Money, meet Mouth. Mouth, Money

U.S. adds $20 million to emergency relief fund

Rejecting a U.N. official's suggestion that it had been a "stingy" aid donor, the Bush administration yesterday announced $20 million more in relief for victims of the Asian earthquake and tsunamis and dispatched an aircraft carrier and other ships to the region for possible relief operations.

The announcement brought the United States' total aid package to $35 million so far, and Bush administration officials said that much more would be sent.

A small list of items that cost more than $35 million.

$135 million - Bush's proposal for abstinence only education for FY2002, a $33 million increase over FY2001.

$240 million - Bush's proposal for 2005 for states grants to promote marriages and limit out-of-wedlock births. The proposal also includes $120 million to research and pilot programs on marriage promotion, and $50 million to "promote responsible fatherhood."

$177 million - Cost of one day of the war in Iraq.

$60 billion - CBO's estimate of the cost of the current "Star Wars" missile defense system.

$140 billion - The additional cost of Bush's Medicare "Reform" as announced after it's passage, bringing the total cost of the program to $540 billion over ten years.

$340 million - Proposed spending in 2005 for US-VISIT, a program to check foreign visitors arriving with visas at U.S. airports and seaports against terrorist watch lists.

$2.1 billion - Proposed spending increase to tighten security on our border with Canada.

$98 million - Bush's 2003 proposal to train a Colombian military brigade to protect a U.S. oil pipeline from narco-guerillas.

$1 billion - Bush's proposal for 2002 for the construction of new Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities.

$27.4 million - Overcharges for meals served to American troops at five military bases by Halliburton.

$61 million - Overcharges for fuel delivered to the Army in Iraq by Halliburton.

$451 billion - Bush's proposal for military spending by 2007.

$500 million - Extra Medicare payments this year to HMOs and other private health plans in an effort to persuade them to enter the Medicare market and increase benefits for the elderly.

$200 million - Each for Lockhead's costly and unnecessary F-22 “Raptor” jets, totaling $3.6 billion awarded this year.

$1.5 billion - Approved this year for Boeing's V-22 “Osprey", which then-Defense Secretary Cheney opposed in the first Bush Administration.

$318 billion - Cost of the interest to service the 7 plus trillion dollar debt in 2003.

$1.08 trillion - Cost of Bush tax cuts for the top 1%, total 2001-10, if made permanent.

$1.9 trillion - Ten year cost, with sunsets, for the total of Bush's tax cuts.


0.0000714% - Percentage that $35 million represents of the US 2003 GDP.

Read the full post.

Merry Christmas - Dammit!

Add this to the list of symptoms that is the evolving neuroses of the religious right, wishing a Merry Christmas not as a gay holiday greeting, but as passive aggression; not as a sincere expression of conviviality but as an assertion of the primacy of fundamentalist Christianity in American culture.

More than a handful of people in the religious right are terribly concerned that Christmas, and Christianity, are under attack. In Jerry Falwell’s December 13th editorial The Impending Death of Christmas he asserts:

The spiritual Grinches in our nation are accelerating their war against Christmas as never before. And they are tragically convincing growing numbers of our fellow citizens - primarily those in our nation's public schools and public administration - that Christmas should be publicly shunned, replaced by nebulous substitutes designed to avoid offending those who are all-so-easily outraged.

The so-called mainstream media often portray radical secularists as reasonable individuals, but the people at the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and other such groups are practitioners of an extremist movement that would completely outlaw God, Christianity and any remnant of such from the public arena.

Falwell is not alone in this. O’Reilly, Hannity and others on Fox News, along with the usual cast of suspects, are hyping a set of incidents, some true, individually of minor importance, in which people have either attempted to enforce the separation of church and state or show respect for the beliefs of non-Christians, and offered these up as Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity (conveniently the title of a book by David Limbaugh, Rush’s brother.)

Of course it’s not a new observation to note that a persecution complex is part of the right wing fundamentalist Christian (RWFC) package. Perhaps this is why the general feeling of being of under attack is so familiar (comfortable?) to them. And it must be noted that this domestic religious war is happening just as the Right’s standard bearer, Bush, is waging an international religious war, albeit in a secular guise.

But they are simultaneously claiming to be persecuted while asserting that this is a Christian Nation and that they are entitled to write Christian doctrine into secular law. It’s hard not to notice that this new round of intensified kvetching over the persecution of Christians in America comes fast on the heels of their victory lap around the Beltway claiming that they were the one’s who delivered the re-election of George W Bush.

It’s also hard not to notice that each of these instances of ‘persecution’ are either examples of religious tolerance and inclusiveness (New York’s Mayor Bloomberg referring to he tree at Rockefeller Center as a ‘holiday tree’) or respect for the separation of church and state (the removal of the ten commandments from Alabama’s state judicial building's rotunda in August).

One key to understanding this phenomenon is to realize that they have recast attempts to resist the institutionalizing of their personal beliefs as persecution. If you prevent me from legislating my religious beliefs and forcing you to live by my rules, you’re infringing on my liberty. The idea that same-sex couples might marry is seen as an assault on the private liberties of RWFCs because they are 'forced' to live in an environment that fails to reinforce their beliefs.

This sense of entitlement, to project one’s beliefs on the culture and protect one’s beliefs from the culture, is partly a reaction to Christianity’s own cultural hegemony in the US. In the US, it doesn’t matter what you believe, you cannot escape Christmas. This produces a powerful expectation among RWFCs that a nation which celebrates Christmas as its primary national holiday will be itself Christian.

Yet I, myself, participate in secular aspects of the holiday - family, community, time off from work, gifts - even though I’m an atheist. The fact that an atheist can celebrate Christmas is an indication of the secularization of the holiday, itself a result of its own cultural authority. Christmas has become so much a part of the American culture that it has become secularized in the process. So Christmas (TM) dominates while the religious aspects of the day do not. For RWFCs there is a great disparity between their own celebration and mine, and mine is closer to that which dominates in the culture. It is this disparity between expectations and reality that produces the sense of persecution. We ought to be able to live in a culturally and politically Christian nation, as we understand the term, but we are being denied that by the secularists, the liberals. They are thwarting our Christian birthright.

The recent elections, not unjustifiably, has heightened this sense of entitlement. The religious right acquired in 2000 and 2004 a level of political access and influence far out of proportion to their percentage of the population. This raises expectations of efficacy in achieving the goals of their movement. Among these goals are political and policy goals. But the policy goals are in service of a larger and more important, from their perspective, cultural agenda - the Culture War. Their goal is to make this a Christian Nation in policy and practice. As they run aground the reality, for example, that passing amendments to ban same-sex marriage effects no improvement, from their perspective, in the culture (marriages won't be any happier, children won't be any more obedient, people won't stop being gay because of this legislation) there is bound to be a sense of frustration or even anger at the very time that they are the height of their political influence. They can proclaim this a Christian Nation. They can elect a Christian President with Christian Values. But they cannot make the celebration of Christmas any less secular for Americans generally or specifically. Political power, real and damaging, does not necessarily translate into cultural power.

For all of the talk of Moral Values in the last election the percentage of people who, as a percent of the total voting age population, cited anti-choice or anti-gay positions as an important factor in their voting decision is quite small. Twenty-five percent of Bush supporters mentioned the protection of marriage as between a man and a woman and twenty-two percent of Bush supporters mentioned anti-abortion positions. Since Bush received only 60,608,582 votes out of a total estimated voting age population of 225,425,000, this translates to only 6.7% anti-gay and 5.9% anti-choice.

The logic of politics is different than the logic of culture. In politics, it is possible for a small group of people to acquire power or influence out of proportion to their numbers by allying themselves with other groups with non-competing or complimentary agendas. So the number of people sufficiently motivated by the desire to deny same-sex couples marriage that they were willing to vote on that basis may be far less than fifty percent of the voting age population. But that can become the policy of the party in power if that is what is necessary to bring that percentage of people into the coalition and the number of people deterred by that, who would otherwise be a part of the coalition, is sufficiently less. There is no similar mechanism in culture.

RWFCs are losing the cultural war, and they know it. If this past election had been decided by voters under 30, Kerry would have won with 375 electoral votes. This persecution complex is really an excuse for aggression, a weapon in the war. I'm not forcing my beliefs on you, I'm defending my beliefs from attack - where an attack is any attempt to respect the beliefs of non-Christians or the right to not believe at all.

The juvenile expectation that the world will conform to/reinforce one's worldview is neither unique to nor ubiquitous among the RWFCs. But there is something about the intersection of modern conservatism (selfishness) and fundamentalism (literalism) that creates a nice fit. I = World, I am good, therefore for the world to be good it must be like me. Another way of seeing this is through the hostility to, even fear of, any degree of moral relativism, any hint that others might have a valid, albeit different, worldview, and that they are just and entitled to make demands on society as anyone.

Of course this creates something of a conflict. The relativist project has been sufficiently successful that the RWFCs are forced to frame their claim in the very relativist language that they oppose. They pay nominal respect to the idea of religious tolerance in order to cast their cultural aggression as a plea for religious freedom against the forces of intolerance - all those who won’t tolerate compulsory Christianity.

In fairness, many RWFCs are sincere in their expressions of religious tolerance, we sometimes even hear noises from their direction that it’s okay to be gay (in the sense of allowed by the demands of respect for liberty) in private life. But if we look closely at these claims, this tolerance is limited to one's private life. Go ahead and celebrate Kwanzaa, in your own home. If you want to live with a person of the same sex, do what you want, in your own home. That's your right. But once non-RWFCs leave their homes, RWFCs begin to assert the privilege of their claimed majoritarian status, cite historical precedence and make clear that, for them, religious freedom means that you get to do what you want in your home and they get to do what they want with the laws. They appeal to their claimed majority status to legitimate their feeling of entitlement while appealing to their minority status to legitimate their feelings of persecution.

RWFC's claim control of the laws and culture as a necessary prerequisite to their religious freedom. Any attempt to keep RWFC religious doctrine out of government is viewed as an unacceptable infringement of their rights, an intolerance bordering on fanatical hatred. I cannot even begin to imagine the howling that would be generated if the RWFC were to be restricted to religious observances in their homes alone in the manner that they wish to impose on the rest of us.

Clearly part of the RWFC formula is not the idea that basic rights should not depend upon historical precedent or public opinion. This manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, you have the right, just like anyone, to be a RWFC. Everyone has the right to marry, in accordance with RWFC prescriptions. The right to marry the person of your choice is a 'special' right. Secondly, you have the right to believe as you choose, even to hold non-RWFC beliefs. But your right to live in accordance with those beliefs is circumscribed by the extent to which it may conflict with RWFC beliefs once you enter the public sphere.

The idea on the left that this is all a diversion, a distraction from ‘real’ problems, misses the point, but not by much. We underestimate the degree to which the RWFCs take this seriously at our own peril. Fox is simply pandering to their audience, and in that they are hardly unique, simply more blatant. It’s a distraction only in the sense that it is a substitute for other anxieties for the RWFCs. They are not trying to distract the rest of us so much as to find a means to gain a sense of control and stability without the need to directly confront their own problems.

The totemic power of symbols explain, create community of common language and understanding, and create a sense of the ability to control is a natural fit with the idea that the Word is sacrosanct and the Word is power. So what becomes important is not the actual conduct and content of marriage, at least directly, but the definition of marriage. Once the definition is secured, the actual conduct is expected to follow. People cannot do what they cannot conceive of. Wipe out gays by wiping out the idea of gays. The control of definitions, language, and laws (as a statement of national belief) are supposed to produce a Christian Paradise on Earth – to fix everything. Of course it won’t, and so there must be a reason.

Even though I have written in terms of a cynical plot to use cries of persecution as a battering ram to knock over the last vestiges of the first amendment, the truth on the ground is much stickier, with many RWFCs being quite sincere in their feelings and quite unaware of any contradictions. Given this set of assumptions, there can only be one explanation. The liberals that are fighting the rightful creation of a Christian Nation are actually preventing the realization of the positive effects in real lived lives that must surely follow school prayer or restricting access to abortion or carving the denial of marriage to gays into the constitution.

The problem of course is that while the prize that the RWFC's have their eyes on may ultimately be cultural, real damage can be done to real lives through government policies. They may see the denial of US government funds to foreign non-governmental organizations that provide abortion, abortion counseling referral, or related services with their own funds (the “Mexico City” policy) as a statement of national belief. But actual people are harmed by this. The percentage of people who view the war in Iraq as a war to bring Western Democracy (read Christian values) to the Middle East (read Muslims) may be quite small, but they are among the one’s calling the shots.

Someone needs to stand up to the RWFCs and say that a failure to persuade is not persecution. And no election, no legacy, no numerical majority of nominal Christians provide an excuse to curtail the rights of the rest of us or to destroy lives in the pursuit the grand social experiment of the Great Christian Society.

Read the full post.

The Rebuilder's Dilemma

This past week I’ve been pulled away by some personal issues. But these are issues that have political and economic dimensions. I am an owner in a small manufacturing operation in the automotive parts rebuilding aftermarket. The industry we are in has experienced, over the past decade or so, a dramatic and often painful restructuring and contraction. Tough decisions have needed to be made over the past ten years and over the past week. I do not intend to discuss too much the specifics of my own situation. But this is a story of the fate of smaller US manufacturers in the face of globalization and consolidation.

The need to repair parts for autos is as old as autos themselves. In the forties, this coalesced into an industry, with its own distribution system and supply chain. The idea of parts rebuilding is simple. When a part fails, it usually is only one component of that part that has failed. Repairing or replacing that component, along with other components prone to wear or early failure, produces a rebuilt part that functions like new, but for less cost. The parts rebuilding industry is a recycling industry. And, over the years, untold tons of steel, copper, aluminum and other metals have been saved from being scrapped; while unrebuildable components have met exactly that fate, being sorted and sent to scrapyards for recycling by other means. There is a significant problem in the US as how to handle the waste produced by complete cars that are no longer practical to repair. But our landfills are not clogged with used and discarded transmissions, engines, starters and alternators.

Early signs of trouble for automotive parts rebuilders began to surface in the late 80s. A handful of businesses, including some larger operations, began to go under. But business was still relatively good for most companies and it was easy to view the cause of failure in these cases as specific to the individual companies. By the mid 90s, however, industry-wide changes began to be harder to deny. The Automotive Parts Rebuilder Association (APRA), the industry’s leading trade organization, commissioned a private study of these changes. For reasons of institutional interest, the APRA never released the results to their members, though inevitably copies leaked out. The study was, in retrospect, fairly prescient. It saw fundamental shifts in the distribution chain and was relatively pessimistic about the possibility of returning to the way things had been for decades.

Businesses, large and small, began to fail. The remaining businesses began to suffer from declining margins and increased competition over the remaining orders. After a large enterprise shut it doors, there would widespread expectation that the remaining players would be able to split up the orders that that company had remaining. Yet these expectations were always dashed. The industry wasn’t just contracting, it was vanishing. Payment problems began to become endemic, and companies that once could reliably pay their vendors in 30 days now struggle to meet commitments to pay at 120 days.

In an effort to stay afloat, desperate companies tried various strategies. Once sacrosanct supply chain rules fell by the wayside and companies, at first surreptitiously and then openly, began to pursue their customers’ customers. Cutting overheads could only go so far. The industry demands people with a fairly specific skill set and reducing wages, in the US, was not a viable option for the most part. Some firms sought to expand their way out of the problem and take advantage of economies of scale. This has proved to be a largely unsuccessful strategy. It involved fairly significant financing, often using receivables as collateral. As sales continued to decline, firms were unable to replace paid or out-of-formula receivables with new ones and started to starve for cash flow. Perhaps most portentous, some firms began to explore or expand foreign operations, notably in Mexico, and importation from overseas producers, notably from China.

Today, the rebuilding industry is a shadow of its former self. There are many fewer companies. And few of these are healthy. In the sub-industry I am in, one firm has emerged as a kind of Walmart equivalent. (We’ll call it Company X. They like to sue people, so I’d rather not name it.) It has gobbled up or put under most its competitors. It has created alliances with OE manufacturers to become the sole distributor of certain types of product. It imports large amounts of goods from China, India and other countries, offering 100% new parts for less than or near to the cost of US made rebuilt. Recently the next largest competitor has closed it doors. Company X bought the assets, though not the liabilities, of its competitor in a lengthy negotiation with the primary secured creditor. And now, finally, many people in this generally conservative industry are waking up to the fact that, when it comes to certain products, they no longer have a choice of supplier. They resent it. But it’s largely too late.

The root causes of this contraction are rather complicated. A lot of the generalizing rhetoric of the critics of globalization and industry consolidation seem too simple when you’re on the inside of the problem. Increased reliability of automobiles and their components – a good thing for most people – is a significant factor. Parts simply don’t fail like they used to. And people have been less likely to keep vehicles past the warranty period.

The automotive aftermarket depends on either do-it-yourselfers or independent repair shops as the ultimate consumers. So part of the problem too has been the increased complexity of automobiles and the corresponding decrease in the DIY market. Automotive parts retailers have seen their revenue base shift to accessories – the things people buy for their cars but don’t really need. Tires and brakes are last two remaining really healthy bits of the automotive aftermarket – but there are safety issues involved here and people are less likely to wait for actual failure before replacing these. Additionally, the publicly traded auto parts retailers have, in an effort to boost stock prices, sought increasingly inventive ways to squeeze their suppliers for profit. One common practice is to only accept suppliers who are willing to put product in on consignment, that is the retailer doesn’t create a payable to the vendor until point of sale to the consumer, and then insist on 120 day terms. It takes a sizable investment for a manufacturer to ramp up to supply a major retailer. Walking away due to these sorts of terms can mean financial collapse.

Related to these trends is the entry of the OE manufacturers – Ford, Delco-Remy – into the rebuilding market. Within the last decade Ford deauthorized its network of Ford Authorized Rebuilders and went into the market big-time with its Visteon division. The Delco-Remy story (now split between Delco and Remy Intl) is too complicated to discuss here. Let it suffice to say that the entry into the rebuilding industry of the OE’s is a large part of the industry consolidation. And, needless to say, no move by any large manufacturer, no merger or acquisition within the automotive aftermarket has caused even the slightest hint of anti-trust problems. In a world in which Time Warner and AOL can merge, the automotive aftermarket is small potatoes.

In a closely interrelated industry where bankruptcies are increasingly common, bankruptcy law which greatly favors secured creditors (banks) over unsecured trade creditors has been a factor, particularly for mid to small sized businesses. Following a bankruptcy, many a trade creditor has been strong-armed into paying to the secured creditor everything it collected from the bankrupt firm in the 90 days prior to the bankruptcy or face an expensive court battle to prove that it hadn’t received preferential treatment. The current rules put the burden of proof on the unsecured creditor.

Yet, co-equal to all of the above, has been the increased importation of goods, particularly from China. In truth, as with the Walmart phenomenon, part of this problem is self-inflicted. A friend of mine who is a US component remanufacturer tells me the story of an open forum of rebuilders he attended a few years back. At one point he stood up and asked the attendees if they would be willing to pay a bit more for US reman over Chinese new. About 90% of the hands went up. Yet at that moment of purchase decision, considerations, such as where did this come from, what are the longer-term ramifications for the sum total of these purchase decisions for my industry, fall away. Maybe it’s because these decisions happen in isolation. One Chinese component isn’t going to destroy the whole automotive aftermarket. Maybe it’s because those colorful flyers with all the low, low prices don’t have the words “Made in China” or “Made in India” printed all over the place. So people are not really confronted with the choice. Maybe it’s because, well, it’s cheaper.

It’s a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We’d all be better off if we supported one another. But each fearing that the other one won’t, we chose our own selfish interests and, in doing so, diminish our own well being.

But this is not the whole story. The success of this industry has depended in large part on the fact that, until quite recently, the rebuilt parts were substantially cheaper than their 100% new counterparts. This is less true today, largely due to Chinese imports.

Even so, there are costs associated with importing goods from China. Lead times tend to be lengthy, relative to domestic production, so the importing firm needs to take something of gamble on the future demand for the product. Most Chinese firms still demand payment by letter of credit executable upon presentation of an ocean bill of lading – that is to say once the goods hit the water. So there are finance costs. Other costs such as customs clearing and duties need to be paid up front. Ocean freight is still the only viable means of shipment. This adds to lead times, but it also means that it is only practical to buy product in container loads, and ocean freight costs are still largely the responsibility of the importer. Importation is out of the question for smaller firms. Mid size firms that do not specialize in importation have often floundered on the rocks of one of these issues. It falls to specialized importers and large companies (like our Company X) to really make a go at this, further decreasing the competitiveness within the industry.

Quality has been an issue too. There is no good means of dealing with defective product. Small quantities of defective goods wind up being “eaten” by someone in the US supply chain. It isn’t so easy to return the stuff, especially if it’s been prepaid. And quality from Chinese manufacturers has been spotty, though steadily improving, an improvement that has come partly through the cooperation of US firms providing the Chinese firms with the technical know-how.

Massive subsidization of the Chinese automotive parts industry by the Chinese government has helped them to leapfrog their US counterparts in acquiring equipment and QS and ISO certifications.

Yet for all of this, within the remaining US market, the Chinese goods are not that much cheaper. The change in one single variable would dramatically change the fortunes of the US manufacturers. The hard peg of Chinese currency to the US dollar, which causes the cost of the Chinese product to drop for the US (and world) market even as the dollar drops, ensures that prices of Chinese goods will steadily undercut their US counterparts, owing to the huge advantage in labor costs in China. Experts disagree as where the value of the yuan would be if set by the market. But the consensus it that it is undervalued by approximately 40 per cent. This effectively reduces the cost of Chinese goods by forty per cent in the US market. Speaking, for the moment, solely for the US automotive parts aftermarket, an increase of 40% in the cost of Chinese goods would price them out of the market.

This hard peg comes at a cost to the people of China too, whose buying power, and thereby the value of their labor, is undervalued.

Powerful interests stand to gain from this arrangement. Companies far larger than Company X, for example Walmart, would be in deep trouble if the Chinese currency was set by the market.

Even if it were so inclined, the US government is in no position to pressure the Chinese government to allow its currency to be set by the market. While Japan remains, far and away, the number one foreign holder of US debt, China has bought 175 billion in US debt as of the end of October 2004.

And so the little company I am a part of and another one have decided to merge. And between us, we will offer product with a significant amount of Chinese components. There really is no other viable option at this point.

Read the full post.

The Continuing Crisis: Satan at the UN

The distrust of and animosity toward the United Nations that many conservatives demonstrate is as old the institution itself. Progressives, too, have often been critical of the UN. But this criticism tends to center on issues like the UN’s general inability to respond well or quickly enough to emerging humanitarian crises. While conservatives of the Limbaugh sort seem more intent on contending that the UN has an irrational hatred of America and Israel.

I thought to write a piece on why there was this fear and loathing of the UN on right; why they seemed to interpret international cooperation as a relinquishing not just of sovereignty, but of control over our national and individual destinies to those who manifestly do not have our interests at heart. Related to this is the question of why any criticism of the policies of the Sharon government in Israel is taken by certain people on the right as an anti-Semitic diatribe.

But I didn’t get very far before I was distracted. As an attempt to investigate the matter, I started to hunt on Google for conservative commentary on the UN. And I ran across a post titled: Satan Advising The United Nations? On a blog called RightNation.US, a conservative blogging cooperative. (No, I don’t think they’re aware of the irony.)

He starts off with what might be something like a reasonable question.

As the fog of war lifted, I became aware of a previously subconscious discomfort, like a muscle pain you don’t notice until you finally get a chance to sit down. The discomfort in question had been present since the Democratic primary season, when blowhards like Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich were preaching the seemingly ludicrous – that President George W. Bush and his administration were keenly aware of the September 11th attacks before they happened, yet did nothing to prevent them. How could someone believe something so outrageous? I thought. How could so many people raise their voice in agreement, latching onto a Kool-Aid inspired fantasy?

This, at least, could be responded to. Neither Dean nor Kucinich ever accused Bush of being “keenly aware of the September 11th attacks before they happened”, simply of being keenly disinterested in terrorism generally and Al Qaeda in particular. It is entirely possible, even had Bush focused on the threat of terrorism before 9/11 like he did in the campaign, even if he had read the entire page and a half Presidential Daily Briefing entitled Bin Laden determined to strike inside the United States, that the tragic events on 9/11 would still have happened. The point is that it is also possible that they wouldn’t have.

Let me interrupt to say that one blogger proposing to psychoanalyze another based on one post is not pretty. I am inherently distrustful of anecdotal evidence as a means to understanding larger phenomena. But this post elicited 92 comments. My interest here is to see if we can tease out of this exchange some useful insights into the culture in which we live. So with my gloss of noble purpose in place, I beg your indulgence as I proceed.

Our author decided to investigate the topic of kooky conspiracy theories in an effort to understand how it is that liberals could think like that. (Yes, I am aware of the irony.) This led him to the discovery of a short-lived 18th Century German rationalist society called the Illuminati that had ties to the Freemasons. The 18th Century group derived their name from a 15th& 16th Century Spanish group that believed people have direct communion with the Holy Spirit, so outward forms of religious life are unnecessary.

Okay, stay with me people.

The contention by certain conspiracy theorists it that the Illuminati still exist and that they advocate One World Government, One World Religion and under One King.

Now we see the connection to the UN, provided that you’re predisposed to viewing the UN as some sort of One World Government conspiracy itself. At this point our author shows no awareness that this is a conservative conspiracy theory he’s uncovered. The web site from which he’s drawing from Illuminati Conspiracy Archive, is rabidly right wing. It even accuses Bill O’Reilly of being an Illuminati disinformation agent.

We continue. (Emphasis added.)

All this is rather difficult for one to accept, and quite easy to dismiss as the paranoid ravings of extremists with too much time on their hands. But the mere possibility that even part of it is true was enough to send a chill down my spine. So, I decided to investigate independent, non-conspiracy theorist sources, and see if I could find any evidence of this plot in modern society.

Fair enough, I suppose. Our author arrives upon a group (this one really exists) called the Lucis Trust. They are a messianic organization that preaches respect of all people and cultures. They see a commonality in figures such as Christ and the Buddha. And they believe that the coming of the Avatar will be for all humanity, not just Christians. Also they are critical of Christian missionaries more concerned with nominal converts than spiritual converts. The group has sort of an ecumenical, One Religion kind of overtone. So you can see why our author found this relevant.

Additionally, and more damning, the Lucis Trust is listed as having ECOSOC Roster Consultative Status. The ECOSOC is responsible for promoting higher standards of living, full employment, and economic and social progress; identifying solutions to international economic, social and health problems; facilitating international cultural and educational cooperation; and encouraging universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. ECOSOC's purview extends to over 70 per cent of the human and financial resources of the entire UN system. (Text from the ECOSOC site.)

It turns out that any NGO in existence for at least two years and doing work related to this broad mandate can apply for this status. There are hundreds of them. Roster Status is a catch-all for NGOs that are not large and have no particular technical expertise.

Here’s the kicker. Still in regards to the Lucis Trust:

Intimately linked to the organization are former American president, Jimmy Carter; former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt; former English prime minister, Lord Callaghan of Cardiff; former United States secretary of defense and retired president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara; and many others of similar standing throughout the world.

The Lucis Trust posted on their web site a copy of a statement on human responsibilities written by the completely unrelated InterAction Council. That document was endorsed by all of the above.

We conclude: (emphasis added)

But, mixed in among the outrageous and thoroughly unbelievable, there are a few nuggets of truth that deserve greater scrutiny. One of them is the fact that an organization founded by an occult teacher of esoteric philosophy that advocates the formation of one world religion, and seems to have a particular distaste for Christians, has connections with the elite in every human discipline. You may not take Lucis Trust seriously; but the United Nations and world leaders do. The question is why.

We might dismiss this as the ramblings of one person. Yet he clearly hit a chord with his readers. I don’t think we can so easily dismiss this vein of sentiment in American culture. A sampling of responses:

As far as the Lucis Trust goes, - it’s freaky!!! I must do more research on it, but anything that the UN and Jimmy Carter are involved in is “not quite right”. We all know that the UN wants to rule the world. No surprise there, and like most liberals they'll go about it anyway they have too...from perverting christianity to condoning murder.

Presented to the world as a mystical revelation, the UN Earth Charter is actually a diabolical blueprint for global government…. The Charter is intended to become a universally adopted creed that will psychologically prepare the world’s children to accept the necessity of world government to save the environment. It is also an outrageous attempt to indoctrinate your children in the UN’s New Age paganism…. Have some fun, we are entering the end times, and for those who are blind to it I'm very sorry for you.

Pat Robertson wrote a book on the matter with regards to the one world government and new world order stuff. While I have trouble with much of it, I am not ready to say it it is all beyond the realm of some possiblity. The Devil may not be running the U.N., but that does not mean his followers aren't.

As far as there being a movement for a 'one world' socialist or communist government well we had be weary of that. We have been attacked by a covert army and the United Nations have betrayed us. And there is already a covert effort to undermine our war effort from within and to alter our Constitution.

To be fair, there were four critical responses, though our author defended his thesis to each. There was a fair amount of talk about End Times, a couple of swipes at Hillary Clinton, and a lot of chatter. Neither our author nor many of his respondents were willing to fully accept the Illuminati or Lucis Trust conspiracy theories. Yet they were willing to take this as evidence of another conspiracy, that of UN to abolish US sovereignty and Christianity and impose a New World Order. For most the possibilities implied by these theories were enough to enhance their fear and suspicion of the UN.

So what gives? I’ll not try here to analyze the motives of these individual writers. But I will note that what started out as an attempt to figure out why those wacky liberals were willing to believe such outrageous conspiracy theories morphed into a discussion about how those evil liberals were willing to engage in such outrageous conspiracies. Without even a hint of irony our author went from “How could so many people raise their voice in agreement, latching onto a Kool-Aid inspired fantasy?” to “the fact that an organization founded by an occult teacher of esoteric philosophy that advocates the formation of one world religion, and seems to have a particular distaste for Christians, has connections with the elite in every human discipline.”

A willingness to believe evil intent of one’s ideological rivals and to impute to them unfair claims about the motives and beliefs of one’s own group are, I think, two sides of the same coin. The elements of which that coin is made include: fear, distrust of “elites”, jingoism, fundamentalism and a persecution complex. But that is a substantial claim. I would not expect anyone to accept it with substantiation. And I am wary of treading too close to counteraccusations of: You’re the conspiracy nut. No, you’re the conspiracy nut.

But just because this is treacherous ground, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth exploring. And that is exactly what I intend to do. Later.

"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you." - Unknown

Read the full post.

So who's a racist now, scumbags?

There’s an interesting column by Patricia Williams in the 12/13/04 issue of The Nation in which she talks about her opinions regarding and feelings toward Condoleeza Rice. Her main point is that however glad she might be to see a black women rise to such prominence, it doesn’t erase her distaste for Rice’s policies and actions over the last four years. These are, in fact, separable issues: the person and the policies.

I’d like to briefly pick up one minor point from the column. In it, Prof. Williams observes the unrestrained enthusiasm that hosts and callers on right-wing radio shows have for Dr. Rice.

The day after Rice was nominated, I listened to gleeful talk-radio hosts set out the right wing's new terms of debate about her. It was something on the order of: So who's a racist now, scumbags? We're the ones who love her. Liberals hate her. And you affirmatively active black people must be choking on a bone.

Rush Limbaugh has picked up on and ran with the idea that several political cartoons critical of Rice have portrayed her unflatteringly. (Which is something political cartoons never do, you know.) Daryl Cagle has gathered a sampling of cartoons critical of Rice. Judge for yourself.

Conservative blogger Amy Ridenour points out that a radio show host in Madison WI referred to Rice as "Aunt Jemima" and Colin Powell as "Uncle Tom". While the host did apologize for the remarks – though not for the substance of the criticism – Ridenour points out that the Madison chapter of the NAACP had failed to condemn the remarks. She appears to be correct. It was in fact NAACP President & CEO Kweisi Mfume who denounced the remarks. Yet the remarks of one radio host and the apparent inaction of a local organization were sufficient to conclude: Some people just can't stand it when blacks do well. Too bad the NAACP leadership appears to be among them.

Although it must be noted that this radio show host’s remarks demonstrates that being a liberal is not exactly a certification of being racism free.

Ann Coulter, always useful as the direct line to the conservative Id, picked up on both the cartoons and the radio show remarks and added this: Most recently – at least as we go to press – last Sunday Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, had this to say about Justice Clarence Thomas: "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written." To which she added: You'd think Thomas' opinions were written in ebonics.

There is something more going on here than just payback for Trent Lott and the 90 plus per cent of African-American voters that rejected the party of Dr. Rice and Gen. Powell. And there is something more going here than a general sense of defensiveness on the part of conservatives, who feel that they’ve been unfairly labeled as racists for too long. Although, clearly both of these elements are strongly present.

The undercurrent here, and all along in the conservative Weltanschauung on racism, is that complaints about racism and racist behavior are largely unfounded. Since they do not accept that racism in America has been built into the structures and institutions of our society, they are free to atomize the discreet examples of racial discrimination. And since it is an article of unquestionable faith for conservatives that America is the best country ever and that equality of opportunity abounds for anyone willing to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, they are free to interpret individual charges of racial discrimination as whining or ingratitude or a defense of laziness.

And yet anytime they even try to make this case, they get slapped with the label Racist (one can only wonder why) or so they feel. So the train of thinking follows a track something like this: When we criticize someone who is black people, however justifiably, we’re called racists, therefore, when liberals criticize someone who is black people they must be, by their own definition, racists too. So there!

The crux of the arguments made by each of these conservatives is that liberals are being racist because they have criticized Rice, who is black. This can only make sense if, in their view, being critical of someone, anyone, who is black is just what racism is. And this can only make sense if racism is not a real thing in the world – at least not in America – but rather a slander, a weapon, a tool with which those without press their demands on those with for more than they have earned on their own. This view also depends on the notion that we are individually responsible and accountable for our own destinies, that there are no larger social or economic forces that cannot be overcome through determination and hard work, and that the success of Rice and Powell demonstrate this. They succeeded at the highest levels of power. They’re black. It is possible.

That Gen. Powell and Dr. Rice are to become our nation’s first and second African-American Secretaries of State is a demonstration both of the progress in America and of that progress’ exasperating slow pace. But the fact that this happened in the Republican party should be no surprise. Their stories confirm for conservatives the narrative that there are no barriers to achievement for people of color other than that which in their heads. Republicans hold out Powell and Rice as proof that racism is no longer a significant factor in either America or the Republican party. But Powell was too much of a moderate for the Bush crowd. After his nomination he was never the darling of the Right like Rice appears to be now. But Rice has demonstrated her conservative bona fides. She’s not one of those liberals that want to change everything.

Allow me to go on record with a partial list (in no particular order) of people in the current government whose performance I have largely disapproved of: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, Rove, Powell, Ridge, Rice, Snow, Thompson, Hastert, Frist, DeLay… okay, I think you get the idea and I don’t want to run out of room on my hard drive. I suppose Coulter would call me a racist for including Rice and Powell on the list. Yet I also suppose that if she were to ever stumble onto this blog, she’d have a few more choice adjectives for me too.

All of this might be little more than an academic excursion into the psychology of the modern conservative if it weren’t for the fact that Bush & Co. have set the agenda for the last four years, and barring a miracle, will for the next four too.

From John Kerry’s campaign website:

The African American unemployment rate was 10.4 percent in August, an increase of 27 percent since Bush took office. The unemployment rate for whites is currently 4.7 percent.

Under President Bush the typical African American family has seen its inflation-adjusted income decline by $2,045. Under President Clinton the typical African American family saw its inflation-adjusted income rise by $9,197.

During the Clinton era, African American poverty dropped from 33.4 percent in 1992 to 22.5 percent in 2000, the lowest African American poverty rate in American history, but falling incomes and higher unemployment contributed to an 8.4 percent rise in the poverty rate by 2003. As a result, in 2003 the poverty rate was 24.4 percent, with 8.8 million African Americans in poverty. The African American child poverty rate was even higher, 34.1 percent or 3.8 million children.

Bush eliminated the microloan program and halted the SBA program that provided $588 million in loans to African American businesses in 2000. George Bush cut minority enterprise development funding by 14 percent.

In 2003, 7 million African Americans lacked health insurance – that is nearly one in five African Americans. The uninsured rate for African American was 77 percent higher than the rate for whites.

The Bush Administration has reduced the value of Pell Grants, which 45% of African American college students rely on to help cover tuition costs.

According to a study released in February 2004 by The Urban Institute, only 50 percent of all African American students and only 43 percent of African American males got a high school diploma in 2001. But Bush cut dropout prevention programs entirely from his 2005 budget. In explanation of the cut, OMB called the programs “unnecessary.”

Despite Bush’s claims that he is focusing on the minority housing gap, the ownership gaps for Blacks, Hispanic, and Native Americans have all grown under Bush. The black homeownership gap has grown by 2.6%.

George Bush has nominated some of the most radical, right-wing judges that our country has ever seen. For example, Bush appointed Charles Pickering through a recess appointment after Pickering testified in his confirmation hearing for a seat on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that as a trial judge, he threw out cases alleging sex or race discrimination on the job, assuming that they all lacked merit. Pickering was criticized for “his role in a cross-burning case in which he went out of his way to lower a defendant's sentence. Pickering found the first-time offender's recommended sentence of seven years too harsh, and sentenced him to 27 months.”

On Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, Bush announced his opposition to the University of Michigan admissions process filing two amicus briefs in the Supreme Court, minutes before the midnight deadline. When Bush announced his opposition, he called the admissions system a “quota.”

Bush eliminated the Equal Pay Initiative, a program designed to expand federal enforcement against discriminatory practices that threaten equal pay for women and minorities. To make matters worse, “the Department of Justice (DOJ) has weakened enforcement of the laws against job discrimination and even abandoned pending sex discrimination suits without notice or explanation,” according to the National Women’s Law Center.

So it matters whether the people in charge of all three branches of government for the next four years understand the relationship between government policies and the differing outcomes in peoples’ lives based on race and due to institutionalized racism, or whether they point to Dr. Rice and say: Look. See? She made it. Stop your whining.

Read the full post.

Abortion Saves - Save Abortion

Unlike many in the blogosphere, I am just old enough to have arrived at a feminist consciousness just a decade after Roe v Wade. Stories of the “bad old days” of illegal back alley abortions were not so distant as they seem today. And vigilance about regression to the pre-Roe America was more present on people’s minds. Not coincidentally, I think, more people, even men, were likely to think of themselves as feminists then.

Abortion rights have been under assault by the Right since January 23rd, 1973 (the day after the Supreme Court decided that women really did own their own bodies after all) and never more so than now. Since I will never match the eloquence and clarity of the Goddess Katha Pollit, I won’t even try. Here’s a little blurb from her article in this week’s The Nation:

How long did it take Republicans to write their thank-you note to the Christian right? About five minutes. On November 21, Congress passed a $388 billion spending bill that permits any health provider--not just doctors and nurses, who can already opt out in forty-five states, but health insurers, HMOs, public or private hospitals, clinics, pharmacists--to refuse to be involved in abortion, up to and including informing a woman where to get one. Your employer can now deny you abortion coverage! Coming up soon: the Child Custody Protection Act, which would make it illegal for anyone but a parent or guardian to take an underage girl across state lines for an abortion, thus making parental notification and consent laws impossible to get around; the grotesque Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, which would require doctors to offer women aborting after twenty weeks pain medication for their fetuses; the Post-Abortion Depression Research and Care Act; and lots more. Measures like these make abortion harder to get: Arrangements take longer, travel becomes more burdensome, the clinic date gets pushed later and the cost goes up--from around $350 for a first-trimester procedure to $1,000 or more after twelve weeks.

OK, let’s start with the tough stuff. Embryos and fetuses are not people.

No they aren’t.

No they aren’t.

Okay Ms or Mr. Smart E Pants, if someone out there can provide to me a coherent definition of Human Being or Person that includes blastocysts but not adult stem cells, I’m all ears.

I’m waaaiting….

I thought not.

I do not pretend to have a clear idea when along the gestational period the fetus crosses the line to Human. But then that is the reason for the three part structure of Roe in the first place. My point here is that we cannot let drop this important question. The right’s position that the embryo is a person on day one is consequence of their religious belief that abortion is wrong and not its foundation. A coherent moral philosophy starts with an ontology and then builds an ethical system on that.

So then the next tough bit we have to look at has to do with religion. I know that there are lefties of faith out there that struggle with this issue. There are even closeted anti-choice lefties. But, here’s the thing, many of the rest of you may be surprised to find out that neither the Tanakh nor the Christian Bible prohibit abortion. (My ignorance of the Koran and other sacred texts is boundless. My apologies.) The right-wing fundamentalist Judeo-Christian position opposing abortion is based on inference. Yes, that’s right inference. Reasonable people can and do disagree about the meaning of the handful of passages the fundies quote in support of their position. But no one can dispute that it is a matter of interpretation. Yes, all of the fuss, all of the anger, all of the pain is about how some people interpret a handful of lines from two books some two millennia or so old.

And what are those lines? Well one you may have often heard, in fact the most often cited is often rendered something like: Even in the womb, I knew thee. This is actually from Jeremiah 1:15. (The same Jeremiah from which we get the term “jeremiad.”) My copy of the JPL translation of the Tanakh renders it:
Before I created you in the womb, I selected you; Before you were born, I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet concerning the nations.

Yes. What the fundies don’t bother to mention is that this a line in which Jeremiah was quoting God as saying to him personally that he was chosen by Him as a prophet to the nations. It has nothing to do with any other person, living, dead or yet to be born. I could see an argument that if it were possible for God to know one person before conception, it would be possible to know others. But that’s kind of a stretch. And it is a matter of interpretation. That’s not what the passage actually says. And even so, you’d have a distance to go from there to demonstrating that all pregnancies are the work and act of an intentional God - even miscarriages, still births and in vitro fertilizations – and that this applies from the very moment of conception. All of these things must be inferred in order to reach the conclusions that the fundies do.

Number two on the list is from Psalms 139:13&16. Again from the JPL edition:
13. It was you who created my conscience; you fashioned me in my mother’s womb. 16. Your eyes saw my unformed limbs; they were recorded in Your book; in due time they were formed, to the very last one of them.

Now, you may believe that God is the driving force behind fetal development, just like you may believe that God is the driving force behind evolution. But that is wholly separable from the question of what defines humanity. According to this same book God is the driving force behind the creation of the heavens and the earth and every living thing upon the earth. Does that mean that the heavens and the earth and every living thing upon the earth are equally sacrosanct with humanity? And, stay with me here, it does not say that abortion is wrong. To get there, you would have to contruct an argument, it would have to be, in part, a matter of your own opinion.

A final word on this topic. This web site quotes the short list of biblical quotes supporting the anti-choice position. Click if you dare. And then ask yourself if what you find is sufficient grounds in which to base the control and regulation by the US government of the reproductive organs of every woman in America.

I understand of course that most liberals steer a Texas mile away of these topics. There is a fundamental presumption of respect on the left for other people’s religious views, even if it doesn’t generally seem like that those on the right. The liberal position is generally more along the lines of: it’s fine that you believe that, but that doesn’t mean that you can force your beliefs on me. Keep your laws off of my body. This is true and correct and I wouldn’t advocate abandoning this for a moment.

But it seems to me that the Left has too easily conceded to the Right that religion and God are on their side. In another interesting Nation article, Frances Kissling asks the question, where are all the lefties of faith? Not just on this issue, but on many others concerning justice and equality, lefties of faith have something valuable to say. The sacred texts of the Judeo-Christian faiths are scarcely silent on these matters. And yet the voices of believing Jewish and Christian Liberals are starkly missing from the national discourse. You don’t have to be a believer for this to be a sad occurance.

Now, we have come to full disclosure time. I am not, as they say, “of faith.” I do not have a uterus. And, being a gay man means never having to say “You’re pregnant?” Of course I care about these issues because I’m an all around good guy. And I live in the world too. But the question of reproductive freedom is not merely academic to me.

The crux of my argument is that, even for those on the right, the debate over abortion is about control over our reproductive organs. It is not, nor has it ever been, about the fetus.

No, it isn’t.

No, it isn’t.

To show this, let us consider just how different the behavior of the anti-choice crowd would be if they were really, as they claim, being pro-life.

An analogy – you’re a doctor and a patient presents with a disease for which there is no cure, but there are treatments. As a doctor you naturally disapprove of all disease. Do you, a) provide the best treatments available or, b) refuse to care for the patient because offering a treatment without a cure is like saying you “approve” of the disease?

If the Right really was concerned about the fetus as a mini-person they would want to both work for reduction and elimination of abortion. Instead, abortions under Bush have increased, and this is after a steady decline in abortion rates from 1973 to 2000. The reason is clear, the primary reason for obtaining an abortion is economics. Bush’s cut and spend policies have made it manifestly more difficult for people to contemplate bearing, much less raising, children.

Is it also not unimportant to note that abortion rates in liberal Western Europe, with all their sex education, are 30% lower than in the US, where we have been at best ambivalent, if not downright hostile, to sex education for minors. In the United States, the teen pregnancy rate is more than nine times higher than that in the Netherlands, nearly four times higher than the rate in France, and nearly five times higher than that in Germany. In the United States, the teen abortion rate is nearly eight times higher than the rate in Germany, nearly seven times higher than that in the Netherlands, and nearly three times higher than the rate in France. Yet the Right is not willing to set aside their sex hang-ups long enough to focus on what really works to reduce abortion and teen pregnancies – education and empowering women to make their own reproductive decisions. If it were all about the fetus, and not control and regulation of our sex bits, these results would matter to the Right.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) is not always successful. In the US the live birth rate for women under 35 for each IVF cycle is 30-35%. And it goes down as the women’s age goes up. An untold, and uncounted, number of “extra” embryos are created and many are ultimately destroyed in these procedures. Truth be told, a small minority of “pro-lifers” are concerned about this also. But there has been no significant move to ban IVF procedures, even proportionate to their ratio to abortions. The reason, I contend, is clear. IVF means babies but no sex. Abortion involves sex but no babies. (So too, not coincidentally, does number two on the religious right’s hit list, gay sex.)

And that’s what it comes down to. There is a fundamental discomfiture on the right with sex, sex just for fun, sex for pleasure. To the religious right, no baby should mean no sex. Yes, there are a lot of wholes in that. For one, they don’t seem to be too worried about infertile different-sex married couples having sex. And, despite nominal protestations, the amount of energy they expend on railing against pre-marital sex or birth control is dwarfed by the red-faced rage that abortion and gay people illicit.

It is not for nothing that the Right sees this a Culture War. They’ve lost ground on pre-marital sex, where the vast majority of popular opinion is against them, and so they intend to draw the line on abortion and gays, where they hope that can stand on firmer ground, and return to these other issues at a later time. Majorities of Americans support abortion rights and civil unions for gays. But the vast majority of people have had non-marital sex. The Right is on the losing side, now, on the abortion and gay rights issues, but that is why they see this a war.

It is also why they resort to deception based campaigns. The majority of the people polled in Ohio say they support civil unions for same sex couples, yet they also passed an amendment banning not just same-sex marriage but also civil unions. This because the right framed this as an issue about protecting churches from being forced into performing ceremonies. There is no such thing as “partial birth abortion.” This is not a medical procedure. The Right invented this term whole cloth as a means to banning abortion under a different name.

Safe and legal abortion has been associated with a reduction in crime rates. But most important, keeping abortion a legally available and practically viable option for women greatly improves the lives of women, and men.

Today, abortion is 11 times safer than childbirth, says Planned Parenthood. Legal abortion has been associated with decreases in both maternal and infant mortality. According to one estimate, 1,500 pregnancy-related deaths were prevented in 1985 .The right to make childbearing decisions has also enabled women to pursue educational and employment opportunities that were often unthinkable a generation ago. The Supreme Court noted in 1992 that "the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.

Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe, called the decision "a step that had to be taken as we go down the road toward the full emancipation of women".

And that is why we must also see this as a culture war.

Read the full post.

Postcards from the War

You may remember, from last April the flap over pictures of flag draped coffins of American casualties in Iraq in a cargo plane about to depart from Kuwait.




The photographer lost her job over these, even though she did not work directly for the government or the military. Apparently this was so we could be freed from having to look at the consequences of our invasion of Iraq. The case the White House made wasn't that exactly. But it wasn't much different.

This administration has been fanatically concerned with controlling the flow of information, but especially images, regarding the war in Iraq. The White House web site house photo galleries of Iraq. They mostly of Americans helping smiling Iraqis, smiling Iraqis cheerfully rebuilding their country, and of course, lots of smiling Iraqi children. Here's a smattering:





There is a very interesting blog called Fallujah in Pictures that host pictures of the invasion of Fallujah and its aftermath that you won't see on CNN. Here is one of the tamer ones: (Actually hosted on the Randi Rhodes web site.)





And now there are more photos that have turned up of abuse of Iraqis by Americans, this time it looks like by Navy Seals.







Bush and C. haven't had time yet to craft their spin. But early indications are that it will be something like a statement released by Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a former military spokesman in Iraq that the new pictures showing apparent abuse of Iraqi prisoners were the acts of an isolated few but will be used by some to try to tarnish the entire U.S. military.

The abuse in Abu Ghraib was dismissed as an isolated incident. (Click the link for additional photos not generally distributed.) How many more "isolated" incidents need to turn up before Bush and Co. are forced to admit that this is systemic abuse, part of the program?

That will probably never happen. But what is clear is that, once again, the first and primary concern on behalf of the military is the public relations impact.

Gen. Kimmet, if the military does not adopt a policy of greater transparency regarding this abuse, if they don't step up and take responsibility, if the fail to understand the seriousness of this issue, then, yes, it will tarnish the image of the entire U.S. military. But not unjustly. And you and your fellow generals will only have yourself to blame.

Read the full post.

This Week in Human Tragedy

December 3^rd marked the 20^th anniversary of the tragedy in Bhopal.

From www.bhopal.net, an activist and advocacy group seeking justice for the victims of the tragedy in Bhopal.

3rd December 1984
Shortly after midnight poison gas leaked from a factory in Bhopal, India, owned by the Union Carbide Corporation. There was no warning, none of the plant's safety systems were working. In the city people were sleeping. They woke in darkness to the sound of screams with the gases burning their eyes, noses and mouths. They began retching and coughing up froth streaked with blood. Whole neighbourhoods fled in panic, some were trampled, others convulsed and fell dead. People lost control of their bowels and bladders as they ran. Within hours thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets.

The plant, which never reached its full capacity, proved to be a losing venture and ceased active production in the early 1980s. However vast quantities of dangerous chemicals remained; three tanks continued to hold over 60 tons of methyl isocyanate, or MIC for short. Although MIC is a particularly reactive and deadly gas, the Union Carbide plant’s elaborate safety system was allowed to fall into disrepair. The management’s reasoning seemed to be that since the plant had ceased all production, no threat remained. Every safety system that had been installed to prevent a leak of MIC—at least six in all—ultimately proved inoperative.

Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal.

It wasn’t until 1989 that Union Carbide, in a partial settlement with the Indian government, agreed to pay out some $470 million in compensation. The victims weren’t consulted in the settlement discussions, and many felt cheated by their compensation -$300-$500 - or about five years’ worth of medical expenses. Today, those who were awarded compensation are hardly better off than those who weren’t.

From www.bhopal.com. Union Carbide’s site regarding the tragedy in Bhopal.

The 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India, was a terrible tragedy which understandably continues to evoke strong emotions even 20 years later. In the wake of the release, Union Carbide Corporation worked diligently to provide immediate and continuing aid to the victims and set up a process to resolve their claims. All the claims arising out of the release were settled 15 years ago at the explicit direction and with the approval of the Supreme Court of India.

In 1998 the Indian state government of Madhya Pradesh took full responsibility for the site.

In the wake of the gas release, Union Carbide Corporation, and then-chairman Warren Anderson, worked diligently to provide aid to the victims and set up a process to resolve their claims. All claims arising out of the release were settled 15 years ago at the explicit direction and approval of the Supreme Court of India.

As a result of the sale of their shares in UCIL, Union Carbide retained no interest in — or liability for — the Bhopal site.
Shortly after the gas release, Union Carbide launched an aggressive effort to identify the cause. A thorough investigation was conducted by the engineering consulting firm Arthur D. Little. Its conclusion: The gas leak could only have been caused by deliberate sabotage.

December 1^st marked the 17^th annual World AIDS day.

From the UNAIDS website
GLOBAL SUMMARY OF THE HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC DECEMBER 2004

Number of people living with HIV/AIDS in 2004 Total 39.4 million (35.9 - 44.3 million)
Adults 37.2 million (33.8 - 41.7 million)
Women 17.6 million (16.3 - 19.5 million)
Children under 15 years 2.2 million (2.0 - 2.6 million)

People newly infected with HIV in 2004 Total 4.9 million (4.3 - 6.4 million)
Adults 4.3 million (3.7 - 5.7 million)
Children under 15 years 640 000 (570 000 - 750 000)

AIDS deaths in 2004 Total 3.1 million (2.8 - 3.5 million)
Adults 2.6 million (2.3 - 2.9 million)
Children under 15 years 510 000 (460 000 - 600 000)

The ranges around the estimates in this table define the boundaries within which the actual numbers lie, based on the best available information.

An interesting visual representation of the spread of AIDS diagnoses in the US from the CDC 1983-1997 can be found here. (Please note, this has not been updated since 1998.)

From the Office of National AIDS Policy – President’s HIV/AIDS Intiatives:

Care and Treatment. …The President supports the Ryan White CARE Act reauthorization and seeks to strengthen the program using the following principles as guidelines:…
* Provide greater flexibility to better target Ryan White CARE Act resources to address areas of greatest need.
* Encourage the participation of any provider, including faith-based and community organizations that show results, recognizing the need for State and local planning, and ensuring accountability by measuring progress.

Prevention and Research. … Efforts include:…
* Emphasizing Abstinence: Abstinence is the only sure way to prevent sexual transmission of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. In the President's 2004 State of the Union Address, he called for a new emphasis on abstinence-only education, and doubling the funding for abstinence-only programs.

From Esther Kaplan’s most excellent article in the indispensable The Nation (to which you should be subscribing – yes you should):

The Bush Administration's AIDS conservatism has been on vivid display in its attacks on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, which it has sought to undermine, preferring its own, US-owned and -operated vehicle. In September, several top US AIDS officials, including global health adviser and Bush family friend Bill Steiger, held a briefing on Capitol Hill at which they charged that the fund was descending into chaos. This set the tone for final deliberations by Republican leaders in Congress over the government's 2005 contribution to the fund, slated for a $200 million cut. US diplomats even lobbied the fund's board members to vote against launching a new round of grants in 2005 at its mid-November board meeting. This, just as the UN announced that the number of HIV-infected has reached 39 million worldwide.

Bush's grants favor faith-based programs, and while his first round of grants supported more mainstream religious charities like World Vision, a new $100 million round of international abstinence grants--announced in October--went to such Christian right groups as Samaritan's Purse. That relief organization, headed by the Rev. Franklin Graham (who called Islam an "evil" religion), was censured just three years ago for proselytizing while using a USAID grant to assist Salvadoran earthquake victims.

Meanwhile, Bush's neglect of the domestic epidemic has borne fruit. New data show that the government is set to fail at its 2001 goal to cut new domestic HIV infections in half by 2005. Far from declining, HIV infections plateaued at 40,000 a year during 2002 and 2003; this year, documented HIV diagnoses actually rose. … On the treatment front, in May an Institute of Medicine report calculated that tens of thousands of Americans living with HIV aren't getting needed treatment--the result of state cuts to Medicaid and the chronic flat funding of the Ryan White Act.

Ms Kaplan is most on point here:

No more tawdry talk of gay men and drug users, condoms and clean needles; by abandoning the domestic for the international, Bush rewrote AIDS as a story about orphans, abstinence and faith. Unilateralism, corporatism--Bush found a home for these first principles, too, in his $15 billion global AIDS initiative, which is US-run and Pharma-friendly.

Both the tragedy in Bhopal and the AIDS epidemic punctured the American Consciousness 20 years ago. Both have histories of denial by those who had or should have taken responsibility. And now it seems these ongoing crises share one more thing in common. Union Carbide disavowed responsibility for the worst industrial accident in history and relocated that responsibility offshore to India. They also have sought to reframe the story of Bhopal, to create a narrative that better fits their interests and agenda. The Bush administration, it seems, is attempting a similar feat with AIDS.

Read the full post.

Access of Evil - or - Everything I need to know about terrorism I learned in the 50s. - Part II

With apologies for the long delay, I will now deliver what I promised – sorta.

In Part I, I re-wrote the 1951 and 2001 State of the Union addresses by swapping the words Communism and Terrorism (and their derivatives) and changing or omitting historically specific details, while maintaining the integrity of the themes and ideas. It was my intent to show the continuities and dissimilarities of the ideas in each speech so that I could then discuss what that means for our present situation.

As astute reader will have noticed already that it was the 2002 SOTU that had the (in)famous phrase “Axis of Evil”. This is where I’d like to start. There are reasons why I chose the 2001 SOTU that are relevant to the present discussion. Chief among these is that the 2002 SOTU just did not contain much in the way of ideas. In fact, what you’ll see below is that what is there is largely redundant. By ideas, I have in mind concepts, a worldview. This is as opposed to policy initiatives, unspoken assumptions or subjective descriptions of events, places and people - of which there were plenty.

Here’s what we can salvage from that speech using the same treatment. (Please note, for interests of space, I have largely omitted the ellipses that would have shown deleted text.)

As we gather tonight… the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger.

Our cause is just, and it continues. We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred. And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design.

Thanks to the work of our law enforcement officials and our partners, hundreds of communists have been arrested. Yet, tens of thousands of communists are still at large. These enemies view the entire world as a battlefield, and we must pursue them wherever they are. Freedom is at risk. And America and our allies must not, and will not, allow it.

My hope is that all nations will heed our call, and eliminate the communist parasites who threaten their countries and our own. Many nations are acting forcefully.

But some governments will be timid in the face of tyranny. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will.

And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security.

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.

We can't stop short. If we stop now our sense of security would be false and temporary. History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight.

Our first priority must always be the security of our nation, and that will be reflected in the budget I send to Congress. My budget supports three great goals for America: We will win this war; we'll protect our homeland; and we will revive our economy.

We are protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigilance at home.

During these last few months, I've been humbled and privileged to see the true character of this country in a time of testing. Our enemies believed America was weak and materialistic, that we would splinter in fear and selfishness. They were as wrong as they are evil.

We were reminded that we are citizens, with obligations to each other, to our country, and to history. We began to think less of the goods we can accumulate, and more about the good we can do.

No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.

America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere.

No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture. But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal justice; and religious tolerance.

America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world, because we have a greater objective than eliminating threats and containing resentment. We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on communism.

Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential.

Our enemies send other people's children on missions of suicide and murder. They embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life.

Steadfast in our purpose, we now press on. We have known freedom's price. We have shown freedom's power. And in this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom's victory.

Thank you all. May God bless.

It has become rather common to assume that Bush and Co. do not have a worldview, simply an agenda. While making no assertions yet as to which comes first, they have both. In both the 2001 and 2002 SOTU’s, they telegraphed to anyone listening their intentions. In fact the motivation for my exercise in rewriting these speechs came from my reaction to the 2002 SOTU. I read it as a declaration of war. I saw in it an old Cold War mentality that found a new home in the War on Terror.

Actually doing the exercise, however, showed to me that my first reaction was too simple.

The Bush speeches were short on ideas, especially in comparison to Truman’s 1951 SOTU. But they were, I think more importantly, long on detail. Bush named names, literally. Both SOTU’s were replete with actual people’s names. But also there was a prevalence of references to specific places and events. The difference between Truman and Bush is that Bush tends to talk about each of these details in isolation – both from History and from each other. Truman attempted to situate the Cold War both in a historical context and a conceptual one. Bush frames his ideas and objectives as a reaction to the events of 9/11. This enables him to filter out contrary historical and contemporary events. The War on Terror that Bush describes in his speeches lives in its own universe.

But what he holds back from the Cold War is the idea that we face a murky enemy, capable of infiltrating America, danger abounds – and that the proper focus of our efforts to defend ourselves remains other nation-states. It is as if Bush and Co. do not realize that communism is a political and economic system which therefore lives in, or seeks to live in, nations; and terrorism is not. So they strike at Iraq and think/claim they are striking at terrorism. They destroy Fallujah, a place, in an effort to destroy an “insurgency”, a method.

Take this hangover from the 1950s and combine it with the historical shortsightedness, which asserts that history began on September 11th, 2001, and you get a potent mixture. The result is a McCarthy-esque worldview that only applies to a specific situation.

I vividly recall, prior to the Iraq invasion, the incredulity on the part of liberals at the lack of perspective inherent in the neo-conservative argument. What if we applied the rules they are making for themselves generally to the world? What if every nation got to decide on its own if and when another nation constituted a sufficient “threat” that a preemptive war was justified? Why are they not applying these rules to other threats, other tyrants? And so on.

This was met with equal incredulity on part of neo-conservatives (and their fellow cons). Don’t they understand that we were attacked? We were, by the way, attacked. And it must be said that this constituted another significant difference in the speeches. Especially in the 2001 SOTU, I had to deal with the repeated use of the word “attack”, for which there was no 1951 era equivalent. Communists did not “attack” us like the terrorists did. There was no 9/11 equivalent in 1951.

But there was in 1941. Here’s where the “axis of evil” line becomes relevant. It recalls the Axis in WWII. It isn’t an idea so much as a reference that is meant to connect the dots from Pearl Harbor to the Cold War to 9/11. We were attacked and – later – we were forced into a prolonged battle with a shadowy threat to our way of life and our values. This odd conflation of WWII and the Cold War allows Bush and Co. to borrow elements from each, as suits their purposes, in their response to terrorism, and discard the rest. That the threats facing the US and the free world are not analogous to either WWII or the Cold War becomes unimportant. The WWII/Cold War story provides a narrative framework within which they talk to us, and I suspect each other, about the War on Terror. They are prisoners of their own rhetoric.

The assertion, made by many, that the agenda of invading Iraq, for oil and spoils, precedes the justifications for the war and the general conduct of the War on Terror, I think misses the point. It assumes too much of depth of thought and planning on the part of Bush and Co. It is not that they are not capable of it. It is that it just does not seem to occur to them. I mean more than just the general lack of planning for the aftermath in Iraq. I mean a general orientation of intuiting policies and objectives in an undifferentiated mass. To us going to war for oil or for security or for liberation are three distinct things. And that distinction is critical. To them the liberation of the Iraqi people, the privatization of the Iraqi economy by large American and multinational firms and security of the American people are all part of a single entity. What matters is they sense these connections, their ideas feel coherent, their claims fit a story.

It’s a story that is at once American and juvenile. It is the tale of the cowboy and of Captain Avenger, of the entrepreneur and of the selfish child. Truman’s 1951 SOTU was an explicit call for a multinational and cooperative approach to containing the “threat” of communism. The framework of cooperation, of generally applied and generally agreed upon international law was posited as a prerequisite, not the antithesis, of American security. To alter his speech to read like it could have been from 2001, I had to change many references to the community of nations and the free world as the primary agents of security of freedom and instead posit the US the lone guard or the first among lesser allies. That movies and backyard playacting is the primary contact with war that most of the architects of the invasion of Iraq have had is not accidental nor incidental.

If I’m correct, then it’s only the unexpected costs and difficulties of reaching a satisfactory conclusion to their adventure in Iraq that has prevent Bush and Co. from moving on to the next project of liberation/imperialism. Sure, they’ve blown stuff up, and one might think that now that that’s done it is time for another game. I’m not so sure. Clearly they are already trying to quit this game. Afghanistan was boring. Iraq is too hard. It remains to be seen, and I have no great prescience here, if these experiences have soured them on these sorts of misadventures or simply primed them for another go at it in the hopes that it will be more fun the next time.

Read the full post.