The Rag Blog

Emma Lazarus’ memorable words on Lady Liberty’s pedestal once had meaning as a new nation grew. No longer in a country hostile to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless and many others not making the grade in a white supremacist Judeo-Christian state worshiping wealth and privilege. No welcome sign is out for the unwanted poor and desperate. At best, they’re ignored to subsist on their own. At worst, they’re scorned and abused, exploited and discarded like trash or labeled “terrorists” in a post-9/11 world of mass witch-hunt roundups aimed at Muslims because of their faith or country of origin and Latinos coming north to survive the fallout from NAFTA’s destructive effects on their lives.

Immigrants of color, the wrong faith or from the wrong parts of the world are never greeted warmly in “America the Beautiful” that’s only for the privileged and no one else. They’re not wanted except to harvest our crops or do the hard, low-pay, no-benefit labor few others will do. The ground rules to come were set straight away in our original Nationalization Act of 1790 establishing the first path to citizenship. It wasn’t friendly to the wrong types as permanent status was limited to foreign-born “free white persons” of “good moral character,” meaning people like most of us – our culture, countries of origin, religion and skin color.

Left out were indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, native Americans being exterminated, and later Asians and Latinos whose “appearance” wasn’t as acceptable as the whiteness of English-speaking European Christian settlers and the mix of others from Western European countries like Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. The law scarcely changed for 162 years until the 1870 15th amendment loosened it enough to include blacks by 1875, no longer slaves but hardly free and in 1940 gave Latin Americans the same right. After the war in 1945 it extended it further to Filipinos and Asian Indians. Original native Americans, whose land this was for thousands of years, only were enfranchised and given the right of citizenship in their own land when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 after most of them were exterminated in a genocidal process still ongoing, never mentioned in the mainstream, and for which no redress was ever made or likely will be.

The 1952 Immigration and Nationality (McCarran-Walter) Act (INA) only grudgingly did what no law before it allowed. For the first time it made individuals of all races eligible for citizenship but imposed strict quotas for those from the Eastern Hemisphere with different standards for caucasians from the West. But nothing is ever simple and straightforward in “America the Beautiful.” In the early Cold War atmosphere of Joe McCarthy’s communist witch-hunts, anyone accused of leftist sympathies could be targeted, and any alien so-tagged could be deported, and like today no evidence was needed.

From the INA to the present, immigration laws kept changing for better or worse, but one thing was constant. White Christian Western Europeans are welcomed. Others, especially people of color or the wrong religion, get in grudgingly in lesser numbers and receive unequal or harsh treatment when they arrive. The 1996 Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) and Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA)proved it showing Democrat presidents can be as mean and nasty as Republicans, especially with help from a Republican-controlled Congress.

The 1996 acts were ugly and repressive ignoring the rights of due process and judicial fairness. They allowed Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents to detain legal immigrants without bond, deport them without discretionary relief, restrict their access to counsel, bar them from appealing to the courts, and can be applied for even minor offenses little more than youthful indiscretions. These laws under a Democrat president “feel(ing) our pain” showed no more compassion or equity than later ones under George Bush in force today. They allow no second chances and deny targeted legal immigrants their day in court. Their harshness tears apart families unjustly made to suffer by a nation hardening its stance to the wrong kinds of immigrants. They’re sent an unwelcome message now much worse in the age of George Bush with his permanent wars on the world and homeland “terrorists” meaning anyone called that on his say alone.

It started post-9/11 with the 2001 USA Patriot Act even harsher in its updated Patriot Act II version. Enacted to combat “terrorism,” it’s done on the border with more guards to spot, detain, arrest and incarcerate Latinos entering the country for a way to survive. For being undocumented and on the pretext of being suspected “terrorists,” they may be indefinitely detained or deported the way it works under any despotic national security police state. It’s even worse for Muslims, 5000 of whom were rounded up and held early on with only three of them ever being charged with an offense. And it got far worse for them after that still ongoing.

Today, federal immigration courts can hold secret hearings for anyone here illegally or charged with a law violation, no matter how minor. Those convicted can then be incarcerated or deported to their country of origin often to face arrest and torture. It’s now open season on anyone targeted with legal protection no longer shielding innocent victims Justice Department (DOJ) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) go after. They includes poor and desperate mostly undocumented Latinos from Mexico and Central America coming el norte because NAFTA, CAFTA and other neoliberal unfair trade agreements called “free” destroyed their ability to earn a living at home leaving them no other choice but come north or perish.

It shouldn’t be that way, and promises were made early on that “free trade” lifted all boats with higher wages and more jobs. Instead millions of jobs were lost while real wages fell under the effects of a globalized market system crafted for investor elites to profit at the expense of ordinary working people paying the price. They’ve been devastated since by a sustained massive wealth transfer to the top of the economic pyramid that in the US alone has been a generational process of well over $1 trillion annually to corporations and the richest 1%.

For the past 13 years, NAFTA and the rest of globalized trade provided cover for imperialism on the march for power and profit. It prospers from economic and shooting wars of conquest with an engineered race to the bottom driven by giant predatory corporations allied with friendly governments in their service at the expense of ordinary working people paying the price. The result – mass and growing poverty, human misery, and ecological destruction great enough to threaten the ability of the planet to sustain life.

Dennis Ott: In a recent interview you quoted Thorstein Veblen, who contrasted “substantial people” and “underlying population.”[1] At a shareholder’s meeting of Allianz AG, major shareholder Hans-Martin Buhlmannn expressed the view that there is only one limit to the increase of the dividend: “The inferiors must not be bled so much that they can no longer consume. They must survive as consumers.”[2] Is this the guiding principle of our economic system? And if so, is there any substance to the notion of a “social market economy”?

Noam Chomsky: Those are traditional questions in economics. It’s part of Marx’s reasoning about why there’s going to be a continuing crisis of capitalism: that owners are going to try to squeeze the work force as much as possible, but they can’t go too far, it’ll be nobody to purchase what they buy. And it’s been dealt with over and over again in one or another way during the history of capitalism; there’s an inherent problem.

So for example, Henry Ford famously tried to pay his workers a higher wage than the going wage, because partly on this reasoning – he was not a theoretical economist, but partly on the grounds that if he doesn’t pay his workers enough and other people won’t pay their workers enough, there’s going to be nobody around to buy his model-T Fords. Actually that issue came to court in the United States, around 1916 or so, and led to a fundamental principle of Anglo-American corporate law, which is part of the reason why the Anglo-American system is slightly different from the European social market system. There was a famous case called “Dodge v. Ford.” Some of the stockholders of the Ford motor company, the Dodge brothers, brought Henry Ford to court, claiming that by paying the workers a higher wage, and by making cars better than they had to be made, he was depriving them of their profits – because it’s true: dividends would be lower. They went to the courts, and they won.

The courts decided that the management of the corporation has the legal responsibility to maximize the yield of the profit to its stockholders, that’s its job. The corporations had already been granted the right of persons, and this basically says they have to be a certain type of pathological person, a person that does nothing except try to maximize his own gain – that’s the legal requirement on a corporation, and that’s a core principle of Anglo-American corporate law. So when, say, Milton Friedman points out that corporations just have to have one interest in life, maximizing profit and market share, he is legally correct, that is what the law says. The reason the Dodge brothers wanted it was because they wanted to start their own car company, and that ended up being Dodge, Chrysler, Daimler-Chrysler and so on. And that remains a core principle of corporate law.

Now, there were modifying traditional decisions, which said that a corporation is permitted legally – that means, the management is permitted legally – to carry out benevolent activities, like to join the Millennium Fund or something, but only if it improves their humanitarian image and therefore increases their profit. So a drug company can give away cheap drugs to the poor, but as long as the television cameras are on; then it’s still legal. And in fact, there’s an important decision by an American court, which is quite intriguing. It urges corporations to carry out benevolent activities; it says – and I’m quoting it now – or else “an aroused public” may figure out what corporations are up to, and take away their privileges – because after all, they’re just granted by the government, there’s nothing in the constitution, there’s no legal basis for them, it’s a radical violation of classical liberal principles and free market principles. They’re just granted by powerful institutions, and “an aroused public” might see through it and take it away. So you should have things like the Gleneagles conference once in a while, which is mostly fake, but looks good, and this is basically the court decision.

How does the social market system differ? There’s no principle of economics or anything else that says – first of all that even says that corporations should exist, but granting that they exist – that they should be concerned only with the maximization of gain for their stockholders instead of what’s sometimes called “stakeholders”: the community, the work force, everything else. As far as economics is concerned, it’s just another way of running things. And the European system to an extent has stakeholder interest. So, say, Germany has a theoretical form of co-determination – mostly theoretical, but some degree of worker participation in management, acceptance of unions, that’s been a partial move towards stakeholder interest. And the governmental social democratic programs are other examples of it.

The United States happens to be pretty much at the extreme of keeping to the principle that the corporate system must be pathological, and that the government is allowed to and glad to intervene to uphold that principle. The European system is somewhat different, the British system is somewhat in between, and they all vary.

Like during the New Deal period in the United States and during the 1960s, the United States veered somewhat towards a social market system. That’s why the Bush administration, who are of extreme reactionary sort, are trying to dismantle the few elements where the social market exists. Why are they trying to destroy social security, for example? I mean, there’s no serious economic problem, it’s all fraud. It’s in as good fiscal health as it’s ever been in its history, but it is a system which benefits the general population. It is of no use at all to the wealthy. Like, I get social security when I retire, but I’ve been a professor at MIT for fifty years, so I got a big pension and so on and so forth, I wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t get social security. But a very large part of the population, maybe 60% or something like that, actually survive on it. So therefore it’s a system that obviously has to be destroyed. It’s useless for the wealthy, it’s useless for privilege, it contributes nothing to profit. It has other bad features, like it’s based on the principle that you should care about somebody else, like you should care whether a disabled widow has food to eat. And that’s hopelessly immoral by the moral principles of power and privilege, so you’ve got to knock that idea out of people’s heads, and therefore you want to get rid of the system.

Slashdot and Cryptome report that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is demanding the master key for the DNS root zone – a demand that has other nations alarmed. With the master key, DHS would have control over the Internet, as Slashdot describes, quoting an “anonymous reader.”

The key will play an important role in the new DNSSec security extension, because it will make spoofing IP-addresses impossible. By forcing the IANA [Internet Assigned Numbers Authority] to hand out a copy of the master key, the US government will be the only institution that is able to spoof IP addresses and be able to break into computers connected to the Internet without much effort.

The issue arose at Friday’s meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Lisbon, Portugal.

* Deep Harm’s diary:: ::

There is no indication yet that U.S. mainstream news media have reported on the DHS proposal. U.S. coverage of the ICANN meeting focused (predictably) on a proposal to create a domain specifically for adult websites. Cryptome cites a German news source, Heisse Online, which provides the following information.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)…wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government. This ultimate master key would then allow authorities to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system’s root zone on the Internet. The “key-signing key” signs the zone key, which is held by VeriSign. At the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Lisbon, Bernard Turcotte, president of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) drew everyone’s attention to this proposal as a representative of the national top-level domain registries (ccTLDs).

At the ICANN meeting, Turcotte said that the managers of country registries were concerned about this proposal. When contacted by heise online, Turcotte said that the national registries had informed their governmental representatives about the DHS’s plans. A representative of the EU Commission said that the matter is being discussed with EU member states. DNSSec is seen as a necessary measure to keep the growing number of manipulations on the net under control. The DHS is itself sponsoring a campaign to support the implementation of DNSSec. Three of the 13 operators currently work outside of the US, two of them in Europe. Lars-Johan Liman of the Swedish firm Autonomica, which operates the I root server, pointed out the possible political implications last year. Liman himself nominated ICANN as a possible candidate for the supervisory function.

When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as “Lula”, visits Washington on March 31, he will likely spend most of his time with President Bush discussing ethanol, a relatively safe subject for the two leaders. Earlier this month, Brazil and the United States, the world’s two top ethanol producers, announced the creation of an international forum to help turn biofuels into a globally traded commodity. Brazil, unlike the U.S., has spent thirty years developing its ethanol technology, and is producing a surplus of a sugar-based version of that fuel.

Lula has been criticized for following the Bush Administration on foreign trade policy, but he may be in even more hot water for following Bush on a foreign military adventure. When President Lula relieved U.S. Marines in Haiti by having Brazil take the lead of the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) in early 2004, he got Bush, whose troops were spread thin, out of a tight spot. Lula also earned brownie points for Brazil’s bid for a permanent seat on a potentially-expanded UN Security Council.

But all this came at a price. MINUSTAH was the only UN peacekeeping mission in history deployed without a peace agreement. It’s true purpose was to consolidate the February 29, 2004 coup against the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. This genesis put MINUSTAH in a quandary from the beginning. In order to fulfill its mission of supporting the illegitimate, unpopular and brutal Interim Government of Haiti (led by a Bush supporter flown in from Florida), MINUSTAH was forced to join the dictatorship’s attacks on poor neighborhoods that would never accept the overthrow of their democracy.

In August 2006, the British Medical Journal The Lancet published a mortality study that concluded 8,000 people were killed in the first twenty-two months of the coup. In almost half of the reported deaths, the perpetrators were identified as security agents of the coup government, former soldiers or armed anti-Lavalas groups. No murders were attributed to Lavalas members. Although the government and its paramilitary allies did the lion’s share of the killings, MINUSTAH participated as well. In a July 6, 2005 raid, MINUSTAH soldiers shot 22,000 bullets (by the UN’s own count) into the thin walls of the poor Cite Soleil neighborhood. Up to sixty civilians were killed, dozens more wounded, but none received help from the “peacekeepers.”

Although a democratic government was inaugurated last May, MINUSTAH continues to kill civilians. In the early morning of December 22, 2006, 400 Brazilian-led MINUSTAH troops in armored vehicles carried out a massive assault on the Bois Neuf and Drouillard districts of Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince. The military operation, which claimed the lives of dozens of area residents, took place near the site of the July, 2005 raid.

Citizens of Lebanon, beware. Arieh Eldad has it out for you. After the scandal-ridden government of Ehud Olmert falls, probably within the next few weeks, a new government, likely led by Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, will attack Lebanon. “We have no choice. We will have to do it,” Eldad tells the neocon website, NewsMax. “Dr. Eldad explained that Israel was facing a new strategic threat, caused in part by its own failure to deal a crushing blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the impression of weakness last summer’s failed war created in the minds of Israel’s enemies.”

In fact, short of killing hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, there is no way for Israel to “deal a crushing blow to Hezbollah,” as more than half of the population supports the Islamic organization, created in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Since Israel will certainly face defeat on the ground in Lebanon, as it did last summer, the only option will be to shock and awe the country into submission.

But it is simply not Hezbollah. “The Hezbollah template for attacking Israel is being repeated in Gaza, Dr. Eldad said. ‘Hamas is building bunkers. They are bringing missiles across the Egyptian border, and the Egyptian government is failing to prevent it. So I hope the next Israeli government will be courageous enough to carry out these operations before it is too late.’” Swap “courageous” for “psychotic” and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Eldad and Moledet have in mind for the grandmothers and toddlers of Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.

Arie Eldad, a member of the “right-wing” (that is to say, fascist) Moledet political party, heads the Ethics committee of the Knesset. Of course, when we talk about ethics here, we are talking about a brand of “moral principles” alien to the West and Christianity. According to Eldad, sanctions of the sort to be levied against Iran are based on Western logic. “But when states have missions that are bigger than life, they are not obeying the basic rules of logic that Western civilization obeys.”

And what is are these “missions that are bigger than life”?

Ethnic cleansing. Moledet advocates the “voluntary transfer” of the Palestinian population out of the West Bank and Gaza. A few years ago, Moledet bought space on billboards around Tel Aviv, calling for ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. “Only transfer will bring peace,” read the billboards. Imagine this tactic repeated here in the United States. “Only sending the Blacks back to Africa will reduce crime.” It does not take an overactive imagination to envision the response. But in Israel this sort of behavior is normal, even considered mainstream politics.

Think about it this month, as you get ready to fill out your tax forms. “Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today’s population, that is more than $5,700 per person,” reports the Christian Science Monitor. “Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. It is already due to get $2.04 billion in military assistance and $720 million in economic aid in fiscal 2003. It has been getting $3 billion a year for years.”

This “military assistance” translates into “770 cluster-bomb sites” in southern Lebanon, according to the United Nations. “And the current U.N. estimate is that Israel dropped between 2 million and 3 million bomblets on Lebanon, of which up to a million have yet to explode,” according to Saree Makdisi of UCLA’s International Institute. It also translates into 3,020 Palestinians killed since 2000, the wanton destruction of the Palestinian health and educational infrastructure, widespread and growing poverty and unemployment, environmental degradation, and a large and increasing number of Palestinians interned in prisons, well over 650,000 since 1967. Concern over such things, of course, is an artifact of “Western logic,” as a large number of Israelis consider Palestinians little more than “drugged cockroaches in a bottle,” as Rafael Eitan, former Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, characterized them.

Eldad soon moved on to Iran. “Eldad is not suggesting economic or diplomatic ‘engagement,’ as the State Department might use the term. He is talking about having Israel’s military take out Iranian nuclear and missile sites if the Western nations refuse to do the job…. Iran is behaving on a state level as a suicide bomber behaves on the personal level, Dr. Eldad said…. Eventually, military action against Iran will become necessary.”

In other words, if AIPAC and the neocons cannot once again trick the American people into attacking Iran, as they tricked them into attacking Iraq in the name of Israel, the IDF will do it. Of course, this is nonsense, Israel will not go it alone against Iran. In fact, Eldad is simply spewing more rhetoric, as Israel has long expected the United States to attack and slaughter its enemies. If the invasion of Lebanon last summer demonstrated anything, it is that Hezbollah can hold its own and Israel is impotent to change the situation “on the ground,” in essence a result of its own unwavering policies of aggression, be it by way of direct military confrontation or black flag operations.

“Like most Israeli leaders, Dr. Eldad would prefer that the United States and its partners take out Iranian nuclear and missile sites, if for no other reason than the vastly superior conventional firepower the U.S. could bring to bear.”

Israel has plenty of “superior conventional firepower,” courtesy of the American tax payer, never mind what its leaders tell the media. Point is here, Israel expects the United States to pay for—in squandered treasure and sacrificed lives—its long-standing effort to balkanize Arab and Muslim states, beginning most recently with Iraq and continuing with Iran.

“Because Iran has built its nuclear plants in deeply buried, hardened facilities, it will be difficult if not impossible.”

Translation: simple high-explosives, depleted uranium, and millions of cluster bombs will no longer do the trick—it is time to nuke the Arabs and Muslims, as “Western logic,” i.e., use of nuclear weapons is unconscionable, does not apply.

“If Israel is left alone and the point of no return [in Iran’s nuclear weapons program] arrives, then Israel will have to do the job. But most probably we will not be able to do it with conventional warheads. And this is something the world should know.”

The country is not at war. It is the US military that is engaged in an Iraqi conflict

There’s a helluva difference between Cairo University and the campus of Valdosta in the Deep South of the United States. I visited both this week and I feel like I’ve been travelling on a gloomy spaceship – or maybe a time machine – with just two distant constellations to guide my journey. One is clearly named Iraq; the other is Fear. They have a lot in common.

The politics department at Cairo’s vast campus is run by Dr Mona El-Baradei – yes, she is indeed the sister of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency – and her students, most of them young women, almost all scarved, duly wrote out their questions at the end of the turgid Fisk lecture on the failings of journalism in the Middle East. “Why did you invade Iraq?” was one. I didn’t like the “you” bit, but the answer was “oil”. “What do you think of the Egyptian government?” At this, I looked at my watch. I reckon, I told the students, that I just had time to reach Cairo airport for my flight before Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence lads heard of my reply.

Much nervous laughter. Well, I said, new constitutional amendments to enshrine emergency legislation into common law and the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood supporters was not a path to democracy. And I ran through the US State Department’s list of Egyptian arbitrary detentions, routine torture and unfair trials. I didn’t see how the local constabulary could do much about condemnation from Mubarak’s American friends. But it was purely a symbolic moment. These cheerful, intelligent students wanted to see if they would hear the truth or get palmed off with another bromide about Egypt’s steady march to democracy, its stability – versus the disaster of Iraq – and its supposedly roaring success. No one doubts that Mubarak’s boys keep a close eye on his country’s students.

But the questions I was asked after class told it all. Why didn’t “we” leave Iraq? Are “we” going to attack Iran? Did “we” really believe in democracy in the Middle East? In fact “our” shadow clearly hung over these young people.

Thirty hours later, I flicked on the television in my Valdosta, Georgia, hotel room and there was a bejewelled lady on Fox TV telling American viewers that if “we” left Iraq, the “jihadists” would come after us. “They want a Caliphate that will take over the world,” she shrieked about a report that two children had deliberately been placed in an Iraqi car bomb which then exploded. She ranted on about how Muslim “jihadists” had been doing this “since the 1970s in Lebanon”. It was tosh, of course. Children were never locked into car bombs in Beirut – and there weren’t any “jihadists” around in the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. But fear had been sown. Now that the House of Representatives is talking about the US withdrawal by August 2008, fear seems to drip off the trees in America.

Up in the town of Tiger, Georgia, Kathy Barnes is reported to be looking for omens as she fears for the life of her son, Captain Edward Berg of the 4th Brigade, US 3rd Infantry Division, off to Iraq for a second tour of duty, this time in George Bush’s infamous “surge”. Last time he was there, Mrs Barnes saw a dead snake and took it as a bad sign. Then she saw two Canadian geese, soaring over the treetops. That was a good sign. “A rational mind plays this game in war time,” as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution eloquently pointed out. “A thunderclap becomes a herald, a bird’s song a prophecy.”

Dr Michael Noll’s students at Valdosta are as smart and bright-eyed as Dr El-Baradei’s in Cairo. They packed into the same lecture I had given in Egypt and seemed to share a lot of the same fears about Iraq. But a sullen seminar that same morning was a miserable affair in which a young woman seemed to break down in anger. If “we” left Iraq, she said in a quavering voice, the jihadists, the “terrorists”, could come here to America. They would attack us right here.

I sighed with frustration. I was listening to her voice but it was also the voice of the woman on Fox TV, the repeated, hopeless fantasy of Bush and Blair: that if we fail in Iraq, “they”, the monstrous enemy, will arrive on our shores. Every day in the American papers now, I read the same “fear” transformed into irrationality. Luke Boggs – God, how I’d love that byline – announces in his local paper: “I say let the terrorists rot in Guantanamo. And let the Europeans … howl. We are a serious nation, engaged in the serious business of trying to kill or capture the bad guys before they can do us more harm.” He calls Guantanamo’s inmates “hardcore jihadists”.

And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll’s seminar isn’t spouting this stuff about “jihadists” travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the “terror” warnings, the supposed “jihadists” threats, the red “terror” alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden’s job for him: he has crushed this young woman’s spirit and courage.

But America is not at war. There are no electricity cuts on Valdosta’s warm green campus, with its Spanish style department blocks and its narrow, beautiful church. There is no food rationing. There are no air-raid shelters or bombs or “jihadists” stalking these God-fearing folk. It is the US military that is at war, engaged in an Iraqi conflict that is doing damage of a far more subtle kind to America’s social fabric.

Off campus, I meet a gentle, sensitive man, a Vietnam veteran with two doctor sons. One is a lieutenant colonel, an army medical officer heading back to Baghdad this week for Bush’s “surge”, bravely doing his duty in the face of great danger. The other is a civilian doctor who hates the war. And now the two boys – divided by Iraq – can hardly bring themselves to speak to each other.

This is not an exaggerated figure; more cautious than not. I have thought about this quite a lot since President Bush’s meeting with U.S. automobile manufactures.

This sinister idea of converting foodstuff into combustibles was definitively established as the United States economic line within its foreign policy this past March 26.

(Editor’s Summary) Washington AP – North America’s AP news agency, which reaches every corner of the world, reported that President Bush praised the benefits of using ethanol and biodiesel fuel in automobiles during a meeting with General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Motors. Bush’s administration plans to cut gas consumption by 20% in 10 years. (Axis of Logic)

I think that reducing and, moreover, recycling engines, which consume electricity and combustibles, is an elemental and urgent necessity for humanity. The tragedy does not consist in reducing these wastes of energy but in the notion of converting foodstuff into combustibles.

We know today with total precision that a ton of corn can only produce an average of 413 liters of ethanol, according to density, which is the equivalent of 109 gallons.

The average price of corn in the harbors of the United States is $167 per ton. It requires as much as 320 million tons of corn to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol.

US corn harvests, in 2005, rose to 280.2 million tons, according to FAO data.

Nevertheless, the president speaks of producing combustibles from grass and wood, which anyone can understand are phrases absolutely lacking realism. Understand well: 35 billion gallons means 35 followed by nine zeros.

Experienced and well organized U.S. farmers will come up with beautiful examples of production for humans and per hectare: corn converted into ethanol; residues of this converted into animal feed with 26% protein; cattle excrement utilized as primary material for production of gas. Of course, this is after great investments, which can only be expended by powerful firms, those operating on the basis of electric and combustible consumption.

Apply this recipe to Third World countries and we will see how many people among the hungry masses will cease consuming corn. Or even worse: financed loaned to the poorest countries to produce ethanol from corn or any other type of foodstuff and not one tree will remain to defend humanity against climatic change.

Other wealthy countries have programmed to use not only corn but wheat, sunflower and rapeseed oil, and other foodstuff for the production of combustibles. For Europeans, for example, there could be business in importing all the soy beans in the world with the aim of reducing automobile combustible wastes and feed their animals with the residue of this vegetable, especially rich in all types of essential amino acids.

In Cuba, alcohol is produced as a sub-product of the sugar industry after making three extractions of sugar from cane juice. The change of climate is already affecting our sugar production. Great draughts come alternating with record rains, which hardly permits us to produce sugar over a hundred day period with adequate yields during our most moderate winter. Due to the prolonged draughts at sowing and cultivating periods, there is less sugar per ton of cane and less cane per hectare.

In Venezuela, I understand that they don’t use alcohol for export but to improve the quality of environment for their own combustibles. And then, independent of the excellent Brazilian technology for producing alcohol, to employ such technology for the direct production of alcohol based on sugar cane juice in Cuba constitutes nothing more than a dream or nonsense for those who play with this idea.

In our country, the soil dedicated to direct production of alcohol can be much better utilized for the production of food for the people and for protecting the environment.

All the world’s countries, rich and poor, without exception could save millions and millions of dollars in investment and combustibles simply by changing all the incandescent light bulbs to fluorescent lights, something which Cuba has achieved in all the nation’s homes. This signifies a relief to resist climatic change without starving to death the world’s masses of poverty stricken people.

As one can observe, I do not use adjectives to qualify the system and the owners of the world. This task is excellently done by experts of information and of socio-economic sciences, and by honest politicians, who abound in the world and who constantly stir up the present and future of our species. A computer and the growing number of Internet networks suffice.

Today, for the first time, there is truly a global economy and a dominant power in the economic, political and military terrain, something quite distinct from the Rome of emperors.

Some will ask, why do I speak of hunger and thirst. I reply: it is not about the other side of the coin, rather of various faces of other pieces, which could be a die with six faces, or a “polyhedron” with many faces.

In this case, look at an official news agency founded in 1945 and generally well informed about economic and social problems of the world: la TELAM. It wrote:

“About two billion people will inhabit countries and regions of the earth in just 18 years in which water will be a vague memory. Two-thirds of the world’s population could live in places where that scarcity produces social and economic tensions of such magnitude that could bring people to war for the precious `blue gold´.

“During the last century, the use of water has augmented at a rate of more than twice the rate of population growth.

“The WWC (World Water Council) estimates that for the year 2015 the number of inhabitants affected by this grave situation will rise to 3.5 billion.

“The United Nations celebrated World Water Day on March 23, in which it announced a confrontation with this scarcity of water in coordination with FAO. Its objective is to emphasize the growing importance of the lack of water worldwide, and the necessity of a greater integration and cooperation, which must permit sustained and efficient use of water resources.

“Many regions of the planet suffer a severe water scarcity, where people live with less than 500 cubic meters per person annually. The chronic lack of this vital element is increasing in more regions.

“Principle consequences of the lack of water are the insufficient quantity of this precious liquid for food production, the impossibility of industrial development, and urban, tourist, and health problems.”

So far goes the TELAM cable.

It must be mentioned that in this case there are other important facts, such as the melting ice in Greenland and the Antarctic, the damages to the ozone, and the growing quantity of mercury in many fish species and routine consumption.

There are even more themes which could be approached, but I simply attempt within these lines to comment on the meeting with Bush and the principle guests of the North American automobile companies.