The Rag Blog

Editor’s note: Matt Howard gave this statement at a recent protest at the Vermont Statehouse.

11/14/07 “Rutland Herald” — – -In 2003 I illegally invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq with 1st Tank battalion 1st Marine Division. My commander in chief unleashed the world’s fiercest fighting force upon the country and people of Iraq, and now those of us used and betrayed by him are demanding justice.

Four and a half years after our opening “shock and awe” Bush’s lies are known throughout the world, and yet he continues to act with impunity. Four and a half years later the Bush regime has unleashed a hell upon the country of Iraq that only those who have been there can truly understand.

As a two-tour combat veteran of this brutal war, I have a responsibility to speak honestly and openly about what has been done and what continues to be done in our name. We veterans know that this war is not the one being sanitized on the nightly news. It has nothing to do with the liberation of the people of Iraq; instead it has everything to do with the subjugation and domination of these people in the name of U.S. imperial economic and strategic interests.

We did not go to war with the country of Iraq, we went to war with the people of Iraq. During the initial invasion we killed women. We killed children. We senselessly killed farm animals. We were the United States Marine Corps, not the Peace Corps, and we left a swath of death and destruction in our wake all the way to Baghdad.

Let me say again so that there is no misunderstanding. I stand here today as a former U.S. Marine saying we are killing women and children in Iraq. This is the true nature of war. War lends itself to atrocities. Don’t think you can use an organization designed to kill other human beings for anything humanitarian. That has never been our mission. That was crystal clear from the moment I was forced to bury the crate of humanitarian food given to me in Kuwait.

Four and a half years later we as soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are done. We are done being told under threat of court martial to run over children that get in the way of our speeding convoys.

We are done raiding and destroying the homes of innocent Iraqis on a nightly basis.

We are done abusing and torturing prisoners.

We are done being hired thugs for the 160,000 contractors and U.S. corporate interests in Iraq.

We are done being poisoned by depleted uranium, the unspoken Agent Orange of this war.

We are done coming home broken, from two, three, four tours of duty – only to find our commander in chief has actually tried to CUT funding to the Department of Veterans Affairs. To find our doctors being told to diagnose us with pre-existing personality disorders instead of post traumatic stress syndrome.

We are done killing for lies.

So Iraq Veterans Against the War is taking back our history – the history that has been robbed from us. We are dispelling the myth that the Vietnam war ended when the Democrats started voting against it. Instead we are spreading the truth about how the American War in Vietnam ended.

The Vietnam War ended when soldiers put down their weapons and refused to fight; when pilots dropped their bombs in the ocean.

We are re-educating the public to let them know that the power ultimately lies with the people. Just take a look at the thousands of pages of internal documents from the Department of Defense explicitly detailing how at the end of the Vietnam war the military had collapsed. It was literally in a state of mutiny. And that movement is slowly starting again. Because ultimately in every war waged throughout human history, those forced to fight quickly realize they have much more in common with those they are being told to kill than with those telling them to do the killing.

And we are re-educating the public about the true nature of sectarian violence. No, the middle east is NOT inherently violent. In fact, in the 1,400-year schism between Sunnis and Shias – there has NEVER been a civil war fought. They have always lived in the same neighborhoods and even intermarried. The United States has caused this civil war using the classic colonial techniques of divide and conquer.

George Bush is a war criminal who has violated international law, the Geneva convention and the Nuremburg standards and needs to tried accordingly for crimes against humanity.

I ask every red-blooded American today: What would you do if your homeland was savagely invaded and occupied by another country? The Iraqis will continue to resist and fight until the last American has left their homeland. Period. End the violence in Iraq? End the occupation.

We veterans are speaking out to stop the violence being perpetrated in our name. When we voted in the Democrats on an anti-war mandate, the Bush regime expanded the war. As we are marching against further occupation, the Bush regime is making threats against Iran.

And we will not continue to be silenced by the mainstream media. Top generals and bottom privates are all speaking in unison now. We know the truth about the slaughter of upwards of one million Iraqis. Why is no one listening? We will not stand by as this regime tricks the country into thinking that if you oppose the war you do not support the troops. We ARE the troops and we have never felt support from this administration. Stop mindlessly supporting the troops. Start demanding that we come home – and maybe think about apologizing to us when we get back.

Welcome to the Age of Insuffiency: As oil prices hit new highs and supplies sink, our way of life will drastically change.

This past May, in an unheralded and almost unnoticed move, the Energy Department signaled a fundamental, near epochal shift in US and indeed world history: we are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency. The department stopped talking about “oil” in its projections of future petroleum availability and began speaking of “liquids.” The global output of “liquids,” the department indicated, would rise from 84 million barrels of oil equivalent (mboe) per day in 2005 to a projected 117.7 mboe in 2030 — barely enough to satisfy anticipated world demand of 117.6 mboe. Aside from suggesting the degree to which oil companies have ceased being mere suppliers of petroleum and are now purveyors of a wide variety of liquid products — including synthetic fuels derived from natural gas, corn, coal and other substances — this change hints at something more fundamental: we have entered a new era of intensified energy competition and growing reliance on the use of force to protect overseas sources of petroleum.

To appreciate the nature of the change, it is useful to probe a bit deeper into the Energy Department’s curious terminology. “Liquids,” the department explains in its International Energy Outlook for 2007, encompasses “conventional” petroleum as well as “unconventional” liquids — notably tar sands (bitumen), oil shale, biofuels, coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids. Once a relatively insignificant component of the energy business, these fuels have come to assume much greater importance as the output of conventional petroleum has faltered. Indeed, the Energy Department projects that unconventional liquids production will jump from a mere 2.4 mboe per day in 2005 to 10.5 in 2030, a fourfold increase. But the real story is not the impressive growth in unconventional fuels but the stagnation in conventional oil output. Looked at from this perspective, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the switch from “oil” to “liquids” in the department’s terminology is a not so subtle attempt to disguise the fact that worldwide oil production is at or near its peak capacity and that we can soon expect a downturn in the global availability of conventional petroleum.

Petroleum is, of course, a finite substance, and geologists have long warned of its ultimate disappearance. The extraction of oil, like that of other nonrenewable resources, will follow a parabolic curve over time. Production rises quickly at first and then gradually slows until approximately half the original supply has been exhausted; at that point, a peak in sustainable output is attained and production begins an irreversible decline until it becomes too expensive to lift what little remains. Most oil geologists believe we have already reached the midway point in the depletion of the world’s original petroleum inheritance and so are nearing a peak in global output; the only real debate is over how close we have come to that point, with some experts claiming we are at the peak now and others saying it is still a few years or maybe a decade away.

Until very recently, Energy Department analysts were firmly in the camp of those wild-eyed optimists who claimed that peak oil was so far in the future that we didn’t really need to give it much thought. Putting aside the science of the matter, the promulgation of such a rose-colored view obviated any need to advocate improvements in automobile fuel efficiency or to accelerate progress on the development of alternative fuels. Given White House priorities, it is hardly surprising that this view prevailed in Washington.

In just the past six months, however, the signs of an imminent peak in conventional oil production have become impossible even for conservative industry analysts to ignore. These have come from the take-no-prisoners world of oil pricing and deal-making, on the one hand, and the analysis of international energy experts, on the other.

Most dramatic, perhaps, has been the spectacular rise in oil prices. The price of light, sweet crude crossed the longstanding psychological barrier of $80 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange for the first time in September, and has since risen to as high as $90. Many reasons have been cited for the rise in crude prices, including unrest in Nigeria’s oil-producing Delta region, pipeline sabotage in Mexico, increased hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico and fears of Turkish attacks on Kurdish guerrilla sanctuaries in Iraq. But the underlying reality is that most oil-producing countries are pumping at maximum capacity and finding it increasingly difficult to boost production in the face of rising international demand.

Even a decision by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to boost production by 500,000 barrels per day failed to halt the upward momentum in prices. Concerned that an excessive rise in oil costs would trigger a worldwide recession and lower demand for their products, the OPEC countries agreed to increase their combined output at a meeting in Vienna on September 11. “We think that the market is a little bit high,” explained Kuwait’s acting oil minister, Mohammad al-Olaim. But the move did little to slow the rise in prices. Clearly, OPEC would have to undertake a much larger production increase to alter the market environment, and it is not at all clear that its members possess the capacity to do that — now or in the future.

A warning sign of another sort was provided by Kazakhstan’s August decision to suspend development of the giant Kashagan oil region in its sector of the Caspian Sea, first initiated by a consortium of Western firms in the late ’90s. Kashagan was said to be the most promising oil project since the discovery of oil in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in the late ’60s. But the enterprise has encountered enormous technical problems and has yet to produce a barrel of oil. Frustrated by a failure to see any economic benefits from the project, the Kazakh government has cited environmental risks and cost overruns to justify suspending operations and demanding a greater say in the project.

Like the dramatic rise in oil prices, the Kashagan episode is an indication of the oil industry’s growing difficulties in its efforts to boost production in the face of rising demand. “All the oil companies are struggling to grow production,” Peter Hitchens of Teather & Greenwood brokerage told the Wall Street Journal in July. “It’s becoming more and more difficult to bring projects in on time and on budget.”

That this industry debilitation is not a temporary problem but symptomatic of a long-term trend was confirmed in two important studies published this past summer by conservative industry organizations.

The first of these was released July 9 by the International Energy Agency (IEA), an affiliate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of major industrial powers. Titled Medium-Term Oil Market Report, it is a blunt assessment of the global supply-and-demand equation over the 2007-12 period. The news is not good.

Predicting that world economic activity will grow by an average of 4.5 percent per year during this period — much of it driven by unbridled growth in China, India and the Middle East — the report concludes that global oil demand will rise by 2.2 percent per year, pushing world oil consumption from approximately 86 million barrels per day in 2007 to 96 million in 2012. With luck and massive new investment, the oil industry will be able to increase output sufficiently to satisfy the higher level of demand anticipated for 2012 — barely. Beyond that, however, there appears little likelihood that the industry will be able to sustain any increase in demand. “Oil look[s] extremely tight in five years’ time,” the agency declared.

Underlying the report’s general conclusion are a number of specific concerns. Most notably, it points to a worrisome decline in the yield of older fields in non-OPEC countries and a corresponding need for increased output from the OPEC countries, most of which are located in conflict-prone areas of the Middle East and Africa. The numbers involved are staggering. At first blush, it would seem that the need for an extra 10 million barrels per day between now and 2012 would translate into an added 2 million barrels per day in each of the next five years — a conceivably attainable goal. But that doesn’t take into account the decline of older fields. According to the report, the world actually needs an extra 5 million: 3 million to make up for the decline in older fields plus the 2 million in added requirements. This is a daunting and possibly insurmountable challenge, especially when one considers that almost all of the additional petroleum will have to come from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, Kazakhstan and Venezuela — countries that do not inspire the sort of investor confidence that will be needed to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into new drilling rigs, pipelines and other essential infrastructure.

Similar causes for anxiety can be found in the second major study released last summer, Facing the Hard Truths About Energy, prepared by the National Petroleum Council, a major industry organization. Because it supposedly provided a “balanced” view of the nation’s energy dilemma, the NPC report was widely praised on Capitol Hill and in the media; adding to its luster was the identity of its chief author, former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond.

Like the IEA report, the NPC study starts with the claim that, with the right mix of policies and higher investment, the industry is capable of satisfying US and international oil and natural gas demand. “Fortunately, the world is not running out of energy resources,” the report bravely asserts. But obstacles to the development and delivery of these resources abound, so prudent policies and practices are urgently required. Although “there is no single, easy solution to the multiple challenges we face,” the authors conclude, they are “confident that the prompt adoption of these strategies” will allow the United States to satisfy its long-term energy needs.

I have seen the horror of the death penalty and the violence it propels. It is time for a global ban.

For most of the 20th century the majority of the world’s nations used the death penalty. But, as the millennium approached, many societies questioned whether killing their citizens through the judicial system served a positive purpose. I am delighted that the death penalty is being removed from the globe. To a Christian whose belief system is rooted in forgiveness, the death penalty is unacceptable.

Either in law or in practice, 130 countries have now abolished the death penalty. And since 1990, 50 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Last year only 25 countries carried out executions.

So strong is the global sentiment against the death penalty – with some notable exceptions, such as the United States, China and Singapore – that a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions and the abolition of capital punishment is scheduled to go before the United Nations general assembly tomorrow. The world community will decide its view on the morality of capital punishment.

I have experienced the horror of being close to an execution. Not only during the apartheid era of South Africa, when the country had one of the highest execution rates in the world, but in other countries as well.

And I have witnessed the victims of the death penalty the authorities never speak of – the families of those put to death. I remember the parents of Napoleon Beazley, a young African-American man put to death in Texas after a trial tainted by racism. Their pain was evident as the killing of their son by the state to which they paid taxes approached. I can only imagine the unbearable emotional pain they went through as they said their final goodbye to their son on the day of his execution.

It is often asked by those favouring the death penalty: “What if your child was murdered?” And it is a natural question. Rage is a common reaction to the homicide of a loved one, and a wish for revenge is understandable. But what if the person condemned to death was your son? No one raises a child to be a murderer, yet many parents suffer the grief of knowing their child is to be killed. In 1988, the parents of those on death row in South Africa wrote to the president, saying: “To be a mother or father and watch your child going through this living hell is a torment more painful than anyone can imagine.” We must not put these children to death. It is to inflict horrific and unacceptable suffering upon them, and their mothers and fathers.

Retribution, resentment and revenge have left us with a world soaked in the blood of far too many of our sisters and brothers. The death penalty is part of that process. It says that to kill in certain circumstances is acceptable, and encourages the doctrine of revenge. If we are to break these cycles, we must remove government-sanctioned violence.

The time has come to abolish the death penalty worldwide. The case for abolition becomes more compelling with each passing year. Everywhere experience shows us that executions brutalise both those involved in the process and the society that carries them out. Nowhere has it been shown that the death penalty reduces crime or political violence. In country after country, it is used disproportionately against the poor or against racial or ethnic minorities. It is often used as a tool of political repression. It is imposed and inflicted arbitrarily. It is an irrevocable punishment, resulting inevitably in the execution of people innocent of any crime. It is a violation of fundamental human rights.

WASHINGTON (Nov. 13) – The economic costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are estimated to total $1.6 trillion — roughly double the amount the White House has requested thus far, according to a new report by Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee.

The report, released Tuesday, attempted to put a price tag on the two conflicts, including “hidden” costs such as interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars, lost investment, the expense of long-term health care for injured veterans and the cost of oil market disruptions.

The $1.6 trillion figure, for the period from 2002 to 2008, translates into a cost of $20,900 for a family of four, the report said. The Bush administration has requested $804 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, the report stated.

For the Iraq war only, total economic costs were estimated at $1.3 trillion for the period from 2002 to 2008. That would cost a family of four $16,500, the report said.

Two years ago Norman Mailer came to Portland for a big book event portentously marketed as WordStock. Mailer had been battling his failing body for the last couple of years. He inched his way across the stage on crutches and lowered his frail bones down in a big chair. Then he launched into a white-hot excoriation of the Bush administration and the complicity of the Democrats. The mind was still as lethally sharp as ever.

After the talk, women huddled around him. One of them was my wife, Kimberly. I was in San Francisco that weekend, hawking my own books, and she was out flirting with Norman Mailer. Mailer told her they came from the “same tribe.”

Kimberly gushed to Mailer that she had read all of his novels, except for The Naked and the Dead, Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost.

“But, darling,” Mailer said slyly. “Those are my best books!” Still a salesman even at 82.

Of course, Kimberly bought the most expensive collector’s copy of The Naked and the Dead. And that thick book squats in a position of honor on the bookshelf, its pages still unblemished by a single fingerprint.

For some reason, Kimberly told Mailer she was my wife. Mailer responded warmly about the vital service CounterPunch had performed during this dark decade. She said him she would gladly send him some of our books (anything to get them out of the garage). “No,” he interjected. “The last thing I need is more fucking books. Have Jeffrey send me the email edition of CounterPunch.” I did as I was told.

I met Mailer for the first time in 1978 in Indianapolis, where he was giving a reading before a thin and bland crowd. Somehow Mailer had offended his host, who had abandoned him after the event. I offered to take him to dinner (secretly hoping he would pay, which, of course, he did) and drive him to the airport for a late flight to Chicago. I was twenty then, and almost certainly not the type of company he may have been longing for that evening. If so, he didn’t let on. He was generous to young writers–generous to a fault, which is how he landed in so much trouble with Jack Henry Abbott.

Somehow we ended up in that architectural artifact of the Seventies, a fern bar. There was so much foliage creeping through the place that it could have been a scene from The Naked and the Dead. I was braced for Mailer to begin draining a vast amount of alcohol, fretted over whether I could keep up and still get him to the airport. Instead, he ordered a nice bottle of French wine, a vintage he said Jimmy Baldwin had recently recommended to him-a minor miracle that such a wine was available in an Indianapolis fern bar. We eased into a relaxed conversation about music, movies and Muhammad Ali, who I had just met a few days earlier in an elevator at the Hyatt-Regency.

At some point, I told Mailer that I was working feverishly on a novel. “Imagine An American Dream, set in a cow town like Indianapolis,” I said.

He laughed loudly.

“Novel?” he said. “Hell, don’t you know the novel is dead? Give it up, Jeffrey. Go write a screenplay or a book about The Clash. Just get out there and mix it up.”

This advice was coming from a man who hadn’t written a novel in ten years. Of course, in the next decade he would publish three big ones, The Executioner’s Song, Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost.

I met Mailer again six months later at Blues Alley, a jazz club in Washington, D.C., where I was bussing tables trying to pay my way through college. Mailer was there to hear the great saxophone player Dexter Gordon, who was then making a radiant American comeback after a decade of exile in Paris. Although Mailer wasn’t sitting at my table, he recognized me, called me over between sets and introduced me to the most beautiful woman in a room of beautiful women. I don’t remember her name, but she looked a lot like the woman who would soon become his wife, Norris Church.

“How’s that novel coming, Jeffrey?” Mailer inquired to my astonishment.

“But … ” I began, trying to explain that I had followed his advice and incinerated 500 pages of my juvenile novel about sex, death and black magic (none of which I knew much about at the time) in the crossroads of America.

“Oh, forget that all that crap. Just write, man. And do it every fucking day.”

Mailer lived his own advice in that regard. He wrote furiously against implacable deadlines, which in his case weren’t set by publishers and editors but came in the form of mercilessly scheduled alimony payments.

Some of those texts don’t stand up all that well: the Picasso biography reads like notations from an art history lecture at the MOMA, Tough Guys Don’t Dance a mediocre Ross McDonald novel, The Deer Park, his novel about Hollywood, should have been better, the Marilyn books are almost as pathetic as his long-running obsession with Jack Kennedy.

Still for fifty years Mailer stood at the top of the pile: The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore (a novel about official paranoia that is perhaps more relevant today than when it was published), An American Dream, Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Harlot’s Ghost. All better books than anything written by that favorite of the book critics Philip Roth. Only Vidal comes close to Mailer’s long-running achievement.

It’s hard to name a better novel written in the 1970s than The Executioner’s Song. Even Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow seems dwarfed by that sprawling portrait of Gary and Nicole Gilmore and the inexorable descent toward the firing squad in that spooky prison outside Provo. It’s a big book with an immediate voice: clear and chilling. Among other virtues, Mailer captures the strangeness and beauty of life in Utah better than any book since Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country.

At the news of his death, I found myself drawn to the oddities: Advertisements for Myself, Cannibals and Christians, The Faith of Graffiti and, most of all, Ancient Evenings. After a prolonged drought of fiction, in 1983, Mailer unloaded a 700 page novel set in the decadent Egypt of Ramses the Second. All the old obsessions are there: sex, war, violence, scatology, architecture, mysticism, power and the existential life of an individual poised against the imperial state. The prose is dark and elegant. I think of Ancient Evenings as something of a tweak to his old rival, Gore Vidal. You want a historical novel, Gore? Well, take a bite out of this.

Here’s a taste of Mailer at full-throttle from Miami and the Siege of Chicago. He’s writing about the origins of the Yippies and the entropy eating at the American soul:

So the Yippies came out of the Hippies, ex-Hippies, diggers, bikers, drop-outs from college, hipsters up from the South. They made a community of sorts, for their principles were simple-everybody, obviously, must be allowed to do (no way around the next three words) his own thing, provided he hurt no one doing it-they were yet to learn that society is built on many people hurting many people, it is just who does the hurting which is forever in dispute. They did not necessarily understand how much their simple presence hurt many good citizens in the secret valve of the heart-the Hippies and probably the Yippies did not recognize the depth of schizophrenia on which society is built. We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches-the cross was well designed! A land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small-the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode into schizophrenia-life went on. Boys could go patiently to church and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam.

I don’t believe we will ever see writing with that kind of electricity again.

A few years back, Ishmael Reed titled one of his books, “Writin’ is Fightin’.” That phrase could also serve as a fine epitaph for Mailer, who slugged it out to the very end.

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (Nov. 13) – Texan mayors opposed to a planned border fence with Mexico want to widen and deepen the Rio Grande river instead, and say it will be more effective in keeping out illegal immigrants.

The U.S. government aims to build 700 miles of new fencing along the frontier with Mexico to boost security and try to stem the tide of immigration from the south.

But the Texas stretch of the fence, which would be built on the Rio Grande’s desert flood plain, would cut off some ranchers’ access to the river, the main source of fresh water in the arid region. Mayors say it would also damage trade and centuries-old ties with Mexico.

The calm brown waters of the Rio Grande, famed in Western movies and cowboy ballads, have marked the Texan border with Mexico since the 19th century.

Known in Spanish as the Rio Bravo, or “Rough River,” it is nevertheless shallow enough to wade across in parts.

Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans try to swim it or cross over with tire inner tubes.

Six mayors in mainly Hispanic south Texas on the Mexico border call the fence a wall of shame and have vowed to take the federal government to court to block its construction.

They say a wider, deeper waterway along the lower Rio Grande would create a more formidable barrier than a fence that immigrants can cut, climb over and tunnel under.

“We already have a virtual fence and we should work with that,” said Brownsville’s mayor, Pat Ahumada, who has proposed 42 miles of river widening at a cost of $40 million.

“A widened river would be a bigger deterrent to illegal immigration and the project doesn’t send the wrong message to Mexico that the wall does,” he added.

The city of Laredo is also pushing to widen a stretch of its river front and the other four mayors along the Mexico-Texas line say they are evaluating similar plans.

The Brownsville and Laredo projects involve digging out the river bank on the U.S. side to triple the river’s width to up to 500 feet and deepening the river from 2 feet to about 10 feet at its shallowest, and up to 24 feet in the deepest sections.

By constructing a series of low dams, or weirs, at different parts of the river, water would gradually back up behind them and fill the widened river channel, engineers say.

MORE DEATHS?

A wider river would increase the time it takes to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico to up to four or five minutes, making it easier to spot would-be immigrants and allow Border Patrol speed boats to monitor the river and make arrests more easily.

But a government official who requested anonymity said Washington was concerned a bigger river may cost more lives.

“A wider, deeper river means more people may drown,” the official said.

Texan mayors reject that claim and are lobbying hard to convince the government that the project is safe and feasible, holding a series of meetings this month with Department of Homeland Security officials.

“A wider river is a huge disincentive to cross and is no more dangerous than a wall that people will risk their lives to get over,” said Horacio de Leon, who heads the Laredo project.

President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act last year, requiring the construction of the border fence as part of a plan to have “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexico border by 2013.

“The big question is whether the plan falls within the language of that law. We believe it does,” said Chad Foster, the mayor of Eagle Pass.

Mexico, which must also approve the project because the river is a binational waterway, has shown support for the plans, although Brownsville and its Mexican sister city Matamoros have yet to agree on the position of the weir.

Some Border Patrol officials are also warming to it.

Tallulah is a small town in Northeastern Louisiana, one of the poorest regions in the US. It is about 90 miles from the now-legendary town of Jena, and like Jena it is a town with a large youth prison that was closed after allegations of abuse and brutality. Also like Jena, residents of Tallulah are involved in a modern civil rights struggle. Their town has become a battleground in the national debate on whether to spend money to educate or incarcerate poor, mostly Black, youth.

On a recent Saturday afternoon I visited Hayward Fair, a civil rights movement veteran from Tallulah. Mr. Fair is one of the founders of People United for Education and Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to transforming the local prison (now called Steve Hoyle Rehabilitation Center and primarily holding adults convicted of nonviolent offenses) into a “success center” which would give classes and training. If they succeed in their struggle it will be the first time in this country – where for decades funding for education has been cut while prisons have been built–that a prison has been shut down and replaced by a school, a groundbreaking reversal of the nationwide trend.

When I met with Mr. Fair he was going door to door with activists from the grassroots organizations Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, Southern Center for Human Rights and Safe Streets Strong Communities. At nearly seventy years old, with muscular arms and a shaved head, he shows no sign of slowing down. “I’ve been doing a little community organizing,” he explained, modestly. As he went from house to house, it seemed everyone in the city knew and respected him, and everyone had an opinion about both the prison and what Tallulah needs. Wielding respect from both his age and his reputation for fighting for justice locally, Fair was bringing a vision of a new Tallulah to residents who have seen a town die around them.

Speaking in a gravelly voice and a deliberate step weighted with experience, Mr. Fair led me to the site of the prison. “When the prison came to town most people weren’t even aware of what it was going to be,” he said. “It was something that produced jobs and people needed jobs so there wasn’t no real resistance to it.” But now, the local economy is devastated, and Fair blames the prison, at least in part. “It’s killing the economy of the area, in my opinion,” he claims. “Prisons only bring money to the owners.”

When you enter the city limits, the first thing you see after you pass the “Welcome to Tallulah” sign is the prison, a large complex of 33 buildings surrounded by fence and barbed wire. Standing nearby, Fair gestures down the street. “We’re about a block and a half from the junior high school, we’re about 5 blocks from the senior high school. Our children have to walk out from the classroom and the next thing they see is all these bars and towers and all these big buildings. It had a psychological effect on the children and the adults as well. It really just devastated this whole city.” For several years, the people of Tallulah, aligned with Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, have fought this struggle, to not just close the local prison, but to open something different in its place, to demonstrate that small rural towns don’t have to turn to prisons for jobs.

Tallulah, which is seventy percent Black, used to be a town that Black folks would travel from all around the region to visit. To demonstrate his point, Fair took me to the downtown, to a street of shuttered storefronts, with virtually no people out. “On a day like this, on a Saturday evening, you could hardly walk down the streets of Tallulah, you’d be bumping into people. You had all businesses on this end of town,” he gestured across the street. “All the way down, nothing but businesses; grocery stores, cafes, clothing stores, barrooms, you name it. The town was wide open, stayed open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Now Fair says, the town is a very different place. “We are working trying to bring our image back up, but we are now labeled as a prison town.” As in much of the country, prisons are a big business in rural Louisiana, and this part of the state has several. “You go east you got a youth prison. West down here you got this facility, you go south you got two prisons right outside the city limits.” Tallulah is now far removed from its former glory. Young people move away as soon as they’re able. “We lose maybe 70% of our young people,” he says. “Why should they stay? There’s no opportunities here for them.”

The prison in Tallulah has a long and notorious reputation. Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone visited in 1998, and incarcerated kids broke onto a roof to shout out complaints about their treatment. The New York Times wrote several articles that same year, including a front page report calling Tallulah the worst youth prison in the US, and the US Justice Department sued the state of Louisiana over the systematic abuse at the prison, where even the warden said, “it seemed everybody had a perforated eardrum or a broken nose.”

New Orleans-based journalist Katy Reckdahl chronicled the beginnings of the struggle to transform this prison in an important series of articles several years ago. But now the effort is nearing its final days. Activists have lined up local and statewide support for this important transition, from the community level to meetings with the Governor, to support of national allies such as the Center for Third World Organizing and the Southern Center for Human Rights. With a new Governor on the way, the next few weeks will be crucial for this struggle, and for the fate of Tallulah. If the people of Tallulah win, it will be an important victory for people everywhere concerned about issues of race, education, and criminal justice.

Mr. Fair is proud of the civil rights history of Tallulah, which is located not far from where the Deacons for Defense, a pioneering Black armed self-defense group active during the civil rights movement, was formed. “We had some people here that went off to world war two, then they come back here and were second class citizens,” he explained. “They had to ride in the back of the bus. They said were not going to put up with this. So we started a movement ourselves, to eliminate that.”

Fair experienced intense white resistance to basic rights for Black folks. “At one point the Klan met about three miles outside of town and had a rally and they was going to come into town that evening. They thought they were going to run all the Blacks out of town,” Fair says. But resistance in the town was strong. “When they came into town the streets was crowded. People were walking stiff legged, with their shotguns down under their pants. We told the police were going to take care of ourselves; we don’t need you to take care of us. They thought they were going to scare somebody, but nobody here was afraid of them.”

I asked Fair how Tallulah fits into a wider struggle. “All the eyes of the world is focused on the Jena Six. But every small community in the south, and in the north, has its Jena Six. Maybe you can’t visualize it or maybe you don’t want to visualize it, but this is not just small rural towns. Look at New Orleans, during the storm. When the people was trying to cross the bridge to get out of the flood, there were people on the other side, armed, that would not let them cross. In the rest of the nation people are being treated the same way. Chicago, New York, it don’t matter where you are.”

Before leaving, I asked Fair what kept him in the struggle. “I ain’t struggling, I’m free,” he answered, explaining that this struggle is not about him. “I’m gonna do what I know is right, and I don’t care who you are. I see the young people in the community that need help. That’s what keeps me going. If you see something and you feel it aint right, don’t say they ought to change it, get in there, roll your sleeves up and say let’s change it. That’s the only way. You gotta keep a cool head and do the thing that’s right. When you know right and fight for it, you’re gonna win.”

11/11/07 “ICH” — – Whew! What a week for the stock market. On Wednesday the market took a 360 point nosedive followed, two days later, by a 220 point belly-flop. By the time it was over, the trading pits looked more like a sausage-packing plant than the world’s financial epicenter. After the bell, downcast traders could be seen tiptoeing through the carnage on their way to the local liquor store to load up on “Stoly” and boxes of Franzia—anything that would steady their nerves and put the week behind them.

Everyone could see it coming; the train-wreck. It was mostly carry-over from the night before when Asian stocks took a thumping on reports of slower growth in the US and growing troubles in the credit markets. That put the first domino in motion. Fed chief Bernanke’s announcement that the economy will face “a sharp slowdown from the housing market’s contraction” and an “inflationary surge from sharply higher oil prices and the weaker dollar”, didn’t help either. His remarks triggered a blow-off in the currency markets while equities were frog-marched to the chopping-block.

The Shanghai market took the worst hit dropping nearly 5% before the trading-day ended. Taiwan and Hong Kong followed suit, sliding 3.9% and 3.2% respectively. Share prices in Japan fell 2%. The next morning, Wall Street crashed. It was a massacre.

This is a bear market now. The last bull was dragged from the Street on Friday with a harpoon in its chest.

The subprime contagion has now spread beyond the US and Europe to markets in the Far East. No one is fooled by Bernanke’s sunny predictions that the economy will bounce back next year with a strong showing in the first quarter. That’s baloney and everyone knows it. The economy has stumbled down the elevator shaft and is just waiting to hit bottom. Consumer confidence is flagging, housing is falling, foreign capital is fleeing, and the greenback is one flush away from the sewage-treatment plant. Bernanke’s soothing bromides are meaningless.

“I don’t see any significant change in the broad holdings of dollars around the world. Dollars remain the dominant reserve asset and I expect that to continue to be the case,” Bernanke said to the Congressional Economic Committee.

Really? So why is the greenback plummeting if people aren’t dumping it, Ben? What an absurd comment. The dollar has lost 63% against the euro and dropped to record lows against a basket of world currencies. Foreign central banks and investors have been ditching it as fast as they can before it loses more value. The dollar’s tumble has been the most dazzling currency-flameout in modern times and Bernanke is acting like he’s still asleep at the switch. It’s madness.

The greenback is getting clobbered by the Fed’s “low-interest” snake oil and the gargantuan current account deficit. If Bernanke clips rates again to bail out the stock market, the dollar will slip into irreversible respiratory failure. Food and oil prices will shoot to the moon overnight and the remains of the greenback will be carted off to the nearest boneyard.

September’s trade deficit was another blow to the waning dollar. The Census Bureau reported on Friday that the deficit clocked in at $56.5 billion. That’s $684 billion per annum! Bush has been crowing about the “shrinking deficit”, but the numbers are nothing to boast about. We’re still borrowing more than we’re producing. We’re still living beyond our means. The lower numbers just reflect the decline in home construction which is import-intensive. The fact is, we’re addicted to debt-fueled consumption and forgotten that, eventually, the trillions that we’ve borrowed from foreign creditors, will have to be repaid. If the dollar is replaced as the world’s reserve currency, then we’ll have to pay back $9 trillion of outstanding debt. We might as well hang out the “Foreclosed” sign right now and get fitted for Chinese workers-suits.

This is from Bloomberg News:

“As the dollar tumbles, concern is growing that its weakness may augur the end of the U.S. currency’s 62-year reign as the world’s specie of choice for trade, financial transactions and central-bank reserves…..The dollar owes its position as the world’s premier international currency to its status as a haven during times of turmoil, the absence of a suitable rival, weak domestic demand in other countries and plain old inertia. Geopolitics also play a role.”

Nonsense. Who believes this rubbish? The dollar is the so-called “international currency” because the Federal Reserve and its well-heeled patrons are the directors of the US-Euro-Japan banking cabal which is at the center of the global Fiat money scam. There’s nothing more to it than that. Notice the recent “unilateral” clamp-down on Iran by the US-led banking syndicate. The action was initiated without UN approval for the simple reason that the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and thousands of NGOs are just more of the Central Banks’ prime properties. Don’t expect the father to ask the child for permission to punish one of his errant children. The banks are the one’s who really call the shots and—behind the curtain of feigned respectability—they are the driving force behind the endless wars.

The Fed’s plan to “devalue” our way to prosperity appears to have hit a few ill-placed speed-bumps. The stock market is hanging by a thread and consumer confidence is at its lowest ebb since the start of the Iraq War. The falling dollar is expected to put a damper on Christmas spending and knock equities for a loop. That can’t be good for economy—especially when 72% of GDP comes from consumer spending.

We’ve already begun to see the telltale signs that the consumer is loosing ground and about to slip into a debt-induced coma.

According to data from the University of Michigan:

“Consumer confidence reached its lowest level in more than two years this month amid concerns over record-high oil prices, continued trouble in the housing market and higher inflation…Although consumer attitudes deteriorated across the board, the substantial drop in expectations contributed heavily to the sizeable decline in the overall index.”

The average working stiff doesn’t put any stock in Bernanke’s palavering. He sees what’s going on for himself every time he pulls up to the gas pump or goes the grocery store. He doesn’t need the University of Michigan to tell him he’s getting screwed; he knows it! The economy is sinking, inflation is skyrocketing, and the country is adrift. Every farthing in the public till has been shoveled into a black hole in the Middle East. Does Bernanke really think working people don’t know that? Everyone knows that. Everyone knows the economy is on life-support; just like everyone knows the country is collapsing from mismanagement. Even the flag-waving, war-mongering maniacs on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page are starting to shutter from the avalanche of bad news. They see what’s going on and they’re scared—scared sh**less.

Unfortunately, the sudden shift in consumer sentiment is the hurting retailers who depend on Christmas to carry them through the year. We’ve already seen the sluggishness in housing and auto sales. Now it’s showing up in retail. Abercrombie, American Eagle, Ann Taylor, Chicos, Dillards, The Gap and Nordstrom are all reporting sagging sales. Walmart, Lowes and the other big-box stores are lowering their projections as well. It’s going to be a lean Christmas.

The poor US consumer is finally maxed-out and can’t tap into his home equity anymore for presto-credit. He’s mortgaged “to the hilt” and he’s already run up 6 or 7 credit cards to their limit. In fact, credit card debt is a growing concern for the banks, too.

The commercial banks are the victims’ of their own success. After years of seductive promotions and saturation mailings the credit card industry is at its zenith leaving consumers with a staggering bill of nearly $1 trillion. ($915 billion) More and more customers are finding themselves unable to make even minimum payments on their balances and defaults are piling up at a record pace. This is the next phase of the subprime fiasco and it has the potential to be nearly as disruptive as the housing meltdown. The problem is complex, too. After all, most credit card debt in the last 6 years has been “securitized” and passed on to investors in the secondary market. (pension funds, hedge funds etc.) That means we can expect more tremors in the stock market as corporate earnings go south after credit card-backed bonds are downgraded. It’s just more of the same “structured finance” chicanery; debt stacked on debt, until the whole edifice caves in.

It’s looking more and more like Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” was erected on a mountain of toxic debt. It’s a wonder it hasn’t sunk already.

The country is headed for recession and there’s nothing that Bernanke can do to stop it. The only question is whether we’ll be facing a colossal economy-busting meltdown like 1929 or a milder 5 or 6-year slump. That’s up to the Federal Reserve. If the Fed chief decides to pit himself against the falling markets by slashing rates and destroying the currency; then we are likely to be digging-out for years. But if Bernanke steps aside, and lets the chips fall where they may, then the pace of recovery will be quicker.

Whatever choice he makes, there’s no avoiding the inevitable downturn. The hammer is poised to strike the anvil. The stock market will fall, the over-extended banks and hedge funds will collapse, and the country will go into a protracted, economic tailspin. That much is certain. Economic fundamentals can only be shrugged off for so long. When markets correct it’s like a tidal-surge that sweeps-away the deadwood of bad bets and over-levered investments leaving behind a broad-expanse of empty beach.

Recession is a normal part of the business cycle. It can’t be avoided. The economy needs to unwind so debts can get written off and businesses can retool for the future. The upcoming recession is shaping up to be worse than its predecessors—a real doozey. The damage caused by the Fed’s excessive credit has been considerable. It’ll take years to mop up the red ink and set the house aright. The markets are in a shambles, investors have been battered and confidence is gone.

Structured finance has been an unmitigated disaster. It needs to be scrapped. We need a new financial system for a new epoch; a system that is heavily regulated and supervised to discourage the crooks and con-artists; a system that it maintains its essential link to the real, productive underlying economy and avoids the galaxy of complex derivatives, “securitized” liabilities, and opaque debt-instruments that have brought on the present crisis; a system that responds to the needs of working people and takes into consideration the looming problems of environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and climate change; a system that reinvests in communities, education and health-care rather than fattening the bottom-line of corporate racketeers and brandy-drooling elites. It’s time to remove the rotten scaffolding and rebuild the whole contraption brick by brick.

In his article “The Hillarycare Mythology” (The American Prospect, October 2007, pp. 12-18), Paul Starr, a senior health policy advisor to President Bill Clinton and a leading figure in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s White House task force on health care reform, analyzes the origins, development, and final outcome of the Clinton administration’s health care reform–referred to by Republicans as “Hillarycare.”

Starr dates the origins of Bill Clinton’s commitment to health care reform to the special congressional election held in Pennsylvania in November 1991, when Harris Wofford won against all odds by making reform of the health care sector a major campaign issue. According to Starr, this event triggered a great deal of interest in health care reform; even the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) supported some types of reform such as an employer mandate to provide health benefits coverage. As noted by the editor of JAMA, “there was an air of inevitability about health care reform.” It was this surge of interest that candidate, and later President, Clinton tried to capitalize on by developing a proposal to provide universal health care coverage for all Americans (meaning all U.S. citizens and residents).

Once elected, Bill Clinton established the 500 member White House task force, led by Mrs. Clinton, to work on the details of a proposal developed within a framework defined by the President. According to Starr, the proposal failed when President Clinton presented it to the U.S. Senate after completion of, rather than before, the budget discussions. The Senate did not support the proposal, because it would require extra revenues (making senators susceptible to Republican charges of fiscal irresponsibility) and particularly because–again, according to Star–the proposed benefits coverage was too extensive and too large for many senators to swallow. The final message of Starr’s article is that it was President Clinton’s fault, rather than Hillary’s, that the reform proposal failed.

Starr reproduces a widely held interpretation of the failure of the Clinton health care reform that (limiting the analysis to the relationship between the President and Congress) attributes this failure to a calendar error -­ bad timing–and to the excessive generosity of the proposed health care benefits. I believe there is a need to correct such an interpretation of the events that led to the death of the reform proposal and to challenge the assumptions behind the interpretation. This is important because we might face a similar situation very soon. The majority of the U.S. population is dissatisfied with the funding and organization of the health care sector, and this dissatisfaction has reached unprecedented levels. Once again, all indicators show that people want change. But we could face another failure unless some major changes take place in the U.S.–changes that, I admit, are unlikely to occur with the current correlation of forces in the country and in the Democratic Party.

Let’s start with some corrections to Starr’s assumptions. The commitment of the Democratic Party and candidate Bill Clinton to universal health care coverage for all citizens and residents started much earlier than Starr suggests. It began in the presidential primary campaigns of 1988, when Jesse Jackson (for whom I was senior health advisor), running for the Democratic nomination, made a commitment to universal, comprehensive health care benefits coverage a central component of his platform. This proposal was dismissed by the Democratic Party establishment as “too radical,” but it had already mobilized large sectors of the party’s grassroots (especially labor unions and social movements) to support Jackson, with more than 40% of the delegates at the Democratic Party Convention in Atlanta. This shook the Democratic establishment and stimulated responses from Governor Clinton, Senator Al Gore, and Congressman Richard Gephardt to block this rise of the left in the Democratic Party, which they did by establishing the Democratic Leadership Council, among other interventions. (Gore and Gephardt have changed since then; Bill Clinton hasn’t.) (I describe these effects of Jackson’s health proposals on the Democratic Party in “The 1988 Presidential Election,” in The Politics of Health Policy: The U.S. Reforms 1980­1998, Blackwell, 1994. pp. 99-110.) To control this growth of the left, something had to be done. And as liberals always have done when faced with the left, they recycled its progressive proposals, adopting much of their narrative but emptying them of their content. This is what Clinton did in his 1992 campaign. He used the title, narrative, and symbols of Jesse Jackson’s campaign, calling his platform “Putting People First” (the title used by Jackson in 1988) and including the call for universal health care benefits. As the perceptive Financial Times wrote, “Clinton [has borrowed] extensively from Jesse Jackson 1988. He sounds like a Swedish social democrat.” While borrowing the language and the symbols, however, Clinton changed the content dramatically.

Whereas Jackson had called for a single-payer program similar to that in Canada, Clinton chose the opposite pole of the political spectrum: managed care competition. Managed care competition basically meant the insurance companies exercised full control over health care providers, with doctors working in group practices called Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs). As stated by Paul Elwood, a leading member of the White House task force, “insurers-controlled HMOs, under managed care competition will stimulate a course of change in the health care industry that would have some of the classical aspects of the industrial revolution–conversion to larger units of production, technological innovation, division of labor, substitution of capital for labor, vigorous competition and profitability as the mandatory condition of survival” (“Heath Maintenance Strategy,” Medical Care, 9 (1971), p. 291). This industrial revolution in medical care would indeed have revolutionized the practice of medicine.

It is important to note that the idea of managed care competition was first proposed as a solution to the irrationality of the U.S. health care sector by Alain Enthoven, personal advisor to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Enthoven was in charge of developing the “body count” as an indicator of military efficiency. After the Vietnam fiasco, Enthoven retired to the Rand Corporation, choosing to focus his intellectual efforts on the reform of U.S. health care. A strong ideologue and market fundamentalist, and completely ignorant of the mechanics of the medical care sector, Enthoven thought the best way to control out-of-control costs in the health sector was to increase competition in the sector, letting health insurance companies compete for consumers–meaning patients–based on the price of services. The problems with such a naïve and unrealistic scenario are many. First, patients do not determine the cost or price of medical care services. Second, patients have very little choice in the U.S. health care sector: employers choose which plans are available to employees. Third, the market does not exist in the health care sector. Fourth, the insurance industry’s financial viability depends on its ability to discriminate against heavy care-users. I could go on and on detailing just how wrong Enthoven’s proposals were.

Not surprisingly, managed care was the proposal chosen by the insurance industry and by employers. As Bill Link, Executive Vice President of Prudential and one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country, stated: “for Prudential, the best scenario for reform–preferably even to the status quo–would be enactment of a managed competition proposal.” Link envisioned the corporatization of U.S. medicine, breaking the long dominance of health care providers in the medical care sector. As Enthoven wrote in an article co-authored with Richard Kronick, another leader of the White House health care reform, “what about traditional fee-for-services individual and single specialty group practices? We doubt that they should generally be compatible with economic efficiency. . . . Some would survive in private solo practice without health plan contracts, serving the well-to-do.” It could not have been put more clearly: managed care competition was corporate assembly-line capitalism for the masses and their health care providers, with free choice and fee-for-service medicine for the elites.

This proposal was actively promoted in the White House task force by the staff of Democratic Representative Cooper and members of the so-called Jackson Hole Group, who even distributed the group’s manuals on implementing managed care competition to task force members. They were particularly active in the Governance of the Health System (chaired by Richard Curtis, who had been an official of the HIAA) and Global Budgeting working groups. Outside the task force, managed care competition was actively promoted by the insurance companies. Mr. Weinstein, a disciple of Enthoven and a member of the editorial board of the New York Times (a third of the Times board members then had connections with insurance companies), wrote nine editorials in support of managed care competition.

Paul Starr sold managed care to candidate Bill Clinton. Of course, Starr and another leader of the White House task force, Walter Zelman, were aware of some drawbacks of this scheme, and they modified it to allow for some form of regulation of the ill-defined market forces–without specifying, however, who would do the regulating. They spoke of Health Alliances that would regulate the rate of growth of premiums and would allow, in theory, for consumer choice of health plans, with large employers operating on their own outside the regulatory process but still within the framework of managed care competition (with budget constraints); health insurers and health care providers could be integrated in the same organization, or Health Plans. While managed care competition was the proposal favored by insurers and large employers, it was not favored by health care providers. Providers had already had enough experience with insurance companies to know that they could be more intrusive, abusive, and nasty than government. And managed care was certainly not the choice of the grassroots of the Democratic Party–labor unions and social movements.

Concerned that managed care was not backed by the majority of the progressive base of the Democratic Party, Jesse Jackson, Dennis Rivera (then president of Local 1199, the foremost health care workers union), and I went to see Hillary Clinton. We complained about the commitment to managed care competition without due consideration of a single-payer proposal supported by large sectors of the left in the Democratic Party. We emphasized the need to include this proposal among those to be considered by the task force. Mrs. Clinton responded by asking Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition to appoint someone to the task force with that point of view. And this is how I became a member of the White House task force. I later found out that there was considerable opposition from senior health advisors, including Starr and Zelman, to my becoming part of the task force. According to a memo later made public and published in David Brock’s nasty book The Seduction of Hillary Clinton, Starr and Zelman disapproved of my appointment “because Navarro is a real left-winger and has extreme distaste for the approach we are pursuing”­ which was fairly accurate about my feelings, but I must stress that my disdain for managed competition and the intellectuals who supported it did not interfere with my primary objective: to make sure that the views of the single-payer community would be heard in the task force. They were heard, but not heeded. I was ostracized, and I had the feeling I was in the White House as a token–although whether as a token left-winger, token radical, token Hispanic, or token single-payer advocate, I cannot say. But I definitely had the feeling I was a token something.

It was at a later date, when some trade unions and Public Citizen mobilized to get more than 200,000 signatures in support of a single-payer system, that President Clinton instructed the task force to do something about single-payer. From then on the battle centered on including a sentence in the proposed law that would allow states to choose single-payer as an alternative if they so wished. In Canada, after all, single-payer started in one province (Saskatchewan) and later spread to the whole nation. I have to admit that I made that proposal with considerable misgivings, since the insurance companies can also be extremely influential at the state level. For example, Governor Schaeffer (a Democrat) of Maryland had asked insurance companies to interview the various candidates for state insurance commissioner. Still, including this proposal was a step toward giving single-payer a chance in the U.S.

It is interesting that in my debates with Alain Enthoven, he dismissed my proposals with the comment that “the U.S. Political System is incapable of forcing changes in such powerful constituencies as the insurance industry.” Such candid admission of the profoundly undemocratic nature of the U.S. political system was refreshing. The splendid opening of the U.S. Constitution, “We the people . . . ,” should be amended with a footnote reading “and the insurance companies.” Actually, Enthoven’s statement came very close to Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, which defines democracy as a class dictatorship in which the corporate class controls the state. Empirical support in the U.S. for that statement is strong. But the statement is not 100% accurate. I lived under a dictatorship in my youth (in Franco’s Spain) and I recognize a dictatorship when I see one. The U.S. is not a dictatorship. People in the U.S. do have a voice. Marx and Engels (and Enthoven) were not completely right: U.S. history shows that people’s mobilizations can win the day. But, while not a dictatorship, U.S. democracy is profoundly undermined by the enormous influence of the economic and corporate lobbies, components of the corporate class. I documented this in Medicine Under Capitalism, published in the 1970s. And things have become much worse during the Reagan­Bush Sr.­Clinton­Bush Jr. era. The huge limitations of U.S. democracy are evident in the difficulty with which the importance of people’s voice gets noticed. And this is why the Clinton proposal failed. He did not include in his plans any effort to mobilize people in support of the reform. Quite to the contrary. He allied himself with the major forces responsible for the sorry state of the U.S. medical care sector–the health insurance industry. The insurance companies ultimately opposed the final proposal because of its regulatory components, added by Starr and Zelman. But, apart from these components, the insurance companies would have continued to manage the health care system.

Starr’s explanation of why the reform failed is dramatically insufficient. The failure had little to do with timing, with when and where President Clinton presented the proposal. It had to do with how the Clintons related to the progressive constituencies, including labor and social movements. No universal, comprehensive coverage will ever be achieved in the U.S. without an active mobilization of the population (especially progressive forces) so as to balance and neutralize the enormous resistance from some of the most important financial lobbies in the nation. Starr’s social engineering approach, lacking any understanding of the dynamics of power, explains failure as a consequence of problems of the electoral calendar or the types of benefits offered.

In reality, the Clinton administration ignored the majority of the country’s progressive forces from the very beginning of its mandate. President Clinton made his first priority a reduction of the federal deficit (a policy not even included in his program), approved NAFTA (against the opposition of the AFL-CIO, the social movements, and even the majority of the Democratic Party), and committed himself to perpetuation of the for-profit health insurance system–the primary cause of the country’s inhumane medical care system. When NAFTA was approved, Clinton signed the death certificate for the health care plan, and for the Democratic majority in Congress. The number of people who voted Republican in 1994 was no larger than in 1990 (the previous non-presidential congressional election year). The big difference was in the Democratic vote. Abstention by working-class voters increased dramatically in 1994 and was the primary reason why Democrats lost their majority in Congress. This is a point that Starr ignores. The Gingrich Revolution of 1994 was an outcome of voter abstention, particularly among the working class, who were fed up with President Clinton. But NAFTA was also the death knell for health care reform. One could see this in the White House task force. NAFTA empowered the right, and weakened and demoralized the left.

A continuing shift to the right (erroneously called the center) has been the Democratic Party’s strategy for the past 30 years, abandoning any commitment to the New Deal and the establishment of universal entitlements that make social rights a part of citizenship. David Brock writes in his book “that Navarro had told Mrs. Clinton that if the President went ahead with a managed care competition plan, it would cost the election to the Democratic Party.” Brock’s credibility as a reporter is extremely limited, but on that point he was right. I told Mrs. Clinton that the only way of winning, and of neutralizing the enormous power of the insurance industry and large employers, was for the President and the Democratic Party leadership to make the issue one of the people against the establishment. It was a class war strategy that the Republicans most feared. My good friend David Himmelstein, a founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, told Mrs. Clinton the same thing. And as I judged by her response, she seemed to think we did not understand how politics works in the U.S. The problem is, we understood only too well how power operates.

This, then, is why the Clintons failed. And unfortunately, Hillary Clinton will fail again if she lacks the courage to confront those responsible for the predicament in the nation’s health care system. The insurance-controlled system imposes enormous pain on the population. It is not just that 46 million people are now without health insurance, but the system also fails the huge numbers of people who have insufficient coverage and don’t discover this until they need it. This cruel system has been supported by large employers because it gives them oppressive control of the labor force. When workers lose their job, they lose not only their income but also health benefits coverage–for themselves and their families. The alliance of two of the most powerful forces in this country–insurance and large employers–is at the root of the problem.

A final observation. Love of country is measured by the extent to which one promotes policies that support the well-being and quality of life of the population and, most particularly, the working and middle classes that make up the vast majority of the population. Judged by this standard, most super-patriotic, right-wing forces fail miserably on the love-of-country front. People in this nation die due to lack of health care. The estimates vary from 18,000 to 100,000 a year, depending on how you measure preventable deaths. But even based on the most conservative number of 18,000 (from the conservative Institute of Medicine), this is six times the number of people killed on September 11, 2001, by Al Qaeda. And these deaths continue year after year. The deaths on 9/11 are rightly seen as the result of enemy action. But why do the 18,000 deaths each year go unnoticed? Why aren’t they seen as the outcome of hostile forces, whose love for their country is clearly nil? Mark Twain said, “You cannot love people and then go to bed with those who oppressed them.” Why is it so difficult to understand such a basic truth?