Are There Real Differences Between Democrats and Republicans?

Posted on July 26, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Oh, hell yes!’
By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / July 26, 2008

Steve Russell is a former Austin activist and staff writer for the sixties underground newspaper The Rag. He has worked as a lawyer, an elected judge in Travis County (Austin), a writer and a professor. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Steve is a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog.

Is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans? Oh, hell yes!

Before I get started, I must recognize that the backbone of the Ragblog is a group of people who have known me very well for a long time—for several, that includes in the Biblical sense—so they know I held office as a Democrat. While I was, since before I held office, a sustaining supporter of the Travis County Democratic Party, I never voted a straight ticket in my life until the last elections, when the Iraq war pushed me to that extreme. When I had a choice, before Iraq took that choice away, I have at times voted Libertarian, Raza Unida, Socialist Workers, and, yes, even Republican.

Lately, though, there have been plenty of classic struggles at the federal level where party has made a difference.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bush appointee Christopher Cox requested “emergency powers” to protect the stock of the privatized mortgage brokers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Shortly thereafter, he was informed that rule was already in effect to ban the practice that had him exercised, so-called “naked shorts” —short selling stock you do not own or have not made arrangements to borrow for the purpose. When Republicans took over the SEC, the rule became politically moribund. Another rule, the “uptick rule” — requiring that short-selling be preceded by a rise in stock price — was flatly repealed. The purpose is to keep big players from hammering a stock down for their own profit.

In anticipation of retirement, I have taken up some stock trading, but I do not sell short. It amounts to betting on someone else’s misery—entrepreneurs, workers, small stock holders—which offends me as much as insurance policies, which involve betting on my own misery. However, I understand that short selling serves a function in the market, just as insurance does. That I do not choose to participate is idiosyncratic.

When informed that he had the power, did Christopher decide to enforce the law? Well, not exactly. He announced that the naked short rule would henceforth be enforced in the case of stock in Fannie and Freddie as well as an announced list of behemoth investment banks. Not in the case of all stocks, or even all banks!

Who does the non-enforcement of short-selling rules benefit? Hedge funds, minimum price of buying in, $25,000 for a small one. If you are not worth a million dollars, hedge fund managers will not give you the time of day. They control enough investing power to create a downward spiral for a stock and then short into it, reaping millions while the average working stiff’s mutual fund takes the hit.

Need I add that the Republicans wanted to shift the Social Security program into the stock market? Where we would allegedly have more control over our own retirement funds. At the same time, the same folks were making it easier for the big players to manipulate the stock market to the disadvantage of small players.

The Housing Bill. As I was driving home this evening, I heard on the news that Senate Republicans were infuriated that they had staked out positions against the Democratic-tinged bill that passed the House, only to have Bush withdraw his veto threat and cut their legs off.

The swill these people signed on to sell is that the United States can afford to bail out Fannie and Freddie but not to undertake the rescue of individuals who have been sucked into subprime mortgages. That is not an easy sell.

The new GI Bill, which ought to be named the Jim Webb GI Bill, after the man who did the heavy lifting. The rightwing take on this bill was that it would make military service too unattractive by allowing soldiers to go to college after only one hitch. (Full disclosure: the GI Bill allowed me to go to college after only one hitch.) John McCain opposed Webb’s bill so strongly that he introduced an “alternative” with fewer benefits.

When the bill passed both houses with veto-proof majorities, Bush credited McCain, who had not bothered to vote on final passage after failing to stop it!

Energy Policy. You might have heard that the government subsidies for solar and wind power have not been reenacted because of “partisan bickering.” This is so. It goes as follows.

The Republicans favor renewable energy subsidies but as a price for their votes demand that current favorable treatments for oil and gas exploration be continued.

The Democrats claim that is both economically and environmentally irresponsible. We don’t get off the oil teat by subsidizing oil exploration. All these battles could be dismissed as “partisan bickering,” but in each case one party seems to be on the side of ordinary folks. Current events look like FDR v. Herbert Hoover.

There is no revolutionary electoral party. Revolution is not the purpose of voting, as I explained to my friends when I determined to run for office back in 1976. The fights the Democrats are in right now are fights worth having. There’s a right side and a wrong side. I’m voting for the right side, which in this case is the left side.

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BushCo : Remember Them When You Lose Your Home

Posted on July 26, 2008 by RagBlog


Full Court Press: Charles Kaiser on the Bush administration’s role in the subprime mortgage crisis
By Charles Kaiser / July 25, 2008

One of the most ignored aspects of the subprime mortgage catastrophe is the extremely active role the Bush administration played in creating it.

Last February, I pointed out an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that was written by then New York governor Eliot Spitzer, just before those unseemly events at the Mayflower Hotel dislodged him from office.

Spitzer revealed that not only did the Bush administration do nothing to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis, it actually “embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.” When predatory lending practices became so prevalent five years ago that attorneys general in all 50 states started to take action against the banks responsible for the crisis, for the first time in its history Bush used the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as a tool against consumers.

Some diligent lawyer in the administration dug up a clause from an 1863 banking act that gave the OCC the power to preempt all state predatory lending laws: “The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government’s actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules. But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks.”

This is an amazing example of federal intervention on behalf of the pure greed of America’s banks. And as far as I can tell, it has received virtually no coverage by the leading national newspapers or any television network.

This week, the Wall Street Journal did report on a smaller example of the federal government’s active role in creating the crisis. Mark Maremont wrote that after the Federal Deposit Insurance Company seized the assets of Superior Bank FSB, then a national subprime lender based in Hinsdale, Illinois, the FDIC “continued to run the bank’s subprime mortgage business for months as it looked for a buyer. With FDIC people supervising day-to-day operations, Superior funded more than 6,700 new subprime loans worth more than $550 million, according to federal mortgage data.”

“The FDIC then sold a big chunk of the loans to another bank. That loan pool was afflicted by the same problems for which regulators have faulted the industry: lending to unqualified borrowers, inflated appraisals, and poor verification of borrowers’ incomes, according to a written report from a government-hired expert. The report said that many of the loans never should have been made in the first place.”

In another fine story this week, titled “Unraveling Reagan,” the Journal reported on the only good effect of this scandal: a long overdue resurgence of government regulation of the financial sector.

Written by Bob Davis, Damian Paletta, and Rebecca Smith, the story described “a new wave of government regulation of business and the economy.”

“Federal and state governments alike are increasingly hands-on in their effort to deal with failing businesses, plunging house prices, worthless mortgages, and soaring energy prices. The steps add up to a major challenge to the movement toward deregulation that has defined American governance for much of the past quarter-century since the ‘Reagan Revolution’ of the early 1980s. In fact, some proponents today of a bigger oversight role for government are Republican heirs to the legacy of President Reagan.”

The housing and financial crisis may be finishing off the Reagan Revolution, the movement of smaller government and lighter regulation that has defined governance for the past 25 years. On Thursday, the government’s role in policing the financial markets took center stage at a House Financial Services Committee hearing.

“There’s a backlash against the laissez-faire, ‘isn’t it wonderful how creative markets are’ viewpoint,” says former Fed vice chairman Alan Blinder, a Democrat. “Markets are creative, but sometimes the creativity leads to strange and dangerous directions.”

What this scandal really proves is that the intellectual bankruptcy of the neocons reflected by the invasion of Iraq has a perfect mirror image in their obsession with deregulation of the economy. If a new Democratic president is elected with enhanced majorities in the House and Senate, he will have the opportunity to emulate everything Franklin Roosevelt did in the ’30s in response to the last great American binge of greed—the one that led to the crash of 1929.

Source / Radar Online

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No One Is Willing to Join the Brigade to Take Preventive Action

Posted on July 26, 2008 by RagBlog


We’re a Nation of Lemmings: Screw The Climate! We Want Our Cheap Gas!
By Dave Lindorff / July 25, 2008

Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day, and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.

Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse about the ongoing destruction of the world’s remaining wetlands (60 percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants, factories and automobiles.

There are also credible, well-researched reports that even a few more degrees of temperature rise in the arctic regions of Siberia and northern North America will melt the permafrost and release as much 400 gigatons of methane gas trapped in frozen clathrates for millennia — the release of which would cause global temperatures to soar to levels not seen in 250 million years (methane is 20 times as potent a global warming gas as CO2). Vast regions of Siberia are already bubbling with releasing methane as the permafrost line moves north.

Now I grant that our corporate media, ever focused laser-like on important stories like Britney Spears’ return to the stage and on the latest gaffe of one or the other presidential candidate, have not been very interested in alerting the masses to these disasters now in progress that could end humanity’s run on the planet (along with exterminating most of the rest of the life on the planet too). But that said, at this point everyone has surely heard enough, and witnessed enough in person of the dramatic changes taking place in the earth’s climate, to know that something scary is going on.

And yet, people are not just going about their business as usual — they are actually, for the most part, complaining not about the lack of highly energy-efficient transportation, the lack of alternative and less energy-wasting public transit, and the lack of government funding for a crash program into researching carbon-free energy solutions, but rather about the high price for carbon fuels. People are clamoring for solutions to make gasoline cheaper!

Years ago, back in the 1970s during an Arab-led oil embargo, when gas prices soared, there were mass campaigns to organize car pools. No such campaigns are being organized today, and if any are they don’t get any media attention. Instead we read that geologists are saying that massive quantities of untapped oil reserves exist in the far north.

Now the last thing we should be wanting to do is take that nicely sequestered carbon out of the ground and burn it into CO2! But that’s what many Americans want done. Screw the climate! We want our cheap gas!

There are so many things we could be doing right now to reduce carbon emissions — as individuals and as a nation. Turning off air-conditioners would be one. Why should entire houses be cooled by central air? Cool one room and use it for the hottest part of the day if need be. Live downstairs during the hottest months and close off the upstairs when it gets too hot. Ditto in the winter. There’s no need to occupy and heat an entire house when it gets really cold. Most Americans’ homes are way too large anyhow, but if you need that much room, use it when it doesn’t require all that extra energy to heat and cool. (When I lived in Cambridge, England as a kid, we used to sleep in unheated bedrooms under cozy comforters, and then in the morning, I’d go down and light a fire in the living room where we’d be during the day. It would be cold as hell until the fire started, but not for long.) Share rides. Plan errands so that many things get taken care of on one outing, instead of in multiple run-outs. Use bicycles. I have yet to see, on my own bike rides in down or when driving anywhere, someone who is actually riding a bike on some errand-carrying a load in a basket or in a backpack. The only bikers I see are people dressed like Tour de France racers out for some exercise. What’s the matter with using bikes for a purpose, instead of the family car?

I’m not trying to criticize, or to say I’m more ecologically virtuous. I’m looking at this as an unprecedented disaster that is dooming my kids, or their future children, to a life of strife, misery and maybe even catastrophe. If I don’t take serious action — and I don’t just mean individual life changes, but political action — to try and save their world, I am guilty of a serious crime. And so are we all.

What the hell happened to any sense of shared responsibility, not just for society, but for our own offspring?

Most decent parents are ready to sacrifice in their lifestyles in order to send their kids to college, or to help them out financially when they are starting out as young adults. But for some strange reason nobody seems ready to sacrifice at all when it comes to rescuing their collective future. This makes no sense.

And yet, this is what our mass culture has done to us. As a nation, as a people, we cannot think beyond our own noses. We cannot even think about the need to act in our own and our children’s interest.

Seventeen years ago, I had occasion while living in Shanghai, China, to visit a rural area in Anhui Province that the year before had been devastated by a flood so huge that the entire region had been not just flooded, but put deep underwater. As I neared a county seat town that was my intended destination, the bus I was on passed a dike-building project. Thousands of peasants were laboring by hand, with shovels and wheelbarrows, to erect a 50-foot wall of earth to keep the river in its banks in the event of another such flood. I got off the bus and, with my travel companion, started walking towards the project. When we were spotted, thousands of those workers dropped their shovels and ran towards us. It was a terrifying moment to have so many people heading towards and surrounding us, but they were very friendly — just curious because none of them had ever met a westerner. We began talking with them, and learned that they were all peasants who had left their fields to build this colossal new Great Wall of dirt. They brought us to the worksite and showed us how they would bring their wheelbarrows to the base of the dike, and then attach a cable, which was connected to a winch operated by those ubiquitous one-cylinder, two-stroke kerosene tractors used across rural China. The winch would whip the barrow up the steep hillside, with a peasant running up behind keeping it upright. At the last minute, the peasant would flip the barrow, dumping the dirt and releasing the hook. Then he’d be off down the hill to collect more dirt.

What struck me, besides their ingenuity, was how all these thousands of people had left their own fields to labor for the collective good that year.

I tried at the time to contemplate my fellow Americans doing the same thing, and couldn’t for the life of me imagine it.

Now we’re in that moment. We know the flood is coming, but no one is willing to join the brigade to take preventive action.

No. Buying a Prius is not taking action. Neither is upgrading the insulation on your house or buying carbon offsets when you fly. We need, as a nation, to commit to seriously ending our addiction to fossil fuels, to rapacious development and the concomitant destruction of forests and wetlands. We need to end our nation’s imperialist policies and to instead devote the trillion dollars a year spent on war to saving the planet from ourselves.

A good start would be seeing that people “get it.” That would mean communities starting to organize around improving mass transit, arranging for carpooling, and demanding climate-saving action from our political leaders.

I’m not optimistic.

[Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/. ]

Source /

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David Zeiger : Did the GI Movement End the Vietnam War?

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Updated July 26, 2008

G.I. dissenters in David Zeiger’s documentary “Sir! No Sir!”. Photo courtesy of Displaced Fillms.

And What is the real legacy of the GI Coffeehouses?
By David Zeiger / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2008

David Zeiger is an award-winning film producer and director whose highly–acclaimed film Sir! No Sir! documented the little-known GI resistance to the Vietnam War. He was a staff member at the Oleo Strut, a GI coffee house in Killeen, Texas near Ft. Hood that was a major center of anti-war activities from 1968 to 1972.

Zeiger, also a writer and an activist, produces and directs documentary films through his company, Displaced Films.

This article joins a Rag Blog discussion of the history of the GI anti-war movement with articles by Tom Cleaver on the history of the Oleo Strut coffee house and on the founding of a new GI coffee house in Killeen called Under the Hood. Please see Under The Hood : An Anti-War GI Coffeehouse in Texas.

Over the past three years, there has been a significant and heartening growth of opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations among active duty soldiers, and several organizations have been doing tremendous work with soldiers and veterans. From the groups and individuals supporting soldiers who have refused deployment and been court-martialed, to the work of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, the Military Project and Different Drummer Café, serious and determined work is being done to turn the deepening disaffection and anger with the occupations inside the military into a real political movement and force (and I apologize now to everyone who I left out).

It is a source of great joy for me, in that context, to see the story of the GI Movement against the Vietnam War playing a significant role in inspiring and helping shape that burgeoning movement. The reissuing of David Cortright’s Soldiers in Revolt, along with important books published in the 90s (please see the list at the end of this article), brought to life what had been deeply buried for two decades and made it possible for a film like Sir! No Sir! to be made, and for this new movement to be born.

The GI Movement of the 60s is loaded with lessons for today. But those lessons have to be seen realistically to really be truly learned, and that puts a tremendous responsibility in the hands of those of us who were part of that movement. Memory can be a tricky thing, and it is no more helpful to exaggerate the events of that time than it is to deny them. Mythologizing or inaccurately portraying the GI Movement can, in my mind, do far more harm than good as people struggle to find ways to build a new movement in the military today. But a real understanding of its ups and downs, victories and defeats, and most importantly the tremendous struggle it involved on every level can be a powerful resource.

So I was very interested to read about the effort to open a new GI Coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, outside of Fort Hood. The coffeehouse movement has, since the invasion of Iraq, been one of the few “forms” of organization from the 60s that seem to me to make a lot of sense today. But as I read Tom Cleaver’s depiction of the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse and its relevance for today, I found myself growing increasingly concerned that real understanding may be being replaced by nostalgia (and I speak from experience, as I am always fighting my own nostalgia while looking at the past). And beyond that, Tom’s interpretation of the GI Movement in the 60s raised many issues that I want to discuss here, in the spirit of making history serve the present.

Let me emphatically state first that I am not an organizer, but a filmmaker, and I do not pretend to know what the “right thing to do” is today. Nor do I intend to criticize or direct anyone. I don’t even consider myself an “expert” on the GI Movement. But I do hope that my two years working at the Oleo Strut, and the work that I and others have done to tell the GI Movement story today can be helpful. For the record, I am not a veteran. I went to Killeen in June of 1970 as a 20-year-old drop-out– and scared to death, I might add.

Now to the issues. The biggest for me is Tom’s statement that “GIs stopped the war in Vietnam and they can stop the war in Iraq.” This has become a pretty popular view nowadays among many people, and while it may sound ironic coming from me, I find it to be misleading and potentially very harmful. It takes what is true, the fact that the GI Movement cut at the heart of the war, and uses it as a kind of club over everyone else. But most significantly, it rips the GI Movement out of the political and social context that gave birth to it and nurtured its growth.

Put simply, GIs did not stop the war in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was ended by a combination of forces–first and foremost the Vietnamese people, whose struggle for self-determination became an inspiration for millions around the world. And beyond that the antiwar, counterculture Black liberation and revolutionary movements were all key to creating the context for soldiers in their thousands to revolt and certainly play a major role in bringing the war to a grinding halt. It can even be described as the straw that broke the camel’s back–but that wouldn’t have happened without all those other straws!

Look at Tom’s main example from the summer of ‘68–the urban rebellions and demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and the GI’s response to being ordered into riot control duty (“First we fought the Vietnamese, now they want us to fight Americans,” as Dave Cline said). There’s clearly a cause and effect here. If Black people were not rebelling in the cities, and if students and radicals weren’t planning to demonstrate at the Democratic convention, there would have been no riot control in the military, and it wouldn’t have been such a powerful impetus for rebellion that it was.

(In that light I want to correct a significant inaccuracy in Tom’s description of the Fort Hood 43, the Black GIs who resisted deployment to the Chicago convention. Tom describes them as a highly organized group, who had chosen which soldiers would refuse to go based on their service in Vietnam. That isn’t what happened. As vividly described in Sir! No Sir! by Elder Halim Gullabehmi, one of the participants, several hundred soldiers met all night in an open field to protest their deployment and discuss their grievances and make plans. No decision had been made. In the morning, when 43 were still in the field waiting for a response from the base Commanding General, they were ambushed by MPs, beaten, and thrown in the stockade. Many, including Elder Halim, were later sent to Vietnam as further punishment).

What gave the GI Movement so much power was its deep connection to the broader movement it was part of. That movement wasn’t just students resisting the draft to keep from going to Vietnam themselves (another popular myth, in my view). It was the Black Panther Party; it was Vietnam Veterans Against the War; it was national organizations that were constantly expanding the scope of protest against the war; it was students who were shutting their campuses down to force companies like Dow Chemical off campus and end university complicity with the war; it was all those things and more. In 1971, the same time Colonel Heinl wrote his famous article that Tom quotes, Washington was wracked with a myriad of demonstrations, including the May Day attempt by over 10,000 people to shut the city down (which Nixon specifically cited as a reason to “get the troops out as quickly as possible.”).

I’m not saying this to nit-pic, or to in any way lessen or denigrate the impact of the GI Movement. Yes, the GI Movement had become a force in the military that seriously challenged its authority and ability to fight; and yes, thousands of GIs were actively organizing and demonstrating, but that can’t be ripped out of the context it grew in and declared to be the sole force that ended the war. Doing so, it seems to me, could lead to a distorted view of the situation today and very unrealistic expectations. It certainly doesn’t help point the road forward.

Part of the importance of understanding the context for the GI Movement is recognizing that it faced tremendous repression. The whole nature of the military is based on isolation from the world outside, and the more that world intruded, the more they fought back. The coffeehouses were an essential link between soldiers who faced tremendous repercussions for their actions and the broader movement in society. That link was political, and just as importantly cultural, and without it much of what flourished would have been quickly crushed.

And that raises my questions about the differences between then and now. In 1968, the Oleo Strut was for the most part the only way that GIs could be in contact with that movement (although even the local porn shop carried The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice). Most GIs didn’t have cars then, and at night and on weekends the only place you could go was the downtown strip since bus service ended there. Life was very constricted. The Strut was literally a haven, one you couldn’t find anywhere else, and a place to listen to music and read literature that was only available there. Especially in the early years, that made up a lot of what sustained it.

It’s a different situation today, is it not? Mobility and communication are worlds apart from 1968. While we were filming IVAW in their efforts to bring Winter Soldier to the soldiers at Fort Hood this year, much of their outreach was done at bars in Austin–60 miles away! There isn’t the kind of central place today that GIs are locked into, making something like the Strut unique. That seems to me to be a significant change.

One reason this is important is that the coffeehouses themselves faced huge obstacles to staying open. Tom mentioned the KKK and “goat-ropers,” but it went way beyond that. They were physically attacked, hit with bizarre legal charges, and often burned down. But those weren’t the most difficult challenges.

Even the most successful coffeehouses were never self-sustaining financially. We barely survived, even with the Herculean efforts of the United States Serviceman’s Fund, a group whose sole purpose was raising money for the GI Movement. But even with that and the day jobs many of us had, we came close to shutting down many times. In addition the constant legal battles and harassment arrests (I spent nights in jail for such things as hitch-hiking, driving with a dirty license plate, and swearing in front of a police officer), were a huge financial drain.

It was also a constant struggle to keep staff. Burn-out was a big problem in places like Killeen (and I don’t imagine that’s much different today). Keeping a place like the Strut alive wasn’t a weekend or summer gig. The reality is that there were many long periods when it was successfully isolated from the soldiers, and it took tremendous endurance to survive those times. Life in the GI Movement, like life in the military, was characterized by many months of intense tedium punctuated by moments of intense action.

In short, the GI Coffeehouses of the 60’s were a major force that filled a very specific need, one that grew out of the times we were living in. They were also a major commitment of time and resources–extremely difficult to sustain but well worth it for the role they were playing at that time.

Again, I am not raising these things to pour cold water on the current effort. But I believe that to be kept alive, history has to be seen in all its parameters. And I do think it’s important to not view the coffeehouses of the 60s through rose-colored glasses, especially when you’re contemplating diving into the fire. I’m not drawing conclusions, just raising questions.

So as I said in the beginning, I offer these observations and thoughts in the spirit of welcoming all of the work being done today in the military, and wanting to use our history to enrich it. I hope this helps.

The books that I referred to are:

* Soldiers in Revolt by David Cortright (aka The Bible)

* The New Winter Soldiers by Richard Moser

* The Spitting Image by Jerry Lembcke (A wonderful expose of the myth of the spitting hippie)

* A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War by William Short and Willa Seidenberg (This is an incredible book, very hard toget but well worth it. Bill and Willa traveled around the country in the early 90s photographing and recording extensive oral histories of dozens of veterans of the GI Movement. Their work formed much of the basis for Sir! No Sir!).

There are also several great books on the veterans’ movement, and particularly Vietnam Veterans against the War.

PS–Again to keep the record straight, Fred Gardner, one of the founders of the GI Coffeehouses, was not an officer, but a PFC attached to an Army Reserve unit at Ft. Jackson when he and others started the UFO Coffeehouse in 1967. The “Summer of Support” referred to in Cleaver’s article was not organized by him, but by Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, original founders of Students for a Democratic Society. SOS was one of, but not the only organization supporting the GI Coffeehouses.

Thorne,

I heard an interesting story about the Olio Strut and the general attitude of the soldiers to authority. The guy who told me the story was a combat vet send to Ft Hood to decompress along with a lot of other guys who had seen heavy combat. He is the only source but I have no reason not to believe him. He told me that there was a small lake somewhere around the base with a small island in it and that it was common for the soldiers to use rowboats and go to the island where they would have numerous small fires around which they would talk and decompress. Of course there was a considerable amount of the magical herb being smoked out there too. The cops knew what was going on and a squadcar load of them got into a couple of the small rowboats and decided to liberate the island. They landed and went to the first campsite and announced “Y’all are all under arrest” My friend told me that the entire island became silent and then across the island could be heard the sound of the hammers being pulled back on the government issue .45 callibar handguns that the GI’s still carried. Needless to say the cops were tripping over one another trying to get back into their boats.

Robert Pardun / July 26, 2008

Under The Hood : An Anti-War GI Coffeehouse in Texas. / by Tom Cleaver / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2008

And Austin, 1969 : Bob Bower, Anti-War GI by Henry Mecredy / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2008

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ENVIRONMENT : A Point of No Return for Greenland’s Ice

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Melt water is seen here running over the Greenlandic icecap, in August, 2007. A new analysis suggests there is a tipping point, in terms of how much carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, beyond which Greenland’s ice will be forever lost. Photo from Getty Images

Total meltdown: Sea level rise of 20 feet
By Jessica Marshall / July 25, 2008

July 25, 2008 — Every molecule of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere brings Greenland’s ice sheet closer to irreversible melting — and a sea level rise of more than 20 feet.

A new analysis suggests that if we pass a certain threshold of total emissions, the ice sheet will melt completely, no matter how high or low a peak CO2 concentration is reached or how quickly emissions are reduced afterward.

“A peak warming for a very short period will have an impact, but it might not be enough to cause long-term melting,” said John Church of the Center for Australian Weather and Climate Research in Hobart, Australia, who was not a part of the study. “It’s a matter of getting the temperatures up and keeping them up.”

“We show that it’s not really a question of how much CO2 in terms of 700 or 800 ppm [parts per million] in the atmosphere,” said study author Gilles Ramstein of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Gif-sur-Yvette, France “It’s really about cumulative doses. That means you can get a deglaciation of Greenland at 700 ppm if you reach this value and stay on that value for a long time.”

The researchers used a climate model designed to reach over very long timescales — tens of thousands of years — to test the effect of different emissions scenarios on the extent of Greenland ice melting over millennia.

Their results indicate that regardless of the peak CO2 concentration, if total emissions surpass 3,800 billion tons of carbon, the Greenland ice sheet will melt completely over thousands of years. So far, humans have emitted about 380 billion tons of carbon from fossil fuel combustion, according to the researchers.

It will take longer — perhaps thousands of years longer — to melt Greenland completely, the longer it takes to reach the threshold. But once the threshold is passed, the melting will be irreversible, because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and because positive feedback cycles — where loss of snow increases heat absorption by darker, exposed surfaces — will propagate melting.

And, the researchers emphasize, the true threshold may be lower than they calculate.

“What we found here is largely an underestimate,” Ramstein said. “We have a model that is quite simple, with coarse resolution so that it can simulate for thousands of years. You might actually get complete melting for lower carbon emissions.” The work was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Scenarios below the 3,800-billion-ton threshold led to a reduction in the ice sheet size of 10 to 63 percent over the course of the simulations, still a concerning loss. “Even one meter of sea level rise is a complete catastrophe,” Ramstein said.

“Rates of a meter per century are feasible,” Church said, so it will not take thousands of years to feel the effects of melting.

“This is only the northern part of the story,” Ramstein added. “There is also a southern part, in Antarctica. In the south there is the ice shelf. This makes west Antarctica very vulnerable to changes.”

Source / Discovery News

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HEALTH CARE : How Hospitals Are Killing E.R. Patients

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

King’s County ER in New York City where patient Esmin Green died due to negligence. Photo by uberzombie.

Waiting Doom: A ‘systematic and widespread danger’
By Zachary F. Meisel and Jesse M. Pines / July 24, 2008

Last month, Esmin Green, a 49-year-old mother of six, tumbled off her chair and onto the floor of the Kings County psychiatric E.R. waiting room in New York City.

Members of the hospital staff saw her lying there but did nothing for about an hour. When Green was finally brought into the E.R., she was dead. An autopsy revealed that she died from a pulmonary embolism, which occurs when a blood clot forms in the leg, breaks off, and travels to one or both lungs. This can also kill long-haul airplane passengers who sit in one spot for hours: The blood sits stagnant in their legs for so long that it clots. You could say that Green, too, had been on a plane ride of sorts. She’d waited for a psychiatric-unit bed to open up for more than 24 hours, roughly the same time as a trip from New York to Tanzania.

The surveillance video of Green collapsing and lying untended, as hospital staff at Kings County fail to respond to her collapse, is inexcusable by any stretch. And so Nancy Grace, for one, focused on the negligence. But what’s largely missing from this story is the likely cause of Green’s pulmonary embolism. The answer lies in a far more systematic and widespread danger in hospital care: E.R. waits. Why was Green sitting and waiting while blood pooled in her legs? Despite increasing evidence that crowded E.R.s can be hazardous to your health, hospitals have incentives to keep their E.R. patients waiting. As a result, there has been an explosion in E.R. wait times over the past few years, even for those who are the sickest.

A major cause for E.R. crowding is the hospital practice of boarding inpatients in emergency departments. This happens when patients who come to the E.R. need to be admitted overnight. If there are no inpatient beds in the hospital (or no extra inpatient nurses on duty that day) then the patient stays in the E.R. long past the completion of the initial emergency work. This is what happened to Green, and it has become widespread and common. The problem is that boarding shifts E.R. resources away from the new patients in the waiting room. While E.R. patients wait for inpatient beds, new patients wait longer to see a doctor. As more new patients come, the waits grow. And an E.R. filled with boarding patients and a full waiting room is an unhappy E.R.: The atmosphere is at once static and chaotic. If you or a loved one has waited for hours in an E.R., you know what we mean. The environment can be unsafe and even deadly. A recent study found that critically ill patients who board for more than six hours in the E.R. are 4 percent more likely to die.

What hospital would promote such a practice? Potentially, those that profit more from boarding, particularly in poorer communities with high numbers of uninsured and Medicaid patients. Imagine you run a hospital. There are two competing sources for inpatient beds. The first source is patients who come in through direct and transfer admissions. They are more likely to come with private insurance and need procedural care, both of which maximize profits. The second source is E.R. patients, who are more likely to be uninsured or have pittance-paying Medicaid and less likely to need high-margin procedures. Do the math: If you fill your hospital with the direct and transfer admissions and maroon the E.R. patients for long periods, you make more money.

In effect, then, E.R. boarding allows hospitals to insulate themselves from the burgeoning needs of the poor. E.R.s are safety nets: By law, we who work in them see any and all patients, regardless of their ability to pay. But as more E.R. beds are devoted to boarders, the E.R. has less space for new patients, which keeps a lid on the number of un- and underinsured. So unless you are having a heart attack and can jump the line, your emergency—though it may still be serious—may wait for so long that you give up and go home. Bad for you, good for the hospital’s bottom line. E.R. boarding also tamps down nursing costs, again not to your benefit. Hospitals generally maintain strict patient-to-nurse ratios for inpatients. But many hospitals don’t apply the same rules to the E.R. because they can’t control the number of patients who come in that way. Sometimes the nursing ratio in the E.R. can be as high as 8-to-1. That’s unacceptable in inpatient units, but just stack ’em in the E.R. hallways and suddenly it’s OK.

What about the staff upstairs, who take care of the admitted patients once they leave the E.R.? Their incentives are misaligned, too. Put yourself in an inpatient nurse’s shoes. You are overworked, and your current patients need attention. You get a call from the E.R., saying that a patient like Green is ready to come upstairs. The bed is clean and ready. But you have 20 more things to do before your shift ends in two hours, and you won’t get paid an extra cent if you accept Green to the empty bed. Can’t she wait just a bit more in the E.R.? When the next nurse comes on fresh, you tell yourself, she can admit the new patient. You won’t get in trouble for stalling because no one really measures how long patients stay in the E.R.. So you tell the E.R. nurse that the bed isn’t ready yet. This practice of “bed-hiding” is more common than you think.

What can be done about all this? We think the answer is that hospitals should have to disclose and take responsibility for how long E.R. patients—that is, you—wait for beds. But, not surprisingly, hospitals have lobbied hard to not be held accountable for E.R. crowding and boarding. If they won’t measure and eliminate E.R. boarding on their own, then the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which pays many hospital patients’ bills, or the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, should take this on.

And let’s also hold congressional hearings on E.R. boarding. In England, the National Health System now has a rule that 98 percent of patients have to spend less than four hours in the E.R.. Apparently, the son of a member of parliament spent too long in an E.R., we’ve heard. Esmin Green wasn’t well-connected. But her death should serve as a similar prompt to fix the problem of endless waiting.

Meanwhile, if you have to go the E.R., you can vote with your feet. When you are really sick, of course, go to the closest E.R. or call an ambulance. But if you can wait long enough to choose, go to the E.R. where they don’t make patients wait or board for long periods. Yes, we know—since hospitals don’t publicize E.R. waits or boarding, you’ll have to go by word of mouth. If, despite your efforts, you or your grandmother is forced to lie in the E.R. all night, complain directly to the hospital administrators who actually have the power to fix the problem. But don’t count on any major changes. As long as hospitals profit more from boarding and aren’t forced to admit to doing it, your trip to the E.R. will be as long as a flight to Africa—but without the in-flight movie and far more risky.

Zachary F. Meisel is a practicing emergency physician and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation clinical scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jesse M. Pines is a practicing emergency physician and an assistant professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Source / Slate

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Lammas Seasonal Message – Kate Braun

Posted on July 25, 2008 by RagBlog


“Here we come rejoicing Bringing In The Sheaves”

By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2008

Friday, August 1, is Lammas, also named Harvest Home, Lughnasach, and First Harvest. On this date we will be feeling the effects of the new moon and the solar eclipse, although the eclipse won’t be visible in North America (areas of greatest visibility: parts of eastern Asia, parts of eastern Europe, northern Alaska and Canada). The name “Lammas” comes from “Loaf Mass”, reflecting the custom of reserving the first harvesting of grain to make the loaf that is used in this day’s celebration. Friday is Freya’s day; Freya is also called the Giver of the Loaf. It is good to honor her by name on this feast day.

New moons are times to formulate and announce plans yet to be fulfilled; eclipses are times of change; Lammas will be a good occasion to define and set goals for the future. Keep in mind that there are still many retrogrades in effect and that the cumulative effect of these retrogrades is to urge us to take care of unfinished business as well as to pay more attention to our weaknesses so that we can turn them into strengths. The longest journey begins with a single step; use this opportunity to take that first step.

Lammas is a fire festival. Celebrate it by using the colors red, gold, orange, yellow, and bronze in your decorations and dress; by serving breads, apples, berries, squash, lamb, ale, and fruit wine; by giving thanks as you share food; by engaging in activities that promote abundance. Ideally, the type of fire used for this celebration is a fire into which you may toss offerings: a fireplace, backyard grill, cauldron. On this day we recognize the power of Mother Earth’s energies, the life she gives that gives us life. You and your guests should take time at the beginning of your feast to verbally express thanks for the good things in your lives, for the lessons you are learning, for whatever there is in your life that is worth being thankful for.

If you bake, bake a loaf of bread in the shape of a person and at the beginning of the meal, beginning with yourself and going sunwise (clockwise) around the table, tear off a piece of the breadman and feed it to the person sitting next to you while saying “May you never go hungry” or “May food be always on your table” or words to that effect. An alternative to this ritual is to substitute a large gingerbread man for the breadman. Each celebrant should be sure to save a bit of the ginger/breadman to toss into the ceremonial fire when the breadman has completed his journey around the table and is no more. This is a prosperity ritual: by reducing food to ashes and giving the ashes to Mother Earth, you are feeding her as she has fed you; this lays the foundation for more food (prosperity) in the future. Be sure the ashes of your offerings are cold before you disperse them in your garden, though. At the end of your feasting, before you leave the table, thank Mother Earth again. Thank her for the food you have eaten, the company you have enjoyed, the lessons she is teaching you, the joy that you know awaits.

Sharing leftovers is another ritual of increase you and your guests may enjoy. Just be sure each guest takes home some of someone else’s leftovers.

Don’t forget the fairies, especially the garden fairies, in your celebrations. Like Mother Earth, garden fairies work with us to keep our flora healthy. Like Mother Earth, it is polite to remember them and thank them for their efforts. Fairies don’t need much: a doll’s tea set will suffice to set out a Fairy Feast of wine, bread, and fruit. Include a flower and your garden fairies will be honored and pleased.

Reminder/update: the August Metaphysical Fair will be on August 16 & 17, 2008, at the Radisson Hotel, 6000 Middle Fiskville Rd., Austin, TX 78752. $7.00 at the door, good for both days. 10 AM – 6 PM Saturday, Aug. 16; 11 AM – 6 PM Sunday, Aug. 17. This date is per the hotel due to a scheduling conflict. If you put this fair on your calendar for Aug. 9 & 10, please change the dates.

Tarot by Kate 512-454-2293
http://www.tarotbykateinaustin.com/
kate_braun2000@yahoo.com

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McCaskill Takes On Military Industrial Complex

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

A Governmental Accountability Office report has found that Defense Contract Audit Agency officials and major defense contractors successfully pressured Pentagon auditors to hide damaging facts about the performance and costs of weapons systems. Photo by Joseph Kaczmarek / AP.

Freshman senator files scathing report
By Matt Renner / July 25, 2008

A scathing report accusing government auditors of corruption, issued by the government’s top investigative body, prompted a freshman senator to call for firings “by nightfall” on Thursday.

In her first term, Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), a former prosecutor and Missouri state auditor, has taken the lead in figuring out whether the US military gets what it pays for from contractors

In an impassioned speech on the floor of the Senate, McCaskill outlined the findings of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which found that Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) officials and major defense contractors successfully pressured Pentagon auditors to hide damaging facts about the performance and costs of weapons systems.

The DCAA has “gotten caught in what could be the biggest auditing scandal in the history of this town, and I’m not exaggerating here. I will guarantee you, as auditors around the country learn about this, they’re going to have disbelief and raw anger that this agency has impugned the integrity of government auditors everywhere by these kinds of irresponsible actions,” McCaskill said.

McCaskill fired off letters to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and DCAA Director April G. Stephenson, demanding accountability and a full explanation of the issues the GAO report raised. In a July 11 letter, Stephenson said that DCAA did not agree with the “totality” of the report but was addressing some of the issues raised.

The GAO, the top nonpartisan governmental investigative body in Washington, DC, looked at 14 audits performed by the 4,000-member DCAA, the internal government audit team that is supposed to oversee contracting for the Department of Defense (DoD) and other government agencies. Zero of the 14 audits met government standards.

The report, titled “DCAA Audits: Allegations That Certain Audits at Three Locations Did Not Meet Professional Standards Were Substantiated,” was based on over 100 interviews with current and former auditors and a review of the 13 sets of “working papers” – the documentation auditors use to backup their conclusions.

The report found, in every case, the working papers did not support the conclusions of the auditors – a clear violation of auditing principles. In addition, the investigation revealed that supervisors at the DCAA “dropped findings and changed audit opinions,” and that the DCAA did not allow auditors sufficient time to do thorough work.

According to GAO investigators, “[W]e also found that contractor officials and the DoD contracting community improperly influenced the audit scope, conclusions, and opinions of some audits – a serious independence issue.” In GAO speak, this means private companies and people in the Pentagon conspired to conceal wasteful and fraudulent activity by contractors at the cost of the US taxpayer.

Among the findings of the report:

* The DCAA resident auditor made an agreement with an unnamed aerospace contractor (determined to be Boeing based on the facts contained in the report), one of the five largest government defense contractors, that “limited the scope” of the audit and would allow the contractor to correct problems that were found before the final audit opinion was issued. [Bullet]The resident auditor replaced uncooperative auditors and intimidated others into making unsubstantiated assessments that benefited contractors at the expense of the government. [bullet]Supervisors assigned complex auditing tasks to underqualified subordinates, resulting in incomplete audits.

* DCAA officials threatened staff members with retaliation for speaking with GAO investigators.

* The director of a cost-estimating system for a major defense contractor threatened the DCAA he would “escalate” the issue “to the highest level possible” in the government and within the company in question if the DCAA would not green-light the billing system it identified as problematic.

* The DCAA failed to revisit contracts that were negotiated by a corrupt (and later convicted) Air Force official.

* Mistakes, incompetence or intentional deception by the DCAA has essentially built in defective price-estimating systems that may artificially inflate contract estimates for years to come.

The GAO investigation itself was interfered with. In a letter to top members of Congress, the GAO stated: “we noted a pattern of frequent management actions that served to intimidate the auditors and create an abusive environment … As a result, some auditors were hesitant to speak to us.” Nick Schwellenbach, National Security investigator for the nonpartisan government spending watchdog group, Project on Government Oversight (POGO), said that the GAO report “demonstrates that the government’s system of contractor oversight is rotten because the independent government agencies that are supposed to look out for the taxpayers are corrupted,” adding “we have senior members inside the DCAA who are retaliating against their own members in favor of the private contractors.”

Schwellenbach pointed out that DCAA auditors oversee contracting at a number of different government agencies including NASA, and that NASA’s inspector general has previously criticized the DCAA’s work. “This looks like it could go even deeper,” Schwellenbach added.

“You know, the Department of Defense has been on the high risk list of this government for more than a decade. Scandal after scandal has rolled out of the Department of Defense on contracting … I took a trip to Iraq just on contract oversight with an auditor’s eye, meeting with the people that oversee the contracts in Iraq … I think we burned up more than $150 billion in just pure contracting abuse,” McCaskill said during her speech, adding, “and all this time that we have been wasting hundreds and billions of dollars, the fox was in the chicken coop.”

Source / truthout

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Racism At FOX News : Rapper Nas Delivers the Goods

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Hip-hop artist Nas joins members of MoveOn.org and ColorofChange.org to deliver a speech to supporters protesting FOX News coverage of Barack Obama in front of News Corp. headquarters, Wednesday, July 23, 2008 in New York. Photo by Mary Altaffer / AP
.

The other day I signed a MoveOn.org petition protesting racism in reporting on the Obamas by FOX News. All in a day’s work.

But MoveOn was nice enough to report back to me with a play-by-play account of my signature’s epic journey – from my humble computer; to Kinko’s, where it was printed out; to rapper Nas, who gave a speech; to FOX News headquarters, where it was refused; and to the Colbert Report, where it and 199,000 others were presented to Colbert Nation.

Nice of them to keep me informed. (Watch the videos below.)

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2008

Big news! Your petition signature telling FOX to stop their racist smears against the Obamas had a really exciting day on Wednesday. Here’s what happened:

1:00 p.m. Your signature was printed off at a New York City Kinko’s along with 620,126 others—filling 19 big boxes.

2:00 p.m. The signatures were piled in front of FOX’s national headquarters at 6th Avenue and 48th Street.

3:15 p.m. Hip hop star Nas (whose new album had just risen to #1 on the Billboard charts hours earlier) joined over 100 activists and delivered the petitions to FOX on behalf of ColorOfChange, MoveOn, and Brave New Films.

3:30 p.m. FOX refused to accept the petitions. (Sometimes, the truth hurts.)

4:00 p.m.—9:00 p.m. News of FOX’s racism and the star-studded petition delivery made its way around the world—with stories in Rolling Stone, Billboard, USA Today, Associated Press, Reuters, India Express, Huffington Post, MTV, OpenLeft, and over 200 other places.

11:30 p.m. Stephen Colbert welcomed Nas as his guest on the Colbert Report and dedicated over half of his show to FOX’s racism. The boxes containing our signatures were stacked prominently on Colbert’s set in place of his normal interview table and chairs—and he conducted the entire interview surrounded by petitions! Then, Nas performed his new song “Sly Fox,” which is all about FOX’s racism.

12:00 a.m. Several MoveOn staffers, jaws dropped open, got on the phone and engaged in several rounds of, “Wow!” 🙂

Since then, the news has kept spreading around the world. You sent a message to FOX, and that message was very much received!

And the fight’s not over. Together, we’ve denied FOX the legitimacy that would come by hosting Democratic presidential debates, and we got a company to stop advertising on Bill O’Reilly. This week’s delivery made an impact, and we’ll continue to push back together against FOX’s racism and their smears against Obama.

Colbert Report: Nas responds to Bill O’Reilly like the gangsta that he is — with a petition.

Rapper Nas Delivers Fox News Petition

Source / MoveOn.org

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Slammed: Welcome to the Age of Incarceration

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The US holds 1 in 4
of the world’s prisoners.

What happens when you lock up 1 in every 100 American adults?
By Jennifer Gonnerman

The number first appeared in headlines earlier this year: Nearly one in four of all prisoners worldwide is incarcerated in America. It was just the latest such statistic. Today, one in nine African American men between the ages of 20 and 34 is locked up. In 1970, our prisons held fewer than 200,000 people; now that number exceeds 1.5 million, and when you add in local jails, it’s 2.3 million—1 in 100 American adults. Since the 1980s, we’ve sat by as the numbers inched higher and our prison system ballooned, swallowing up an ever-larger portion of the citizenry. But do statistics like these, no matter how disturbing, really mean anything anymore? What does it take to get us to sit up and notice?

Apparently, it takes a looming financial crisis. For there is another round of bad news, the logical extension of the first: The more money a state spends on building and running prisons, the less there is for everything else, from roads and bridges to health care and public schools. At the pace our inmate population has been expanding, America’s prison system is becoming, quite simply, too expensive to sustain. That is why Kansas, Texas, and at least 11 other states have been trying out new strategies to curb the cost—reevaluating their parole policies, for instance, so that not every parolee who runs afoul of an administrative rule is shipped straight back to prison. And yet our infatuation with incarceration continues.

There have been numerous academic studies and policy reports and journalistic accounts analyzing our prison boom, but this phenomenon cannot be fully measured in numbers. That much became apparent to me when, beginning in 2000, I spent nearly four years shadowing a woman who’d just been released from prison. She’d been locked up for 16 years for a first-time drug crime, and her absence had all but destroyed her family. Her mother had taken in her four young children after her arrest, only to die prematurely of kidney failure. One daughter was deeply depressed, the other was seething with rage, and her youngest son had followed her lead, diving into the neighborhood drug culture and then winding up in prison himself.

The criminal justice system had punished not only her but her entire family. How do you measure the years of wasted hours—riding on a bus to a faraway prison, lining up to be scanned and searched and questioned, sitting in a bleak visiting room waiting for a loved one to walk in? How do you account for all the dollars spent on collect calls from prison—calls that can cost at least three times as much as on the outside because the prison system is taking a cut? How do you begin to calculate the lessons absorbed by children about deprivation and punishment and vengeance? How do you end the legacy of incarceration?

This is not to say that nobody deserves to go to prison or that we should release everyone who is now locked up. There are many people behind bars who you would not want as your neighbor, but in our hunger for justice we have lost perspective. We treat 10-year sentences like they’re nothing, like that’s a soft penalty, when in much of the rest of the world a decade behind bars would be considered extraordinarily severe. This is what separates us from other industrialized countries: It’s not just that we send so many people to prison, but that we keep them there for so long and send them back so often. Eight years ago, we surpassed Russia to claim the dubious distinction of having the world’s highest rate of incarceration; today we’re still No. 1.

If awards were granted to the country with the most surreal punishments, we would certainly win more than our share. Thirty-six straight years in solitary confinement (the fate of two men convicted in connection with the murder of a guard in Louisiana’s Angola prison). A 55-year sentence for a small-time pot dealer who carried a gun during his sales (handed down by a federal court in Utah in 2004). Life sentences for 13-year-olds. (In 2005, Human Rights Watch counted more than 2,000 American inmates serving life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles. The entire rest of the world has only locked up 12 kids without hope of release.) Female prisoners forced to wear shackles while giving birth. (Amnesty International found 48 states that permitted this practice as of 2006.) A ban on former prisoners working as barbers (on the books in New York state).

America is expert at turning citizens into convicts, but we’ve forgotten how to transform convicts back into citizens. In 1994, Congress eliminated Pell grants for prisoners, a move that effectively abolished virtually all of the 350 prison college programs across the country. That might not seem like a catastrophe, until you consider that education has been proven to help reduce recidivism. (This was the conclusion of a recent paper by the Urban Institute, which reviewed 49 separate studies.) As the New York Times’ Adam Liptak has pointed out, our prisons used to be models of redemption; de Tocqueville praised them in Democracy in America. Many prisons still call themselves “correctional facilities,” but the term has become a misnomer. Most abandoned any pretense of rehabilitation long ago. Former California governor Jerry Brown even went so far as to rewrite the state’s penal code to stress that the primary mission of that state’s prisons is punishment.

Our cell blocks are packed with men and women who cannot read or write, who never graduated from high school—75 percent of state inmates—who will be hard-pressed to find a job once they are released. Once freed, they become second-class citizens. Depending on the state, they may be denied public housing, student loans, a driver’s license, welfare benefits, and a wide range of jobs. Perhaps there is no more damning statistic than the fact that within three years, half will be convicted of a new crime.

Recently, there have been some hopeful signs. In April, the Second Chance Act was finally signed into law; it will provide federal grants to programs that help prisoners reenter society. But our punishment industry—which each year spends millions lobbying federal and state lawmakers—has grown so massive and so entrenched that it will take far more than one piece of legislation to begin to undo its far-reaching effects.

Just look at our felony disenfranchisement laws, which prohibit 5.3 million people from voting—including 13 percent of African American men. These numbers actually underestimate the scope of the problem, as many ex-prisoners believe they cannot vote even if they can. And so the legacy of our prison boom continues: We’ve become a two-tier society in which millions of ostensibly free people are prohibited from enjoying the rights and privileges accorded to everyone else—and we continue to be defined by our desire for punishment and revenge, rather than by our belief in the power of redemption.

[Contributing writer Jennifer Gonnerman’s book, Life on the Outside, was a 2004 National Book Award finalist. This article appears in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.]

Source / Mother Jones

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Alleged Rove Threat Brings Immunity Request

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Rove Threatened GOP IT Guru If He Does Not ‘Take the Fall’ for Election Fraud in Ohio, Says Attorney
By Brad Friedman / July 24, 2008

Karl Rove has threatened a GOP high-tech guru and his wife, if he does not “‘take the fall’ for election fraud in Ohio,” according to a letter sent this morning to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, by Ohio election attorney Cliff Arnebeck.

The email, posted in full below, details threats against Mike Connell of the Republican firm New Media Communications, which describes itself on its website as “a powerhouse in the field of Republican website development and Internet services” and having “played a strategic role in helping the GOP expand its technological supremacy.”

Connell was described in a recent interview with the plaintiff’s attorneys in Ohio as a “high IQ Forrest Gump” for his appearance “at the scene of every [GOP] crime” from Florida 2000 to Ohio 2004 to the RNC email system to the installation of the currently-used Congressional computer network firewall.

Connell and his firm are currently employed by the John McCain campaign, as well as the RNC and other Republican and so-called “faith-based” organizations.

In a phone call this afternoon, Arnebeck could not publicly reveal specific details of the information that triggered his concern about the threats to Connell. The message to the IT man from Rove is said to have been sent via a go-between in Ohio. That information lead Arnebeck to contact Mukasey after he found the reports to be credible and troubling.

“If there’s a credible threat, which I regard this to be,” he told The BRAD BLOG, “I have a professional duty to report it.”

Attempts to reach Connell for comment late this afternoon were not successful.

The disclosure from Arnebeck comes on the heels of a dramatic announcement last week, made at a Columbus press conference, announcing Arnebeck’s motion to lift a stay on the long-standing King Lincoln Bronzwell v. Blackwell federal lawsuit, challenging voting rights violations in the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio.

The motion was made following the discovery of new information, including details from a Republican data security expert, leading Arnebeck towards seeking depositions of Rove, Connell, and other GOP operatives believed to have participated in the gaming of election results in 2004. A letter [PDF] was sent to Mukasey at the same time last week, asking him to retain email and other documents from Rove…

“Mr. Rove’s e-mails from the White House to the Justice Department, the FBI, the Pentagon, Congress and various federal regulatory agencies are obviously relevant to the factual issues that we intend to address in this case,” Arnebeck wrote last week to the Attorney General. “We are concerned about reports that Mr. Rove not only destroyed e-mails, but also took steps to destroy the hard drives from which they had been sent.”

In his email to Mukasey today, Arnebeck writes: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to ‘take the fall’ for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations.”

“This appears to be in response to our designation of Rove as the principal perpetrator in the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act/RICO claim with respect to which we issued document hold notices last Thursday to you and to the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform,” the Ohio attorney writes, before going on to link to The BRAD BLOG’s coverage of his press conference last week and requesting “protection for Mr. Connell and his family from this reported attempt to intimidate a witness.”

The complete, short email, sent today from Arnebeck to AG Mukasey, follows in full below…

Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 10:51 AM
To: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Subject: Report of Rove threats against witness Michael Connell

Dear Attorney General Mukasey:

We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to “take the fall” for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations.This appears to be in response to our designation of Rove as the principal perpetrator in the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act/RICO claim with respect to which we issued document hold notices last Thursday to you and to the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. See: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6189 and http://www.archive.org/d…tionFraudInOhioCourtCase.

I have informed court chambers and am in the process of informing the Ohio Attorney General’s and US Attorney’s offices in Columbus for the purpose, among other things, of seeking protection for Mr. Connell and his family from this reported attempt to intimidate a witness.

Concurrently herewith, I am informing Mr. Conyers and Mr. Kucinich in connection with their Congressional oversight responsibilities related to these matters.

Because of the serious engagement in this matter that began in 2000 of the Ohio Statehouse Press Corps, 60 Minutes, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, C-Span and Jim VandeHei, and the public’s right to know of gross attempts to subvert the rule of law, I am forwarding this information to them, as well.

Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney
###-###-####
Cell ###-###-####

cc: Robert Fitrakis, Esq.
Henry Eckhart, Esq

Source / The Brad Blog

Rove Threat to Blackmail GOP IT Mastermind Triggers Immunity Request to Ohio AG by Election Lawyers
by John Michael Spinelli / July 24, 2008

COLUMBUS, OHIO — The little story about how the GOP cyber-gamed the Ohio presidential election in 2004 is growing by the day, spurred on to greater heights Thursday when an Ohio election attorney asked the Ohio Attorney General to provide immunity protection to Mike Connell, the GOP IT mastermind who built various computer systems they say not only won Ohio for President Bush in 2004 but led to many other wins for Republicans over the years of the Bush Administration.

A key figure in the grand strategy of the Grand Old Party to build a cyber system that could assure permanent control by Republicans of key offices, state and federal, is Mike Connell, an Ohio native some refer to as a “High IQ Forrest Gump” for his brilliance in masterminding the construction of various computer systems associated with election procedures and data security, including the so-called firewall in Congress.

Source. / ePluribus Media

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HEALTH CARE : Bone Density Drugs Can Do More Harm Than Good

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Big Pharma Pushes Drugs That Cause Conditions They Are Supposed to Prevent
By Martha Rosenberg / July 24, 2008.

Yet again, women are the industry’s main targets.

Like gastroesophageal reflux and bipolar disease, osteopenia began to inflict millions when a drug to treat it was patented.

“Osteopenia, or the risk of developing osteoporosis, was concocted as a disease at a World Health Organization osteoporosis conference in Rome in 1992 that was sponsored by two drug companies and a drug company foundation,” writes Susan Kelleher in the Seattle Times.

Using the bone density measurements or “T scores” of a 30-year-old woman as a standard, the new condition, osteopenia, had “boundaries so broad they include more than half of all women over 50,” writes Kelleher. And it didn’t hurt that 10,000 bone density measuring machines appeared in doctors’ offices to detect the new disease — only 750 existed in 1995 — many owned and financed by Merck, whose anti-bone-thinning drug Fosamax came online in 1995.

No wonder doctor visits for thinning bones increased by 5 million from 1994 to 2003, according to the Associated Press.

Of course, selling “prevention” to at-risk patients is a pharma gold mine.

It keeps patients on meds for decades through fear, alarmist marketing and after-this-because-of-this reasoning — since a patient doesn’t know if she would have gotten the disease anyway.

So even when reports of Fosamax-related jaw problems called osteonecrosis surfaced — 1,000 cases have been documented — and even when a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine this year found that Fosamax doubled women’s risk of irregular heartbeat, which can cause clots and strokes, few doubted its primary action of protecting women’s bones.

But now, like hormone replacement therapy, which also exploited women’s fear of aging and social marginalization, Fosamax appears to cause the conditions it’s supposed to prevent.

Since 2006, articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Orthopedic Trauma, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism and Aging Clinical and Experimental Research have suggested the anti-bone turnover action of bisphosphonate drugs like Fosamax can in some cases cause fractures.

Oops.

While preventing bone loss that is caused by the process of bone turnover or remodeling, bisphosphonate drugs can fossilize and petrify a bone so it breaks spontaneously and with minimal trauma — like chalk. It will not heal properly.

Thighbones of patients on bisphosphonates have “simply snapped while they were walking or standing,” following “weeks or months of unexplained aching,” reports the New York Times.

Like other fast-tracked-to-Wall-Street drugs that are effectively “tested” on the first users, adverse reports about bisphosphonates came from patients and practitioners long before they came from the FDA or manufacturers.

Bisphosphonate patients have documented excruciating pain from Fosamax since 2001 and GlaxoSmithKline’s Boniva since 2006 on askapatient.com, many calling the drugs “poison” and saying they were forced into wheelchairs.

But only in March did the FDA alert health care professionals to the “severe, sometimes incapacitating, musculoskeletal pain” that bisphosphonate drugs could cause in their patients and caution them to consider whether musculoskeletal pain “might be caused by the drug” rather than the bone condition.

Not only is the pain that bisphosphonate patients report “not in their heads” — imagine 1,257 men on askapatient.com saying their doc dismissed their constant pain and symptomology — it is emblematic of what is really going on.

“There is actually bone death occurring,” Dr. Phuli Cohan told Mallika Marshall, M.D., a medical reporter for Boston’s WBZ-TV News in May. “People don’t want to believe that this is happening, but it is a side effect of the medicine,” she said.

Dr. David Hunter of New England Baptist Hospital concurs that bisphosphonates can cause “dead bone syndrome” and that patients should have a “drug holiday to allow bone cells to rejuvenate,” reports Marshall.

Even drug reps on the industry chat room cafepharma are skeptical about bisphosphonates.

“They over-suppress the bone and ‘may’ cause subtrochanter fractures. … It’s the next hot button,” wrote one anonymous poster on a thread titled “Is Boniva dead?” sparked by a rumor that Boniva pitchwoman Sally Fields had fallen and broken a bone.

Nor do bisphosphonates exit the body quickly when patients quit taking them, according to a 2006 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association — rather, they remain for years.

(Patients “need not take costly bone-building drugs such as Fosamax for life to reap the medicine’s protective benefits,” was the News & Observer’s upbeat interpretation of the drug’s tenacity.)

Will bisphosphonates be the next hormone replacement therapy? Another example of women getting the diseases they were supposed to avoid, thanks to misogynistic marketing?

Is there a market for 10,000 used bone density measuring machines?

Source / AlterNet

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