More Garbage Medical Headlines: Vitamin E and Prostate Cancer; Death from MultiVitamins

It is painful to watch the media glom on to incompetent ‘research’ published in medical journals. It would be nice if they made sure of their facts before they spread misinformation and create a bandwagon full of misleading and dangerous hot air.

Take the headline about how Vitamin E causes prostate cancer, for example. What won’t they think of next?

One of their main conclusions, so important that it was included in the abstract, said that the results were not significant. Translated, that means that they were aware that they had proven nothing. You still with me?

Not wanting to admit that Vitamin E may not be dangerous for men, they continued collecting data for several more years – after the study ended – until they had met their goal, found more men from their original group who had developed prostate cancer, and could insist, according to their new and rewritten rules, that Vitamin E IS dangerous.

Huh … ??? Are we still in Kansas?

This study had so many weaknesses that it is hard to know where to begin. So here are just a few items that make for questionable results.

1. The sponsors of the study, various components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have a very long standing grudge against using non-pharmaceuticals to control disease. They have repeatedly tried and sometimes succeeded in either forcing supplements off the market or regulating access to them. The only reason we now have relatively free access to supplements is because of public outrage directed at past FDA shenanigans. Did you think your opinion didn’t matter?

I was there in person when FDA agents discussed ways they could ‘get’ vitamin makers. No joke.

2. As these authors acknowledge, there has been well done research linking Vitamin E and good prostate cancer control. Therefore, we have to wonder if their real goal was to find a way to contradict those studies, especially since they didn’t end the study as scheduled in their own protocol.

They seem to have continued collecting data for a number of years until they thought they had accomplished their real job: discrediting a vitamin.

3. A huge weakness, as always, was in the study design. They say the study included ‘healthy men’ which seems to mean that the men didn’t have prostate cancer when the study began.

Not having cancer does not mean that one is healthy. Smoking is a major risk factor for all kinds of cancer. How many smokers did they include? No mention of this or many other factors linked to cancer, like geography, diet, other health factors and diseases, and chemical exposure. They must have collected this data. Why is it not discussed in the article?

These are the kind of ‘confounders’ that routinely turn research results into garbage.

Would I suggest that anyone stop taking Vitamin E based on these results? Are you kidding me? Remember those other major and better-done studies showing that this vitamin is actually protective? This article gives no reason whatever to change our minds or our habits.

Besides, the amount of Vitamin E they administered – 400 IU/d – is probably too small to make much difference of any kind.

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Does taking multivitamins increase the risk of death in women? This study also made the news.

The publishing journal hasn’t yet allowed public access to the text of this article so their study design and methods can’t be vetted. However, results given in the abstract fail the smell test.

The abstract say that all vitamins, both separately and combined, increase the risk of death. Does that seem reasonable to you?

Or does it sound like more anti-vitamin hype paid for by either big business or big government? Hmmm. Is there a difference? No disclosure of the study funding sources.

Medical research is rife with nonsense and contradictions that blur important news, quite often because of the bias of the researcher or the funding source.

As a peer reviewer I reviewed articles for an international medical journal. I rarely approved a study for publication because of the abysmal quality of so much medical research.

Unfortunately, a lot of junk ends up in the hands of journalists who don’t recognize what they are looking at and don’t take the time to find out.

As usual, I will ignore these headlines.

 

That Giant Sucking Sound and East Coast Wealth: Will the U.S. Split Apart?

The New York Times ran a recent article about income disparity in the U.S., this time focusing on geography.  It seems that the Atlantic corridor, centered in New York City and Washington, DC, has far and away the greatest concentration of household wealth per square mile, and has benefited also as income disparity has turned into a runaway freight train.

That, of course, is as expected, a natural result of the politics of no holds barred financial capitalism with a criminal, taxpayer subsidized underpinning to ensure its continuity.  Only the wealthy need apply.

U.S. financiers and their co-conspirators in Washington have fine tuned the art of sucking the economic life out of the rest of the country. Institutionalized fraud is now an accepted way of life among those who make the rules.

First there were the trillions of dollars in 2008 bank bailouts.  After massive popular resistance to then Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson’s railroad act, Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, decided that he should hand out additional trillions more discretely, meaning without informing the public.  So he very discretely turned on the printing presses.

Mission accomplished with no more of that messy interference from voters as their wealth was diluted and transferred to the East Coast to prop up domestic and foreign banks, river boat gamblers, thugs and other assorted criminals.

A far less expensive and less destabilizing alternative might have been for the government to find a way to guarantee credit and the pension funds lost in the morass and then allow the banks to fail.  But there was no time for thinking. Mr. Paulson, grifter in charge, insisted on action NOW, and those bought–and-paid-for lackeys in Congress agreed without hesitation. Ominously, there was no daylight between then-Democratic front runner Barack Obama and Hank.

The second thing that has enriched the East Coast are our tax dollars that pay inflated government salaries and benefits to millions of Washington-based employees, contractors, retirees and military.

When the average salary of border patrol agents in Texas was $92,000 in 2009, plus health care, pension, cost of living and ‘locality’ adjustments, you’ll have to guess what all those high level managers and super managers in D.C. bring home and into retirement because official information is hard to come by. Undisputed is the fact that there has been enormous inflation in the number of federal uber-managers in recent years.  A common personnel tactic to compensate for a salary freeze is to simply  promote.

How long will the East Coast governing and capitalist classes get away with enriching themselves while depleting the rest of us?

As demonstrations break out in the U.S. and across the globe, protesting joblessness and an often IMF-imposed decline in the standard of living, as race/ethnic and class polarization marches on, voices answering ‘Not for long,’ are beginning to sound reasonable.  At the far end of the looking glass, somewhere in the foggy distance, the dissolution of the 50 United States may be lurking.

The first person on record to predict the disintegration of the United States was a Russian professor named Igor Panarin, who survived the 1990s collapse of the USSR, took another look at its nemesis on the other side of the globe, and predicted the future:  the U.S. was no more likely to go the distance than his country had.  He believed that the US was headed for extinction because of capitalist excesses leading to high unemployment and the virtual shutdown of entire cities, as well as the problem of financialization:  too much money in too few hands, too few manufactured goods, too much in personal losses.

He says now that a number of other factors are also contributing to the fragmentation of the U.S., including political stalemate, civil dissension and a lack of unified national laws.

He left out the rest of it. In addition to politics and the economy there is also geography.

The continental U.S. stretches 3000 miles  from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from sub tropics to the frozen north,  across 4 time zones.

It encompasses tens of thousands of square miles of increasing cultural differences, from the financial and governing centers on the East Coast, to the wide Hispanic band along the southern border, to the Asian enclaves of California, to the one-off culture of the Pacific Northwest.  There are other unique areas:  the Great Lakes, Texas, the High Plains and the mountain states, and the Great Plains, once known as The Great American Desert.  (Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner).  Toss in incipient problems with water resources, the disappearance of the oil economy, the weakening bonds of a unifying national language, and come face to face with the possibility of an eroded nation-state.

If Professor Panarin is right and the 50 united states are destined to eventually dissolve into autonomous regions, we should expect bumpy times ahead since the U.S.A. is no more likely to allow peaceful secession now than it did in 1861.

As others have noted, there is no reason to expect a different response at home than the U.S. government often uses to get its way abroad:  Those weapons of mass destruction, paid for with our tax dollars, may be used domestically, along with the many thousands of jobless, returning military vets who might be happy to earn a living subduing unrest in the streets.

But there will be resistance.  In no other Western nation is the population so armed and prepared to defend itself.

The U.S. is far from the only nation facing upheaval. From Cairo to Tel Aviv, from Madrid to India to China, anti-government demonstrations have been everywhere this year. According to the New York Times:

‘….  [Demonstrators] are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box. … protesters say they so distrust their country’s political class and its pandering to established interest groups that they feel only an assault on the system itself can bring about real change.”

Sound familiar?

History-wise, the twenty-teens could be an interesting decade indeed.

 

Cuba: The Anomaly in the Caribbean

Canada’s travel advisory for Cuba:

Cuba — There is no Official Warning for this country. …Normal security precautions should be observed while in Havana and other Cuban cities….

***************

U.S. State Department’s travel advisory for Cuba:

Cuba is a totalitarian police state which relies on repressive methods to maintain control. These methods include intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Cuban citizens and foreign visitors. Americans visiting Cuba should be aware that any on-island activities could be subject to surveillance, and their contacts with Cuban citizens monitored closely.

*************

I stood transfixed on the third floor balcony of my hotel room in Old Havana and watched what looked like a carefully choreographed game of chicken in the huge, bustling, intersection below. Bicycle taxis, horse-drawn carriages, vintage cars circa 1955, cabs, motorcycles and pedestrians all rushed through in different directions at the same time. With no traffic signals, lane markers or pedestrian cross walks, this intricate, strangely civil ballet with its hundreds of moving parts played out from sunrise to dark every day. Despite the horn honking it appeared that no one ever got hurt, not even the drunk who passed out in the middle of the hubbub.

With its free education and health care, with food and other rations for the month costing only pennies, with a stable government and apparently incorruptible leaders, Cuba had always been an anomaly among poor countries. When U.S. travel restrictions loosened this year, I had to see for myself.

The first things a visitor familiar with the third world notices in Cuba are the roads and the drivers. The highway from the airport into Havana was as good as any in the U.S. As we toured Western Cuba I kept looking for the rutted, impassable roads that are common in countries without the tax base needed to create adequate  infrastructure. We never saw any. Plus, there were gas stations, fittingly called Negro Oro (Black Gold) at reasonable intervals.

Even more surprising were the Cuban drivers. Unlike all other third world countries I’ve visited, not to mention a number of industrialized nations, the driving was surprisingly sane. There seems to be several reasons for this. One is that drivers are licensed, something that can never be taken for granted in poor countries. The second reason is enforcement. In Cuba there was a quiet and unobtrusive police presence on the roads as well as in the cities. Order on the highways is a great gift to citizens, not least because it cuts mortality. Maybe it is also the mark of an orderly society.

After being wowed by the roads, we were stunned by the state of decay of what was once, clearly, a glorious city. Many buildings in historic Old Havana are in such a state of disrepair that it is unlikely that they can ever be restored. The relatively small number of buildings that have been restored are interspersed among the ruins, creating a surreal landscape of elegance literally next door to devastation. In any case, it is easy to understand why Earnest Hemingway fell in love with 1950s Havana.

Although we were warned not to talk politics with the locals, it seemed that everyone we met was willing to discuss the details of their lives. Here are some of the things we learned:

– The average salary in Cuba, paid by the government which holds almost all property, is less than USD $20/month. Doctors and police (!) make about $40/month. Entrepreneurs like the owners of bicycle rickshaws or taxicabs pay the government a set fee.  The moneyed class in Cuba consists of those who work in tourism because tourists leave tips that are not taxed. Our tour guide’s parents were both physicians but his income was many multiples of theirs, combined. Taxi drivers and waiters we talked to also considered themselves fortunate to have high paying jobs. As in other third world countries, waiting tables is almost always a man’s job.

– The number of cattle in the country is strictly regulated. The government recognizes that cows are one of the least efficient uses of land and are unnecessary to a healthy diet, so it insists that property be used in other ways. Pork, fish and chicken are more readily available.

– Cuba has a population of about 11 million, 4 million of whom live in Havana. What keeps Havana from turning into another Calcutta or Los Angeles? Internal immigration policy, that’s what. As in many countries, Cuba requires a national identity card subject to random checks by police. The Cuban government recognized long ago that a city could easily out strip its resource base and become unmanageable. Official permission is required to move from the countryside to Havana.

– The U.S. lease on Guantanamo expired in 2001 and, predictably, was not renewed by Cuba. The U.S. sends Cuba a check for a few thousand dollars every year which Fidel tears up and tosses into the trash. (OK, maybe Fidel doesn’t do it himself.)  Flags in Cuba never fly at full staff as a memorial to, and reminder of, Guantanamo.

– The Cuban economy is so controlled that it allows only limited personal expression – the source of much popular dissatisfaction. In the late 1950s, Fidel and his revolutionaries were determined to throw out the capitalists who prevented most Cubans from benefiting from their own labor. In fact, it was the nationalization of the American sugar industry that precipitated the U.S. embargo. It is the lobbying of Miami’s Cuban ex-pat population that keeps it going.

– The arts and sports of all kinds are supported by the government, from the ballet to choirs to boxing, you name it.

– Unlike Americans, every Cuban is familiar with the wet-foot-dry-foot policy of the U.S., which gives any Cuban reaching land the right to stay, collect a stipend, get medical care through Medicaid, food stamps, a green card in one year and citizenship in 3 years. A number of Americans on the tour with us couldn’t believe their ears.

– Why does anyone stay in Cuba, you ask? Cuban citizens, to a person, expect their economic fortunes to change with the passing of Fidel. There seems to be a deep reservoir of affection for the old man who, 50 years ago, redistributed land, guaranteed that no citizen would starve, provided free education to the university level as well as free health care, and raised the standard of living and quality of life for 75% of the population – those who stayed.  Our hot-shot 20-something tour guide actually teared up when someone brought up Fidel’s declining health.

Most people in the third world would think they had died and gone to heaven to live in such a country.

In addition to being an intellectual and a visionary, Fidel Castro and his brother, Raoul, to whom he has passed the presidency, are recognized by Cuban citizens as a men of scrupulous integrity, a stark departure from the leaders of most third world countries.  And some might say most countries of any kind.

I hope Cuba can find a way to keep the accomplishments of Fidel without Fidel. There is already talk of eliminating the ration system and raising salaries. No one seems to be asking if salaries can be raised enough to compensate for the price of food.

The Dominican Republic is part of the next large island southeast of Cuba and there is no comparison whatever between the two. The Dominican’s roads, except in tourist areas like Puerto Plata and the capitol, Santo Domingo, are usually next to impassable due to potholes. The joke is that you can drive into one side of a Dominican pothole and out the other. Parents pay a fee to send their kids to school, and in an impoverished country you can guess how well educated the population is. Neither health care nor food are ever taken for granted and police protection seemed nonexistent.

You can drive for hours in the DR without seeing a gas station. Roadside mom-and-pop stands sell gas by the liter or part of a liter, literally in soda bottles. We saw one boy on a moped drive into the only gas station we ever saw and fill an empty Coke bottle with gas. He then roared off into the potholes with the gas wedged next to the steering column. He was a rolling Molotov cocktail. We saw nothing similar in Cuba.

Government graft has been a major problem in the Dominican as in Haiti. Many accounts blame invasions by the U.S., U.S. policy, and U.S. support for corrupt dictators as a major influence on the dismal economies of both countries.

U.S. influence has, of course, been mostly absent from Cuba, except for the embargo and numerous CIA assassination attempts. Fidel jokes that when he dies no one will believe it. After a body guard estimated 638 CIA assassination attempts in the years since 1959, Castro said “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.”

The CIA may not have been able to kill Fidel, at least so far, but it has succeeded in making his life difficult. For years he has rotated between a series of safe houses.

The last assassination attempt is believed to have been in 2006, but to this day the U.S. remains a neighbor from hell.

There is no American embassy in Cuba but there is an ‘American interests’ facility that functions like an embassy. Cubans still talk about the ticker tape scroll denouncing their country that was posted at this embassy-that-isn’t by their American guests.

The embargo and American insistence that other countries fall into line with it has left Havana’s harbor still and virtually unused. By depriving Cuba of needed supplies, the U.S. and complicit Cuban ex-pats in Miami hoped to dislodge the uppity government that stands in the way of profiteering.

After 50-odd years, maybe its time to give it up.

 

TSA Porno Scanners – the Height of U.S. Paranoia?

By Cameron Salisbury

My plane was taxiing into the gate at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport when the end-of-flight announcements came on. Seatbacks in upright position, trays closed and locked, baggage under the seats, you know the drill. On an in-bound international flight, I was headed for my second trip through TSA security in 3 hours.

Since I’ve been in five airports, some more than once, in the U.S. and Central America, in the past month or so, I’m beginning to feel like a reluctant – and unhappy – expert on airport security in a few these places. I can say for sure that I’ve found no place as paranoid as the U.S. But then, no other government can hold a candle to the range and variety of enemies the U.S. has created from scratch as part of official policy.

By way of comparison, I encountered no such thing as official government gropers outside of the U.S. In no other country I visited do passengers take off their shoes. There was no such thing as the irradiation of travelers anywhere else. Here in the Deep South, I’ve never encountered a TSA agent who knew that their porno scanners were actually x-ray machines. How exactly are those people trained?

These days, a traveler can go through security before boarding the flight and, at least in Atlanta, again after arrival. There can never be too much security. Has any miscreant ever been caught during exit screening with a weapon missed by the before-flight screeners?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one result of such a before and after screening policy is to require even more of the Michael-Chertoff-get-rich-quick body scanners installed in more locations in every airport.

I’ve also learned that the number of travelers subjected to the digital strip search depends entirely on the supervisor in charge. S/He can send everyone in line to be x-rayed or send them to be groped by coworkers or forget the the whole thing and send them only through the metal detector. It is all up to the person in charge.

U.S. travelers are far from the only ones fed up with the U.S.government’s security delusions.

Scanners are in use in some airports in Britain, the Netherlands and Italy. Other European countries, like Spain and Germany which is scheduled to ignore popular protests, some nude, and roll them out this summer, have issues with the invasion of privacy and radiation and haven’t been shy about saying so. They also say that the machines can be easily fooled by creases in clothing, meaning that the digital frisking must be accompanied by metal detector screening and pat downs.

The chairman of British Airways, Martin Broughton, has made it clear that he sees increasing U.S. demands for ever-more security (Michael Chertoff again?) as a form of idiocy. He says that U.S. airport security is “completely redundant” and is urging other European nations to resist. The recent flight of a U.S. passenger without so much as a ticket indicates that security measures may also be useless.

One more thing: Remember how many times we’ve been told that the scans are not kept after the person clears security? Then why does the U.S. demand that Europeans keep theres indefinitely?

US security authorities had demanded that original pictures taken by the machine – which display the contours of the body – be saved for possible later use. However, the German Interior Ministry has insisted that all images be deleted after passengers pass through the airport.

I’m getting ready for another cross country trip but this time I will escape government intrusion by driving. I won’t have to take off my shoes to start my car and no one will know whether I’m carrying bottles larger than 3 oz. Plus, without either a ticket or a GPS device, it won’t be easy for them to track me.

Take that, TSA!

 

Skepticism Grows. Who Did the Rambo Squad Kill?

If one listens between the lines, it seems clear that the U.S. government has serious doubts about who it murdered in Abbottabad. The problem is not just the changing account coming from spokespersons. The problem is the facts themselves.

At first they were 90% sure that they had killed Osama Bin Laden, meaning a one in ten chance that they had screwed up. Pretty poor odds for an assassination. Then the odds went to 95%, and finally, after the fastest DNA analysis in history, to 99.9%.

What that tells us is that they still weren’t positive that they had their man. The problem is that they matched the DNA of the dead man to the existing DNA of other Bin Ladens, of which there are hundreds. Assuming accurate DNA testing and reporting, what they showed was that they had killed one of the many Bin Ladens. There was no DNA match of Osama with Osama.

Then, there was what they seemed to regard as the thrilling announcement that Al-Qaeda itself said OBL had been killed. If we already knew, why the breathlessness? Further, there is some doubt about the legitimacy of those claiming to represent al-Qaeda, since their announcement showed that they were unaware that the body had been buried.

The entire pursuit of OBL has been fraught with inconsistency and credibility issues.

We were told after 9-11, that Osama Bin Laden was a sick man, using kidney dialysis and in generally poor health. Word came from numerous credible sources in early 2002 that he had died. If true it would certainly have been inconvenient for President Bush who was itching for a war in Afghanistan, which may have something to do with his statement in 2003 that OBL didn’t matter to the war effort.

The Rambo squad took video of the entire compound after assassinating whoever it was and four others. One of the items captured on tape was the medicine shelf, which was carefully dissected by news crews. Turns out there was nothing on that shelf more potent than nasal spray and aspirin. No sign of any dialysis machinery. Actually, the people who lived there seemed to be in good health. But Osama was in poor health, wasn’t he?

Osama Bin Laden was a wealthy man. The people who lived in that compound were not. Despite the efforts of the administration and the lapdog media to paint his home as a luxurious mansion, videos told the truth. The buildings where those people lived were more shabby hovel than an upper class Shangri La. Would Osama, raised with wealth, really have ever spent time there, much less six years, with no sign of luxurious furnishings? Aw, c’mon.

The break in and murder were captured on real time video via cameras attached to the commandos’ helmets. If the film is ever released, we’ll be able to see for ourselves how much the man resembled Osama before he was murdered. Does that have anything to do with the refusal to release it?

There are two quite different pictures of a man we are told was OBL, when the reality for anyone who compares them is that the pictures are of different persons. The media tells us that the second Osama dyed his beard black. If the consequences weren’t so serious we might be inclined to think that was a punch line in a sick joke. What are the chances that the leader of an international terrorist organization would bother? Who are we supposed to believe he was trying to impress? Or is the joke on us?

Most recent is the picture from the back and left of someone watching a video, using a remote device with his right hand. Although everyone, including those in the progressive press, have accepted the government’s contention that the man is OBL, it’s impossible to confirm visually. Regardless, we know that Osama was left handed. So who is in the picture?

Despite the fact that Osama was six feet four and slender, there has been no information about the dimensions of the body. We’re supposed to believe that the commandos just forgot to bring a measuring tape. OK. Well, there must have been one on the ship where the body was taken. Oh. They didn’t have one either?

Identifying the dead is a basic of any coroner’s job and usually means that someone who knew the person can testify to his identity. But not us. We relied on the man’s wife who supposedly called his name. Was that in English? Plus, dubious DNA evidence, plus the comments of a person identifying himself as a member of al-Qaeda. We assassinated a foreign national in a sovereign country. Is that all we’ve got?

When the commandos blasted and shot their way into the compound – in the dark – killing four persons after crashing a helicopter, their only orders, according to Leon Panetta, were to kill Osama if they found him and get the hell out if they didn’t. There seemed to be nothing in those orders that required a positive identification. In fact, the months and years of training, with the President and other high officials watching on a closed circuit, with their sky-high emotional investment in the mission and the pressing need for speed before the Pakistani military arrived, working in the dark, what exactly are the chances that they would have been able to tone down their adrenalin rush long enough to say, ‘Excuse me, but I need to see your driver’s license’? It seems more likely that they would shoot first and let others justify later.

American officials have been spinning the Pakistani government’s lack of knowledge of the hideout as incompetence. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s an indication that Osama was not hiding in Abbottabad after all.

We are hardly getting the other side of the story.

… maybe after our government talks to his wives we’ll get the truth….

 

Elite Commandos or Assassins with Cameras?

The American media has been joyous about the U.S. trained SEAL guerillas who murdered an unarmed man in cold blood. The are described as heroes, supermen, and courageous, but one national correspondent got it right. She said they were assassins.

Some questions:

If Bin Laden could have been eliminated with 25 commandos, why have 4800 Americans, so far, been sent to a desert to die?

The commandos were wearing headset cameras that filmed everything in their path and sent pictures back to their superiors. We’re told that no proof of Bin Laden’s death will be released because the gruesome nature of the pictures could further inflame his supporters. But not all pictures were taken after his death. Where are the pictures of Bin Laden as he was being confronted by his executioners before he died?

At the time the commandos broke into his bedroom Bin Laden clearly posed no threat. He was not armed and did not resist. He could have been taken alive, except that, as CIA director Leon Panetta finally admitted, the commandos were there for only one reason: to kill him. Why?

The SEALS ransacked the house, taking hard drives and papers, looking for anything that might turn into usable intelligence. But the greatest source of information had been standing right in front of them before they double-tapped, a quaint term for shooting twice at point blank range. Was this their way of discouraging Bin Laden from talking? If given the chance, what might he have said?

In all parts of the civilized world nations pride themselves on their judicial systems and the rule of law. Observers are starting to question the legality as well as the means of America’s extrajudicial administration of ‘justice’ in a sovereign foreign state.

And to what end, exactly, was the deadly Rambo exercise? Terrorism is much more likely to emanate now from Yemen than anywhere Bin Laden travels. Are we safer with Osama out of the way? Well, no one believes that. Even Joe Lieberman warns us to expect retaliation.

The murder of Osama Bin Laden is a win for the Obama reelection campaign, the budgets of Homeland Security, TSA, and the military which now has a victory to shore up lagging support at home. The losers are all other domestic programs, from an underfunded educational system to our tattered social safety net — victims of the Bush-Obama wars as surely as our soldiers have been.

Which brings me to my next question: Exactly who are the people willing to become trained assassins? Can they ever be safely released from the indoctrination of the lawless U.S. military back into the general population? Others must have the same question because the administration now finds it necessary to spin them as lovable, somewhat scruffy, all-American guys-next-door who love their wives and play softball with their kids in their spare time away from work.

Administration spokesmen have been anxious for us to believe that torture works. They tell us that that’s how they got the break leading to their prey. The fact that they found the name of the courier who led them to Bin Laden’s compound in documents released by Wikileaks has received almost no mention in the media. That bit of information seems to have been disappeared.

As the insurgency in Libya geared up a few weeks ago and crowds gathered in the street, three snipers began to fire from the roof of a nearby building. From reports, the shots were remarkably effective, killing a number of the unsuspecting in the crowd below with precise bullets to the head.

The American media blamed the Gaddafi forces for the sniper fire, but wait a minute. That third world country has an unsophisticated, third rate military. What are the chances that it could or would provide care, feeding and training for snipers? Plus, Libya has no recent history of militarism.

Where did those assassins come from?

Have we said a final goodbye to the illusion of America’s moral superiority?

Who are we?

 

Pres O: What the F… Don’t You Get About Republican Intentions?

Cross posted at Arthritis-Alternatives.com

You came out of the meeting with Republican leaders and stood in front of cameras saying that you were optimistic about compromise to improve serious domestic problems.

They came out of the meeting saying that their base liked gridlock and they intended to maintain it.

Were you at the same meeting?

How much clearer can those troglodytes be? What in your background has made conciliation and suck up-ness your most important priorities?

When they say they don’t intend to cooperate with you, they insist on tax cuts for the wealthy, they believe that institutionalized gridlock is the way to accomplish their main goal which is to get rid of you, you need to join the rest of us in the real world and get your head out of the Land of Oz, or wherever it is.

You will not have another chance if you continue to screw up this one. And only your dedicated, appointed, staff believes you haven’t screwed up – so quit talking to them and start listening to us!

You might also disband your insistence on harmony long enough to admit that it doesn’t exist, you can’t create it out of thin air, and no one on the other side wants it.

It was you who lost control of the House, and it was not because of Republican intransigence. It was because you refused to meet them head on. Other presidents, FDR, Harry Truman, had stiff opposition but they used their bully pulpit to disable it. Try to channel them long enough to look presidential.

Where are those principles we thought you had two years ago? Where is your willingness to call injustice by its name and challenge it? Why does Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) have to do it instead of you?

You have been criticized by the usual talking heads for taking your message to the late night talk shows and The View. But it was your explanation that was pathetic. You said that the networks refused to interrupt their own programming to carry your message so you had to resort to social sites to talk to citizens. With all due respect, has anyone ever mentioned to you that the airways that make the networks rich and fat are a PUBLIC resource. Is the real problem less their opinion that you are boring than the fact that you don’t want to cross big campaign donors?

Saying that we, your base, are not happy wildly misses the mark. We are disgusted to the point that many of us will likely sit out the next election, so we too are playing into the hands of the troglodytes. But it is you and not they who are responsible.

Thanks to the conflict-loving media, we understand what you are up against and we get it. We don’t need you to win every battle. We need you to lead, to set a standard, to communicate honestly.

We need you to take a principled stand when health insurers, to protect their profits, insist that they will only ‘allow’ national health care if every citizen is forced to buy health insurance.

We need the drug companies brought under control because of the harm they do – not just in their expensive promotions for dangerous drugs but in their buy out of American medicine.

We need you to clearly state your own grave concerns about the wars in the Middle East and the intimidation tactics used by the military industrial complex to keep you in line.

We need you to think through, once and fall all, those ongoing and ever-increasing corporate bailouts that, despite the happy hype about our improving economy, fools no one and may send our currency into a death spiral. We need you to call corporate socialism what it is and insist on equal treatment for citizens.

We need you to stop the compromise banter and insist on allowing the Bush tax cuts to lapse. You can then begin work on a permanent middle class tax cut and let the Republicans take the fall if they oppose it.

We need you to take a clear look at your administration and get rid of the ethically challenged people, like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, who never belonged there in the first place.

But you can’t do any of that, can you? Anyone who glances at your campaign financing underwriters understands why.

You’ve also done nothing to support campaign finance reform.

Your base is likely to throw up its hands and walk away in 2012.

 

The Mammography Controversy: Selling Out Women?

Cameron Salisbury

A Swedish study published recently maintains that mammograms for women in their 40s saves lives. It contradicts numerous studies done over the past 20 years, as well as recommendations from The American College of Physicians in 2007 and from the expert U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in 2009 which concluded that the benefits of mammography screening before age 50 do not outweigh the risks, something that has been widely acknowledged in public health circles since mammography became big business in the late 1980s.

First, the Swedish study. You’d never know it to listen to the TV docs and their cheering section, but the Swedish study has been widely criticized by scientists for its lack of internal consistency. The research group that received mammograms was not similar to the comparison group that did not and also did not weigh risks against benefits. No conclusions of any kind can be drawn from such a hodgepodge.

Next: that cheering section. It’s understandable that 24 hour news channels require something to fill air space and that they will glom on to anything that might hold a viewer’s attention. It is not so understandable that they would ignore a study published a week or two earlier from Norway and Harvard that not only confirmed the findings of the Task Force but questioned whether mammograms actually benefit woman of any age. In other words, a direct contradiction to the Swedish study that also, remarkably, questioned the screening value of mammograms for anyone and received no media attention at all.

By far the worst of the cheerleaders for the Swedish study was Dr Richard Besser, formerly director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now an expert talking head on all things medical for ABC.

On air, his opinion was that mammograms should continue for women in their 40s because of this apparently “well done study” which he had clearly neither read nor had vetted for him. He said that there was no reason to question the findings of the Swedish article and that women should ask “Why not? Why shouldn’t I have a mammogram?”

OK, Dr. Besser. Let’s talk about why not.

1. Overdiagnosis. Because screening tests are often based on imprecise measurements and are subject to human error, like the mammogram and the PSa test for prostrate cancer, a great many people are misdiagnosed as having a life threatening condition when they don’t. Once a diagnosis of breast cancer is made, the next steps are preordained. What follows is enormous anxiety on the part of the patient, discussions with radiologists, oncologists, surgeons and other doctors about how to treat, the order of treatment and the side effects at each step. There is enormous expense involved at each level of discussion.

And consider this: approximately 1300 women over age 50 must be screened for years to avert one death. In the 40s that figure is 1900 screened. That’s thousands of mammograms, hundreds of biopsies, and many cancers treated as if they were life-threatening when they are not.

What no one is likely to tell the patient is that some cancers are slow growing, or will not expand, or might clear up by themselves as the woman’s immune system comes to the rescue. These cancers need to be just watched; no immediate action necessary.

It has been estimated that 25%-30% of breast cancer found on mammograms is the result of overdiagnosis. Further, an estimated 6% of the time the finding of breast cancer from a mammogram is a false positive. Translated, that means that more than one patient in 20 is told she has breast cancer when she does not.

There is a huge emotional and financial cost associated with overdiagnosis and mis-diagnosis, part of the reasoning of the 2009 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. The down side hazards of mammograms make them unsuitable for women in their 40s who are at low risk for breast cancer, anyway.

2. Radiation: Every dose of radiation from chest xrays, dental xrays, mammograms and other sources is cumulative. When it comes to radiation, nothing is for free. Radiation damages DNA and has been a known to cause serious disease since the scientist who discovered it, Madame Curie, died of aplastic anemia, a rare and quickly fatal blood disorder.

Changes to the DNA resulting from xrays may later cause cancer. That is a major reason for the deep concern and criticism among many scientists regarding mammograms. It’s a reason to avoid unnecessary xray exposure (and to reject dental xrays for routine visits.)

One study showed a much higher incidence of invasive breast cancer in women who had been subject to routine mammograms than those who had not. The suspicion among some scientists is that the mammograms themselves are responsible.

What the experts have said:

Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

We don’t want people to panic, but I’m admitting that American medicine has over-promised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated.

Dr Brawley, under pressure from his employer, immediately withdrew his comment but could not remove it from the record.

From Drs. Epstein (UCLA) and Bertell (International Physicians for Humanitarian Medicine): Mammography facts are in stark contrast with what is most publicized about the screening, namely that “mammography saves lives.”

Routine mammography delivers an unrecognized high dose of radiation. If a woman follows the current guidelines for premenopausal screening, over a 10 year period she would receive a total dosage of about 5 rads. This approximates the level of exposure to radiation of a Japanese woman one mile from the epicenter of atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Why the one-sided emphasis on a screening tool of such dubious value? Because screening is big business.

Outpatient mammogram suites, both free standing and in hospitals, generate billions of dollars each year for their owners. Some of these clinics scan hundreds of thousands of women a year. Advocacy groups like the American Cancer Society (ACS) receive major funding from the makers of xray and mammography equipment and are intensely resistant to changing the screening recommendations for mammograms.

Drs. Epstein and Bertell, again:

The mammography industry conducts research for the ACS and its grantees, serves on its advisory boards, and donates considerable funds. DuPont also is a substantial backer of the ACS Breast Health Awareness Program; sponsors television shows and other media productions touting ACS literature for hospitals, clinics, medical organization, and doctors; produces educational films; and aggressively lobbies Congress for legislation promoting the nationwide availability of mammography services.”

The incidence of breast cancer diagnosis and death has been dropping like a rock since 1999, about 2% every year. Between 2000 and 2006, the last year for which I could find data, the death rate dropped by almost 13%. Between 1990 and 2006, the rate dropped by almost 30%.

There were several things happening during those years which may have contributed to the decline. Although advocacy groups would like to credit mammography for these trends, the fact is that the number of women having mammograms declined in tandem with the change in the diagnosis and death rate. So it is not possible that screening is the cause of the decline. In fact, the opposite may be true, as some scientists believe. Maybe the decline in screening means less breast cancer.

In 2002 a major study was published connecting the use of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) to breast cancer after which the use of HRT by menopausal women dropped precipitously. At the moment, no one knows exactly what the statistical effect of this change had on breast cancer deaths, but it has no doubt contributed to the decline.

There is another important hazard and that is the polycarbonate plastics found in water bottles, canned food, and everywhere else. Some of these plastics are carcinogens and others are endocrine disrupters, causing such things as early puberty in our 7 year old daughters, as well as breast cancer, and quite possibly fertility problems and the serious drop in the sperm count among men, especially in the U.S.

The way to defeat breast cancer, it seems to me, is to eliminate as many cancer causing agents as possible from our lives, and that includes drugs, environmental chemicals like the plastics we live with and inadvertently ingest, as well as xrays from all sources

 

GM, Gasses, Irradiation and Big Business: Subversion in the Grocery Store

Cameron Salisbury

see also: Arthritis-Alternatives.com

Wouldn’t you know it. Just when we thought that we had made choices that made the adulterated American food supply manageable, Corporate Agriculture finds new ways to quietly and unobtrusively pollute our lunch. We figured a way around the colors, texturizers, hidden gluten, preservatives and taste enhancers with unpronounceable names, and thought we were home free at dinner time.

That’s the way it used to be. As the twenty-first century arrived the dark clouds that had been gathering for several decades finally turned American food production into a torrent of bad news for consumers and a bonanza for agribusiness.

The new food productions and preservation techniques, like genetically modified seeds, irradiation of everything that doesn’t move, and gasses that create the appearance of freshness no matter how old the meat, were originally introduced for commercial use in the latter years of the 20th century. None of these changes to the food supply were designed to benefit the health of the consumer. In fact, our regulatory watchdogs, the FDA and USDA have allowed their wholesale introduction into our food supply without serious testing or monitoring.

To keep the consumer in the dark, the USDA and FDA deliberately colluded with Corporate Agriculture by allowing them to introduce their spiffy new methods of polluting the food supply and enhancing their bottom line without the labeling that would have allowed the consumers to make their own decisions. The consumer no longer has even the illusion of protection.

We are on our own.

There has never been more than one purpose to the unending adulteration of the food supply in the U.S., and it certainly was not to benefit us. All of the new pollution methods have been to extend shelf life into infinity and beyond, to sell more and cost Monsanto and ArcherDanielsMidland as little as possible to do it. They have the full collusion of the major grocery chains.

Some of the changes to the food supply, like irradiation, indiscriminately kills organisms, the good and the bad alike, and eliminates the need for growers and processor to maintain sanitary conditions on the farm and at the factory. You may be buying and eating filth but at least it has been sterilized.

Treatment with radiation also inhibits sprouting in potatoes and delays fruit ripening. In other words, it allows food to be transported long distances and extends shelf life far into the future with no change in appearance.

Public Citizen, the Center for Food Safety, and Food and Water Watch have declared the use of radiation on the food supply to be an experiment on the American consumer without informed consent.

Radiation-induced changes in human DNA can produce cancer. Do DNA changes to veggies create synthetic eats without the usual life supporting properties? No one knows what food irradiation kills besides pests, or if the food is functionally the same after.

And then there are the production problems with the radiation itself: there has already been radioactive leakage from a processing plant into the water supply in a suburb of Atlanta.

Thus far, despite continuing industry pressure, the FDA has maintained that irradiated food must contain a radiation symbol, which has limited its use since food processors fear that making consumers aware will hurt their profits. Lobbyists for Corporate Agriculture are working relentlessly to get the requirement for disclosure rescinded.

On the flip side of the disclosure issue are the growing and processing methods for which consumers may legally be kept in the dark. Almost all U.S. produced corn, soybean, cotton and beet sugar are now GM. But, have you ever seen a label in the grocery store that would alert you to the presence of something in your veggies, meat, or corn flakes that you might not want to eat or feed your family? No? Unlike European countries where an informed public has ferociously fought the introduction of GM food, it is probable that every pantry and frig in the clueless U.S. contains it.

And then there are the gasses, one of the newest unstudied innovations for contaminating food that is also legally allowed to remain undisclosed to the buyer. Most consumers are not aware that virtually all meat, fish and poultry sold at retail has been treated with a gas to extend the surface appearance of freshness.

In the old days, say, a year or so ago, only packaged ground meats were treated with gas. Since the gas created a tight, balloon-like appearance to the packaging, they were easy to spot and avoid.

These days, processors, with the collusion of large grocery stores, are in the habit of gassing everything possible. Even the fresh fish in the deli has almost always been gassed on its way to you, with the butcher often none the wiser. Packaged fruits and vegetables are also increasingly treated with gas.

Food processors were able to convince the FDA and USDA that the gasses they use, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, occur naturally in the atmosphere and therefore qualify as GRAS – Generally Regarded As Safe – and in no need of labeling disclosure.

Apparently none of the regulators thought to ask if gasses that enter the airways are metabolized the same as the identical gas that enters the digestive system by way of food.

As the millions of people with an impaired immune system already know, they are not.
It will probably take many years, as consumers gradually become aware of the impact of contaminated food on their bodies, to undo these regulations.

Even without counting the endless list of preservatives, artificial colors and texturizing agents, quietly and invisibly the food supply of the United States has become the most legally polluted on earth.

The US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, federal agencies created to protect the public from polluted food and unsafe medications, have been undermined by the corporate, capitalism-at-any-cost, mindset of one presidential administration after another. As mind-numbing as it seems, the activities of these federal regulators are often subsidized and compromised by their corporate regulatees. Scientists who object to the latest toxin proposed for grocery store aisles often have their careers threatened by the regulated, the ones actually calling the shots.

In the meantime, U.S. life expectancy and average height, major indicators of the health of a population, today fall far behind other nations.

Food allergies and asthma are an increasingly prominent causes of illness, death and disability.

When you get a chance, tune in to this video:

 

True or False: “We Are All Responsible”

Cameron Salisbury

It’s happened again.  Another well meaning soul insisting that EveryOne is to blame for the mess that engulfs the U.S. politically, militarily and economically because in our political system, the country gets what it votes for.  Therefore, ‘we are all responsible.’

Some may get their kicks from an existential guilt trip, but please count me out.

First, we almost never get what we think we voted for.  Just a few examples: Remember George W. saying he’d be a ‘uniter, not a divider’?  Before the vote he also said yes to more social programs, lower taxes and a balanced budget.  Franklin Roosevelt said he’d keep the U.S. out of foreign wars and Richard Nixon said he’d end the war in Viet Nam.

Before election day, voters are bombarded with ads, negative and positive, and promises, some vague, some not.  Complicating the process is the media which prefers sound bites to substance.  Voters negotiate the mine field and cast their ballots for the person who does the best job of convincing them that he or she will fulfill their fantasy.

Every few years we go to the polls and pin our hopes on a Rorschach ink blot shaped like a person.

Don’t blame me for this.

Tens of millions of us had a lot to say, and we said it over and over, both in print and in phone calls to Congress, before our representatives opted to ignore our furious dissension and approved the Wall Street bailout. That act alone has been regarded by some as prima fascia evidence that American citizens are voiceless shadows in a mythical democracy.

Personally, I don’t think I contributed to the problem.

We the people voted in record numbers for someone different, a self-proclaimed agent of change, and Barack Obama became president.  Who is responsible for the disappointment that he has been to many?  We elected him to change the way Washington behaves and he showed every indication that he believed he could.  I’m not sure that he is responsible, either.

And I’m certainly not.

In the name of the U.S., atrocities have been and are being committed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the military and by an increasing number of heavily armed delinquents known as contractors who are accountable to no one. Congress has attempted to reign in the cowboys with what appears to be only marginal success.

The atrocities are both passive, as when sanctions result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, and active, as when Iraqi wedding parties are incinerated by drones.  Obama is unable – though, I’m convinced, not unwilling – to reduce the out-of-control military and its over-the-top budget.  The armed forces are a nation unto themselves and they usurp nearly 50 cents of every one of our tax dollars.

Should you and I shoulder the blame?  If you believe that you are morally responsible,   aren’t you are morally obligated to stop paying taxes?  Let’s see a show of hands for everyone willing to do this.

We have a Supreme Court that says it’s just fine for corporations anywhere in the world to buy a U.S. election.  We have lobbying groups that keep us embroiled in Middle East politics, that fight health care reform tooth and nail, that keep the financial sector fat and happy while tens of thousands lose their jobs and line up at food banks.  We have a cadre of powerful, unelected advisors built into the system, people like Karl Rove, Rahm Emanuel and all of K Street.

I didn’t cause any of this.  Did you?

Many people have responded to the dysfunction in Washington by joining groups like the Tea Party and openly oppose the influential, often appointed, government personnel that citizens have been stuck with. Since most such groups are ignored by the thumb-sucking media, their influence spreads wirelessly. At least for now. Corporations are doing their level best to wrangle control of communication space, too.

OK.  ‘Fess up, you who are accountable.  Is this your fault?  If yes, then fix it.

The ‘We’re all responsible’ group never fails to bring up Nazi Germany.

To which I reply:  What is your point?

Stories still surface, over 60 years later, of German civilians with the power to assist the persecuted who did just that.  There is no way of knowing how many sympathizers had no power to intervene.  But we do know that Germany in the latter 1930s and 1940s was run by thugs who had a heavily armed state at their disposal.  Dissent became a capital offense. During the war, the allies bombed much of Germany into rubble, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The German population paid dearly for the actions of their leaders.

Were they all responsible?

Although most United States citizens were far distant from the corporate-lobbyist coup, we are held accountable for Washington’s actions.  To the 9/11 terrorists, the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans were in no way responsible for U.S. policy in the Middle East was strictly a footnote.  They seemed to have entirely missed the fine print that explained the distinction between wealthy lobbying groups that promote war in the Middle East and the majority who don’t want it.  Or maybe the murderously alienated just don’t care.

Similarly, Amanda Knox is in jail in Italy, one of the most unlikely convicts in history, most probably in retaliation for homicidal actions committed in Italy by an unrepentant American military.

The fact that we will be held to account for actions committed by others is incentive enough to take action.  But we can’t do it by letting the perps off the hook and claiming responsibility ourselves.

What should we do?  Here are some ideas.

–Washington, D.C., should be closed down and its functions decentralized.  All legislators should be required to stay in the districts that elected them and use modern communications to interface with others.  This would remind the elected on a daily basis that their neighbors hired them.  It would have the added benefit of making the lives of lobbyists significantly more difficult.  Tell Michael Moore to investigate the possibility.

– Blame the right people.  Call a war criminal a war criminal and insist on prosecution or extradition for one and all.  Pretend like the Nuremburg trials really mattered.   Support Cindy Sheehan.

– Recognize the class warfare happening in America right now and insist that the casualties be treated like those in any other war, with limitless subsidies for those in the trenches: the unemployed, the undereducated, the uninsured, the debt vassals, the single parents.

–Support open media.  Contribute to the Real News Network and PBS as well as to web sites like this one.

–Join protests against the military and the excesses of the police state, like brutality and tasers, while we still can.

And most of all:  Stop claiming responsibility for criminal acts over which we had no control and put the blame where it belongs.  Stop giving the perps a free ride on our conscience.  They should be driven out of town and into jail by our outrage, not coddled by our narcissism.

We should not be willing to shoulder blame for criminal activity committed, domestically and abroad, without our consent. The fact that we live in the U.S. is not evidence of guilt.

If everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.

 

Repairing the Congress-Citizen Disconnect

by Cameron Salisbury

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s ‘emergency’ $700 billion bailout was authorized in record time by both houses of Congress despite the opposition of an estimated 80% of U.S. taxpayers, each of whom seems to have contacted his/her legislators more than once. For days, Congress was flooded with emails and calls with one message: No Wall Street bail out! When the bail out was fully funded, with lightning speed but no hearings, logical justification or concrete plan, it became clearer than ever that the opinions, wishes, demands of the electorate are scarcely worth the cost of the ballots they cast.

Although the immediate cause of the current economic meltdown was the deregulation of Wall Street, banks and the financial services industry, this was far from the first time that citizens have been sold out by elected representatives doing the bidding of Big Business. In fact, dismantling the regulatory/consumer safety net and throwing the taxpayer under the bus has become a way of life in Washington.

We prefer safe drugs. Instead, we get FDA approval of drugs that sicken and kill us. When the body count reaches a boundary of tolerance, they are withdrawn until Big Pharma’s lobbyists can wrangle them back on the market. This game earns billions for Big Pharma and is worth every calculated penny they pay lawmakers and their victims.

We prefer safe and fuel efficient vehicles. Instead, we get what the auto makers decide to serve up, and that is neither notably safe nor fuel efficient. Detroit’s auto industry is now insisting that they are entitled to their share of the buy out billions. They were part owners of Congress long before the current economic crisis, so what they want now is simple payback.

We prefer a sane and reasonable energy policy. Instead, we are held hostage by an unregulated energy sector that rewards run-amok speculation. In 2008, speculators single handedly raised the price of oil to the extent that the economy threatened to grind to a halt. After the price of food, consumer goods, and transportation skyrocketed, after we were left with a lowered standard of living and Congress belatedly threatened action, they crawled back into their holes and oil prices returned to a semblance of normal. Today, with the tacit approval of a complicit Congress and in conjunction with the rest of the economic crisis, the damage done by Big Oil’s engineered bubble appears irreversible.

We prefer an ethical, honest government that understands the need to protect the economy, the environment and citizens with responsible regulation. Instead, we get the likes of Henry Paulson and Nancy Pelosi, so heavily subsidized by their corporate sponsors that they lose sight of public accountability and, I suspect, their own consciences.

How else to explain an AIG? Even in the Land of Bail Out Oz, these delinquents are in a class by themselves, done in by a highly lucrative and utterly irresponsible insurance swindle called credit default swaps. There is no rational justification for rewarding this 21^st century casino, and the gamblers – whom they prefer to call ‘investors’ – who kept it in business, with one cent. And yet, their heavy lobbying has paid off, once again, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars even as they continue to throw expensive parties and, like the rest of the bail out jackpot winners, hand billions in bonuses to their amoral managers – whom they prefer to call ‘Wall Street elites’ – who are at the root of the turmoil. It would make as much sense to throw a few billion at Starbucks and Caesars Palace.

Will anything change with a new administration? We have clues. President-elect Obama was among the first to say the bail out was needed immediately, no questions asked, no second thoughts about disregarding the wishes of the vast majority of Americans. If he had any concerns about the outsized, poorly reasoned giveaway to the reckless greedy, or to the concept of a Wall Street bail out as absurd as it was intellectually dishonest, he never showed it.

And this episode wasn’t the first clue. As others have documented, President-elect Obama’s voting record has been enough to give most supporters pause, as were his speeches at various high dollar fundraisers during the campaign. The myth that the Obama campaign was financed by legions of individual $10 donations is belied by his campaign disclosure statements (www.opensecrets.org).

Obama’s first, immediate, appointment was Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff. Emanuel is a temperamentally volatile man who never met a war in the Middle East that he didn’t want the U.S. to finance and then star in, and he never met a free trade agreement that he didn’t love. Does he sound like a first round draft pick in a ‘change’ administration? Or does he sound more like a plant preordained by big donors to further their own agendas?

It seems likely that Barack Obama is the best person for the presidency that we could have elected. He is a reasoning, intelligent man of goodwill, a difference of light years from the mean-spirited, short-sighted, unapologetic corporate hustler that he replaces.

But it is naïve to think that he is not caught in the Washington money game or that whatever remains of his ideals, after four years in the Senate and a presidential race, are not prone to extinction by the groupthink that inhabits the East Coast.

Even with Barack Obama as the president elect, our democracy remains fragile, its future uncertain. Here are a few is ideas on how we might restore it.

First, everybody knows that private money should get out of politics. Barring that, politics should get out of Washington.

So, first, close Washington down. Zip it up and return it to the Indians or give it to the Smithsonian for a cautionary display of how not to do democracy.

Elected representatives have shown themselves spectacularly incapable of managing the public trust when they flock together. Grouped, away from the voters who sent them, they make easy prey for corporate predators dispensing lots of money. Events repeatedly show that it is nearly impossible for most of them to rouse their brain cells to independent activity in a crowd. We need to get them out of their noxious geographic comfort zone and send them home.

Given the current economic crisis, we should expect lawmakers to willingly relinquish their cushy, expensive Washington pads and establish primary offices in their home states, among their friends, neighbors and voters. They could thereby patriotically save the taxpayers at least part of the money they gave away to Henry Paulson. They would have an allowance for staff, offices and limited travel. All meetings would be conducted by telecommunication, like it’s the 21^st century.

Further, lawmakers will be reminded daily, up close and in person, of the wishes of those who brought them. There won’t be another misbegotten, taxpayer-financed, Wall Street bailout when directives are delivered by the irate face to face and in the same time zone.

Although this plan will not keep lobbyist entirely at bay, it should make their lives considerably more difficult, a big plus.

Next, the talking heads residing in the New York-Washington corridor should be banned from the air waves. They talk only to each other, being elites and all, and not one of them has had an independent or creative thought in years. We don’t need any more pundits from Yale, Columbia or NYU; we don’t need Brian, Katie or Charlie; we don’t need anyone else from an East Coast think tank giving us their pompous, arrogant version of reality.

There is a continent of alternatives. Let’s get an assessment of the options to Paulson’s opinions from, say, an economist at the University of Missouri; an ungarbled analysis of the Russia-S. Ossetia situation from someone without a vested interest in getting it wrong, maybe a political analyst from the University of Idaho; let’s find people who understand the catastrophe of a toxic ruling class and who won’t lose their jobs for telling the truth right out loud. Because we’ve had enough of the smug politics of condescension.

Getting our news from the western side of the Alleghenies and keeping our elected lawmakers home are actions that could go far toward saving our democracy.

If the United States can elect an Obama, it can do anything.

 

Detroit vs. Wall Street: The Trillion Dollar Class War

by Cameron Salisbury

If anyone doubted that a class war is in progress, hidden beneath a variety of euphemisms, like ‘bail out’, ‘downsizing,’ ‘outsourcing’ and ‘NAFTA’, their doubts can now be given the decent burial that they deserve. There has been no more blatant act of class antagonism in recent memory than the apparent willingness of Congress and Wall Street’s appointed grifter, Henry Paulson, to let a major part of the American manufacturing sector die.

The difference between a diffident Congress respectfully requesting a teensy bit more information before handing Henry The-Sky –Is-Falling Paulson a $700 billion authorization, in record time and with no strings attached, stands in stark contrast to the hostility and derision directed at Detroit’s auto executives, who are responsible for actually making something useful and who are requesting a $34 billion guaranteed loan to help get them through the harshest economy in memory. An economy in freefall, by the way, that is the direct and immediate consequence of Wall Street and its Washington, D.C., enablers.

Until recently, auto manufacturers were selling their big, profitable SUVs, making money for shareholders and being applauded by investors. Suddenly, Wall Street speculators hijacked the oil industry, transportation and food prices skyrocketed, the economic core of the country, the homeowner, went into Wall Street-induced foreclosure, and before Detroit could turn its massive ship around and concentrate more of its attention on hybrids, SUVs were collecting dust on new car lots. A lack of foresight? Yes. Just like millions of homeowners who tried to get ahead of the curve. Just like the Congress that had deregulated so many markets that corrosion had seeped into the financial base forming the substructure of impending economic doom.

The auto executives were told that they couldn’t get a government loan without a specific plan detailing how they would use the funding. With a brand new set of standards that had been notably lacking when Paulson’s railroad came through, Senator Pelosi made clear: “No plan, no money.” Despite the negligence and incompetence of banks, Wall Street, and the U.S. Congress which have caused an international crisis that will certainly bring U.S. hegemony to an end, Paulson was never asked for a reasoned, intellectually honest plan for his bail out billions, which, as events quickly showed, he couldn’t have provided anyway.

Senators, deep in the depths of hypocrisy, castigated the auto executives for flying to Washington on private jets.

They suggested that the auto honchos step down from their jobs so that new management could be put in place.

The auto executives were even asked if they would forego their salaries for the requested loan.

None of these subjects was broached with Wall Street surrogate and ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Paulson.

The sight of U.S. Senators conducting a withering assault on representatives of the manufacturing sector was a sad spectacle made surreal by the participants themselves. The U.S. Congress and its approval of one free trade agreement after another has made virtually all American industry, with its environmental safeguards and middle class wages, noncompetitive in the global market. The entire industrial sector is well on its way to having a Southeast Asia or Mexico zip code. Legislators talk as though the U.S. manufacturing sector is a dispensable nuisance instead of a sign of strength, and when South Carolina’s republican governor Mark Sanford says the American auto industry is unnecessary (PBS, 12/3/2008), we have to wonder if this was their intent all along.

Richard Shelby, R-Ala, has been the most derisive of the industry’s critics. However, as USAToday noted on December 2, his state is home to Honda, Toyota and Hyundai plants, and has given $650 million in tax incentives to foreign manufacturers. The South in total has handed them $3.2 billion.

Critics say that auto workers are paid too much. If we’re talking about the CEOs there is no argument, although they are scarcely in the same league as Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who made $83 million in 2007, or Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein at $54 million.

The workers themselves make about the same as employees at Toyota and Honda, about $26 an hour. The real difference lies in the legacy costs of the Big Three. Although nonexistent at the foreign automakers with their new manufacturing operations, Ford, Chrysler and G.M. have decades of history including retired employees, pension and health benefits obligations. Added together and divided by the current workforce, their hourly employee cost of operation, they say, is $70. Politicians want Detroit to do away with its high legacy costs by ‘restructuring’ or declaring bankruptcy and letting a judge do it for them.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Detroit’s auto industry is largely responsible for creating America’s middle class. Kicking and screaming, the auto companies in the 1940s and 1950s worked with their unions to provide decent pay and benefits. Then – voila! -their employees could not only buy the cars they made but also housing, appliances, and clothing, too. Because of the health care and pension benefits eventually built into their contracts, auto workers became some of the most economically secure citizens in the world.

All workers wanted what Detroit had made possible. Before 1960, the pay and benefits in the industrial sector had become the gold standard for every employee across the country. The quality of life of the U.S. middle class had become the envy of the world.

About 30 years ago, automakers began to take seriously the inroads being made by foreign manufacturers and, in the interest of remaining competitive, began serious efforts to ‘restructure’, that is, reduce the number of employees, pay and benefits. Free trade agreements beginning in the 1990s made circumstances nearly untenable for employer and employee. Detroit went into a downward spiral.

Now, with Washington politicians demanding that auto makers jettison their legacy obligations and cut wages, many in the ‘elite’ classes gleefully anticipate the complete annihilation of the remnants of the hard-won, historically unprecedented, social contract between employer and employee. With an estimated 3 million jobs at stake, this could mean the extinction of the remaining middle class wage earner and pensioner.

The devolution of the middle class coincided with the financialization and securitizaton of the economy, as money handling became more esteemed than making things. Free trade coincided with the announcement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the beginning of every evening news broadcast.

Now, the middle class is vanishing, facilitated by politicians who have enabled the death of unions, rewarded outsourcing, passed free trade agreements, annually increased the numbers of H1-B visas, deregulated the securities and banking industries, actively laying the groundwork for declining incomes and endlessly repetitive financial scandals.

If Congress decides to cut loose one of the last of the major U.S. manufacturers it could have enormous consequences for national security, not to mention the well being of millions of Americans. As our elected champions hand trillions of taxpayer dollars, without challenge or conditions, to a grossly negligent financial sector, it will signal a final chapter in a class war lost by those in the middle.

 

Requiem For Israel

by Cameron Salisbury

Israeli bombs rain down on Palestinian homes. U.N. schools are obliterated, relief workers are murdered, small children cling to their dead mothers for days before they are lucky enough to be rescued alive. In some neighborhoods, the smell of death lingers in the air as Israeli troops advance deeper into Gaza and more heavily populated civilian areas in retaliation for annoying but largely ineffective rocket fire. It is a world-wide public relations disaster, even among the notably clueless United States citizenry.

As a horrified world watches Israel demonstrate its military supremacy over a poor and unarmed population, something else is happening. If you listen closely, you might hear a sad death knell in the distance, and it isn’t for the Palestinians. What we may be witnessing now is Israel’s slow motion suicide.

In the late 1940s following World War II, the territory then known as Palestine and now known as Israel was handed by the victorious allies, free and clear with no strings attached, to the traumatized Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany, thereby creating a Jewish home state. Complicating matters were the Palestinians already living there.

Predictably, with the new nation of Israel created by fiat, by people who neither owned the land nor consulted those who did, it came with deeply embedded seeds of turmoil. The future of Israel depended on how they handled those seeds. They could choose friendship and reconciliation or they’d get the opposite, unending conflict.

When the Palestinians were given neither a voice nor a vote – nor compensation – as they were forcibly evicted from land that had belonged to them for centuries and herded into overcrowded, poor, refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, the die was cast.

Israel has enjoyed only brief, wary, interludes of peace since. The war-with-no-end illustrates beyond question the abject failure of Israel’s international policy during the nearly 60 years of its strife-ridden existence, its superior, American-made military capacity a useless menace.

Palestinian fury is now a violent, bottomless abyss shared by other Arab nations.

And Israel is a small heavily armed island surrounded by a sea of seething Arab bitterness.

Ringed by enemies, Israel could hardly survive alone, and it didn’t have to.

Israel’s best friend and consistent enabler is the United States, which underwrites Israel’s survival to the tune of approximately 3 billion American taxpayer dollars a year, dedicated almost entirely to buying armaments for use against Israel’s neighbors. Arabs hate the U.S., too.

Because Israel uses American dollars to buy its military prowess in the U.S., Israel is essentially the middle man between Uncle Sam and American weapons manufacturers, as well as an outsourced Middle Eastern military arm of the U.S. government.

The world is now changing rapidly, and for Israel that poses several troubling prospects.

First, a number of former third world countries, especially in Asia, have been developing with lightning speed and require increasing amounts of oil from the Middle East. Ominously for Israel, its Arab enemies find themselves with increasing leverage and a growing number of nascent allies, countries like China and Russia, who have little regard for the U.S. or its pet projects. Vladimir Putin is on record drawing a line in the sand, threatening retaliation for any aggression against Iran or Syria.

Worse, Israel’s strong-armed backer, supplier, and buffer has come upon hard times. The U.S. is currently battling a financial meltdown due at least in part to Arab fury at our complicity in the continuing geopolitical upheaval in their lands. Although nearly unreported by the U.S. media, Osama bin Laden has been quite clear in his demands that the U.S. withdraw its forces from the Middle East and relinquish its support of Israel in exchange for safety at home and abroad. What would U.S. citizens say if they knew?

Even before the U.S. went into its current economic dive brought on by that hotbed of capitalism, Wall Street, the downward spiral had begun. Government finances were stretched thin by the Bush-and-cronies mismanagement and ‘war on terror.’ Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent destroying and rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq in addition to the costs of maintaining a military empire around the world; in addition to the very expensive government bureaucracies now needed to defend the ‘homeland’ against terrorism; in addition to a domestic social services sector in meltdown with the increasing demands on Social Security, unemployment levels anticipated soon to reach double digits, and the concomitant increases in the need for unemployment insurance, food stamps and Medicaid.

And that’s just for starters.

America became a debtor nation with the advent of NAFTA and the decimation of the domestic manufacturing sector. Economists say that America is now bankrupt in all but name.

So far the U.S. response to its long simmering economic crisis has been less than confidence inspiring. A massive and speedy infusion of newly printed money was tossed into the economy, which could never have resolved the trouble caused by an out of control financial sector but could be depended upon to cause other problems. Like the devaluation of the dollar. Foreign investors, the props of the American economy, are racing for the exits, leaving behind trepidation about the next chapter in U.S. history.

None of this is good news for those in foreign lands whose borders depend on American strength. The days when the U.S. could reliably determine the world order are vanishing along with the days when oil producing nations can be kept in line with threats.

Unless Israel can get a solid grip on its own independent future, and soon, its days may be numbered, too.

 

Gupta for Surgeon General? Geithner for Treasury? Obama for Irrelevance.

It’s hard to believe that the ‘Change We Can Believe In’ candidate could have morphed into the ‘Are You Kidding Me’ man before he was even inaugurated.  It usually takes a little longer before we catch on to the fact that we have been hoodwinked by yet another amateur.

 

Obama’s early choices for cabinet positions and other posts were questionable from the start.  What is Hillary ‘We’ll Obliterate Them’ Clinton doing as the designee for Secretary of State?  Why is pit bull Rahm Emanuel the new chief of staff?  Why would a  ‘change’ administration keep holdovers from the Bush years? 

 

But, as events are now showing, worse choices were yet to come.

 

The nomination of a CNN lightweight still in his 30’s to be the top doctor in the U.S. simultaneously insults professionals in the fields of medicine and public health.  It demonstrates a shallow understanding of important issues by the new man in charge and his posse that is unnerving. 

 

Sanjay Gupta was probably the only medical spokesman the bunch had ever heard of because he appears on TV.  It’s a leap to believe that on-air exposure makes Gupta an expert at something besides reading a teleprompter.  The transition team would barely have had to scratch the surface to find respected, knowledgeable and experienced professionals who could handle the job without a back-up editorial team or pancake makeup. 

 

You can almost visualize the thought process that went into his selection: The transition team is sitting around discussing possible appointees for surgeon general. None of them know personally any public health leader. CNN is playing in the background and a  presentable looking young man begins a segment on health care.  Of course!  Make him the top doc!  We’re probably lucky they weren’t watching Scrubs.

 

Timothy Geithner’s consideration for Treasury Secretary exceeds the bounds of the ridiculous and encroaches on the borders of serious derangement.

 

Geithner was at Treasury in the 1990s, where he was heavily involved in the multiple IMF-inspired financial disasters in South America and Asia.  Then, during 2001-2003 he was at the International Monetary Fund as director of policy development.  IMF policies have been nothing less than abusive to desperate economies around the world.  In the quest for high returns for investors and in the service of a deeply flawed ideology, country after country was thrown into turmoil, complete with riots, by IMF demands. (Well documented in Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine, and others.)

 

There’s more.

 

According to Geithner’s biography, he was named president of the NY Federal Reserve in 2003.  He became Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee and a member of the influential financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.  In short, Geithner was part and parcel of the current economic meltdown in the U.S.  He was also instrumental in saddling the U.S. taxpayer with trillions of dollars in bail out money to save institutions that are now proving beyond salvage, like Citigroup.  Preoccupied with using public money to subsidize his East Coast friends, he has done nothing to rescue the average citizen or the economy.

 

Geithner’s failure to pay taxes is arguably his greatest travesty.  If confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury he will become boss of the IRS, an organization that routinely dismisses employees for lesser transgressions than Geithner’s years of tax-paying chicanery.  He will become the appointed director or an agency that wouldn’t hire him. 

 

His Washington enablers want us to believe that Geithner is being  victimized for an ‘innocent mistake,’ as Obama called it.

 

Oh, please. 

 

According to IMF records, media and online sources, the chances that Geithner could have accidentally forgotten to pay $34,000 in employee Social Security/Medicare taxes is nil. 

 

The public is nor privy to a complete accounting of Geithner’s multiple years of tax-paying flimflam, but we do know that during Geithner’s tenure the IMF reimbursed their employees, separately and specifically, for the payroll tax with explicit admonition that it was to be forwarded to the IRS.  They also had a staff person dedicated to assuring that taxes were paid. None of that stopped Geithner from pocketing it. 

 

That was no ‘innocent mistake.’ 

 

That was tax fraud.  Instead of being nominated for Secretary of the Treasury, Geithner should be doing a perp walk.

 

The usual sequence is that we elect people who use their office to commit crimes and defraud us.  This time we have the opportunity to get a jump on the time table with a Treasury Secretary whom we know in advance is a cheat.

 

We’ve also learned more about Obama than we wanted to.

 

 

 

 

The Stimulus and The Confidence Game

by Cameron Salisbury

The Sears appliances I bought last summer came with great teaser financing from Citibank available only if I took out a new credit card. The interest rate on the card was a bargain at only 19% because of my sterling credit history. The accompanying disclosure statement informed me that the rate could go as high as 32% if I screwed up and went over my credit limit, paid late, missed a payment, acted badly with any of my other creditors, jaywalked, yelled at my kids or did anything else they frowned on.

Their disclosure statement was not required to tell me that if I paid no more than their monthly minimum my balance would double every few years.

Last week, along with a notice that their interest charges were going up, they sent a note defending the increase by shamelessly blaming the current tough economic climate – the one that they have relentlessly and unapologetically done so much to create.

Everyone knows that U.S. consumers have put away their wallets. But while American consumption and the use of credit cards is dropping like a millstone, the total amount of outstanding debt remains ominously, bizarrely, unchanged (Federal Reserve, release G 19). Because the unregulated credit industry is allowed to change the rules, their interest rates and conditions, and your indebtedness in the middle of the game, spending less does not mean owing less.

In Detroit, the elderly freeze to death when their gas is turned off. In Florida, the formerly employed live in cars for months and longer. Roughly one in nine homes are now vacant and no one seems to have a good handle on whatever has become of the foreclosed families.

The evening news is filled with stories about the newly unemployed, the newly uninsured, and those watching in their living rooms feel a chill of recognition. They look so much like the rest of us. How long before we’re a part of, instead of a spectator at, society’s unraveling?

Despite the illogical daily bluster of the Wall Street swindlers, their academic and government enablers and TVs talking bobble-heads, the trillion dollar bail out of the financial sector, has not, will not, and cannot solve the nation’s economic problems.

All that ever actually sustained our financial system was an illusion that has evaporated: confidence in the protective capacity of our government and regulatory systems. The most critical obstacle to economic recovery now is the national sense of alienation from the institutions and the government we once thought would protect us from the capitalist crapshoot. The public’s deep sense of anxiety, distrust and betrayal, the crisis of confidence, will not be fixed until our institutions are, with or without full employment.

During the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt initiated regulatory reforms of Wall Street and the banking industry that restored a battered nation’s faith in the future. With the introduction of the Social Security safety net to protect the unemployed, the aged, the disabled and the widowed, the launching platform for the ‘American Century’ was in place.

It lasted 50 prosperous years until Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II systematically deep-sixed as many of those guaranteed protections as they could get away with, and handed the levers of the nation’s well-being to privateers. American economic power shifted from a manufacturing base to the mainly East Coast, mainly Wall Street, financial sector. Anti trust laws were decimated and mergers infested the economy leaving consumers with fewer and more expensive choices as well as declining wages and increasing responsibility for themselves, their families and their future. Now, corporations reign anew, the safety net is in tatters, and people are scared. Again.

Thanks to our politicians, much of the way back has been sealed off.. Shoring up American workers and American jobs is decried as ‘protectionism’ by the same lost souls in the media and government who brought us ‘free trade’ and the current national and personal catastrophe.

There won’t be a return to the American century, but there can be a good life in our future, and a workable transition now, if we strengthen the safety net while we work for re-regulation and responsive politicians. Here are my suggestions:

First, people thrown out of work by Wall Street grifters and their government enablers deserve a little dignity in the form of a guaranteed income for the duration. Unemployment benefits should be extended until the economy recovers, possibly ten years. Pay for it by yanking back, clawing back, and redirecting the $1.7 (so far) trillion bail out for banking and Wall Street hucksters whose behavior throughout has been the very definition of criminal, a fact that only our politicians seem to misunderstand.

Second, the banking system must be reformed from the ground up. The American people are starved for honesty, accountability and transparency in finances that now seem out of their hands and out of control. Bring ethics, reason and capitalism back to the financial sector by letting banks that have driven themselves into bankruptcy fail and regulating the new ones that form. Stop using the American taxpayer to protect the lawless from the results of their own behavior.

Usury laws must return to the financial system to keep credit users from being thrown under the bus by rapacious and unpredictable creditors, and to lessen the sense of chaos in the social fabric.

Third, stop foreclosures by freezing the teaser rates for anyone who still has a job and a house they want to keep. Our wealthy bankers can afford to make a reasonable profit instead of a windfall on every transaction, but if it can’t, well, taxpayers should foreclose them.
The feds have a huge problem with buying toxic mortgage assets because no decision maker wants to admit that they have no value. If derivatives were ‘marked to market’, investors could lose big time, and politicians Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner certainly don’t want to inconvenience the wealthy. Better to stick taxpayers with a fairy tale and let us restore those fortunes.

In return for our unwilling largesse, the least bankers can do is ‘mark to market’ personal mortgages so homeowners are paying on actual value instead of the false prices created by the policies of the banking system. The banks have it coming. Couldn’t happen to nicer people. Besides, what else are they using their bailout billions for?

The most recent ‘stimulus’ theory, that banks should reconfigure mortgages to 31% of a person’s income with the Treasury subsidizing the difference up to 38% of income, is crazy. We don’t need to provide additional taxpayer dollars to hedge funds. Banks should lower mortgage payments to 31% of income because we’ve already given them boatloads of loot! Like all the other bits of insanity drifting out of the fog in Washington, D.C., this one is on track to become the latest citizen-financed boondoggle.

Fourth, health care must be provided to the increasing numbers of uninsured by federally funding Medicaid and taking the burden off the fiscally drowning states. We must also rethink Medicare. To control costs we’ll have to give up the outdated, corrosive and costly third party payer system as well as the flagrant violation of common sense that prevents the government from negotiating drug prices. It will require political will and WE – you and I – have to supply that. It can’t be trusted to anyone else.

Fifth, forget the stop-gap teensy tax cut drivel and permanently eliminate the payroll tax on everyone making less than $75,000 a year as well as on the vulnerable small businesses that provide so many jobs. That will put another 7.65% of personal earnings into the economy and give businesses another 7.65% of payroll to use as needed.

Now that’s a stimulus!

The payroll tax is unconscionably regressive, hitting hardest those making the least. It should be replaced with a tax on all earnings above the $75,000 threshold, not just wages, and it should not be capped. That should guarantee the future of Social Security and eliminated one endless, tiresome conversation from the national discourse. Instead, maybe we can begin to discuss the cost of keeping military bases in 100 countries. Or we can talk about how to elect a responsive government.

Contributing their share to the Social Security system seems like the least the wealthy can do given the massive financial rewards they’ve received from the political and economic stability our tax dollars buy them. Not to mention the tax dollars that are now restoring their fortunes. I’m sure they’ll be happy to do their part.

That’s my plan.

In the meantime, I’ve cancelled my Citibank credit card.

 

As GM Goes …

Cameron Salisbury

With the government-mandated bankruptcy of one of the largest, longest-lived, and, until recently, most profitable manufacturers in the world, the takeover of the U.S. economy by the same East Coast forces that destroyed it is now complete.

The speed with which GM spiraled into insolvency was breath taking. Less than 18 months ago, just as the horrifying effects of Wall Street’s malfeasance were becoming clear, GM was profitably selling SUVs, making money for its shareholders and paying big ticket CEOs far more than they were worth, just like Wall Street.

Suddenly the rules changed.  In a spectacular reversal, GM was deceptively accused of failing to sell what consumers wanted to buy, of being out of touch and out of date, of having too many built in personnel costs which made them unable to compete with foreign auto makers whose short history in the U.S. left them free of pension liabilities.

The piling on was not done by vaudeville comedians as we might have expected.  No, in a priceless ironic twist, the proximate cause of their downward spiral was the economic wreckage brought about by their accusers: Wall Street and Congress.

Bankruptcy was immediately proposed as an option because, Wall Street-Washington decided, it was the only way to scrap the gains unions had made for pensioners, employees and their families and millions of others around the world.

No one said the words ‘unions busting’ right out loud.  They tidied up their intent by calling it a problem of ‘legacy costs’, giving an antiseptic feel to creating poverty by fiat.

The most viscerally determined for a GM bankruptcy were senators from the anti-union south who had been instrumental in subsidizing the establishment of foreign auto manufacturing in their own states.

When the Wall Street cabal was put in charge of dismantling the giant, pensioners and health care benefits were automatically toast, as were suppliers, many dealerships, all factory workers, and hundreds of thousands of families.  The successful, final sell out of middle class laborers was heralded by the new, rock bottom wage agreement struck with the crushed UAW which brought American auto workers in line with the low pay of foreign competitors.

Thanks to Wall Street and their elected enablers, the American manufacturing sector and its middle class wages have evaporated, almost as though they never existed.

No one has to be a fan of GM to understand that it was part of the last of the once-dominant American industrial sphere; to understand the importance of manufacturing to a healthy economy; or to understand that the real loser is the middle class which now has millions fewer jobs and livable incomes which are not coming back any time soon.

The American middle class was essentially created by automotive unions and the reluctant Big Three beginning in the late 1930s and continuing into the 1950s.  Everyone, on all continents, wanted the hard won wages and benefits the unions had wrested from the mighty industrialists and, to a large extent, they got it.

The middle class, which took root in all the western industrialized nations, was one of America’s most successful exports.  People all over the world had the money to buy American clothing, German cars or French champagne.

Every country used trade barriers in the form of import taxes to maintain a level playing field for its middle class and to protect national prosperity.

The formula worked well for 50 years until the marauders in charge of the free for all known as American capitalism found a way to take it all.  Not satisfied with great wealth, they wanted humongous wealth, sort of a corner on the wealth market.

At the top of their hate list, always and forever, were unions.

The campaign to destroy unions and usurp middle class prosperity started in earnest in the 1990s when Clinton’s White House pushed successfully for the passage of NAFTA, which was quickly followed by other free trade agreements.

Free trade meant that factory jobs could be outsourced around the globe to places with negligible labor costs and unprotected workers.  And then, voila! those cheap foreign made goods could be re-imported to the U.S. duty free.

The uneven playing field became the law of the land.

CEOs pocketed the profits cheap foreign labor provided and CEO pay went through the roof.  The penalty for dismantling a once vibrant industrial base was gone, replaced by unimaginable riches for those at the tippy top of the income pyramid.

American workers didn’t fare as well.  No longer in a position to bargain with management for the cost of their labor, they accepted whatever they were given and were happy just to have a job.  Earnings stagnated, inflation climbed, purchasing power eroded.

Cheap imported goods, an economy awash in credit, and declining real wages paved the way to disaster for millions of Americans struggling to cope with economic factors beyond their control.

Both unions and the middle class were headed for the trash bin of history with the full knowledge and consent of the governing class.

Workers in other parts of the world were equally vulnerable. Beginning in the late 1990s, factories and employees were discarded with reckless abandon in country after country, as capital moved to the next hot spot of miniscule wages and nonexistent worker protections, first Mexico, then Thailand or Vietnam or China.

In the U.S., each announcement of a factory closing, jettisoned employees, or increased outsourcing was met with a rise in the Dow Jones, accurately reflecting the hostility of capitalists for the worker.

As Wall Street revels in its taxpayer financed wealth bubble, foreclosures on Main Street escalate; reports of stress-induced suicides, homicides, child abuse and domestic violence increase; families move in together and try to make cramped living conditions work; tent cities sprout everywhere.

Millions have made their first ever trek to the unemployment office; seen their possibility of retirement vanish with their 401Ks; taken a pay and benefit cut; or were jolted with the realization that they and their families no longer had health insurance.

But a worse catastrophe may be in hiding in the shadows.

On Wednesday, June 4, in front of a congressional committee, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke went public with the plan he had held close to the vest since his endorsement of the trillion dollar taxpayer giveaway to his Wall Street friends.  He says the U.S. must “maintain the confidence of the fiscal markets”, i.e., protect the interests of the Wall Street thugs and the banks-too-big-to-fail by imposing austerity measures on the U.S. population.  He wants major cuts in all public spending, including Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, education and health care.

With the big manufacturers facing bankruptcy and the Bernanke, Geithner and Obama triumvirate feeling the need to shred the safety net, it’s conceivable that the middle class slide will not end simply in a lower standard of living, but in poverty and civil unrest.

 

The Mindless Class: The Left’s Evil Twin

by Cameron Salisbury

Who are those people?  They look like ordinary citizens but they act like maniacs, screaming at members of congress who want to discuss health care coverage for the tens of millions, including themselves, who are either uninsured or may become so tomorrow.  They shout gibberish into the microphones of reporters, things like “I don’t have a job.  I don’t have health insurance.  Keep the government out of my business!”   No one could make this up.

They spread incomprehensible nonsense about President Obama’s birth, and prevent their children from listening to a U.S. president, THEIR president, speak to them in the classroom, as other presidents have in the past.

At first glance they seem to have sprung from the media’s imagination, manufactured to placate the mindless and fill time between stories devoted to happy talk about Wall Street and the ‘recovering’ economy.

It’s a strategy that has worked perfectly well with any number of other nonsense issues.  Currently there’s swine flu, a subject that fills up hours of broadcast time with over blown, irrational scare tactics for a disease that appears slightly less lethal than the common cold.

Before swine flu there was SARS, once sold as a major public health threat, which vanished from the airways and our memories without a trace; Bird Flu, which on a slow news day can still be jimmied up for an evening news cast; and any number of sex scandals used primarily to generate ill-will among the mindless and eliminate political actors disliked by the corporate media, like Eliot Spitzer who posed a major threat to the likes of Bernie Madoff .

There is lots of pandering to the vacuous about missing and murdered young women, whom the media much prefers over missing and murdered young men, or the utterly inconsequential acts of buffoons like Joe Wilson.

But nothing makes better television than mindless outrage with home made signs.

Is there any method to the collective madness of the tea party goers, or are the red-faced, eyes-popping insurrectionists just the close-minded, self centered nincompoops they appear?

Maybe both.

Hannah Erendt coined the phrase ‘The banality of evil’ to describe the daily capitulation to depravity in Hitler’s Germany. Her premise was that Hitler’s enablers, like Adolph Eichmann, were not sociopaths but ordinary people who substituted the will of the group for their own judgment.

Adolph Eichmann was one of the Nazis responsible for shipping Jews and others to Hitler’s concentration camps and gas chambers.  When brought to justice his defense, like that of virtually all war criminals, then and now, was that he was only following orders.  He had no particular feelings for or against those whose deaths he arranged.  He did it because he was told to; it was his job.

He did it because he was part of a group whose members all believed that mass murder of ‘others’ was ok.

Like others of the mindless class, Adolph Eichmann acquiesced to groupthink because he had either no capacity to think for himself or was simply too pathologically lazy to make the effort.  His judgment and his conscience were farmed out to his preferred collection of sociopaths.

When the group makes all value judgments, the life of the member gets much less complicated. There is no need to obsess about right or wrong. No need to consider the lives of others, the impact of personal decisions, the requirements of a sustainable neighborhood, the future or the past.  No need for morals, scruples or principles and no place for self doubt.  The group takes care of it all.

If we accept the premise that everyday, garden variety evil is the narcissistic need to escape the turmoil of thinking, the world of the mindless comes into better focus.

It’s no secret that the Progressive Left seems to have a monopoly on internet blog sites.  While sites like this one team with original writers sharing their ideas, the Right, deprived as it is of originality, creativity, and the ability to put a logical thought or a coherent sentence together, readily embrace marginally demented spokesmen who are given the power to reach millions by the corporate media, people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. These surrogates mirror the frustration and fear of the mindless class who get a fleeting sense of belonging and power as they channel their own destructive anger into a larger destructive force.

The Republican Party serves the interests of a tiny percent of Americans but gets around 50% of the vote in every election.  The great majority of those who vote Republican are voting against their own welfare.  If not for their intellectual emptiness, they’d likely be part of us.

Most of today’s tea party participants are mini, mindless, Adolph Eichmanns.  If their tactics, abetted by media collusion, successfully promote their negative agenda on health care, they will have accomplished the nearly impossible task of winning on a position that makes them losers.

The Nuremburg war crimes tribunal, standing in for civil society, refused to accept the idea that people can escape responsibility for their actions by blaming the group.   The court did not regard the refusal to think a viable defense.  Each criminal was punished alone.

But his victims were still dead.

 

Foxy Knoxy and the Flying Marines

Cameron Salisbury

Amanda Knox, the 22 year old American undergrad studying in Perugia, Italy, has been found guilty of murder in the slaying two years ago of her British roommate, and sentenced to 26 years in prison.  It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely perp or a less likely outcome.

Amanda, who had worked three jobs to pay for her trip to Italy, had no history of violence and was shocked, after she volunteered to try to help the police, to find herself interrogated late into the night and physically abused to coerce a confession that the police, in time-honored and apparently international police fashion, decided to get from her.

There was no physical evidence linking her to the murder. The man whose DNA and blood were found all over the scene had already been found guilty of the murder and sentenced to 30 years.

The case against her was based on ephemeral evidence that must have seemed fantastical even to the Italian authorities. For example, the blanket thrown over the body, which prosecutors said would have been done by a woman, not a man, therefore made her guilty.  Or because, they said, there had to be more than one murderer. Her lapses during the interrogation were turned into proof of guilt rather than the mistakes of a frightened, novice scapegoat.  They concocted a tale of sex, drugs and violence that any fiction writer would have envied, and the British and Italian tabloids lapped it up.

As the character assassination grew more lurid, the tabloids created an alter ego for Amanda whom they named Foxy Knoxy, a promiscuous, drug addicted and drunken party girl.  The young woman they put on trial was Foxy Knoxy, and neither Amanda nor her attorneys could help her.

The jury was not sequestered.  The case was tried by a panel of judges and the verdict, we hear, was not unanimous.  Nevertheless, unless an appeals court overrules the lower court, Amanda Knox will be living a nightmare for the next 26 years at the expense of the citizens of Italy who, by all accounts, are more than willing to pay the cost of housing her in their prison system

What is going on here?  The conviction of this girl was such a transparent travesty that it seems clear that something else must be happening, as though the anger directed against her belonged somewhere else.

When it came to the facts, the guilt or innocence of Amanda Knox was not actually on trial.  It’s more likely that she was a stand-in for long simmering rage in Italy against the U.S. military residing there.

At the end of WWII American soldiers took up permanent residence in Italy, Germany and Japan.  It was the real, in earnest, beginning of the American empire which has since expanded to virtually every corner of the globe.

While host governments rationalize the financial benefit provided by the U.S. military, local citizens generally have an unadulterated and undisguised antipathy.  It is they who are up close and personal with the daily reports of drunken brawling, rape, murder and property destruction, as well as the arrogance and disdain of foreign youth wearing uniforms who treat them with a profound sense of entitlement and disrespect.

No place has been more vocal about their hatred of the chaos that accompanies American military occupation than the residents of Okinawa, Japan.  With good reason, they are so adamant that the Americans go somewhere, anywhere, else that it has even made news in the U.S.

Despite the best, and usually successful, efforts of the military to cover up crimes committed by soldiers against local residents, the only people left in the dark are Americans.  The citizenry of every country housing U.S. soldiers is well aware of atrocities committed by mostly young men who commit criminal acts and are abruptly shipped home and beyond the reach of local authorities.  Our military makes every effort to protect American soldiers from the consequences of their own behavior.

And that’s what they did with the incident of February 3, 1998, in Cavalese, an alpine ski town in Northern Italy.

That was the day that marine pilots flying at 500 to 600 miles an hour and 260 feet off the ground sliced the cable of a gondola carrying 20 skiers down a mountain in the Alps. No one on the gondola survived.  The dead suffered horrific injuries and could only be identified from the effects they were carrying.

The plane few back to base where the pilots initially feigned surprise that they had caused any damage. It was the ‘Who, me?” defense.

Both the plane’s speed and low altitude were violations of military policy, as was the pilot’s destruction of the cockpit video.  The deaths caused by the pilot’s  hot-dogging were violations of Italian law.

The plane’s crew was hustled back to Camp LeJeune, N.C., where the pilot was eventually accused, quaintly, of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman and dismissed from the armed forces.  There was no criminal prosecution and the U.S. government has never compensated the victims.

Needless to say, the Italians were outraged.  Unfortunately for Amanda Knox, it seems they still are.

Blowback faces American citizens around the globe for crimes committed by those acting for the U.S., including its military.  Tourists and travelers from the U.S. are fundamentally not safe in almost any foreign country.  After 9/11, we might ask if our government has foreclosed the option that we can be safe anywhere.

 

Supreme Court’s Gift to Corporations: The U.S. Military

Cameron Salisbury

It’s not easy to establish a clear line in history between the time when American democracy belonged to citizens and when it was lost, but wars give us starting point.

The first wars were fought over ideas. There was the Revolutionary War in the 18^th century and then in the 19^th century, the Civil War ‘preserved the union’ and ended slavery.

In the 20^th century came the wars for national imperialism.  First, Teddy Roosevelt’s wars in the Philippines and Cuba, then WWII which more or less accidentally resulted in imperial expansion.

After 1945, the U.S. was very good at waging war but no longer so good at winning, so we kept practicing.  Wars waged against Korea and Vietnam failed to accomplish anything but massive destruction on somebody else’s land, ratchet up the hate index for the U.S., and give the Pentagon an excuse to exercise its military muscles and escalate its budget.

Increasingly, especially since the implosion of the U.S.S.R. in 1989, the U.S. military has been used as a tool to interfere in the politics of smaller and weaker nations, to intimidate and harass, to make the world safe for corporations, which is also known euphemistically as ‘making the world safe for democracy’ and ‘protecting American interests.’

The U.S. has been the only and unchallenged superpower since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Relieved of the need to protect the world from ‘the communist threat’, citizens expected the defense budget, larger for many decades than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined, to finally yield to common sense.  Americans anticipated a peace dividend in spending that reflected the irrelevance of the military sink hole and left room to support the economy, education, and social programs.

It didn’t happen.  New arguments were created, like the wars in the Middle East, or exploited, like 911 or the earthquake in Haiti, to keep the bloated military budget growing.

First responders, U.S. style, are not the Red Cross and not the Salvation Army, but U.S. soldiers armed to the teeth patrolling the streets of a devastated city, supposedly protecting the dead, dying and starving, but transparently marking territory, protecting the regime from imaginary encroachment by other countries.

One of many riveting scenes during the past few weeks was the black faces and skeletal bodies pressed against the airport fence in Haiti awaiting distribution of the tons of food and water piling up on the tarmac. Face to face with the desperate, on the inside of the fence, was not USAID, not the State Department, and not FEMA, but the U.S. military, locked and loaded, ready to do whatever necessary to keep the provisions safely away from those in urgent need.

The grounds of Haiti’s presidential residence, located directly across the street from a hospital, eventually filled with marines and U.S. helicopters carrying medical supplies that waited indefinitely for distribution as people died and the marines in charge hung out until they had approval from higher-ups.

As reports from the rest of the world trickled in through the BBC and Al Jazeeraz, we learned of the complaints generated in country after country by the high handed arrogance of the U.S. military controllers of Haiti’s one-runway airport who seemed intent on refusing entry to any plane that did not display the insignia of the U.S.A. Eventually, according to one report, the airport was turned into a military base and all non-U.S. flights were rerouted to the Dominican Republic.

We heard the international community voice the fear that the U.S. military was once again using aid as a pretext to extend American imperialism. Sri Lanka’s insistence, after the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004, on prohibiting entry to the U.S. military began to seem quite rational, even to Americans.

Does any of this sound like it could be President Barack Obama’s doing?  He is the calm, reasoned, constitutionally designated commander in chief of the military, but is he in control of it?  Or has the military, like its budget, been allowed to run amok?

Military spending, including discretionary and nondiscretionary is now closing in on 50% of every tax dollar the federal government spends.  Nevertheless, it’s the financing for America’s social fabric, education, social security, Medicare and aid to the poor, that is scheduled for reductions.  The massive, irrational, tax subsidies for the military and defense contractors make most of us unwilling collaborators in the coming reckoning.   (For more dismal information about the U.S. military and the weapons industry go to www.globalissues.org.)

Today, the U.S. military brazenly supports the corporate agenda, from the oil wars in the Middle East to the juntas in Central and South America that regularly replace democratically elected presidents with puppets that international elites, including the U.S. corporate sector, find less likely to support challenges to plutocracy and fascism.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court, demonstrating once again that it is no tool of democracy, handed corporations unlimited control of election advertising in the warped pretense that money equals free speech and that corporations are people.  The case the Court was deciding, whether an ad about Hillary Clinton was prohibited corporate interference in an election, was not directly related to its ruling. Dispensing with precedent on corporate funding of elections was apparently something that the right wing of the Supreme Court just had to get off its chest.

So now, instead of the U.S. Congress being an occasionally unreliable agent of international corporations, it is on track to become a wholly owned subsidiary.

With complete control of Congress comes complete control of the U.S. military, all its appropriations and all its weapons industries.  Today, the sale of armaments internationally is done promiscuously; it is a mere profit center to bolster CEO salaries and shareholder return.

Arms sales are often made to small or developing countries that could never afford the stratospheric expense if not for U.S. foreign aid dedicated to that purpose.

So, when China reacts with unshirted fury to weapons sales to Taiwan, as it did last week, some might wonder who to blame–the U.S. government or the profit motive of Boeing, Lockheed or Microsoft (yes, Microsoft).

Thanks to the Supreme Court, it shouldn’t be too long before that blurry, officially unacknowledged symbiosis between government decision and corporate action resolves into sharp clarity.  China can then confront the less than neighborly behavior of a corporation and it will indeed be the same as taking on the U.S. government, no questions asked.

Just as NAFTA, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been extensions of America, Inc., the new and regulation-free power of corporations to buy elections may create a U.S. military that is another nifty new international profit center for big business.

Multinational corporations are free floating, rootless, entities and will soon be the new sheriffs in town, with a guaranteed, ever expanding, tax payer financed military strong arm.

Local protesters?  Use Homeland Security to finish creating a police state and disappear them.

That pesky open internet?  Get rid of it.

Monsanto’s Round-Up resistant super weeds strangling the food supply?

Drug pusher GlaxoSmithKline hawking another deadly concoction for another made-up disease?

Resistance in the Middle East to Exxon’s coveted oil pipeline through Afghanistan?

Privatize social security?

With control of Congress, corporations will have the money- their own and ours – and the military manpower to handle any challenge.  They will also have the CIA, education, social security, Medicare and the rest of America’s institutions in their hands: All the goals of globalization, thanks to the Supreme’s gift, on an expedited timeline.