The Pork Barrel Thrives in This Administration

Posted on July 7, 2008 by RagBlog


CEO of Firm That Signed Controversial Iraq Oil Deal Longtime Bush, Cheney Adviser
By Jason Leopold / July 6, 2008

Ray Hunt, the Texas oil man who landed a controversial oil production deal with Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government, has enjoyed close political and business ties with Vice President Dick Cheney dating back a decade – and to the Bush family since the 1970s.

Despite those longstanding connections – and Hunt’s work for George W. Bush as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board – the Bush administration expressed surprise when Hunt Oil signed the agreement last September.

At that time, administration officials said Hunt Oil’s deal with the Kurds jeopardized delicate negotiations among competing Iraqi sects and regions for sharing oil revenues, talks seen as vital for achieving national reconciliation.

“I know nothing about the deal,” President Bush said. “To the extent that it does undermine the ability for the government to come up with an oil revenue sharing plan that unifies the country, obviously if it undermines it I’m concerned.”

However, on July 2, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released documents showing that senior administration officials were aware that Hunt was negotiating with the Kurdistan government and even offered him encouragement.

Hunt also personally alerted Bush’s PFIAB about his oil company’s confidential contacts with Kurdish representatives.

In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, committee chairman, complained that the administration’s comments last year were “misleading.”

“Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed,” Waxman wrote.

Waxman said the Hunt-Kurdish case also raised questions about the veracity of similar administration denials about its role in arranging more recent contracts between Iraq and major U.S. and multinational oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Chevron.

Plus, there’s the longstanding suspicion that oil was a principal, though unstated, motive behind the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, which sits on the world’s second-largest oil reserves.

Administration officials – and much of the mainstream U.S. media – have ridiculed the oil motive charge as a conspiracy theory.

Oil Deals

But many of the oil companies now stepping forward to benefit from Iraqi oil were instrumental in both supporting Bush’s political career and giving advice to Cheney’s secretive energy task force in 2001.

For instance, Ray Hunt’s personal relationship with the Bush family dates back to the 1970s as Hunt, the chief of Dallas-based Hunt Oil, helped build the Texas Republican Party as it served as a power base for the Bushes rise to national prominence.

The Hunt family donated more than $500,000 to Republican campaigns in Texas, while Hunt Oil employees and their spouses gave more than $1 million to Republican causes since 1995, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Ray Hunt also had strong ties to Dick Cheney during his years at the helm of Halliburton, the Houston-based oil-services giant. In 1998, Cheney tapped Hunt to serve on Halliburton’s board of directors, where Hunt became a compensation committee member setting Cheney’s salary and stock options.

In 1999, when Texas Gov. George W. Bush was running for the Republican presidential nomination, Bush turned to Hunt to help fund his presidential campaign efforts in Iowa, according to Robert Bryce’s book, Cronies: Oil, The Bushes, And The Rise Of Texas, America’s Superstate.

“By the summer of 1999, Bush had already raised $37 million but he wanted to conserve his campaign cash so he turned to a Texas crony, Ray Hunt, to help fund the Iowa effort,” Bryce wrote. “In July of 1999, Hunt was among a handful of Bush supporters who each donated $10,000 to the Iowa Republican party.”

In May 2000, Bush appointed Hunt finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Hunt also donated $5,000 to the Florida recount battle and spent $100,000 on Bush’s inaugural party.

Bush Presidency

When Bush became President in 2001, Hunt emerged as an advisor to Cheney’s energy task force, according to highly placed executives at Hunt Oil whom I have been in contact with over the past seven years.

Bush also appointed Hunt to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and to the PFIAB, giving him access to highly classified information.

Hunt’s son, Hunter, a vice president at Hunt Oil, became another top energy advisor to the new administration, the company’s Web site said.

One of the topics before Cheney’s task force was the hoped-for opportunity for American oil companies to regain access to Iraq’s underdeveloped oil fields as a way to meet increasing U.S. energy demands.

That opportunity opened up after the U.S.-led invasion and conquest of Iraq in March and April of 2003, although a stubborn insurgency and political disarray slowed efforts to modernize the Iraqi oil industry.

Further bolstering Hunt Oil’s influence in the region in November 2003, Bush named James Oberwetter, a Hunt Oil vice president, to be U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Hunt Oil finally nailed down a major oil agreement with the semi-autonomous Kurdish region on Sept. 7, 2007. But the deal outraged many Iraqi officials because it was enacted before a national law could be adopted on the distribution of oil revenues. Bush administration officials also criticized the deal.

At the time, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, questioned whether Ray Hunt benefited from inside information from Bush, Cheney and/or other White House officials about Iraq’s stalled national oil law.

“As I have said for five years, this war is about oil,” Kucinich said. “The Bush administration desires private control of Iraqi oil, but we have no right to force Iraq to give up their oil. … The constitution of Iraq designates that the oil of Iraq is the property of all Iraqi people.”

Amazon Pipeline

The production-sharing agreement Hunt Oil signed with the Kurds is not the company’s first controversial energy project. Nor is it the first time the company has received help from the Bush administration for its work overseas, as documents obtained by Waxman’s investigators show.

In August 2003, the Bush administration threw its support behind the Camisea gas-pipeline project in the Amazon jungle in Peru that drew international criticism because it threatened to destroy a pristine stretch of rainforest and jeopardized the lives of indigenous people.

The London Independent reported that the beneficiaries of the project “would be two Texas energy companies with close ties to the White House, Hunt Oil and Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton.” [Independent, Aug. 4, 2003]

When the pipeline deal went through, Hunt hired Halliburton to conduct the engineering work on the project as well as to build a $1 billion export terminal on the coast.

“Bush Pioneer Jose Fourquet played a pivotal role in the financing of a massive Peruvian natural gas project that benefited Hunt Oil Co., whose chairman, Ray L. Hunt, signed up to be a Pioneer and is a longtime ally of the president,” the Washington Post reported on May 17, 2004.

“Fourquet, the Treasury Department’s U.S. representative to the Inter-American Development Bank, rebuffed the official written and oral recommendation from other U.S. officials to vote ‘no’ on the project.

“Instead, he abstained on $135 million in financing for the project, allowing it to proceed. Opposition from the United States, a primary funder of the IDB bank, would have jeopardized the deal,” the Washington Post reported.

Wink and Nod

Now, the new evidence suggests that Hunt Oil at least benefited from the administration’s wink and nod in striking the Kurdish oil deal.

In a July 12, 2007, letter to PFIAB, Hunt disclosed that Hunt Oil was “approached a month or so ago by representatives of a private group in Kurdistan as to the possibility of our becoming interested in that region.”

Hunt described a visit of a Hunt Oil survey team and stated, “we were encouraged by what we saw. We have a larger team going back to Kurdistan this week.”

In a second letter to PFIAB, dated Aug. 30, 2007, Hunt revealed that he would travel to Kurdistan in early September for meetings with the Kurdistan regional government, including its president, prime minister and oil minister.

Those meetings led to the oil agreement between Hunt Oil and the Kurdish leaders — and now have raised questions about Bush’s denial that he had any advanced knowledge about the deal.

“State Department officials similarly disavowed involvement in the contract,” Waxman said in the letter to Rice. “Department officials claimed that to the extent they were aware of any negotiations, they actively warned Hunt Oil not to enter into a contract because it was contrary to U.S. national security interests.

“Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed.”

Waxman asked Rice to cooperate with the committee’s investigation. Hunt Oil declined to comment on Ray Hunt’s relationship with Bush or his administration.

Source. / The Public Record

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Suicide : The Military’s Shameless Cover-Up

Posted on July 7, 2008 by RagBlog


Hidden Casualties
by Eric Ruder / July 5, 2008

A year and a half ago, Scott Eiswert, a specialist in the Tennessee Army National Guard, returned from Iraq, only to face an escalating battle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When he learned that his unit would deploy again soon, he felt he could no longer stave off the pain. On May 16, his wife Tracy and his three daughters discovered his body after he shot himself in the family’s home.

Pfc. Jason Scheuerman left a note nailed to his barracks closet in Iraq. “Maybe finally I can get some peace,” wrote the 20-year-old man. Then he stepped inside the closet and shot himself. His parents only found out about the note after a yearlong fight to cut through military red tape and discover what happened to their son.

Scott and Jason are just two of the thousands of military personnel whose service in Iraq and Afghanistan plunged them into a place so dark that they took their own lives.

In fact, the number of suicides among veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan now likely exceeds the number of troops killed in combat.

Nearly one in five soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan–about 300,000–report symptoms of PTSD or major depression upon returning home, but only about half seek treatment, according to a Rand Corporation study released in April.

Based on known suicide rates for similar patients, “It’s quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,” according to National Institute of Mental Health director Thomas Insel, who is the government’s top psychiatric researcher.

But even more appalling than the human toll these wars are claiming even after troops leave the battlefield is the military’s shameless cover-up of the extent of the problem–and its effort to deny veterans the health care they deserve when they return.

The Pentagon officially reports that about 30,000 troops were seriously wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. But USA Today found at least 20,000 cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI) not reported by the Pentagon when the newspaper conducted its own study and filed numerous requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Rand Corporation study found that 320,000 personnel may have experienced a TBI in Iraq or Afghanistan, but only 43 percent said they had ever been evaluated by a physician for the injury.

As for PTSD, the Pentagon officially acknowledges that 38,000 veterans have been diagnosed with it since 2003–so if the Rand study of 300,000 soldiers with PTSD is accurate, that means some 260,000 have either not sought treatment, not been diagnosed or simply aren’t being counted by the military.

This isn’t surprising, given the culture of denial that pervades the military and veterans health care system. In April, for example, an e-mail surfaced from Ira Katz, deputy chief patient care services officer for mental health at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), acknowledging that 1,000 veterans under VA care attempt suicide every month. On average, 18 veterans commit suicide in the U.S. every day, and four of those are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“Shh!” begins the e-mail from Katz. “Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

Another troubling e-mail from a VA official came to light in May. Norma Perez, a leading psychologist at a facility for veterans in Texas, wrote to staff members in March directing them to diagnose PTSD less frequently because PTSD patients can receive government disability payments for their condition.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” wrote Perez in the message to mental-health specialists and social workers. Instead, she continued, “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

A diagnosis of adjustment disorder is considered less severe and isn’t typically compensated like PTSD, for which veterans are eligible for disability payments of up to $2,527 a month, depending on the severity of their condition.

“It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which released the memo to the media. “Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better.”

Scott Eiswert had stopped going to the VA for PTSD treatment before his suicide, and the disregard for vets under its care was one reason why, according to Stacy Hafley, an advocate for military families who is helping the Eiswert family get back on its feet.

“He didn’t feel like it was helping,” said Hafley in an interview. “He thought they were leaning toward saying that his issues were ‘family problems,’ and not PTSD. So he stopped going, which is fairly common and symptomatic of PTSD.

“I’ve heard it so many times, and my husband, who also suffers from PTSD, did the same thing. So many feel that the VA is either trying to overmedicate or understate the scope of the problem, and neither of those is particularly helpful. They get frustrated, leave and don’t come back.”

Hafley underscored the chief problem facing an understaffed VA: “The VA is trying to build a million-dollar home with a penny, and it can’t be done,” she said.

The VA has an annual mental health budget of $3.8 billion, which U.S. officials contend is a substantial amount. But the U.S. spends this much every 11 days to keep U.S. forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In late June, Bush signed a new supplemental war spending bill, approved by Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress. The bill allocates an additional $162 billion of spending that will last into the middle of 2009, well into the term of Bush’s successor.

While the bill increases spending on GI education benefits, it contains nothing for expanding the budget for military health care. “The recent war funding bill was passed to go clear through the spring of 2009, which was clearly a political ploy to not have to deal with war spending right before the election, given that both candidates are sitting senators,” explained Hafley.

“I feel like they are playing political games with the lives of our loved ones. We shouldn’t be tolerating that. This has been going on for years. These aren’t new problems. These are the same problems that Vietnam vets have been facing for decades.”

Hafley is right. Fighting wars by skimping on compensation for the soldiers who must fight them is a tried-and-true strategy of every commander in chief. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations stood in the way of compensation for Vietnam veterans struggling with PTSD and Agent Orange exposure.

The Clinton administration dragged its feet when tens of thousands of veterans of the 1991 Gulf War struggled to get compensation for the dizzying array of symptoms they were experiencing, such as frequent immune system disorders, birth defects, cancer, chronic fatigue, loss of muscle control, headaches, dizziness and loss of balance, memory problems, muscle and joint pain, indigestion, skin problems and shortness of breath.

Today, the military is employing a different arsenal to keep its overstretched military in the field at bargain-basement prices. “For the first time in history,” according to a cover story in the June 16 issue of Time, “a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool, but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines. Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope.”

Chris LeJeune, who returned home in May 2004, began struggling with depression while on a 15-month deployment to Iraq. The uncertainty about the mission itself weighed heavily on his conscience and contributed to his condition.

“When you search someone’s house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there’s little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor–things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would,” LeJeune said.

When LeJeune sought counseling, he got a prescription for antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications, but not much else. “In the civilian world, when you have a problem, you go to the doctor, and you have therapy followed up by some medication,” said LeJeune. “In Iraq, you see the doctor only once or twice, but you continue to get drugs constantly.”

And that’s if you’re lucky enough to see a mental-health professional. According to Time, about a third of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan say they can’t see a mental-health provider when they need one.

Adding to the frustration facing the loved ones of veterans seeking help is the unresponsiveness of every level of government to the crisis.

Seeking to break the logjam, two veterans’ organization filed suit to ask a federal judge to order changes to how the VA delivers care to veterans. The suit sought redress for the lack of mental health care services, the long delays for appointments, and the four-and-a-half year backlog of cases in which veterans are appealing for a higher disability rating than was issued by VA doctors.

But the judge refused to grant the order, saying the plaintiffs were demanding nothing short of “a complete overhaul of the VA system.”

Hafley can think of only one other measure that would work better than a complete overhaul. “Quite frankly,” she said, “the best thing they could do to stop the overload at the VA is end the war, bring the troops home and stop creating more troops with PTSD who are at risk of suicide or having addiction problems. Adding more money into the VA does help the ones who are already home, but every day, new ones are being created.

“That influx is going to continue. Spending more money is just a temporary fix. They aren’t stopping the bleeding. And that’s the problem that brought us where we are now.”

The Rand Corporation’s study “Invisible Wounds of War” compiles information on veterans suffering from PTSD, TBI and major depression. The Rand site also has links to pamphlets with advice for individuals and families trying to cope with post-deployment stress.

To find out more about the Eiswert family and how you can help, go to the E-4 Scott Eiswert Memorial Fund.

In “Disposable heroes,” published in the International Socialist Review, Pham Binh covered the struggle of soldiers to get the government to devote adequate resources to compensating them for their service.

The Citizen Soldier is an excellent resource for active-duty soldiers looking for news and advice about their rights. Soldiers can also contact the GI Rights Hotline, or call 877-447-4487 from the U.S., 415-487-2635 from outside the U.S., or 06223-47506 from Germany.

[Eric Ruder writes for Socialist Worker, where this article first appeared.]

Source / Dissident Voice

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Just Another Day in Amman or Baghdad

Posted on July 7, 2008 by RagBlog


Cold Shoulders
by Kathy Kelly / July 6, 2008

Over the past two years, here in Amman, Jordan, I’ve regularly visited the family of Umm Hamdi, an Iraqi woman forced out of her native Iraq four years ago by terrifying death threats after her husband, very likely prey to that same threatened violence, disappeared. Although often met with the proverbial “cold shoulder” when trying to improve conditions for her family, she persists,–in the daytime she does child care for another family and, in the evening, she knits, sews, and makes handicrafts to sell in a local market. Umm Hamdi is tough, strong and fiercely determined to provide for her children. Nevertheless, she’s wretchedly insecure as a single mother and one more refugee among thousands in a country where resources to cope with her anxious needs are very slim. And she is worried for her son who is still in Iraq.

Two nights ago, I turned up to her small bare apartment during an evening when her young daughters were out in the care of a local charity and she was home alone. I saw how worn out she was from working to support them – but more telling on her is the frustration and remorse she feels for Hamdi, her teenage son, who is barred from entering Jordan because he is a young man over 15 years of age, and whether for fear of spillover violence or from a wish to concentrate its taxed charitable resources among women and children, Jordan’s policy strictly bars him entry. In Iraq, Hamdi lives with a family that resents him for his unemployed status, (there are no jobs), and can barely spare the little support they offer him.

Umm Hamdi is stricken with remorse over separation from her son. In regular phone calls, he learns that his sisters are going to school, that one has completed a vocational training program, and that when the oldest daughter was recently married the family did everything they could to give her a traditional wedding. The anguish overwhelms her as she recounts their latest conversation: “You do everything for your daughters,” he had shouted, over the phone: “everything for them, but what about me? What about me? I am your son!” She clutches her hands over her eyes. Between sobs, she repeats, “My son, my son.”

Her son is one of many thousands in Iraq who are out of luck, out of work, undereducated, and lonely for parents and siblings lucky enough to escape to neighboring countries.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says that poverty is driving Iraq’s boys and young men, out of desperation, into the militias. A 2007 IOM report noted that “militant fighters sometimes buy the loyalty of displaced persons by providing them some of the things they need, such as food and shelter. More and more children are joining these armed groups, the militias and the insurgents,” said IOM officer Dana Graber Ladeck. “Sometimes they do it for money and sometimes for revenge, but we’re finding more and more child soldiers, so to speak.” (January 30, Voice of America interview)


Some youngsters agree to carry guns and to man checkpoints for the strongest and most heavily armed militia in their country, the U.S. military. Reporting for Reuters, Adrian Croft recently wrote about a “ragtag band of men toting AK-47s at a checkpoint in Baghdad’s Sadr City,” some of 500 youngsters the US had recruited as part of a new plan to “strengthen the Iraqi army’s hold” in the backyard of U.S. rival Moqtada Sadr. (Jordan Times, June 27). New recruits risk their lives to earn $300 a month, guarding these checkpoints. It’s undoubtedly one of the best jobs in town. Will this option, will one like it, attract Umm Hamdi’s son?

Other Iraqi youngsters have been swept up by the U.S. military and sent to prisons, without charge, as a measure to prevent them from joining an Iraqi militia. On May 19, 2008, Fox News reported that the U.S. military is holding about 500 juveniles suspected of being “unlawful enemy combatants” in detention centers in Iraq. In August of 2007, in anticipation of the “troop surge,” CNN reported that the US had imprisoned, without charge, 800 Iraqi youngsters (or “security risks”) between the ages of 11 and 17, in a “prison school,” to prevent them from lending their bodies to militias as decoys or snipers. The CNN reporter said that, within the school, textbooks and classrooms were another “weapon” against terror. Commanding officer Lt. Glenn expressed his goal: “We ensure that when they are released that they don’t – they pick up a book instead of an AK-47 or laying an IED. And that’s what this really gets back to.” And when it gets back to young men like Hamdi, the message is perfectly clear: the U.S. will supply plenty of guns and explosives as long as the attacks are done in the name of protecting U.S. “security.”

Umm Hamdi doesn’t want her son to pick up a gun or lay an explosive device, for Iraq or for anyone. She would rather see him pick up a book. She cries herself to sleep at night wishing she could just see him. But she can’t bring her daughters back to the maelstrom of violence her native country has become with the U.S. invasion. And with Jordan straining to contain the refugees it has absorbed, she can’t bring her son out of Iraq.

Would it reassure her to think that Hamdi might find more secure shelter and achieve some educational goals if U.S. military jailers could imprison him for a year or so? Would it help if I told her that millions of impoverished parents in the U.S. worry that their sons might land in jail, and that many see the military as a better option?

I talked with her for a while longer. Her daughters returned from the event the charity had hosted for them, their faces sparkling with glitter and their arms colorful with painted designs. Umm Hamdi wiped away tears from a suddenly, forcedly, cheerful expression. She fetched a small ball of yarn – royal blue – and started rapid work to knit me a sweater, a parting gift I will take with me when I leave here. “It’s cold in Chicago, very cold!” she said, laying down the needles and yarn. She grabbed her shoulders to help me understand that she didn’t want me to have cold shoulders. “No, we don’t want you to be cold.”

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Source / Common Dreams

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Time to Get Over the American Superiority Complex

Posted on July 6, 2008 by RagBlog

Why I’m Not Patriotic
By Matthew Rothschild / July 2, 2008

(In memory of George Carlin.)

It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out.

Spare me the puerile parades.

Don’t play that martial music, white boy.

And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s.

You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.

It’s not that I’m anti-American, but I am anti-patriotic.

Love of country isn’t natural. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s an inculcated kind of love, something that is foisted upon you in the home, in the school, on TV, at church, during the football game.

Yet most people accept it without inspection.

Why?

For when you stop to think about it, patriotism (especially in its malignant morph, nationalism) has done more to stack the corpses millions high in the last 300 years than any other factor, including the prodigious slayer, religion.

The victims of colonialism, from the Congo to the Philippines, fell at nationalism’s bayonet point.

World War I filled the graves with the most foolish nationalism. And Hitler and Mussolini and Imperial Japan brought nationalism to new nadirs. The flags next to the tombstones are but signed confessions—notes left by the killer after the fact.

The millions of victims of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot have on their death certificates a dual diagnosis: yes communism, but also that other ism, nationalism.

The whole world almost got destroyed because of nationalism during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The bloody battles in Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s fed off the injured pride of competing patriotisms and all their nourished grievances.

In the last five years in Iraq, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died because the United States, the patriarch of patriotism, saw fit to impose itself, without just cause, on another country. But the excuse was patriotism, wrapped in Bush’s brand of messianic militarism: that we, the great Americans, have a duty to deliver “God’s gift of freedom” to every corner of the world.

And the Congress swallowed it, and much of the American public swallowed it, because they’ve been fed a steady diet of this swill.

What is patriotism but “the narcissism of petty differences”? That’s Freud’s term, describing the disorder that compels one group to feel superior to another.

Then there’s a little multiplication problem: Can every country be the greatest country in the world?

This belief system magically transforms an accident of birth into some kind of blue ribbon.

“It’s a great country,” said the old Quaker essayist Milton Mayer. “They’re all great countries.”

At times, the appeal to patriotism may be necessary, as when harnessing the group to protect against a larger threat (Hitler) or to overthrow an oppressor (as in the anti-colonial struggles in the Third World).

But it is always a dangerous toxin to play with, and it ought to be shelved with cross and bones on the label except in these most extreme circumstances.

In an article called “Patriot Games” in the current issue of Time magazine (July 7), Peter Beinart, late of The New Republic, inspects his navel for seven pages and then throws the lint all around.

“Conservatives are right,” he says. “To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours.”

And then he criticizes, incoherently, the conservative love-it-or-leave-it types.

The moral folly of his argument he himself exposes: “If liberals love America purely because it embodies ideals like liberty, justice, and equality, why shouldn’t they love Canada—which from a liberal perspective often goes further toward realizing those principles—even more? And what do liberals do,” he asks, “when those universal ideals collide with America’s self-interest? Giving away the federal budget to Africa would probably increase the net sum of justice and equality on the planet, after all. But it would harm Americans and thus be unpatriotic.”

This is a straw man if I ever I saw one, but if the United States gave a lot more of its budget to eradicating poverty and disease in Africa and other parts of the developing world, it might actually make us all safer.

At bottom, note how readily Beinart disposes of “liberty, justice, and equality.”

He has stripped patriotism to its vacuous essence: Love your country because it’s yours.

If we stopped that arm from reflexively saluting and concerned ourselves more with “universal ideals” than with parochial ones, we’d be a lot better off.

We wouldn’t be in Iraq, we wouldn’t have besmirched ourselves at Guantanamo, we wouldn’t be acting like some Argentinean junta that wages illegal wars and tortures people and disappears them into secret dungeons.

Love of country is a form of idolatry.

Listen, if you would, to the wisdom of Milton Mayer, writing back in 1962 a rebuke to JFK for his much-celebrated line: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Mayer would have none of it. “When Mr. Kennedy spoke those words at his inaugural, I knew that I was at odds with a society which did not immediately rebel against them,” he wrote. “They are the words of totalitarianism pure; no Jefferson could have spoken them, and no Khrushchev could have spoken them better. Could a man say what Mr. Kennedy said and also say that the difference between us and them is that they believe that man exists for the State and we believe that the State exists for man? He couldn’t, but he did. And in doing so, he read me out of society.”

When Americans retort that this is still the greatest country in the world, I have to ask why.

Are we the greatest country because we have 10,000 nuclear weapons?

No, that just makes us enormously powerful, with the capacity to destroy the Earth itself.

Are we the greatest country because we have soldiers stationed in more than 120 countries?

No, that just makes us an empire, like the empires of old, only more so.

Are we the greatest country because we are one-twentieth of the world’s population but we consume one-quarter of its resources?

No, that just must makes us a greedy and wasteful nation.

Are we the greatest country because the top 1 percent of Americans hoards 34 percent of the nation’s wealth, more than everyone in the bottom 90 percent combined?

No, that just makes us a vastly unequal nation.

Are we the greatest country because corporations are treated as real, live human beings with rights?

No, that just enshrines a plutocracy in this country.

Are we the greatest country because we take the best care of our people’s basic needs?

No, actually we don’t. We’re far down the list on health care and infant mortality and parental leave and sick leave and quality of life.

So what exactly are we talking about here?

To the extent that we’re a great (not the greatest, mind you: that’s a fool’s game) country, we’re less of a great country today.

Because those things that truly made us great—the system of checks and balances, the enshrinement of our individual rights and liberties—have all been systematically assaulted by Bush and Cheney.

From the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act to the new FISA Act, and all the signing statements in between, we are less great today.

From Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Force Base and Guantanamo, we are less great today.

From National Security Presidential Directive 51 (giving the Executive responsibility for ensuring constitutional government in an emergency) to National Security Presidential Directive 59 (expanding the collection of our biometric data), we are less great today.

From the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to InfraGard and the Terrorist Liaison Officers, we are less great today.

Admit it. We don’t have a lot to brag about today.

It is time, it is long past time, to get over the American superiority complex.

It is time, it is long past time, to put patriotism back on the shelf—out of the reach of children and madmen.

Source / The Progressive
h/t Earth Family Alpha

And there’s this:

Written on July 4, 2008
Some Thoughts on Patriotism
By WILLIAM BLUM

Most important thought: I’m sick and tired of this thing called “patriotism”.

The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being patriotic — saving their beloved country from “communism”.

General Augusto Pinochet of Chile: “I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country.”[1]

P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: “I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did for my country.”[2]

Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.”[3]

Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: “I did what I thought was right for our country.”[4]

Read all of it, including notes, here. / Counterpunch

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged | Leave a comment

Janice Tibetts :
Canadian Court Sides With U.S. Deserter

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer
Photo of Joshua Key

Joshua Key on stage in Ottawa talking about his memoir The Deserter’s Tale. Photo by John W. McDonald.

Read a gripping excerpt from Joshua Key’s book, “The Deserter’s Tale,” at the end of this article. It is a revelation.

Ruling: Soldier witnessed enough rights abuses to gain Canadian asylum

By Janice Tibetts | July 5, 2008

OTTAWA — A Canadian court has sided for the first time with a military deserter who fled to Canada seeking refugee status, ruling yesterday that the U.S. soldier witnessed enough human rights abuses during a stint in Iraq that he could qualify for asylum.

The decision also marked the first time that the Federal Court, which has heard a handful of cases involving deserters, concluded that military action against civilians in Iraq violates the 1949 Geneva Conventions, an international prohibition against humiliating and degrading treatment.

Federal Court Justice Richard Barnes ordered the Immigration and Refugee Board to reconsider the failed refugee claim of Joshua Key, a soldier who entered Canada with his wife, Brandi, and their small children in March 2005.

Key, an army private, deserted during a two-week break from serving as a combat engineer in Iraq, where he spent eight months in 2003 and says he was involved in military-condoned home invasions against civilians.

“This is a real breakthrough,” said Lee Zaslofsky of the Toronto-based War Resisters Support Campaign. “What excites us is this may also apply to other war resisters who took part in Iraq.”

Barnes ruled that the board too narrowly interpreted refugee eligibility by concluding only soldiers who seek protection from committing war crimes need apply.

“Officially condoned military misconduct falling well short of a war crime may support a claim to refugee protection,” said the ruling.

Barnes said it “cannot be seriously challenged” that some of the conduct in which Keys participated violated the Geneva Conventions.

“This included the responsibility for conducting night-time raids of private Iraqi homes in search of weapons,” said the decision.

“Pte. Key’s role in this was to blow open the doors with explosives and then to assist in both securing the premises and detaining the adult male occupants. Mr. Key alleged that during these searches he witnessed several instances of unjustified abuse, unwarranted detention, humiliation and looting by fellow soldiers, much of which he said was ignored by his superior officers.”

The Geneva Conventions prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” and “unlawful confinement.”

Key, 30, is the co-author of The Deserter’s Tale, a book about serving in Iraq and his flight from the U.S. military. He was born in Oklahoma in 1978, enlisting in the military in 2002. He now lives in Spiritwood in northern Saskatchewan and says that he suffers from post-traumatic stress, including insomnia, nightmares and hallucinations that “flash me right back to Iraq.”

His lawyer, Jeffry House, said it was not lost on Key that the ruling was released on July 4, the U.S. national holiday.

“He’s crossing his fingers that he and his family will be able to stay,” House said.

Source. / Times-Colonist, Victoria

Thanks to Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

photo of man carrying sign

Photo by Ishiku.

Why I fled George Bush’s war
What happened to make a patriotic, gung-ho soldier desert the U.S. army, and turn against the war in Iraq.
By Joshua Key

[Joshua Key, 28, was a poor, uneducated Oklahoma country boy who saw the U.S. army and its promised benefits — from free health care to career training — as the ticket to a better life. In 2002, not yet 24 but already married and the father of two , Key enlisted. He says his recruiting officer promised he’d never be deployed abroad, but a year later he was in Iraq. Only 24 hours after arriving, as Key recounts in The Deserter’s Tale(Anansi), he experienced his first doubts about what he and his fellow soldiers were doing there.]

I was scared out of my wits that first day in Ramadi. Our own air force had just finished bombing these people, but as soon as we got out of our vehicles we began patrolling their streets, on foot. With nearly 100 lb. of weaponry, equipment and clothing on my back, I was about as mobile as a cow. It was just my platoon, 20 guys, walking single file through streets full of Iraqis. I could not stop thinking that anywhere, at any time, some half-starved sniper on a roof could have taken me out in no time flat. Iraqi kids surrounded me in swarms, hands out, asking for water and food. I kept hearing the last words [my wife] Brandi said to me before I flew out: “Don’t you let those terrorists near you, Josh. Even if they are kids. Get them before they get you.”

I was awakened at 3 a.m. that first night and told to get my ass up quickly because in one hour we were going to raid a house full of terrorists. Capt. Conde and some sergeants showed me and my squad mates a satellite photo of a house and a drawing of the layout of the inside. Our assignment was to blow off the door, burst into the house, raid it fast and raid it good — looking for contraband, caches of weapons, signs of terrorists or terrorist activity, then rounding up the men and getting out damn fast. The longer we stayed in any one location, the longer somebody would have to put us in the sights of a rocket-propelled grenade or lob mortars at us.

I had no idea what to expect. Would I charge through the door, only to be blown to bits by a grenade? Would somebody with an AK-47 knock my Oklahoman ass right back out that door? Would some six-year-old terrorist with two days of gun training be waiting to put me in his crosshairs? The minutes ticked on, and I wanted the hour to speed forward so we could get on with it. One or two guys did push-ups to pump themselves up. I borrowed Mason’s portable CD player and bombed out my eardrums to the beat of Ozzy Osbourne. It got me going. High and ready for action. I checked my watch, wished it would accelerate, and stuck some dip — Copenhagen, bourbon flavor — behind my lip. You can’t manage a cigarette when you’ve got an M-249 automatic weapon on your arm. So dip was best. Makes your mouth black as sin, and rots the roots right out of your gums, but dip was my nicotine hit of choice going into that raid.

I committed our instructions to memory. I knew the angles of the house, what door I would help blow down, how many floors were in the house, and who would do what when we busted inside. I would be third in the door, which means I was the second most likely to get shot if anybody had a mind to take us down, and I’d head to the left. Always, for every raid, I would be third in, heading left. I gripped my M-249. Yes, it could belt out 2,000 rounds a minute but only in theory. You couldn’t really hold your finger down that long. When you were blazing away like that, the bullets turned the barrel as hot as Hades. And if you held your finger down too long, it would warp the barrel.

It took thirty seconds for Jones and me to put the charge of C-4 plastic explosive on the door. Then we dashed around to the side of the house so we wouldn’t blow ourselves up. You’d be fried meat if you were anywhere near the explosion. I set off the blast, and then the six of us charged in. Jones went first — that skinny, red-haired Ohio boy was always hot to trot. With Jones leading the way we burst into the house, armed to the hilt. Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, machine guns, combat boots, the whole nine yards.

I’d never been inside an Iraqi’s house before. We charged through a kitchen. I had been told by squad leader Padilla to check everything, so I even opened the fridge. Perhaps, I thought, I would find guns or grenades hidden inside. No such luck. In the fridge, all I saw was a bit of food. In the freezer I found big slabs of meat, uncovered. No wrapping. No plastic. Frozen, just like that. We ran into a living room with long couches, one along each wall. In this room with the couches we found two children, a teenager, and a woman. We also found two young men in the house. One looked like a teenager and the other was perhaps in his early 20s — brothers.

We hollered and cussed. I spat dip on the floor and screamed along with the other soldiers at the top of my lungs. I knew they didn’t understand, but I hollered anyway.

“Get down,” I shouted. “Get the fuck down. Shut the fuck up.”

They didn’t know what “get down” meant, so we knocked the two brothers to the floor, face down. We put our knees on their backs, pulled their hands behind them, and faster than you can bat an eye we zipcuffed them. Zipcuffs are plastic handcuffs that lock on tight. They must have bit something fierce into those young men’s skin. There was no key, nothing — the only way to get them off was to slice them with cutters.

We pushed the brothers outside, where 12 other soldiers from our platoon were waiting. The Iraqi brothers were taken away to an American detention facility for interrogation. I don’t know what it was called, and I don’t know where it was. All I know is that we sent away every man — pretty well every male over five feet tall — that we found in our house raids, and I never saw one of them return to the neighbourhoods we patrolled regularly.

Inside, we kept on ransacking the house. The more obvious it became that we would find no weapons or contraband, the more we kicked the stuffing out of the house. We knocked over dressers, sliced into mattresses with knives, kicked our way through doors, raiding the three bedrooms on the second floor, then raced up to the third floor. We turned over everything we could and broke furniture at random, searching for contraband, weapons, proof of terrorist activity, or signs of weapons of mass destruction. We found nothing but a CD. Soldiers initially said it showed proof of terrorist activity, but it turned out to have nothing on it but a bunch of speeches by Saddam Hussein.

Once we had everybody outside the house and had done our initial job of ransacking, another squad took over inside. They kept raising hell in there, breaking and turning over more furniture, looking for weapons that we might have missed. Outside, under a carport, I was assigned to watch the women and children. We weren’t arresting them, but we weren’t allowing them to go anywhere either. The family members couldn’t go back inside, and they couldn’t wander off into the neighbourhood. They had to stay right there while we tore the hell out of their house.

A girl in the family — a teenager — started staring at me. I tried to ignore her. Then she began speaking to me. Inside, when we had been screaming at her and the others, I’d assumed that nobody understood a word of English. But this young girl spoke to me in English, and her eyes bored holes right through me. She was skin and bones, not even 100 lb., not yet a full-grown woman, but something about her seemed powerful and disturbing. I feared that girl, and I wanted to get away from her as fast as I could, but it was my job to stay right there and make sure she didn’t move. I had my weapon ready. She was wearing a blue nightgown and had a white scarf covering her hair. She had no veil, so I could see her face perfectly. Her eyes were coal black and full of hatred.

In English, she asked me, “Where are you taking my brothers?”

“I don’t know, Miss,” I said.

“Why are you taking them away?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say.”

“When are you bringing them back?”

“Couldn’t tell you that either.”

“Why are you doing this to us?”

I couldn’t answer that.

I hoped she would not raise a fuss. I didn’t want her to start screaming, which could attract the attention of my squad mates. One or two, I feared, would be more than happy to use a rifle butt to knock out her teeth.

I hadn’t been in Iraq more than 24 hours and already I was having strange feelings.

First, I was vulnerable, and I didn’t like it. Even with all these soldiers and all this equipment, I knew that anywhere, at any time, any Iraqi with a gun, a wall to hide behind, and one decent eye could pick me off faster than a hawk nabs a mouse. Second, with hardly one foot into the war, I was also uneasy about what we were doing there. Something was amiss. We hadn’t found anything in this girl’s house, but we had busted it up pretty well in 30 minutes and had taken away her brothers.

Inside, another squad was still ransacking the house. I didn’t enjoy being stuck guarding this girl under the carport, in the cool April air before dawn in Ramadi. Her questions haunted me, and I didn’t like not being able to answer them — even to myself.

Busting into and ransacking homes remained one of my most common duties in Iraq.

Before my time was up, I took part in about 200 raids. We never found weapons or indications of terrorism. I never found a thing that seemed to justify the terror we inflicted every time we blasted through the door of a civilian home, broke everything in sight, punched and zipcuffed the men, and sent them away. One raid was far worse.

It was a handsome two-story house and quite isolated. As usual, I put the charge of C-4 explosives on the door and we blew it in. As we rushed into the house, women were staggering out of their rooms. Three teenage girls screamed when they saw us.

Some of my squad mates grabbed them and held them at gunpoint, and the rest of us ran through the house. We found no men at all, just six more women in their 20s and 30s. The guys in my squad couldn’t find a thing, not even any guns — and it seemed that the more incapable they were of locating contraband, the more destructive they became. They smashed dressers, ripped mattresses, broke cabinets, and threw shelves to the floor.

Outside I found Pte. 1st Class Hayes with a woman under an empty carport. He pointed his M-16 at her head but she would not stop screaming.

“What are you doing this for?” she said.

Hayes told her to shut up.

“We have done nothing to you,” she went on.

Hayes was starting to lose it. I told her that we were there on orders and that we couldn’t speak to her, but on and on and on she bawled at Hayes and me.

“You Americans are disgusting! Who do you think you are, to do this to us?”

Hayes slammed her in the face with the stock of his M-16. She fell face down into the dirt, bleeding and silent. The woman lay still on the ground. I pushed Hayes away.

“What are you doing, man?” I said to him. “You have a wife and two kids! Don’t be hitting her like that.”

He looked at me with eyes full of hatred, as if he was ready to kill me for saying those words, but he did not touch the woman again. I found this incident with Hayes particularly disturbing because during other times I had seen him in action in Iraq, he had showed himself to be one of the most level-headed and calm soldiers in my company. I had the sense that if he could lose it and hit a woman the way he had, any of us could lose it too.

Then something happened that haunts my dreams to this day. All the women were led back inside the house and our entire platoon was ordered to stand guard outside it. Four U.S. military men entered the house with the women. They closed the doors. We couldn’t see anything through the windows. I don’t know who the military men were, or what unit they were from, but I can only conclude that they outranked us and were at least at the level of first lieutenant or above. That’s because our own second lieutenant Joyce was there, and his presence did not deter them.

Normally, when we conducted a raid, we were in and out in 30 minutes or less. You never wanted to stay in one place for too long for fear of exposing yourself to mortar attacks. But our platoon was made to stand guard outside that house for about an hour. The women started shouting and screaming. The men stayed in there with them, behind closed doors. It went on and on and on.

Finally, the men came out and told us to get the hell out of there.

It struck me then that we, the American soldiers, were the terrorists. We were terrorizing Iraqis. Intimidating them. Beating them. Destroying their homes.

Probably raping them. The ones we didn’t kill had all the reasons in the world to become terrorists themselves. Given what we were doing to them, who could blame them for wanting to kill us, and all Americans? A sick realization lodged like a cancer in my gut. It grew and festered, and troubled me more with every passing day. We, the Americans, had become the terrorists in Iraq.

In December 2003, Key went home on a two-week leave. He never returned to Iraq. Instead, Key went into hiding. The following March, he and his family crossed the Canadian border at Niagara Falls.

[Published by House of Anansi. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.]

Source. / Macleans, CA.

The Deserter’s Tale at Amazon.com.

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Robert Silverberg : Sci Fi Writer Takes On Peak Metal

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Robert Silverberg at Worldcon 2005 in Glasgow, August 2005. Photo by Szymon Sokół.

Reflections: The Death of Gallium
by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg is an American author, best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He is a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

I mourn for the dodo, poor fat flightless bird, extinct since the eighteenth century. I grieve for the great auk, virtually wiped out by zealous Viking huntsmen a thousand years ago and finished off by hungry Greenlanders around 1760. I think the world would be more interesting if such extinct creatures as the moa, the giant ground sloth, the passenger pigeon, and the quagga still moved among us. It surely would be a lively place if we had a few tyrannosaurs or brontosaurs on hand. (Though not in my neighborhood, please.) And I’d find it great fun to watch one of those PBS nature documentaries showing the migratory habits of the woolly mammoth. They’re all gone, though, along with the speckled cormorant, Steller’s sea cow, the Hispaniola hutia, the aurochs, the Irish elk, and all too many other species.

But now comes word that it isn’t just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

Running out of oil, yes. We’ve all been concerned about that for many years and everyone anticipates a time when the world’s underground petroleum reserves will have been pumped dry. But oil is just an organic substance that was created by natural biological processes; we know that we have a lot of it, but we’re using it up very rapidly, no more is being created, and someday it’ll be gone. The disappearance of elements, though—that’s a different matter. I was taught long ago that the ninety-two elements found in nature are the essential building blocks of the universe. Take one away—or three, or six—and won’t the essential structure of things suffer a potent blow? Somehow I feel that there’s a powerful difference between running out of oil, or killing off all the dodos, and having elements go extinct.

I’ve understood the idea of extinction since I was a small boy, staring goggle-eyed at the dinosaur skeletons in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. Bad things happen—a climate change, perhaps, or the appearance on the scene of very efficient new predators—and whole species of animals and plants vanish, never to return. But elements? The extinction of entire elements, the disappearance of actual chunks of the periodic table, is not something I’ve ever given a moment’s thought to. Except now, thanks to Armin Reller of the University of Augsburg.

The concept has occasionally turned up in science fiction. I remember reading, long ago, S.S. Held’s novel The Death of Iron, which was serialized in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories starting in September, 1932. (No, I’m not that old—but a short-lived SF magazine called Wonder Story Annual reprinted the Held novel in 1952, when I was in college, and that’s when I first encountered it.)


Because I was an assiduous collector of old science fiction magazines long ago, I also have that 1932 Gernsback magazine on my desk right now. Gernsback frequently bought translation rights to European science fiction books for his magazine, and The Death of Iron was one of them. The invaluable Donald Tuck Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy tells me that Held was French, and La Mort du Fer was originally published in Paris in 1931. Indeed, the sketch of Held in Wonder Stories—Gernsback illustrated every story he published with a sketch of its author—shows a man of about forty, quintessentially French in physiognomy, with a lean, tapering face, intensely penetrating eyes, a conspicuous nose, an elegant dark goatee. Not even a Google search turns up any scrap of biographical information about him, but at least, thanks to Hugo Gernsback, I know what he looked like.

The Death of Iron is, as its name implies, a disaster novel. A mysterious disease attacks the structural integrity of the machinery used by a French steel company. “The modifications of the texture of the metal itself,” we are told—the translation is by Fletcher Pratt, himself a great writer of fantasy and science fiction in an earlier era—“these dry, dusty knots encysted in the mass, some of them imperceptible to the naked eye and others as big as walnuts; these cinder-like stains, sometimes black and sometimes blue, running through the steel, seemed to have been produced by a process unknown to modern science.” Which is indeed the case: a disease, quickly named siderosis, is found to have attacked everything iron at the steel plant, and the disease proves to be contagious, propagating itself from one piece of metal to another. Everything made of iron turns porous and crumbles.

Sacre bleu! Quel catastrophe! No more airplanes, no more trains or buses, no bridges, no weapons, no scissors, no shovels, no can-openers, no high-rise buildings. Subtract one vital element and in short order society collapses into Neolithic anarchy, and then into a nomadic post-technological society founded on mysticism and magic. This forgotten book has an exciting tale to tell, and tells it very well.

It’s just a fantasy, of course. In the real world iron is in no danger of extinction from strange diseases, nor is our supply of it running low. And, though I said a couple of paragraphs ago that the ninety-two natural elements are essential building blocks of the universe, the truth is that we’ve been getting along without two of them—numbers 85 and 87 in the periodic table—for quite some time. The periodic table indicates that they ought to be there, but they’re nowhere to be found in nature. Element 85, astatine, finally was synthesized at the University of California in 1940. It’s a radioactive element with the very short half-life of 8.3 hours, and whatever supply of it was present at the creation of the world vanished billions of years ago. The other blank place in the periodic table, the one that should have been occupied by element 87, was filled in 1939 by a French scientist, who named it, naturally, francium. It is created by the radioactive decay of actinium, which itself is a decay product of uranium-235, and has a half-life of just 21 minutes. So for all intents and purposes the world must do without element 87, and we are none the worse for that.

Gallium, though—

Gallium’s atomic number is 31. It’s a blue-white metal first discovered in 1831, and has certain unusual properties, like a very low melting point and an unwillingness to oxidize, that make it useful as a coating for optical mirrors, a liquid seal in strongly heated apparatus, and a substitute for mercury in ultraviolet lamps. It’s also quite important in making the liquid-crystal displays used in flat-screen television sets and computer monitors.

As it happens, we are building a lot of flat-screen TV sets and computer monitors these days. Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use. Indium, another endangered element—number 49 in the periodic table—is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses (plus some others—it’s a gasoline additive, for example, and a component of the control rods used in nuclear reactors) and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. Hafnium, element 72, is in only slightly better shape. There aren’t any hafnium mines around; it lurks hidden in minute quantities in minerals that contain zirconium, from which it is extracted by a complicated process that would take me three or four pages to explain. We use a lot of it in computer chips and, like indium, in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but the problem is that we don’t have a lot of it. Dr. Reller thinks it’ll be gone somewhere around 2017. Even zinc, commonplace old zinc that is alloyed with copper to make brass, and which the United States used for ordinary one-cent coins when copper was in short supply in World War II, has a Reller extinction date of 2037. (How does a novel called The Death of Brass grab you?)

Zinc was never rare. We mine millions of tons a year of it. But the supply is finite and the demand is infinite, and that’s bad news. Even copper, as I noted above, is deemed to be at risk. We humans move to and fro upon the earth, gobbling up everything in sight, and some things aren’t replaceable.

Solutions will be needed, if we want to go on having things like television screens and solar panels and computer chips. Synthesizing the necessary elements, or finding workable substitutes for them, is one obvious idea. Recycling these vanishing elements from discarded equipment is another. We can always try to make our high-tech devices more efficient, at least so far as their need for these substances goes. And discovering better ways of separating the rare elements from the matrices in which they exist as bare traces would help—the furnace-flue solution. (Platinum, for example, always in short supply, constitutes 1.5 parts per million of urban dust and grime, which is ever-abundant.)

But the sobering truth is that we still have millions of years to go before our own extinction date, or so we hope, and at our present rate of consumption we are likely to deplete most of the natural resources this planet has handed us. We have set up breeding and conservation programs to guard the few remaining whooping cranes, Indian rhinoceroses, and Siberian tigers. But we can’t exactly set up a reservation somewhere where the supply of gallium and hafnium can quietly replenish itself. And once the scientists have started talking about our chances of running out of copper, we know that the future is rapidly moving in on us and big changes lie ahead.

Source. / Asimov’s Science Fiction

Thanks to devilstower / Daily Kos / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Against the (Border) Wall!

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Not even federal law can keep Bush’s fence from ripping through natural areas along the Rio Grande.
By Melissa del Bosque / June 27, 2008

The following article appears in the current issue of the Texas Observer [Vol. 100, No. 13, June 27, 2008].

Ken Merritt dedicated 31 years of his professional life to protecting endangered wildlife for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. He’d still be doing the job he loved if not for a fateful decision. In December 2007, his bosses presented Merritt with a choice: Adhere to longstanding federal law, or sign off on a plan by the Department of Homeland Security to build an 18-foot steel wall through a wildlife refuge under his charge.

Merritt oversaw 180,000 acres of federally protected land that comprises three national wildlife refuges: the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the Santa Ana, and the Laguna Atascosa. In an area where 95 percent of the native habitat has fallen prey to development, the value of the refuges cannot be overstated. Over three decades, the federal government invested more than $80 million in buying and restoring habitat along the Texas-Mexico border, creating 115 refuges along the Rio Grande. Merritt’s three-refuge complex is the largest tract. Volunteers and federal employees painstakingly restored native grasses and trees to fallow farmland, and endangered species such as ocelots and jaguarundis slowly returned. The refuges are home to 700 species of birds and animals, as well as 300 species of butterflies, including the rare Telea hairstreak butterfly, which caused a stir last year in scientific circles when it was spotted for the first time in 70 years. The wildlife refuges have been an economic boon for one of the poorest regions in the country. The median annual household income along the border is $15,000. The more than 200,000 birders and ecotourists who visit the region generate an estimated $150 million a year.

Merritt assumed his job was secure. “I really didn’t think it was a career-ending decision until they told me so last December,” he says. “I thought what I was doing was right. But it was a train wreck waiting to happen.”

Merritt says his boss, Benjamin Tuggle, the southwest regional director at Fish & Wildlife in Albuquerque, explicitly asked him to approve the engineering survey for a fence through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. It was implied through numerous conference calls and a visit from Tuggle that the Bush administration wanted badly to begin building the border fence. A private environmental consulting firm from Colorado, E2m Inc., had won the contract to do surveys for the fence, and needed access to the refuge. The National Environmental Policy Act, however, requires that a wildlife refuge manager answer a series of questions to determine whether construction projects—in this case a border fence—are appropriate and not detrimental to wildlife in the refuge.

Merritt’s findings indicated the opposite. “It had no benefit for the refuge and no relationship to why the refuge was established,” Merritt says. He denied permission to perform the survey. Tuggle told him his choice was a “career-ending decision,” Merritt says. “He said some other things, which I won’t go into, but it was pretty ugly.” On January 3, Merritt retired.

Contacted by the Observer, Tuggle denied telling Merritt that his decision would end his career.

Merritt, 54, bemoans the politicization of wildlife protection under the Bush administration. He says political appointees with little background in wildlife management or biology have disregarded the agency’s mission, protecting the nation’s natural resources. “I put a lot of time and a lot of thinking into working through this issue on the border fence,” Merritt says. “And I came to the right conclusion about it, but nothing was done in the end because the waiver wiped everything out.”

The waiver in question stems from a provision Congress tucked into the Real ID Act in 2005 that allows the secretary of homeland security to ignore federal law in the name of national security. On April 1, Secretary Michael Chertoff used his authority to waive 36 federal laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Antiquities Act, and the Native American Graves Protection Act. His waiver applies to 470 miles of southern border in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The edict ended public input and interagency discussion on alternatives to the fence.

Yet, as Chertoff has admitted, building a fence through Texas’ wildlife refuges, while costly to taxpayers, will do little to solve America’s illegal immigration problems. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, has estimated that building and maintaining fence segments along the southern border could cost $49 billion. Last July, Chertoff told CNN’s Late Edition that “fencing has a symbolic value, and it has usefulness in some parts of the border. And we’re going to use it where it is effective. The idea that you are going to solve the problem simply by building a fence is undercut by the fact that yesterday we discovered a tunnel. So the idea that fencing alone is a solution I think is overly simplistic.”

Despite complaints from congressional leaders about lack of public input, a class action lawsuit by several Texas border landowners and cities, and a lawsuit filed in the U.S. Supreme Court by Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club, Chertoff expects private contractors to start building the fence in Texas by July or August.

In May, the Army Corps of Engineers began soliciting bids to build three segments of steel fence through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Houston-based KBR Inc., formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., is one of the companies bidding for the project.

Privatization of border security is a hallmark of the Bush administration’s effort to curb illegal immigration. At a January 2006 “Industry Day” in Washington, D.C., Deputy Director of Homeland Security Michael Jackson told more than 400 defense contractors, “We’re asking you, we’re inviting you to tell us how to run our organization.” Jackson, a former Lockheed Martin Corp. vice president, added, “This is an invitation to be a little bit aggressive, thinking as if you were owner and you were partners with CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection).”

In 2006, Boeing Co. won a multibillion-dollar contract to build and maintain “technology and tactical infrastructure projects” along the northern and southern borders. A Government Accountability Office report released in February indicated the contract runs for three years, with three one-year extension options. The GAO has repeatedly recommended that Homeland Security place a spending cap on the contract, to no avail.

Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative office, whose responsibility it is to oversee the Boeing contract and several other border-security projects, did not return six phone calls and four e-mails requesting comment.

Boeing drew the wrath of congressional leaders in February, when the company delivered a “virtual fence” to surveil the Arizona border near Tucson. It didn’t work. Under accelerated deadlines imposed by Congress and Homeland Security, the company used commercial software for police dispatchers. The company didn’t consult with Border Patrol agents as to what would work in the field. Congressional leaders threatened to take the project, called P-28, away from Boeing, but instead granted the company two more contracts worth $133 million to salvage the effort.

Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva, whose district is on the Arizona border, has watched the P-28 debacle unfold over the past two years. “They screwed up the virtual fence, and $20.6 million was flushed down the toilet—no problem,” he says. “Now they’ve been given additional money to redo it. It’s nothing more than political symbolism.”

Chertoff announced this month that the technology would be operational in 2011.

In June 2007, Grijalva, who chairs the subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands of the House Natural Resources Committee, introduced the Borderlands Conservation and Security Act. His legislation requires, among other things, that Homeland Security publish full public notice and seek public input. And it repeals Chertoff’s waiver authority. Despite 49 co-sponsors, the legislation languishes in another House subcommittee—the equivalent of outer Siberia on Capitol Hill.

Grijalva has spent his whole life on the Arizona border, and he understands the complexities of the region. His Capitol office is decorated with Native American artwork and colorful southwestern décor. At times he slips into Spanish border slang. “The fence is not a deterrent for the high-level organized criminal organizations operating on both sides of the border,” he says. “Guns one way, dope the other way, human smuggling, stolen vehicles—those activities are now organized. And if you talk to Border Patrol agents who don’t have to carry the party line, they’ll tell you it’s not the poor pelado coming across to wash dishes in some restaurant that’s a threat. It’s the cartels that control Nuevo Laredo and Juarez in Texas and Naco, Nogales, and Agua Prieta in my state.”

Grijalva has been trying for months to get traction on his legislation. But it remains unacceptable to both Republicans and the Democratic leadership, the former for ideological reasons and the latter because it’s too controversial in an election year.

“When I first filed this bill, some of my colleagues thought it was a real pain in the ass,” Grijalva says. “Nobody thought the fence would be built. Then their communities started calling them.”

In April, he held a field hearing on his bill at the University of Texas campus in Brownsville. The hearing brought together seven committee chairs and a bipartisan panel of congressional members, including Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a primary architect of the Secure Fence Act. Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo, a staunch fence supporter, also took part. He had one of the more memorable lines of the day when he peevishly suggested that the border fence be built north of Brownsville since residents hated the plan so much.

One important witness was conspicuously absent. Grijalva had requested that a deputy or high-ranking member of Homeland Security be present to answer questions. Chertoff ignored Grijalva and the six other Democratic committee chairs, and didn’t send a high-level staffer.

“The administration is an animal unto itself,” Grijalva says.

Though Democrats have the majority in the House and the Senate, and control the administration’s purse strings, they have been reluctant to take on Homeland Security because they don’t want to be perceived as soft on security issues, Grijalva says.

“A lot of what we need to do as Democrats in Congress is not panic and stick our tails between our legs at the tactics that Homeland Security uses, such as ‘Oh, if you’re not for waiving 36 laws, building a fence, and putting the safety of the nation above a species, then you are obviously pro-terrorist, open borders, and don’t care about the security of our nation,’” he says. “It’s been a very convenient political hammer on both sides of the aisle.”

Grijalva’s hope is that Democrats can eventually reform Homeland Security, but he doesn’t see it happening until Bush has left the White House. “I think we can provide some real oversight over these agencies and at least minimize the damage and hold it until the new administration can come in and clean it up,” he says. “That’s the long-term strategy for me—holding the dogs at the gate until we can have a more rational look at border security and border policy. Because everything we are doing right now is in response to being perceived as a political advantage or disadvantage. And so when you create policy that way, like with the border fence, it is doomed to failure. Those policies have no lasting strength to them.”

Particularly galling to the congressman is Homeland Security’s plan to spend $1.3 billion to build a massive headquarters in Washington; the money will come from port of entry funding within the agency’s budget. Local officials, along with law enforcement personnel, have long begged for more money to beef up security at ports of entry along the border. “People are calling it the ‘Little Pentagon,’” Grijalva says of the new headquarters. “They squeezed port of entry funding, better security, and flow-of-traffic money slated for ports of entry to build it.”

He says he believes the agency never intended to follow federal law when building the fence segments across the southern border. “I think the waiver was always in the works,” he says. “There is a military mentality toward this now in the Department of Homeland Security. They use words like ‘operational management, operational control.’ They didn’t want to deal with the National Environmental Policy Act. Because Homeland Security feels it is to some extent part of the Defense Department and that oversight should be minimal and secretive. The National Environmental Policy Act is an open and public process, and in that culture they feel it’s their prerogative to be closed about it for security reasons.”

Every year, Grijalva says, at least 400 dead migrants who have succumbed to the elements are routinely discovered in the desert in his district. He is frustrated that the administration won’t work with local communities and law enforcement to come up with a border policy that works. Instead, private contractors are making millions off U.S. taxpayers building pieces of fence that no one believes will work. “This administration has made sure their allies have found a way to make money out of it,” Grijalva says. “I find it very disturbing.”

The congressman hasn’t given up on his legislation. He hopes to hold another hearing in July. While he has gathered support from 49 Democrats, not one Republican has joined them.

Noah Kahn, federal lands associate with Defenders of Wildlife, says his group has repeatedly met with Republican congressional members to persuade them to join Grijalva. “Many of them show interest, but they always ask, ‘Have any other Republicans signed on to the bill?’ No one wants to be the first Republican to sign on,” Kahn says.

“I don’t think I will get bipartisan support,” Grijalva says. “So the point quite honestly is to continue to move the issue—you don’t want it to disappear. We want to put this in front of the American people and say, ‘OK, the border fence is not going to solve the problem you perceive because, (a) it is dividing communities and, (b) it’s a waste of money, and it’s affecting the environment and our constitutional principles, such as private property and sovereign rights for native people.” Ken Merritt, for one, would like to see a real debate about the fence. On a sweltering June afternoon, he sits under a tree at the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge in a contemplative mood. Just last December he was the boss here.

“The border fence really threw the service for a loop,” he says of Fish & Wildlife. “They wrote this policy about appropriate uses to protect the refuges as much as possible from political decisions. They never thought about a fence coming in. It’s a tough one because the administration wants a fence, and they are telling everyone down the line in the executive branch, ‘Make this thing happen.’”

Merritt says the American people shouldn’t have to choose between saving endangered species and securing the border. “You hear about a wildlife refuge and the border fence on Fox News, and they always paint it as black and white,” he says. “Do you want to save an ocelot or have our border secure? It’s a ridiculous question, because we ought to be able to have both.”

[Reporting for this story was supported by funding from the Fund for Constitutional Government.]

Source. / Texas Observer

EPA Wouldn’t Rubber Stamp Border Wall
By Melissa del Bosque / July 2, 2008

Not even the Environmental Protection Agency was buying the border fence, according to documents released today by the Sierra Club.

In a 23-page document written in the past year about the Rio Grande Valley section of the fence, John Blevins, an EPA official, details the various reasons as to why the agency can’t rubber stamp Chertoff’s border fence plan. The first paragraph, titled “Purpose and Need,” highlights just about every question border residents have been asking for the past year.

Blevins writes:

“There is no text, studies, etc. that provide support for the Purpose and Need. There should be a section describing the amount of drug traffic that occurs along this sector, the number of illegal crossings, the number of Border Patrol responses, decreases in land values over time along the border, crime statistics, maps showing common interdiction locations, or the like. There are none in this document.”

Homeland Security officials should be answering these questions — especially when they plan on condemning private properties. Landowners such as Brownsville Resident Eloisa Tamez, 72, deserve an explanation why her land is targeted for the fence and not the River Bend Resort down the street.

But Chertoff wasn’t about to let something like a federal regulatory agency get in his way. In April — on April Fool’s Day, no less — Chertoff issued his imperial waiver of 36 federal laws — and thus bypassed agencies like the EPA and U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

In the current Observer issue, we highlight the story of Ken Merritt who worked at U.S. Fish and Wildlife for 31 years, but left the agency after refusing to sign off on Chertoff’s plan.

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist recently told me that Homeland Security has created its own sham environmental assessments, since Chertoff waived the National Environmental Policy Act.

These new assessments are called the Environmental Stewardship Plan and the Biological Resource Plan. In this way, Chertoff is trying to create a patina of democracy and environmental stewardship for his border-fence boondoogle.

Source. / Texas Observer Blog

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Former Sen. Jesse Helms, Icon of the Ultra-Right, Dead at 86

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Jesse Helms. Art by Paul Giambarba / Truthout.

Jesse Helms, isolationist, old school racist, he softened a bit near the end.
By Leonard Doyle / July 5, 2008

The former US Senator Jesse Helms, a legendary isolationist and defender of “Southern values” who spent much of his life goading liberals, died yesterday (July 4).

Universally known as ‘Senator No’ he was deeply sceptical of international cooperation and intervention. His refusal to ratify international accords, notably the Kyoto treaty on global warming, made him the bete noir of the Georgetown foreign policy establishment

”Compromise, hell! … If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?” he wrote in an editorial setting out his political style back in 1959.

US business disliked him for his tireless campaigns for unilateral US economic sanctions on Iran and Cuba. He was also deeply sceptical of America’s opening up to China and always ready to reject international cooperation if it meant yielding American sovereignty.

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he used his power to oppose the international criminal court, the international land mine treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as Kyoto.

For many he was a caricature of a right wing conservative, being pro-gun, pro-death penalty and anti-abortion. He ran what many considered to be a vendetta against publicly-funded arts, and was frequently accused of homophobia and sexism,

He exploited racial divisions in his native North Carolina and was first elected to the US Senate in 1972. A deeply polarising figure in each of hi five contests he never won more than 55% of the votes. On the campaign trail he tapped into the fears of middle and working class white voters stirring up anger against affirmative actions programme to help unemployed blacks.

He famously ran a “white hands” ad that showed a white man crumpling up a letter while a narrator said: “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?

He also used his power in the senate to block the nomination of black Americans to the courts and to ambassadorial positions.

A journalist in his early career, he persuaded millions of Americans that their country was being run by liberals in Washington, and controlled by the New York-based media.

Never caring much what his critics thought, he rampaged against what he believed were the evils of abortion, affirmative action and homosexuality.

“Just think about it – homosexuals, lesbians – disgusting people – marching in our streets, demanding all sorts of things including the right to marry each other and the right to adopt children. How do you like (that)?” he said.

Near the end of his career he would make his way his way through the US Capitol on a scooter. He decided not to run for a sixth term in 2002 and was diagnosed with vascular dementi after repeated minor strokes brain in 2006.

In his later years a compassionate side emerged that few of his colleagues believed was possible. At the instigation of U2’s Bono he accepted that debt was the cause of suffering in the developing world and campaigned for a debt relief bill and attended his first ever pop concert in Washington DC.

He was 86.

Source. / The Guardian, U.K.

Thanks to truthout / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Brother, Can You Spare a Euro?

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The U.S. dollar has been declining steadily for six years against other major currencies, undercutting its role as the leading international banking currency. (Photo by Michael Probst / AP.

The buck doesn’t stop here; it just keeps falling
By Tom Raum / July 6, 2008

WASHINGTON — Things in the U.S. sure are tough. Brother, can you spare a euro?

Signs saying “We accept euros” are cropping up in the windows of some Manhattan retailers. A Belgium company is trying to gobble up St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, the nation’s largest brewer and iconic Super Bowl advertiser.

The almighty dollar is mighty no more. It has been declining steadily for six years against other major currencies, undercutting its role as the leading international banking currency. The long slide is fanning inflation at home and playing a major role in the run-up of oil and gasoline prices everywhere.

Vacationing Europeans are finding bargains in the U.S., while Americans in Paris and other world capitals are being clobbered by sky-high tabs for hotels, travel and even sidewalk cafes. Northern border-city Americans who once flocked into Canada for shopping deals are staying home; it’s the Canadians flocking here now.

Everything made in America — from goods to entire companies — is near dirt cheap to many foreigners. Meanwhile, American consumers, both those who travel and those who stay at home, are seeing big price increases in energy, food and imported goods. The dollar has lost roughly a quarter of its purchasing power against the currencies of major U.S. trading partners from its peak in 2002.

Since oil is bought and sold in dollars worldwide, the devalued dollar has made the recent surge in energy prices even worse for Americans, leading to $4 gasoline in the United States. Analysts suggest that of the $140 a barrel that oil fetches globally, some $25 may be due to the devalued dollar.

Further declines in the dollar will add to oil’s appeal as a commodity to be traded.

Oil, suggests influential energy consultant Daniel Yergin, is “the new gold.”

The limp greenback has had one big benefit to the U.S. economy: Since it makes American goods cheaper overseas, it has helped manufacturers who export and other U.S. based companies with international reach. Exports have been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise darkening U.S. economy.

Franklin Vargo, vice president of international economic affairs at the National Association of Manufacturers, welcomes the dollar slide, as do members of his organization.

“We can see that, when the dollar’s not overpriced, that people around the world want American goods and our exports are going gangbusters now,” he said.

He doesn’t see the dollar as undervalued. He sees it as having being overpriced in the 1990s — and what’s happened since as something along the lines of a correction.

Still, Vargo acknowledges the dollar’s decline has brought a measure of pain to some consumers. “As the dollar has gone down in value, that has added to the dollar cost of oil. No question. So having the dollar decline is not unambiguously a plus. That’s why we say there’s got to be a balance there somewhere. What we want is a Goldilocks dollar. Not too strong, not too weak. But just right. And only the market can determine that,” Vargo said.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, said expanding exports due to a weak dollar are “an important source of growth, but it doesn’t add a lot to jobs, it doesn’t mean very much for the average American household. For the average American, for the average consumer, these are pretty tough times.”

The loss of the dollar’s purchasing power and international respect has some experts worrying that the euro might one day replace the dollar as the so-called primary reserve currency. And that could trigger a dollar rout as foreign governments and international investors flee from U.S. Treasury bonds and other dollar-denominated investments.

Making matters worse: The gaping U.S. current-account deficit — the amount by which the value of goods, services and investments bought in the U.S. from overseas exceeds the amount the U.S. sells abroad — and the low levels of domestic savings means that foreigners must purchase more than $3 billion every business day to fund the imbalance.

Since roughly half of the nation’s nearly $10 trillion national debt is held by foreigners, mostly in Treasury bills and bonds, such a withdrawal could have enormous consequences.

Yet Washington finds its options limited.

President Bush asserts longtime support for a “strong” dollar, and made that point again Sunday in a news conference in Japan with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. “In terms of the dollar, the United States strongly believes — believes in a strong dollar policy and believes that the strength of our economy will be reflected in the dollar.”

But not once in his presidency has the U.S bought dollars on foreign exchange markets — called intervention — to help prop up the greenback. There’s no telling where the buck will stop these days, although for the past few weeks it seems to be in a holding pattern. Even as three Bush Treasury secretaries in a row spouted the strong-dollar mantra, the dollar kept tumbling against the euro, the pound, the yen, the Canadian dollar and most other major currencies.

The Federal Reserve could prop up the dollar by increasing interest rates under its control. Increased yields would make dollar-denominated investments more attractive to foreigners. But that could undercut the already anemic economic growth in a frail U.S. economy rocked by soaring fuel costs, falling home prices and rising unemployment — and the lowest reading of consumer confidence in 16 years.

The Fed must do a balancing act between keeping the domestic economy from going into recession and keeping inflation at bay.

Furthermore, no Fed likes to raise rates aggressively in a presidential election year. It seems more inclined to hold interest rates low for now to give financial markets time to recover from the housing meltdown and credit crunch. It did just that in its meeting on June 25, leaving a key short-term rate at 2 percent. The rate reached that level in April after a series of aggressive cuts that brought it down 3.25 percentage points since September. Those cuts helped ease the housing and credit crises — but drove the dollar further down.

In early June, Bush declared before his trip to Europe: “A strong dollar is in our nation’s interests. It is in the interests of the global economy.” That, plus a warning by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke that the dollar’s weakness was contributing to U.S. inflation, seemed to temporarily break the dollar’s tumble. Presidents and Fed chairmen don’t usually talk directly about the dollar and exchange rates — leaving that up to the Treasury secretary — and international bankers and investors took note of the high-level attention.

Over the past few weeks, the dollar has remained relatively stable, although it took a dip after the Fed decided to leave rates unchanged. The long slide may not be over.

Still, if the Fed moves to lift rates later this year, as some traders and investors anticipate, it could buttress the dollar and spur an exodus of speculators from the oil market — helping to both prop up the dollar and drive down oil prices. But few economists are sanguine that the economy will improve any time soon.

The other main tool to move the dollar — intervention in currency markets by buying dollars and selling other currencies — is risky.

It would take great sums of money to make any difference. The foreign exchange market is the largest in the world, with over $1 trillion traded each day. Seeing the U.S. trying to prop up the greenback by buying dollars could be taken as a sign of desperation and possibly trigger a renewed round of selling.

Furthermore, there has been little encouragement for such a strategy from finance ministers from the Group of Eight wealthy democracies — Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Russia plus the U.S.

Leaders of the eight countries were to meet in Japan beginning Monday, but the falling dollar was not even on the formal agenda. It’s too touchy an issue, and the dollar’s relative stability over the past few weeks makes it easier for world leaders to steer clear. “People will be talking about it in the corridors,” said Reginald Dale, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has suggested that nothing is “off the table” including intervention. But Bush has made statements suggesting he intends to let market forces set exchange rates.

The dollar has fallen so far, it will be difficult to halt or reverse its slide.

U.S. efforts to persuade Saudi Arabia and other major oil-producing nations to increase their production — and help ease pressure on both oil prices and the dollar — have brought scant results.

“There’s no magic wand,” said White House press secretary Dana Perino. “It’s not going to be a problem that we solve overnight.”

The impact of the falling dollar is not always visible to the average consumer. Not like the big numbers on gas pumps that give stark evidence of price levels.

But imported goods, from fuel to cars from Japanese automakers and toys from China — are getting more expensive just as U.S. wages are either stagnant or falling.

American companies suddenly look cheap to acquisition-minded foreigners, particularly those based in Europe.

Belgian-based InBev’s hostile bid for Anheuser-Busch is a recent example. It has bid $46 billion to acquire the company — a 30 percent premium above where Anheuser’s shares traded before the June 11 proposal.

A successful acquisition by InBev would put the last remaining mass-market American brewer in foreign hands. InBev is based in Belgium but run by Brazilians. Anheuser-Busch, which brews both Budweiser and Bud light, holds a 48.5 percent share of U.S. beer sales. Anheuser-Busch rejected InBev’s bid, but the Belgian brewer forged ahead, seeking to unseat Anheuser’s 13-member board and take its offer directly to shareholders.

If the takeover goes through, it might open the floodgates to other foreign takeovers of American companies.

Some of the dollar’s decline depends on hard-to-measure factors, like the psychology of foreign investors.

When the U.S. economy is weakening, many investors stay away. The slide of the dollar has coincided with a long period of relatively low interest rates.

And some of the decline in the dollar’s global role “is due to the foreign policy failures of the Bush administration, not just to recent economic developments and policies,” suggests Adam S. Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In other words, some international investors unhappy with Bush’s policy on Iraq or toward other parts of the world might not wish to invest in American companies or buy U.S. bonds.

Still, he argues that the euro is unlikely to replace the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency, and that the euro may be at “a temporary peak of influence.”

David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York, says he envisions a day when the dollar and the euro will share billing as the world’s reserve currencies.

He predicts that the dollar will remain roughly at its present levels “for a couple years.” Still, he says, “We might not be done with this down leg.”

Another big problem for the dollar is that the European Central Bank is likely to hike rates while the Federal Reserve stands pat, giving euro-based investments a bigger yield advantage.

“I could see more downward pressure on the dollar, over the course of the summer, not dramatically, if the ECB does raise rates,” said Robert Dye, an economist with PNC Financial Services Group. “If it is one and done, pressure will be minimal. But if it’s an ongoing pattern of rate increases, there will be more substantial pressure.”

A euro now buys as much as $1.55 in the United States.

The dollar has been the leading international currency for as long as most people can remember. But its dominant role can no longer be taken for granted.

Paul Volcker, who headed the Federal Reserve from 1979-87, warned in April that the nation was in a dollar crisis, and that what is happening now reminds him of the early 1970s, when serious inflation erupted as economic growth stagnated.

Then, as now, a weak economy limited the Fed’s options. The result was a spiral of rising prices and wages — until the Fed, led by Volcker, suppressed double-digit inflation with huge interest rate increases that pushed the economy into a steep recession in 1982. He recently criticized the current Fed as defending the economy and the market, instead of defending the dollar. Volcker said that will make defending the greenback much harder later.

Energy consultant Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, recently told the House-Senate Joint Economic Committee that oil had become “the new gold.”

“Oil has become a storehouse of value — reflecting broad global economic trends and imbalances. At the same time, oil is increasingly seen as an asset by financial investors, an uncorrelated alternative to equities, bonds, and real estate,” he said.

When the credit crisis broke last summer, the result was a sharp reduction in interest rates by the Fed. That, in turn, accelerated the fall of the dollar.

“Instead of the traditional `flight to the dollar’ during a time of instability, there has been a `flight to commodities’ in search of stability during a time of currency instability and a falling dollar,” Yergin said. “There’s a painful irony here: The crisis that started in the subprime market in the United States has traveled around the world and, through the medium of a weaker dollar, has come back home to Americans in terms of higher prices at the pump.”

Source. / AP / Google News

Thanks to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Ninety-Nine Percent of Iraq’s Budget for Walls

Posted on July 6, 2008 by RagBlog

After all, the electricity isn’t that important, right? And we are especially fond of assassination from 10,000 miles away, thus reducing the numbers of US troop deaths and casualties. How humane, how civilised ….

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

How a Surge “Works”
by Gregg Gordon / July 5, 2008

Have you been feeling like me — like everything about our country in the waning months of the Bush administration, from the occupation of Iraq to the economy, is being held together with bailing wire? That the whole sorry mess has come down to (aside from stealing whatever items they can find that still haven’t been nailed down) trying to maintain just enough of the appearance of a functioning society that it will in the future be at least plausible to blame the ultimate collapse on the next president.

Well, if that’s how you’ve been feeling too, I’ve found some of the bailing wire: Miles upon miles upon miles of concrete blast walls — 10, even 20-feet high — that have turned the neighborhoods of Baghdad into a maze-like warren and the residents into laboratory rats.

They “block access to schools, mosques, churches, hotels, homes, markets and even entire neighborhoods — almost anything that could be attacked,” writes AP reporter Hamza Hendawi. “They have become the iconic symbol of the war.”

This is how the surge is “working.”

“Rows after rows of barrier walls divide the city into smaller and smaller areas that protect people from bombings, sniper fire and kidnappings,” Hendawi writes. “They also lead to gridlock, rising prices for food and homes, and complaints about living in what feels like a prison.

“Baghdad’s walls are everywhere. They have turned a riverside capital of leafy neighborhoods and palm-lined boulevards into a city of shadows that separate Sunnis from Shiites.”

Eighteen months ago, President Bush was in a world of hurt. The centerpiece of his presidency, the Iraq war, was on the brink of collapse, both on the ground over there and politically over here. Order had to be restored. They called it a surge, and we did send some more troops, but it was an incremental increase. It turns out the surge was mostly in these walls. Prisons can be useful in restoring order to a lawless society, but let’s face it, 25 million is a lot of people. So if you can’t imprison the nation, you turn the nation into a prison.

“The wall came to make us suffer,” said Waleed Mahmoud, a 35-year-old father of four, told the AP. “It takes my children an hour to get to school. I am often late for work, and there is never fewer than 10 cars in the line at the two crossing points.”

But he is less likely the be blown up than a year ago, and that’s something. From 2,000 civilian deaths a month to some 500 (just estimates of course — we don’t do body counts, except when we do, but it’s too dangerous for any journalist to go to the morgue and double-check, in any case). Yes, this is also how the surge is “working.” To adjust for the two countries’ sizes, multiply by 12 or so, and just think if the US was suffering just two 9/11’s per month — every month — instead of two per week — every week. Just think how much better that would be. Think how normal that would seem. Think how relieved we would feel.

But even with the decline in violence, such as it is, it’s still not quite business as usual. In Azamiyeh, Baghdad’s most famous Sunni district and one of the first to be walled, about half of the neighborhood’s residents have fled, leaving not enough locals to support its once-popular clothing stores, while Shi’ites from other parts of Baghdad are afraid to run the checkpoints necessary to come there to shop.

And there’s plenty else that hasn’t returned to normal either. Electricity is still no more than an hour or two a day. The sewage system is still collapsed. The water is not sanitary enough to bathe in, much less drink. All the money is going into blast walls — the last-ditch, desperate throw of the dice to get a handle on the violence.

“Now banks, the courts and even the markets are surrounded by walls, not to speak of military camps and police stations,” Iraqi contractor Yassir Jadu told Ammar Karim of Agence France Presse last fall. “If we measure the money spent on building blast walls you will find that it is more than that spent on fuel, electricity and other services. About 99 percent of Iraq’s budget is going towards building walls.”

As an example Jaddu said it cost $1.25 million just to buy the 2,500 concrete pieces needed to ring a single Baghdad police station. He could have bought them for only $1 million, but he is a Sunni, and the concrete plant is in a Shi’ite neighborhood, so he had to hire a go-between to buy the 3-meter-high, 5-ton pieces of concrete, adding $100 to the cost of each piece.

The surge has “worked” not only with walls, of course. God only knows how much money is being paid off to who in the financial black hole this occupation has become. $162 billion more, and so much will simply disappear, news that billions can’t be accounted for is scarcely considered newsworthy. The Iraqi official responsible for fighting corruption had to flee the country or be killed.

“In the past, notices would be published in the gazette calling for tenders,” says Sinan, another Iraqi contractor too frightened to state his full name. “Now officials just phone their friends and offer them the work.”

And then there are the drones, aircraft equipped with cameras and guided missiles which tend to keep our casualties down because the “pilot” is on an air force base in Las Vegas. We have hundreds of them in Iraq now, and their missions have doubled since the beginning of the surge. For us, it means fewer casualties. For an Iraqi, it means every day contains at least the slight chance, if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, your life could be extinguished without warning by someone who in 15 minutes will be unwinding in front of a slot machine 8,000 miles away.

So this is what Operation Iraqi Freedom has come to mean: A society kept under lockdown, with the hope the American public will buy it as “success” as long as casualties can be kept lower than they were before. And they may be right, given that the public receives too little news like these reports from Iraqi stringers and activists. Coverage on the evening news is down to two minutes per week — counting all three networks — according to a recent study, and given that such reporting as there is must be done in the presence of “minders” from the American military — it’s simply still too dangerous to do any other kind of story — the public would probably be better informed if they didn’t receive even that. It seems to be progress enough to satisfy Congress, anyway.

But it can’t be sustained forever, just as a prison can’t be kept in lockdown forever. At some point, you need the inmates’ cooperation. Constant coercion is simply too expensive, and how much has it been now? $600 billion? $700 billion? There are websites you can go to to look it up, but by the time you finish typing the number, it’s gone up another $10 million. And the bailing wire holding together the American economy is beginning to fray under the strain.

It’s almost enough to make me want to see John McCain win the election, since he so proudly claims authorship of this surge and so wants us to believe it’s “working.” When George Bush finally returns the keys to the car he so cavalierly took joyriding — you’ll find it down the street, wrapped around a tree — let it be to John McCain.

[Gregg Gordon is a writer, musician, activist, and otherwise ne’er-do-well in Columbus, Ohio.]

Source. / OpEdNews.com

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Obama, Speak Out Now About Iran

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Sen. Barack Obama addresses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, Policy Conference 2008, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, on June 4, 2008 and speaks about Iran. Photo by Alex Brandon / AP.

An Open Letter to Barack Obama on Iran
July 5, 2008

Dear Senator Obama,

We the undersigned may have different views on U.S. foreign policy with respect to Iran. We all, however, are deeply concerned about the stories in the press in the past few weeks suggesting that the Bush administration might be considering a military strike on Iran, that it might give a green light to such an attack by Israel, or that it might engage in other acts of war, such as imposing a blockade against Iran.

We welcomed your stand against the war on Iraq in 2002. And we were encouraged by your early campaign statements emphasizing diplomacy over military action against Iran. Today, you have an opportunity to forestall a repeat of the tragic Iraq war. We hope you will use that opportunity.

We agree with the conclusion of Muhammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, that “A military strike … would be worse than anything possible. It would turn the region into a fireball…” A military attack, he said, “will mean that Iran, if it is not already making nuclear weapons, will launch a crash course to build nuclear weapons with the blessing of all Iranians, even those in the West.” ( Reuters, June 20, 2008.)

We don’t know, of course, whether an attack on Iran is in fact being considered, or if there are serious plans to initiate other acts of war, such as a blockade of the country. But we call on you to issue a public statement warning of the grave dangers that any of these actions would entail, and pointing out how inappropriate and undemocratic it would be for the Bush administration to undertake them, or encourage Israel to do so, in its closing months in office.

An attack on Iran would violate the UN Charter’s prohibition against the use or threat of force and the Congress’s authority to declare war. Moreover, the public right to decide should not be foreclosed by last-minute actions of the Bush administration, which will set U.S. policy in stone now.

We were heartened by your earlier comments suggesting that an Obama administration would act on the understanding that genuine security requires a willingness to talk without preconditions (something Iran has offered several times to no avail), and that threats and military action are counterproductive. We hope you will follow through on these commitments once in office, but also that you will speak out now against any acts of war by the Bush administration.

Sincerely,

Please join these signatories and sign here:

(organizations listed for identification purposes only)

Michael Albert. ZNet

Cathy Albisa, exec. director, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative

John W. Amidon, U.S. Veterans for Peace

Stanley Aronowitz, Professor of Sociology, Graduate Center, CUNY

Rosalyn Baxandall, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY Old Westbury

Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies

Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor (II) of Political Science, Rutgers University

Charlotte Bunch, exec. director, Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers Univ.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor (retired), MIT

Ray Close retired CIA Middle East specialist; Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Rhonda Copelon, Professor of Law, CUNY Law School

Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia Univ.

Lawrence Davidson, Professor of Middle East History, West Chester Univ.

Ariel Dorfman, author

Stuart Ewen, Distinguished Professor, Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY

John Feffer, co-director, Foreign Policy in Focus

Bill Fletcher, Jr. exec. editor, BlackCommentator.com

Libby Frank, Women’s Internat’l League for Peace & Freedom, Philadelphia

Arthur Goldschmidt, Professor emeritus of Middle East History, Penn State Univ.

Tom Hayden, author

Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer

Doug Ireland, journalist

James E. Jennings, exec. director, U.S. Academics for Peace

Nikki Keddie, UCLA (emeritus), historian, Iran specialist

Janet Kestenberg Amighi, v.p., CDR (sponsor of Holocaust child survivor research)

Rabbi Michael Lerner, chair, The Network of Spiritual Progressives; editor, Tikkun mag.

Mark LeVine, Prof. of Modern Middle Eastern History, Culture and Islamic Studies, U. Cal., Irvine

Manning Marable, director, Center for Contemporary Black History, Columbia Univ.

David McReynolds, former chair, War Resisters Internat’l

Rosalind Petchesky, Distinguished Prof. of Poli. Sci., Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY

Rachel Pfeffer, interim exec. director, Jewish Voices for Peace

Katha Pollitt, writer

Danny Postel, No War on Iran Coalition, Chicago

Matthew Rothschild, editor, The Progressive magazine

Stephen R. Shalom Prof. of Poli. Sci., William Paterson Univ.

(Rev.) David Whitten Smith, Univ. of St. Thomas, Minnesota (emeritus)

Meredith Tax, writer; president, Women’s WORLD

Michael J. Thompson, editor of Logos

Chris Toensing, editor, Middle East Report

Cornel West, Professor, Princeton University

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics, Univ. of San Francisco


Source. / Portside

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Abbie and the Theater of the Flag

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Abbie Hoffman, proudly attired.

What Would Abbie Hoffman Have Thought Of The Flag Lapel Pin Debate?
By Chris Weigant / July 4, 2008

I’d like to address, in as patriotic spirit as can be mustered, the wearing of United States flag lapel pins, and the inherent silliness this debate represents. Flag lapel pins are all the rage these days, but the battle over wearing the flag is older than you may have thought. Older than the battles in Congress over flag-desecration amendments to the Constitution (which stretch back to the 1980s … and which even Democrats who should know better still occasionally vote for in Congress … ahem).

In 1968, in the fading years of one of the most un-American chapters in our entire history, the “House Un-American Activities Committee” (“HUAAC” or “HUAC”) still existed. This committee was set up to root out (as you can tell from the title) “un-American” activities … which started out as “communism” but soon morphed into “anything the right wing didn’t approve of.” It was in this later incarnation that, in 1968, it was holding hearings on those unruly and upstart youngsters, the hippies.

These were not patchouli-reeking slackers (OK, well, maybe some of them were), these were the youth of America who were organized, seriously annoyed with the direction of a very unpopular war, and wanted to influence the political debate of the day. They formed their own “political party” in Chicago (at the Democratic National Convention), which they called the Youth International Party — or, the “Yippies.” At the forefront of this movement was the radical leader Abbie Hoffman. And in 1968, he was called before HUAAC to testify on his activities. His testimony followed fellow Yippie Jerry Ruben, who had appeared in front of the committee dressed in (as Hoffman later described it): “Beret by IRA. Black pajama bottoms by Viet Cong. Bandoleers borrowed from the mountains of Mexico were crisscrossed across the bare sexy chest of a yippie warrior — his body slashed with lavish swatches of red paint.”

Needless to say, political theater was very big, back in the day. Why don’t we have committee hearings this entertaining today, one wonders …

But the question remained, how could Abbie possibly top this opening act? Again, in his own first-person account (from his book, Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture):

“In exactly two hours I’d do more for the flag than anyone since Betsy Ross. As our star-spangled retinue approached the hallowed halls of Congress, a detachment of police summoned to the scene quickly encircled us. ‘You are under arrest for the desecration of the flag. Come with us.’ … Instantly the steps became a swarm of cameramen, cops, and screaming yippies. … I fought for life and shirt, swinging wildly. Rrrrrrrrrip! ‘You pigs, you ripped my fuckin’ shirt,’ I screamed … The next day I stood before the judge, bare to the waist. The tattered shirt lay on the prosecutor’s table in a box marked Exhibit A. ‘You owe me fourteen ninety-five for that shirt,’ I mentioned. Bail was set at three thousand dollars. ‘Get out of here with that Viet Cong flag. How dare you?’ the judge intoned. ‘Cuban, your honor,’ I corrected [Hoffman had painted a Cuban flag on his body]. A few months later this same judge started letting his hair grow long, called for the legalization of marijuana, and began speaking out against the war.”

When the trail was held, under a brand-new section of U.S. law (Abbie claims he was the first person tried under the statute, which carried a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $1,000 fine), the judge, whom Abbie reports “deemed it his duty to find me guilty,” allowed him to make a statement. Big mistake, for anyone who knows Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman’s response was: “Your honor, I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.”

The case, of course, was later overturned on appeal (since it was blatantly unconstitutional to begin with), and Abbie never had to serve the month-long sentence handed down. Abbie reports further: “By the time we had [won the appeal], over three dozen people had already been arrested for similar offenses. A vest in Virginia. A bedspread in Iowa. All with the familiar flag motif. In arguing for the government in defense of the law, Nixon’s prosecutor stated, ‘The importance of a flag in developing a sense of loyalty to a national entity has been the subject of numerous essays.’ The first essay the U.S. government quoted was a lengthy passage from Mein Kampf, by history’s most famous housepainter, Adolf Hitler.”

Hoffman went on to wear a similar shirt on the Merv Griffin Show, which was the first example in television history of a show being broadcast with the video edited out. This proto-pixilation showed the entire screen as a deep blue, rather than subject America to an image of Abbie Hoffman with a flag motif shirt on.

Note that: flag motif. Abbie never cut up a flag to make a shirt, he bought these patriotic items from people who manufactured them. As Abbie relates his appearance with Merv (emphasis in original):

“I told him how I had just been given a thirty-day jail sentence, not for wearing the star-spangled shirt, but for the thoughts in my head; how Ricky Nelson, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Raquel Welch, and Phyllis Diller had all worn similar flag garb on television and in movies; how anyone could go to the fashionable boutique a few blocks from the studio where I had bought the shirt and get one just like it.”

Get that — it’s not just wearing the flag that will get you into trouble, but your political beliefs while you wear that flag. Starting to sound a little bit familiar?

Abbie’s appearance was aired the next night, but with the following disclaimer read by the vice-president of CBS before the broadcast (and before it was visually turned into a completely blue screen) [editorial note in brackets in original, by Hoffman, speaking in first-person]:

“An incident occurred during the taping of the following program that had presented CBS network officials with a dilemma involving not only poor taste and the risk of offending the viewers but also certain very serious legal problems. It seemed one of the guests had seen fit to come on the show wearing a shirt made from an American flag [not true; it was a shirt with a flag motif]. Therefore, to avoid possible litigation the network executives have decided to ‘mask out” all visible portions of the offending shirt by electronic means. We hope our viewers will understand.”

Pioneering television. Elvis’ pelvis was just kept off-screen, but the birth of what would develop later into pixilation had its origins not in hiding inadvertent nipples (a la Janet Jackson), or someone flipping the bird to the cameraman, but to hide a man wearing a shirt with a United States flag motif.

Abbie, however, got the last laugh, as he was so often wont to do:

“In all, 88,000 people were angry enough that night to call and protest the censoring. In the following days stores all over the country sold out their stock of shirts bearing the flag motif, demonstrations were held at CBS offices in three cities, and Merv Griffin publicly apologized, saying he had not been told of the censoring in advance.”

The Yippies went on to nominate, during the tumult surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention, a pig named Pigasus to run for President of the United States. Like I said, it was the era of great political theater.

Jump forward 21 years. In 1989, the “Flag-Burning Amendment” was in its infancy, but tensions were high. Republicans were successfully using this as a “wedge issue” to show American voters how gosh-darned patriotic as all get-out Republicans were when it came to sanctifying the American flag (an idea which would cause every single one of the Founding Fathers to spin in their graves so severely that their long-dead neighbors in their respective cemeteries would have risen to file complaints about the resulting noise). But Representative Pat Schroeder, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives from the great state of Colorado, had this to say during a hearing of the Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, on the subject of U.S. Flag Desecration:

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I too join in thanking you for calling these hearings. Mr. Chairman, I am very pleased that we’re looking at this because I’ve probably had a little longer experience with this whole flag issue than some of the others. After my exploratory race for the presidency in 1987, one of the women’s magazines decided that they wanted to do a documentary about that and we thought about what kind of cover would dramatize my feeling about the process and about America.

And we decided to do one of myself wrapped in the flag in the Sylvester Stallone, Rocky II-type of thing and in the American hockey team type of thing showing the expansiveness of the American system and how exciting it was. We thought it was a very positive, upbeat, love of America type of thing.

Well, I can tell you a lot of people didn’t. (Laughter) I got lambasted by all sorts of people for that. And as that little mini-debate raged in America, people started sending me all sorts of clips. Mr. Chairman, I won’t bring all the clips but both the pros and cons would send me clips talking about what do we mean when we talk about flag desecration and what are we talking about in this whole area of how do we use the flag or who can use the flag.

Because of all of these clips, which anybody’s welcome to look at, I probably have the world’s biggest file on the American flag in Washington, and on public officials crying in public, but I won’t bring them all out. But let me just show you some of the things that are interesting. We have here Barbara Bush at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial with a flag around her neck during the inaugural. We have someone who made a cashmere flag into a dress for $2500, and we have Abbie Hoffman wearing a flag.

Now, you know, that’s a range of things, and it’s interesting — are some of those desecrations? Is the commercial use good or bad? Those are very difficult issues. Then we have the whole thing of what do you do with artistic renditions. Here we have the Washington Times, not exactly a leftist newspaper, putting the President in a flag. Is that proper? I’m not sure. If you look at the American Legion calendar for 1988, they were the first to criticize my use of the flag. I was on the February cover of 1988. Let me show you the January cover of the American Legion magazine’s calendar, and I’m not quite sure what the difference is in all of this. It’s a little puzzling, but maybe that’s okay and I’m not. Again, I am — have difficulty in knowing where all these lines are.

And finally, here we have an interesting thing where the top picture is one of the recent press photos that many people protested; women using the flag at one of their meetings. However, the bottom picture is the lady’s auxiliary of the VFW marching. And I really wonder how we know which of these is desecration and which isn’t. They’re both women’s groups. They’re all American citizens and they’re all talking about the flag.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, I find this a very complex issue. Do we allow commercial uses of the flag over used car dealers in magazines and advertisements? We’ve got all sorts of those that I could have brought on board and shown you. What about political parties use of the flag? Should one political party be able to hide behind it or isn’t the flag big enough for everybody?

As I’ve seen America, it’s been a wonderful country big enough for more than one opinion, and that flag is a symbol that’s big enough to encompass it all. So as we talk about desecration, as we talk about intent, my experience has been these are very difficult issues, and I hope people tell us how we will know who’s truly desecrating and who’s not. Burning is a lot clearer. What about all these other things? And what does desecration really mean?”

That’s right. Twenty-one years after Abbie Hoffman was prosecuted for wearing a flag, the First Lady of the United States appeared in much the same garb. Of course, she didn’t face a court case for doing so, reinforcing Hoffman’s claim that he was being persecuted, not prosecuted, and his claim that, “I had just been given a thirty-day jail sentence, not for wearing the star-spangled shirt, but for the thoughts in my head.” But finally, Democrats were fighting back. The concept of outlawing flag-burning has died down somewhat since those days. With no help, I must admit, from another woman who recently ran for president.

It should be noted (back in the 1980s, when she became First Lady) that nobody arrested Barbara Bush. Or even suggested it. How times change.

Here is the appropriate federal law, still in effect, from (assuming I get this legal citation correct) Title 4, Chapter 1 of the United States Code, titled “The Flag.” Paragraph 8 (“Respect for the Flag”) reads:

No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America…

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery…

(g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature….

(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.

(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.

Whew! At least they left that loophole in there for lapel pins! One almost might think politicians wrote this particular piece of legislation, and left such a loophole for themselves. Ahem.

So — according to this federal law — every single car dealership, mattress discounter, tire shop, grocery store, electronics outlet, and other business who uses the flag in any advertising purposes “in any manner whatsoever” should be equally as culpable as Abbie Hoffman in the disrespect shown the American flag. And anyone who uses a paper napkin this weekend with a flag printed on it should be ashamed to call themselves an American. Any athlete participating in the Olympics wearing any part of the flag should be immediately arrested.

Or maybe not. Maybe the flag can survive on its own, as it has been doing nicely for over two centuries. And maybe the Bill of Rights actually means what it says, too. Tinkering around with it only invites turning the Bill of Rights into a political weapon to be used by one faction against another. Personally, I feel that if you give the government an inch, they’ll take a mile. You go down this road, and pretty soon Congress will convene committees to determine what is “un-American” and what is not. Which, to me, is one of the most un-American concepts in our entire history.

Because once you start talking about what the “intent” of the flag-wearer is, you have jumped over the Constitution and are now attempting to prosecute Thoughtcrime. The cops would have to figure out whether wearing a flag pin really made you patriotic, or whether it was some sort of protest of some type. And we wouldn’t want cops making these distinctions, would we? And we certainly wouldn’t want such a silly debate to determine who became our nation’s leader. One would think.

So happy Independence Day, for those that have stuck with this polemic to the end. And if you go to a parade today to celebrate our freedom, and see someone there dressed as Uncle Sam — complete with red-white-and-blue flag motif clothes — feel free to cheer. Feel free to wear a flag pin. Or not. Or even wear a flag-motif shirt yourself. Because freedom means being able to wear a flag motif in celebration of our 232nd birthday as a nation, and (even more importantly) freedom also means being able to do the exact same action to protest this nation’s government. That’s what freedom is all about.

Source. / The Huffington Post

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment