a trigger they cannot make war.”

Strategy number one for the art of peace: deprive the warmakers of people. To do his part, Viges hangs out where young soldiers can be talked to. He also helps to staff a local GI Rights Hotline. Viges declares that there is no better satisfaction than taking calls from people with stress in their voices. They have been told they cannot say no to military service. When they are advised how to remove themselves from that matrix, Viges can hear their voices change from stress to relief. In hearing that change in voice, Viges gets the best feeling.

Viges also works with the local counter-recruitment group, Nonmilitary Options for Youth, where he takes credit for deterring ten young people from signing up for military service. “That’s a body count I can live with,” he smiles. Already, the local group has won a public complaint in the form of a newspaper quote from military recruiters. If local recruiters can feel the impact of a half-dozen organizers working on a shoestring, what would happen with a steady budget and expanded staff?

Strategy number two: take away the warmakers’ money. According to the current pie chart at WarResisters.Org more than half of our federal tax payments in 2008 will help to fund wars past and present. “And since I’ve been downrange,” says Viges, “I know what those dollars turn into. They turn into real bullets and real bombs that kill real people.” The Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act would allow citizens to opt out of war spending as a matter of conscience. During the last session of Congress, legendary peacemaker John Lewis (D-GA) was able to gather more than 40 co-sponsors for the bill. Watch for the bill to come up again this session, then “saturate them with communication.”

Keep Yourself Right

It takes Oklahoma farmer John Scripsick about seven seconds to draw cheering applause: “After listening to you talk about recruiting, I think it should be a law that a recruiter cannot go into a high school.” Dressed in plain clothing and ball cap, Scripsick tells the story of his son Bryan who joined the Marines right out of high school and served for three years and three weeks before being killed in Iraq.

“I often wonder if my son had lived if he would have joined your cause,” says Scripsick. “I was told that in a training exercise in California a higher up gave Bryan an order and Bryan just stood there. The higher up gets in Bryan’s face and asks him if he is going to obey his orders and Bryan just stood there and said, ‘No sir!’ The guy got louder and asked Bryan, you know, ‘Why aren’t you going to do that?’ And Bryan said, ‘Because. That’s. Stupid. Sir!’”

The week before Bryan left for Iraq, Scripsick told his son that although he was going to some dangerous places, if he kept himself right with the man upstairs, he would have nothing to be afraid of. “You who see wrong and speak out,” says Scripsick nodding to the Winter Soldiers, “you’re speaking the truth, and you don’t have anything to be afraid of.” As the audience rises for a standing ovation, Scripsick collects his notes from the podium.

We are not Dollar Signs

As Scripsick walks slowly away from the podium, past the first chair at the panel table, Bobby Whittenberg rises to give the Gold Star Father a big hug and a hearty slap on the back. Whittenberg is introduced as a new member of the IVAW with an impressive passion for the cause of peace. “Hey thanks a lot for being here everybody,” says Whittenberg leaning forward into the mic. Over his black t-shirt, Whittenberg wears a camouflage shirt filled with counter-insignia, sleeves rolled up past elbows. His cap, too, is decked with pins, and he looks out with intensity from behind a trim brown beard as he checks his watch for the starting time.

It was the way his John Wayne commander wanted his men to come swaggering into that Iraqi town that is to blame for Whittenberg getting shot with an AK-47 in some foreign war. “But what happened after that blew my mind even more,” he says. “I became a pariah.” Whittenberg found himself fighting for medical attention then fighting to get out. By the time he won his freedom, he was virtually bed sick and the Veteran’s Administration was explaining to him why he couldn’t get the latest drug to address his medical condition. As soon as he switched to a civilian doctor, his health improved within weeks.

“And the reason is this:” explains Whittenberg, “when you live in a hierarchical capitalist system, the little guy on the bottom, everyone, every one of you, is assessed not by your value as a human being, but by your market value. My market value was not very much at the Department of Defense and was not very much at the V.A. But we’re not dollar signs,” says Whittenberg pointing upward with his left hand. “We’re not weapons. We are not a means of spreading capitalism and greed around the world. We are human beings,” he declares. As Whittenberg says “human” he raises his right forearm to flash the tattoo that says “HUMAN” in bold, all-cap font, written from elbow to wrist.

Soon enough the sound system is quavering and popping as Whittenberg raises one arm and another in passionate declarations that, “Each one of us is born into this world in the same way. We live the same way. Breathe the same air. They can try to commodify food, they can try to commodify water, they can try to commodify health care, but they will never commodify our lives!” Whittenberg shouts into a commotion that drowns his voice, so he pauses. “Your power is not at the ballot box. Your power is in your voice. We need no representation. We can speak for ourselves. We are all equal.” As Whittenberg brings the hall to a crescendo, a man stands fist-up to echo his final refrain: “All power to the people!”

Gazing Upon the Future

“That’s Bobby,” deadpans Greg Foster, raising a swell of laughter as he prepares to introduce the last speaker on the program, Mike Corwin. “When I was talking to some local IVAW members about the program and they saw Mike’s name on the program they said, ‘Is that that one guy who’s smiling and always friendly?’ I said, yeah, that’s Mike, so here he is.”

Corwin has been a socialist a little too long to get qualified as a Winter Soldier, but if we think about the qualities that Doug Zachary says a Winter Soldier should have, then Corwin clearly counts as a steadfast activist against imperialist aggressions. A civilian for peace was the first panelist of the day; another civilian for peace will be the last.

“Why is it that we are spending trillions of dollars already on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and being told at the same time that the money is not there to bring badly needed relief to people here at home,” asks Corwin. He wants to frame an answer in the context of Obama America. On the one hand, Obama’s election seemed to signal a “total rejection of ideas popular for a generation.” On the other hand, as far as the interests of the “American corporate class” are concerned, the new administration offers “a great deal of continuity.”

In fact, says Corwin, “Obama’s goal is to salvage and rehabilitate U.S. military power for the ruling class.” Tactical decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan are still being governed by an overall strategic priority to prop up a permanent global reach for US empire, which means the withdrawal from Iraq is getting slower, the buildup in Afghanistan bigger, and the legacy of the endless war on terrorism clings to its spending priorities.

But there are “chimes of freedom flashing,” says Corwin with Dylan on his mind. Chicago workers occupied their workplace to win severance pay. Students at New School University occupied their cafeteria to gain influence in university leadership. And on college campuses across the country, students protested Israel’s attack on Gaza. At the University of Rochester, a student occupation drew concessions regarding institutional spending in the Middle East.

Corwin wins a passionate burst of applause as he takes his seat. After a round of Q&A, folks head outdoors into the wind for a spirited march through downtown Austin, chanting, “They’re our brothers, they’re our sisters! We support war resisters!” As marchers round the corner in front of the homeless shelter at 7th and Neches, they chant, “Money for Jobs, Not for War!” At Sixth Street the “Not for War” chant draws a heckler: “Ain’t gonna stop the war, get used to it!” But nobody misses a step.

At the sundown rally on West Cesar Chavez St., three generations of war resisters hold up an American flag, an IVAW banner, and the day’s Winter Soldier banner that Heidi Turpin made. Casey Porter’s mother greets the group with smiling support and appreciation from Casey’s extended family. And Arizona Winter Soldier Adam Kokesh punctuates the day with his ex-Marine conclusion that there is no such thing as a good war.

Tonight there will be fellowship in famous Austin fashion, and tomorrow up the road there will be a grand opening of the “Under the Hood” coffee shop for soldiers near Ft. Hood. But right now as the sun glows into the evening wind, pretty much what you hear are the birds gathering in the Live Oak trees, chattering insistently about their Saturday. Yes of course it is–no it must be–a conference of the birds preparing themselves to see in the Colorado water below everything they’re looking for when nothing but the ultimate answer will suffice. Perhaps there are no more than thirty left at the rally after all, but why should any more be needed to set the universe right side up?

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He is a regular contibutor to The Rag Blog. This article was also posted at Dissident Voice.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Anti-War GIs, Anti-War Vets, Iraq Occupation, Iraq Veterans, IVAW, Peace Movement, VVAW, Winter Soldiers | Leave a comment

Power Struggle : Shining a Light on the Salvadoran Elections

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

On March 13, 2009, a pedestrian in San Salvador walks past a mural supporting the FMLN in the upcoming elections . Photo by Daniel Leclair / Reuters.
Live from El Salvador:

We see the electric cable hacked apart and lying on the sidewalk… A delegate asks the driver if the electric company is near. ‘Oh, they are here,’ he says. ‘Great!’ she responds, ‘they can fix the power.’ The driver responds, ‘They are the ones who cut the power line.’

By Al / The Rag Blog / March 14, 2009

[The following is the second of a series of dispatches from a regular Rag Blog contributor who is writing under a pseudonym due to the sensitivity of the situation in El Salvador.]

I am part of a huge presence of international observers in El Salvador, preparing for the Sunday, March 15th election here in which the FMLN and ruling ARENA party are the two contenders. There are 4,000 of us here, from the OAS, EU; there are diplomats and representatives from 30 countries.

Imagine an election with a change candidate and a corrupt party in power for twenty years, presiding over an economy that widens the gap between rich and poor, concentrates wealth, starves public services until they break and then uses that opportunity to privatize those services. Two days before an historic election, International Observers are invited to a reception by the opposition party. A similar reception is given by the party in power. The Vice Presidential candidate is present as are many other elected officials and there are hundreds of observers. After food and drinks, there are speeches. Then the power goes off.

Sabotage say those who know. As my delegation goes off to its tour bus, we see the electric cable hacked apart and lying on the sidewalk. When we get into our bus, a delegate asks the driver if the electric company is near. “Oh, they are here,” he says. “Great!” she responds, “they can fix the power.” The driver responds, “They are the ones who cut the power line.” They work for the privatized electric company in San Salvador with U.S. owners, fearful of any change in government. This is the climate here. Highly charged. A climate of fear.

On the other hand, it has been gratifying to see that public pressure has been mounted. The State Department issued a statement of neutrality. Even the Embassy here has echoed these words. Today, we hope that Hillary Clinton will speak out as well. Some of this has been picked up in the press here and it has dampened the words of a small gaggle of right wing Republicans who have likened the presidential candidate Mauricio Funes to a demonic Hugo Chavez, eager to spread red flags across Latin America. More later. We’re leaving to see our polling stations.

[See Al’s March 13 post on the same subject: El Salvador : U.S. Republicans Meddling in Historic Election]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged El Salvador, Free Elections, Latin America | 1 Comment

Ritter: Obama Needs to Learn the Truth About Iran

Posted on March 14, 2009 by RagBlog

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, doing his best impersonation of a Bond villain, tours a Russian facility last summer that produces advanced surface-to-air missiles. AP pool photo / Aleksey Nikolskyi.
A Lesson in International Gamesmanship: Barack Obama, Meet Team B
By Scott Ritter / March 13, 2009

President Obama received a lesson in international gamesmanship last week, when his secret offer to trade the deployment of a controversial missile defense system in Eastern Europe for Russian assistance in getting Iran to back down from its nuclear program was publicly rebuffed. The lesson? You don’t get something for nothing, especially when the something you’re looking for is, itself, nothing.

If the members of the Obama administration would bother to take a stroll down memory lane, they might recall that once upon a time there was a document called the anti-ballistic missile treaty, signed in 1972 between the United States and the former Soviet Union, which recognized that anti-missile defense shields were inherently destabilizing, and as such should not be deployed. The ABM treaty represented the foundational agreement for a series of strategic arms limitation and arms reduction agreements that followed. President Obama was 10 years old when that treaty was signed. He was 40 years old when President George W. Bush withdrew from it, in December 2001, and set in motion a series of events that saw arms control between the U.S. and Russia completely unravel. The proposed U.S. missile defense shield, to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic, had the Russians talking about scrapping the INF treaty (which eliminated two classes of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that threatened Europe) and deploying highly accurate SS-21 “Iskander” missiles within striking range of the proposed Polish interceptor site.

Russia did not create the missile defense system crisis. The United States did, and, as such, cannot expect to suddenly receive diplomatic credit when it puts this controversial program on the foreign policy gaming table as if it were a legitimate chip to be bargained away.

Russia has always, correctly, claimed that any missile defense system deployed in Eastern Europe can only be directed at Russia. While both the Bush and Obama administrations denied that was the case, Poland has all but admitted its concerns are not about missiles coming from Tehran, but rather missiles coming from Moscow. The American “sweetener” for a potential Polish loss of a missile shield is to offer Poland advanced Patriot surface-to-air missiles, whose intended target is clearly not a Persian missile which cannot reach Polish soil, but rather Russian missiles and aircraft which can.

There are three basic facts that the Obama administration needs to address, but as of yet has not: First, missile defense systems are inherently destabilizing and only contribute to the acquisition of offensive counters designed to defeat those defenses. Second, the rapid expansion of NATO in the past decade has in fact threatened Russia. And third, the Iranian missile “threat” to Europe has always been illusory.

The proposed U.S. missile defense shield in Eastern Europe has been a highly flawed concept from its very inception. Although it used unproven technology, it was sold as a means of protecting Europe from a threat that did not exist (Iranian missiles), while creating the conditions for exposing Europe to a real threat that the missile defense shield was incapable of defeating (Russian missiles). The fact that Obama would put the missile defense shield up for trade as part of a “Grand Bargain” with Russia on Iran only underscores how little value the system has to begin with. It is a big zero, both from a military and diplomacy perspective. Obama, in making it part of his bargain, was trying to give it value it lacked, and the Russians weren’t buying.

The Iranian situation is far too real, but not in terms of the dangers posed by anything Iran itself is doing. The United States has not helped matters by hyping the threat posed by nonexistent Iranian missiles targeting Europe and capable of carrying nonexistent nuclear warheads. Russia has expressed a desire to work with the United States to better control Iran’s program of uranium enrichment, which Iran and the nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), state has been clearly demonstrated as part of a peaceful nuclear energy program. For Russia to buy into Obama’s “deal,” it would have to buy into a threat from Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, a threat Russia does not believe to exist.

Obama would do well to call in his national security team and have it lay out the intelligence information used to assert the Iranian threat. There must be such a foundational document, since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen and the president himself all have repeatedly referred to the “threat” posed by Iran’s “nuclear weapons” ambitions. It is important to distinguish between what we know and what we think we know. For instance, we know that Iran does not have any highly enriched uranium, the kind needed to produce a nuclear weapon. Just ask Adm. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence. This is what he told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee this week in testimony on Iran. And yet many in the U.S. intelligence community continue to state unequivocally that Iran is on the verge of possessing a nuclear weapon.

Obama should take each assertion put forward about Iran’s nuclear ambition and then reverse-engineer the underlying factual basis for making that assertion. If he did so, he would quickly find that he and his advisers know less about Iran than they think they do. The entire U.S. case against Iran is built on supposition and speculation. If the president disassembled the speculative assertions, he would find them cobbled together from an ideologically motivated methodology designed more to justify a policy of containing and undermining Iran’s theocracy than understanding its nuclear ambitions.

Obama ought to reacquaint himself with the 1972 ABM treaty and the case of the CIA versus “Team B.” This chapter of America’s failed arms control policy unfolded from 1975-1976, during the administration of Gerald Ford. Once upon a time, there was a Soviet Union, and a Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. In an effort to prevent the Cold War from becoming a “hot war,” the two powers launched arms control initiatives, packaged as part of a larger East-West détente, to better manage the escalation of an arms race derived from Cold War tensions. It was critical in this effort to have an accurate understanding of not only the physical reality of Soviet strategic weapons programs, but also their intent. The CIA produced a report that addressed these issues, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11-3/8-74, “Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict Through 1985.”

The benign picture painted by the CIA’s estimate of Soviet strategic capability clashed with ideologues in and out of government who were pushing for U.S. defense programs that could not be justified if the CIA’s estimates were allowed to stand. Rather than confront the facts of the CIA’s estimates, these ideologues instead assaulted the methodology used to determine them. Political pressure was brought to bear on President Ford by conservative opponents of détente to prepare a “Team B” of analysts (outside ideologues) who would challenge the conclusions put forward in the CIA estimate by “Team A” (the CIA’s own staff). “Team B” didn’t produce better facts (indeed, every one of its assertions was proved to be wrong), but it did produce better fear. Its claims about Soviet intentions and capabilities, highly inflated and inaccurate, were political dynamite that could not be ignored, especially in the politically charged presidential election year of 1976. “Team B” won out over “Team A,” and the foundation was set for not only the dismantling of U.S.-Soviet détente, but also for the biggest arms race in modern history, culminating in the destruction of the very agreements designed to constrain such an escalation.

Obama should acquaint himself with the story of “Team B,” because “Team B” exists today, propagating myths about an Iranian “threat” that are analogous to those employed by the team that sold the fable of the Soviet “threat.” The new president was critical of the Iraq war, and the sad tale of misinformation and deception that has since been repackaged as an “intelligence failure.” There was no “failure” because there was no “intelligence.” “Team B” doesn’t produce intelligence, but rather ideological assertions used as justification for policy. The same “Team B”-based methodologies which gave us the Iraq assertions about WMD programs are in play today in the Iran “intelligence” used by President Obama and his national security team.

Obama might be surprised that one of the programs being sold by “Team B” in its assault on truth was a missile defense shield to counter the team’s perception of a Soviet missile threat. The falsehoods and fabrications sold by “Team B” back in the 1970s set America on the path toward the withdrawal from the ABM treaty in 2001, and the proposed deployment of the very missile defense shield Obama is trying to bargain away to get Russia to help confront an Iranian “threat” manufactured by none other than “Team B.”

Secretary of State Clinton impressed many when she spoke of the need for America to embrace “smart power.” The implication of her words was that the United States, under President Obama, would use all the tools available, especially diplomacy, in seeking to solve the myriad problems it faces around the world in the post-Bush era, including the problem of Iran. But one cannot begin to solve a problem unless one first accurately defines the problem, for without that definition the “solution” would in fact solve nothing. Any solution to the problem of Iran must be derived from an accurate intelligence picture of what is transpiring inside the country today, one drawn more from fact than ideologically based fiction. Obama is advised to challenge the totality of the current U.S. intelligence used to define Iran as a threat, and purge once and for all the corrupting ideological “Team B” holdovers who still reside within the structure of the American intelligence community. Intelligence is never about hearing what you want to hear, but rather about learning what you need to know.

Obama needs to learn the truth about Iran, and about the proposed missile defense system in Europe. This truth would be inconvenient, but it would also liberate him to develop meaningful solutions to serious problems in a manner that avoids a repeat of his embarrassing “Grand Bargain” gambit with Russia, trying to trade nothing for nothing in an effort to certify something for nothing. There are a lot of “zero sums” in that equation, which pretty much sums up Obama’s Iran and Russia policies to date.

[Scott Ritter is a former intelligence and arms control official who served as an inspector in the former Soviet Union (1988-1990) and Iraq (1991-1998). He is the author of “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2007) and the forthcoming “On Dangerous Ground: Following the Path of America’s Failed Arms Control Policy” (Nation Books).]

Source / TruthDig

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Obama Administration, Russia, U.S. Foreign Policy | Leave a comment

Richard L. Scott: Healthcare Enemy Number One

Posted on March 14, 2009 by RagBlog

See also Dr. Stephen R. Keister’s remarks below about Richard L. Scott. All of this is rather enlightening to say the least.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Former Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. co-founder Richard Scott is now chairman of Solantic, a local walk-in medical care clinic company. Photo: Susen St. Peter.
Healthcare Enemy No. 1
By Christopher Hayes / March 11, 2009

Rush Limbaugh offers Democrats an irresistible target as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, but for my money, Rick Scott is the man who best embodies the spirit of the current conservative opposition. The name may not exactly be a household word, or it may ring a faint bell, but Politico recently reported that the millionaire Republican would be heading up Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR), a new group that plans to spend around $20 million to kill President Obama’s efforts at healthcare reform.

Having Scott lead the charge against healthcare reform is like tapping Bernie Madoff to campaign against tighter securities regulation. You see, the for-profit hospital chain Scott helped found–the one he ran and built his entire reputation on–was discovered to be in the habit of defrauding the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is the man who will be delivering what Politico called the “pro-free-market message.”

A Texas lawyer who shared a business partner with George W. Bush, Scott started his health company, Columbia Hospital Corporation, in 1987. Its growth was meteoric, expanding from just a few hospitals to more than 1,000 facilities in thirty-eight states and three other countries in 1997. As his firm gobbled up chains, like the Frist family’s Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), it became the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country. By 1994, Columbia/HCA was one of the forty largest corporations in America, and Scott had acquired a reputation as the Gordon Gecko of the healthcare world. “Whose patients are you stealing?” he would ask employees at his newly acquired hospitals.

He promised to put nonprofit hospitals–which he insisted on referring to as “nontaxpaying” hospitals–out of business and touted his company’s single-minded pursuit of profit as a model for the nation’s entire healthcare system. “What’s happening in Washington is not healthcare reform,” he told the New York Times in 1994. “Healthcare reform is happening in the marketplace.”

The press portrayed Scott as a guru to be admired and feared, “a private capitalist dictator,” in the words of one Princeton health economist. “Probably the lowest body fat of anybody I’ve been in business with,” his partner told the Times.

“Other hospitals were intimidated,” recalls John Schilling, who worked for Columbia/HCA in the 1990s. Scott was “like the bully that would come into town and if you didn’t sell to him or partner with him, he would open up shop across the street from you and put you out of business.”

Not long after joining the company in 1993 as the supervisor of reimbursement for the Fort Myers, Florida, office, Schilling noticed things weren’t quite kosher. “They were looking for ways to maximize reimbursement…which ultimately would improve the bottom line.”

One way they did this was to fudge the costs on their Medicare expense reports. They were “basically keeping two sets of books,” says Schilling. The company would maintain an internal expense report, what it called a “reserve” report, which accurately tallied its expenses. “And then they would have a second report, which…they would file with the government, which was more aggressive.” That report would “include inflated costs and expenses they knew weren’t allowable or reimbursable. The one they filed with government might claim $5 million and the reserve would claim $4.5.” Columbia/HCA would pocket the difference.

It wasn’t just happening in Florida, and it wasn’t just fraudulent Medicare expense reports. Around the country, dozens of whistle-blowers like Schilling stepped forward to file lawsuits under the False Claims Act, charging the company with sundry forms of chicanery: kickbacks to doctors in exchange for referrals, illegal deals with homecare agencies and filing false data about the use of hospital space.

By 1997 the FBI was investigating Columbia/HCA. Days after agents raided company facilities armed with search warrants, Scott was forced to resign. In 2000 the company pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to pay the government $840 million. Other civil settlements would follow, ultimately totaling a staggering $1.7 billion, making it the largest fraud case in American history.

(Scott was never criminally charged and continues to deny wrongdoing. His spokesperson did not respond to repeated interview requests.)

But in Washington there’s no such thing as permanent disgrace, and as the healthcare debate heats up, Scott has established himself as a go-to source for reporters looking to hear from the opposition. He’s been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He’s been on Fox, of course, railing against President Obama’s efforts to control healthcare costs. He appeared on CNN, where (as Media Matters noted) host Jessica Yellin never saw fit to notify viewers that the man she introduced as running “a media campaign to limit government’s role in the healthcare system” once ran a company that profited mightily from ripping off that government.

Indeed, if there’s one thing that’s most galling about Scott’s antigovernment jihad–and most emblematic–it’s that for all his John Galt bluster, he made his fortune (which, yes, he still has) in no small part thanks to steady contract fees from the Great Society’s entitlement programs.

Congressman Pete Stark, a veteran of the last bruising round of fighting over healthcare reform, remembers Scott all too well. Stark recently sent his colleagues a letter hoping to refresh their memories. Calling Scott a “swindler,” the letter said, “If he is the conservative spokesperson against healthcare reform, there is no debate.”

Source / The Nation

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

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