The Rag Blog

October 12, 2005
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“Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, … the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams­ entire ways of life hissed away like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease and could not explain what was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run, … the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia…”
Elizabeth Fenn, cited in 1491- An article by CHARLES MANN in The Atlantic of March 2002

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Chumash/Population.html

This article, and Mann’s new book provided much of the data contained in the following. Pls see below for more information and links. Brilliant stuff.
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To honor Columbus Day, let us pause for a short moment of appropriate reverence to recall the Wondrous Gifts we White People have — in our bottomless generosity – bestowed and continue to bestow on uncountable Godless Savages throughout history.

First among these surely is Wondrous Gift #1- the gift of immeasurable Human Arrogance.
The notion that Humans are the last, ultimate, and unimprovable final step in Evolution.
That Humans have been granted Dominion over The Earth and all of its beings and creations and inhabitants.
That every Thing on earth is Human property, and belongs to Humans to do with as they wish.

The government must go further, and much faster, in its response to the moral question of the 21st century.

It is a testament to the power of money that Nicholas Stern’s report should have swung the argument for drastic action, even before anyone has finished reading it. He appears to have demonstrated what many of us suspected: that it would cost much less to prevent runaway climate change than to seek to live with it. Useful as this finding is, I hope it doesn’t mean that the debate will now concentrate on money. The principal costs of climate change will be measured in lives, not pounds. As Stern reminded us yesterday, there would be a moral imperative to seek to prevent mass death even if the economic case did not stack up.

But at least almost everyone now agrees that we must act, if not at the necessary speed. If we’re to have a high chance of preventing global temperatures from rising by 2C (3.6F) above preindustrial levels, we need, in the rich nations, a 90% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. The greater part of the cut has to be made at the beginning of this period. To see why, picture two graphs with time on the horizontal axis and the rate of emissions plotted vertically. On one graph the line falls like a ski jump: a steep drop followed by a shallow tail. On the other it falls like the trajectory of a bullet. The area under each line represents the total volume of greenhouse gases produced in that period. They fall to the same point by the same date, but far more gases have been produced in the second case, making runaway climate change more likely.

Al-Hayat printed yesterday (Thursday November 23) an opinion piece whose argument goes like this:

Everyone recognizes that the Iraq policy was based on lies (AlQaeda, WMD and so on), but what is now under discussion is merely how to extricate the troops, and not the formation of a policy freed from those lies.

In fact there is another swindle going on, namely that lying and lawbreaking of the type that the Bush administration indulged in is nothing more than what you can see in the Dirty Harry pictures where the heroic detective breaks the law in order to catch the criminal. (In this case, in order to replace dictatorship with democracy).

Not only that. As befits a great nation with an intellectual infrastructure, the lies are anchored to a quasi-scientific set of arguments. (Terrorists are bred and thrive mainly because they live under dictatorial regimes, etcetera) . Naturally there isn’t any point in refuting these assumptions and arguments, because their proponents don’t let reality bother them. We know that AlQaeda came to Iraq with the occupation and achieved unprecedented expansion thereafter, but that doesn’t matter.

You call yourself a “progressive.” You’ve been down to the Capitol or on the Congress Bridge a time or two, protesting yet another egregious abuse of power by your elected officials. You’re familiar with the pro-choice buttons, the UT kids hawking the Socialist Worker, the honking car bearing an impeachment sticker, and the same six people chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” You know this is a good thing that everyone is doing, but you can’t help but wonder: Is this really the only way to do it?

Jim Rigby, Robert Jensen, and Eliza Gilkyson hope to offer Austin’s progressive community an alternative to the traditional political response with Last Sunday, a monthly salon where progressives can meet and talk at Saengerrunde Hall, and maybe share a beer next door at Scholz Garten. You know, just get to know each other, exchange ideas, and see what happens.

BAGHDAD, Nov 23 (IPS) – After three and a half years of occupation, Iraq’s medical system has sunk to levels lower than seen during the economic sanctions imposed after the first Gulf war in 1990.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said Iraqis are now extremely vulnerable in their health needs.

“Several wars and 13 years of economic sanctions left a heavy toll on the nutrition of the population, on the social structure, on the economy and on the health infrastructure and services,” according to a statement on the WHO website.

“This is well depicted in the morbidity and mortality rates of the population of Iraq, particularly of infants, children and mothers. The majority of Iraqis completely depend on the food Public Distribution System for their nutritional requirements.”

The health situation in Iraq has been in constant decline since the beginning of the U.S.-backed UN-imposed sanctions in 1990. Iraqi doctors were reputed to be the best in the Middle East during the 1980’s, but now they are short of medicines, medical equipment and funding to maintain the hospitals.

“We were angry with Saddam’s government for the poor health situation in the country, but now we wish we could get that back,” 55-year-old teacher Ahmed Zaydan from Sadr City in Baghdad told IPS. “There was not enough medical care, but there was something that one could live with and the private sector market was cheap. We were hoping for the change of regime to improve our lives, but the result is that we practically have no government healthcare.”

The press has almost completely blacked out this news in mainstream press. A long time Chicago activist, artist and contributer to the Chicago jazz scene has burned himself alive in an act of protest against the iraq war. He is only one of 10 Americans in history to have done this. Buddist monks did this during the VietNam war. On Friday, November 3, a man doused his body with gasoline and set himself afire to protest the war in Iraq. He died quietly in flames. His name was Malachi Ritscher.

I have had one previous opportunity to serve my country in a meaningful way – at 8:05 one morning in 2002 I passed Donald Rumsfeld on Delaware Avenue and I was acutely aware that slashing his throat would spare the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people. I had a knife clenched in my hand, and there were no bodyguards visible; to my deep shame I hesitated, and the moment was past.

The violent turmoil initiated by the United States military invasion of Iraq will beget future centuries of slaughter, if the human race lasts that long. First we spit on the United Nations, then we expect them to clean up our mess. Our elected representatives are supposed to find diplomatic and benevolent solutions to these situations. Anyone can lash out and retaliate, that is not leadership or vision. Where is the wisdom and honor of the people we delegate our trust to?

To the rest of the world we are cowards – demanding Iraq to disarm, and after they comply, we attack with remote-control high-tech video-game weapons. And then lie about our reasons for invading. We the people bear complete responsibility for all that will follow, and it won’t be pretty.

Two years from the end of its last mandate, the failure of the forty-third presidency of the United States, sanctioned by the ballot boxes during the midterm elections on Tuesday November 7, affects the entire planet.

Five years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the reality on the ground is anything but reassuring. Between the war lords and the return of the Taliban, the authority of president Karzai is at best symbolic, in spite of the support of the United States and the presence of the NATO forces. The situation has worsened in particular because of the concessions that the Pakistani president, General Musharraf, had to make in order to pacify the tribes in Western Pakistan, and Afghanistan has never before produced such a large quantity of drugs.

In Iraq, the rebuilding is impossible without a return to internal peace, and the preconditions for internal peace are today out of reach. The various communities are tearing each other apart. The country is threatening to explode. The rate of the losses of the occupying forces is increasing. The distress of the American military is clear. As this situation is prolonged, their objective possibilities of intervention elsewhere in the world are reduced. The credibility of the superpower has been severely affected.

Washington has let the situation in the Middle East spoil, since George W. Bush never wanted to or never dared interfere. Prisoner of its ideology, this administration did not understand that no reconciliation between the Judeo-Christian and Moslem worlds is conceivable, unless there is a viable settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. By letting Israel carry out its war of thirty-four days against Lebanon, the position of Washington has weakened even more, from the simple fact that the Hebrew State, even though it did not militarily lose this war, nor did it win it. We are here in the domain of psychology and for Israel not to win a war is to lose it.

Such is the context in which Iran and North Korea scoff at America. Did Iran really make the choice to obtain nuclear weapons fast? A more probable assumption is that Tehran wants to reach the nuclear threshold, i.e. to develop technologies which would one day allow it to cross the final straight line. This is the case of Japan.

I will be 84, come the end of the “war on terror.”

“There is every prospect of the ‘war on terror’ extending for 30 years or more,” declares a report released by the Oxford Research Group, an independent think tank in Britain. “What is required is a complete re-assessment of current policies but that is highly unlikely, even with the recent political upheavals.”

Professor Paul Rogers, who authored the report and is associated with the oldest university in the English-speaking world, believes “recent political upheavals,” i.e., the Democrat victory in Congress, will not change the course of events. Democrats are not about to engage in a “complete re-assessment of current policies,” but rather continue them, as there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans when you turn them upside down.

“Most people believe that the recent elections mark the beginning of the end of the Bush era but that does not apply to the war on terror,” writes Rogers. “In reality there will be little change until the United States faces up to the need for a fundamental re-think of its policies.”

I’m afraid the economy will need crash, the world community will turn against the United States, its people reduced to the sort of penury and humiliation suffered by the Germans at the midpoint of the last century before a “re-think” occurs.

Both Democrats and Republicans are on schedule with the “clash of civilizations,” although they differ only slightly in style, not substance.

Many Iraqi ministers are staying away from work, fearing attacks from militias or insurgents.

Violence has exacerbated in Baghdad with street battles reported daily in several parts of the city.

Despite the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops, residents say there is no street in Baghdad where one can feel safe.

“We live in a city which has gone wild,” one resident, refusing to be named, said.

Gunmen have already kidnapped a deputy minister and attacked the convoy of another, killing two bodyguards.

More than 100 people are being killed every day while the government and its U.S. masters are powerless in the face of the spiral of sectarian violence.

A month before the November elections, Vice-President Dick Cheney was sitting in on a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building. The talk took a political turn: what if the Democrats won both the Senate and the House? How would that affect policy toward Iran, which is believed to be on the verge of becoming a nuclear power? At that point, according to someone familiar with the discussion, Cheney began reminiscing about his job as a lineman, in the early nineteen-sixties, for a power company in Wyoming. Copper wire was expensive, and the linemen were instructed to return all unused pieces three feet or longer. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that resulted, Cheney said, so he and his colleagues found a solution: putting “shorteners” on the wire—that is, cutting it into short pieces and tossing the leftovers at the end of the workday. If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option with Iran. The White House would put “shorteners” on any legislative restrictions, Cheney said, and thus stop Congress from getting in its way.

The White House’s concern was not that the Democrats would cut off funds for the war in Iraq but that future legislation would prohibit it from financing operations targeted at overthrowing or destabilizing the Iranian government, to keep it from getting the bomb. “They’re afraid that Congress is going to vote a binding resolution to stop a hit on Iran, à la Nicaragua in the Contra war,” a former senior intelligence official told me.