The Rag Blog

Condi feels good about herself. She thinks her trip to the region was a success. She got Abbas and Olmert to agree to talk about future statehood for Palestine. What about Hamas, do they not have a say in the matter? Are they not the legal representatives of the Palestinian people elected a year ago?

Regarding Hamas…Rice also found a positive aspect to Hamas, noting that its involvement in the political system and participation in elections have made things “in some sense more complicated,” but she said its inability to govern “has led Hamas to, I think, some very, very difficult situations in which they’re trying to find their ways out.” Rice noted that in 2000, Hamas had been a resistance movement not at all involved politically.

INABILITY TO GOVERN????? Who’s fault is that? Was it not Israel that said it would NEVER negotiate with a Hamas led government? Was it not the United States that said it would NEVER negotiate with a Hamas led government? Was it not both the States and Israel that cut Hamas off from all funds coming to them?

Well…. wake up and smell the coffee guys…. HAMAS IS THE GOVERNMENT OF PALESTINE! Like it or not, they are the ones that will decide who to negotiate with about statehood…. not Abbas. Abbas knows this and better stop playing his game of power tripping, it will only cause him to fall flat on his face.

[Rachel’s introduction: “What intrigues Williams are not just extreme forms of racism, but their subtler, more insidious, day-to-day manifestations. A huge body of research on health disparities has led him to conclude that stress resulting from institutionalized racism and discrimination, be it real or perceived, blatant or muted, is an ‘added pathogenic factor’ that contributes to well-above-average levels of hypertension, respiratory illness, anxiety, depression, and other ills in minority populations.”]

By Richard Saltus

In his latest bid to unearth the dark, tangled roots of disparities in health between blacks and whites, Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) newcomer David R. Williams has gone to South Africa….

Insidious racism

Williams looks at social policies and historical patterns of discrimination through a sociologist’s lens. By sifting and sorting data in fresh ways, he has cast new light on the causes of blacks’ poorer health and rates of survival, observe his new colleagues at HSPH. In August, Williams joined the faculty as the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health.

What intrigues Williams are not just extreme forms of racism, but their subtler, more insidious, day-to-day manifestations. A huge body of research on health disparities has led him to conclude that stress resulting from institutionalized racism and discrimination, be it real or perceived, blatant or muted, is an “added pathogenic factor” that contributes to well-above-average levels of hypertension, respiratory illness, anxiety, depression, and other ills in minority populations. Socioeconomic status is just part of the problem. While lower-income people generally tend to be less healthy, Williams says, “blacks do more poorly than whites at every level of socioeconomic status.”

The roots of health disparities run so deep that they’re invisible to most of society, he has found. “A lot of what I struggle with is understanding the larger social, political, and economic context in which health is embedded and the broader forces, many of them hidden, that shape mobility and access to health care,” Williams says. “I have argued, for example, that residential segregation, resulting from historical racist policies, is a fundamental cause of excess levels of ill health in the African-American population.”

Segregation by neighborhood is so high at every income bracket in the United States that, in many cities, it comes close to levels once legally mandated by apartheid in South Africa, Williams says. Sixty- six percent of blacks would have to move in order to distribute blacks and whites evenly.

Truth in numbers

Over the past decade, Williams has been among the top 10 most-cited researchers in the social sciences. His more than 100 papers have yielded insights such as these:

Blacks die at twice the rate of whites in the age groups 1-4 and 25-54–a grim fact often missed in comparisons of overall mortality rates, which yield a 30 percent mortality disadvantage for blacks.

In Pitt County, North Carolina, the odds of having hypertension were seven times higher for black men who as children and adults had low socioeconomic status (SES) than for black men whose SES was high.

[Catherine Austin Fitts served as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at HUD in the first Bush Administration; she previously served as Managing Director and Member of the Board of Directors of the Wall Street investment bank, Dillon, Read & Co., Inc.]

The day after 9-11, a person whom I respect and care about a great deal said to me, “George Bush was anointed by God for a time such as this.” He then asked me what I thought. I said that I thought that the Bush family was anointed by financial fraud, narcotics trafficking, and pedophilia. Stunned, he said, “If that is true, then it’s hopeless.” I replied that things were far from hopeless, but that for me solutions started with faith in a divine intelligence rather than affirming a dependent relationship with organized crime.

Last week I had dinner with a wonderful couple — activists in the San Francisco Bay Area — and the woman told me how wonderful she thought Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth was. She then asked for my opinion. When I gave it, she said, “If that is true, then it’s hopeless.” We then proceeded to have a rich conversation about why folks who used to call themselves “liberal” or progressive are in the same trap as folks who use to call themselves “conservative.”

In order to respond to the problem of global warming, it is necessary to look at the ways that we as citizens support criminal activity by our government and how we as consumers, depositors and investors support the private banking, corporate and investment interests that run our government in this manner. This is easier said than done. When we ‘get it’ — i.e., that we have to withdraw from a co-dependent relationship with organized crime in order to save and rebuild our world — we can find ourselves struggling to envision the system-wide actions that are needed and feeling overwhelmed by the task of determining how to go about them personally and in collaboration with others.

My nickname for our current economic system is “The Tapeworm.” For decades I have listened to Americans from all walks of life insist that we must find solutions within the system — i.e. within the socially acceptable boundaries laid down by the Tapeworm. Believing that our solutions for addressing global warming lie within the system defined by the Tapeworm goes hand in hand with obtaining our media from companies controlled by the Tapeworm, and having to choose from among leaders anointed by the Tapeworm, such as Al Gore. This belief is, in fact, the source of our hopelessness.

George Orwell once said that omission is the greatest form of lie. Gore’s omissions in An Inconvenient Truth are so extraordinary that it is hard to know where to start.

Watching An Inconvenient Truth is more useful for understanding how propaganda is made and used than for understanding the risks of global warming (I am not qualified to judge the scientific evidence here — I am assuming that Gore’s presentation on global warming is sound).

The fundamental lie that Al Gore is telling comes from defining our problem as environmental — in this case global warming, whereas our environmental problems — as real and important as they are — are but a symptom of the problem, not the problem. Gore defines our problem as “what.” He is silent on “who.” For example, Gore does not ask or answer:

** Who is doing this?

** Who has been governing our planet this way and why?

** Cui bono? Who benefits?

** Who has suppressed alternative technologies resulting in our dependency on fossil fuels? Why?

** Who has generated how much financial capital generated from this damage?

** How did things get this bad without our changing? How much was related to fear of and dirty tricks of those in charge?

** How do we recapture resources that have been criminally drained and use them to invest in restoring environmental balance?

Utah Phillips once said, “The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses.” In one sentence, Utah Phillips told us more about global warming than Al Gore has told us in a lifetime of writing and speaking, let alone in An Inconvenient Truth.

(With apologies to reader anonymous who called attention to this interesting article, this is only a short summary, with a few extracts. The article is by Abdulbari Atwan, who is editor in chief of Al-Quds al-Arabi, but this piece isn’t in that paper, but rather in today’s edition of the Egyptian paper Al-Shaab, from where it was also picked up by a Libyan paper called Akhbar Libya).

Atwan writes that anyone who knows Hosni Mubarak knows what when he is upset with something he can’t help letting people around him know about it, so people know that following the recent visit of Condoleeza Rice he has been quite upset and puzzled about why the United States seems to be so angry: What to they want us to do that we aren’t already doing, asks Mubarak. Atwan says the anxiety and the bitterness are understandable, but what he doesn’t get is why Murarak is in the dark about the reasons. America is facing deteriorating crises in the region: Afghanistan is going from one failure to another. Iraq has turned into a nightmare. Confrontation with Iran is extremely close if not closer, and is awaiting only the trigger-mechanism.

In these circumstances, the United States is looking to its allies in the region for help, but what the United States finds is that these allies themselves [far from being able to help the United States solve any of its crises] are themselves in need of help, in fact they are a millstone around its neck.

I have good news for you. American “consumer sentiment has improved to a 3 years high, propelled by falling gasoline prices and a favorable view of personal finances and economic growth” says a survey. You must be happy. This means more savings for you so you can consume more, eat and spend some more. Go right ahead and anesthetize yourself.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte on Friday cited the Bush administration’s recently disbanded domestic spying program as a critically important post-September 11 change in intelligence practices.

In his final public assessment of U.S. espionage reform, Negroponte said the intelligence community’s 16 agencies have had significant success in restructuring and integration during his 20-month tenure as the first U.S. director of national intelligence.

“Over the last two years, the (community) has achieved good results,” he told an audience of intelligence officials at his office’s headquarters in Washington.

“A great deal of structural change has occurred … in direct response both to our most important past failures and our most important pressing threats.”

The 67-year-old spy chief, who has been nominated to become deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, cited specific achievements by agencies including the National Security Agency that has run President George W. Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

“NSA has been vital in helping support the global war on terror,” Negroponte said.

“In this regard, I would emphasize the critical contributions the terrorist surveillance program has made to protect American lives and interests.”

The NSA surveillance program, exposed by The New York Times in December 2005, was authorized by Bush to monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens, without first obtaining a court warrant.

It caused a political uproar among Democrats and some Republicans who said it violated U.S. law.

Obviously, President George W. Bush is busily looking for a Gulf of Tonkin-like incident in order to further escalate the war in Iraq and to start a fresh one with Iran.

Let us remember that when the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, another Texan, wanted to escalate the war against North Vietnam, in 1964, it fabricated a tale about a maritime incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, which many historians believe never happened. Congress was then steamrolled into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was used by the Johnson administration, and later by the Nixon administration, to escalate U.S. military involvement in Indochina. Tens of thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died as a consequence of this resolution.

And the same scenario is repeating itself today. Politicians, when facing a quagmire of their own making and feeling powerless and under attack, will spend unlimited amounts of public money and will sacrifice unlimited numbers of other people’s lives, in order to save face. —Anxious to provoke Iran into a military confrontation, George W. Bush authorized, in early January, an attack on an Iranian consulate in the town of Irbil, in Iraq, capturing five staff members. This was an act of war, because it was carried out on a diplomatic compound. The Iraqi and Iranian governments have both called for the men’s release.

This aggression came after the Bush-Cheney administration sent two large nuclear aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS John C. Stennis, each accompanied by guided-missile cruisers, destroyers, frigates, submarine escorts and supply ships, to the Persian Gulf. As a consequence, the Persian Gulf is teeming with American military gear.

In this relatively small sea, such a concentration of military equipment is bound to result in accidents. Indeed, around January 8, a U.S. nuclear submarine hit a Japanese oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz near the Arabian Sea. The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea and is a most strategic shipping lane for transporting oil products from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Members of the Hells Angels, including an Army lieutenant colonel from Illinois, have served the U.S. military in Iraq. Another Iraq war veteran, a Marine who belongs to the Maniac Latin Disciples street gang, is charged with shooting three teens in Aurora.

They are examples of growing gang activity in the military, which “poses a threat to law enforcement officials and national security,” according to a new FBI report obtained by the Sun-Times.

“The military enlistment of gang members could ultimately lead to the worldwide expansion of U.S.-based gangs,” the report warned.

The report by the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center said gang members sneak into the military by failing to report criminal convictions or using fake documents. Some have sealed juvenile records unavailable to recruiters. And most of the recruiters are not properly trained to recognize gang affiliation, the report said.

“Military recruiters under pressure to meet recruiting goals have engaged in criminal violations such as overly aggressive recruiting tactics and document falsification,” said the report.

While gang members constitute a “fraction” of the military, the extent of the problem is difficult to gauge because the military is not required to provide the FBI with statistics on crime at military posts. Still, the FBI has documented disturbing examples of how gang members get into the military — and the crimes they commit in the service.

In 2005, for instance, a Latin Kings member was allegedly recruited into the Army at a Brooklyn, N.Y., courthouse while awaiting trial for assaulting a New York police officer with a razor. He was reportedly instructed by the recruiter to conceal his gang affiliation, the report said.

Reportedly steal weapons

Many members of the Illinois-based Outlaw Motorcycle Gang and the Hells Angels have military experience and have been known to recruit soldiers due to their explosives and firearms experience, the report said. One of the most violent gangs — the MS-13 — is increasing its presence on or near U.S. military installations, the FBI said.

Some gang members use their military positions to steal weapons and other equipment.

It’s been a repetitive phenomenon of these last years — when fears about disaster (or further disaster, or even the farthest reaches of disaster) in Iraq rise, so does the specter of Vietnam. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between the two situations, Vietnam has been the shadow war we’re still fighting. The Bush administration began its 2003 invasion by planning a non-Vietnam War scenario right down to not having “body counts,” those grim, ridiculed death chants of that long-past era. His administration, as the President put it before the November mid-term elections, wasn’t going to be a “body-count team.” But the Vietnam experience has proven nothing short of irresistible in a crisis. Within the last month, after Bush himself bemoaned the lack of a body count in the vicinity, the body count slipped back into the news as a way to measure success in Iraq.

And that was only the beginning. With the recent plummeting of presidential approval ratings and the dismal polling reactions to Bush’s “new way forward” in Iraq, the Vietnam scenario is experiencing something like a renaissance. Sometimes, these days, it seems as if top administration officials are simply spending their time preparing mock-Vietnam material for Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. The recent “surge” plan, for instance, brought that essential Vietnam vocabulary word, “escalation,” back into currency. (It was on Democratic lips all last week.) Even worse, the President’s plan was the kind of “incremental escalation” that military commanders coming out of Vietnam had sworn would never, ever be used again.

In any case, when Republican Senator (and surge opponent) Chuck Hagel questioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the E-word last week, she denied it was an appropriate moniker. Here’s what she suggested instead. “I would call it, Senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad.” (And, of course, Stewart promptly pounced…)

BAGHDAD, Jan. 19 — After months of tense bargaining, a cabinet-level committee has produced a draft law governing Iraq’s vast oil fields that would distribute all revenues through the federal government and grant Baghdad wide powers in exploration, development and awarding of major international contracts.

The draft, described today by several members of the committee, could still change and must be approved by the Iraqi cabinet and Parliament before it becomes law. Negotiations have veered off track unexpectedly in the past, and members of the political and sectarian groups with interest in the law could still object as they read it more closely.

But if approved in anything close to its present form, the law would appear to settle a longstanding debate over whether the oil industry and its revenues should be overseen by the central government or the regions dominated by Kurds in the north and Shiite Arabs in the south, where the richest oil fields are located.

The draft comes down firmly on the side of central oversight, a decision that advocates for Iraq’s unity are likely to trumpet as a triumph. Because control of the oil industry touches so directly on the interests of all Iraq’s warring sectarian groups, and therefore the future of the country, the proposed law has been described as the most critical piece of pending legislation.

“This will give us the basis of the unity of this country,” said Ali Baban, the Iraqi planning minister and a member of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Islamic Party who serves on the negotiating committee. “We pushed for the center in Baghdad, but we didn’t neglect the Kurds and other regions,” Mr. Baban said.

Negotiators said that the final weeks of wrangling on the draft focused on a federal committee that will be set up to review the oil contracts. Kurdish, and to some extent Shiite, parties wanted to maintain regional control over the contracts, while Sunni Arabs, with few oil resources in territories they dominate, insisted that the federal committee have the power to approve contracts, rather than just reviewing them and offering advice.