BP and Lax Regulations

As if the Gulf Oil spill pouring from Beyond (British) Petroleum’s drilling rig weren’t bad enough, it’s beginning to appear that, as in the financial meltdown, the culprit was lax regulations. Democracy Now featured a segment on May 7 that referred to a May 6 Washington Post exposè revealing that the Minerals Management Service (part of the U.S. Interior Department) essentially gave BP a free pass on its drilling project. No environmental review was required. Here is what the Post said:

“Petrochemical giant BP didn't file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records.
The Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department known for its cozy relationship with major oil companies, says it issued the rule relief because some of the industrywide mandates weren’t practical for all of the exploratory and production projects operating in the Gulf region.”
According to Democracy Now, this “relief” for certain projects is called a “categorical exemption” and it is meant to circumvent cumbersome environmental reviews for SMALL projects like outhouses or hiking trails. In this case, BP was allowed to slip through this little loophole and engage in drilling without a review at all. Its own assessment was used by MMS, to wit, that spills are unlikely, and in the event one should occur, it wouldn’t exceed a few thousand gallons. This is the Big Lie of offshore drilling according to Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, who was interviewed on Democracy Now:

‘Offshore drilling is safe, and anyway it’s not where spills come from.’

So much for that one. The other big problem, according to Mr. Suckling, is the now head of the Interior Department, Ken Salazar. While he was a senator, Salazar was the darling of the oil drilling industry, receiving huge campaign donations from BP itself. When he became Interior Secretary, he promised, according to Suckling, to rein in the permissiveness at Minerals Management, which had routinely been granting drilling permits without reviews. Instead, Salazar has become a major proponent of offshore drilling, and even pushed MMS to pass more permits. In fact, Shell Oil Co. has a permit to begin offshore drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, where frigid waters make spills far worse than in the Gulf (witness what happened with the Exxon Valdez in 1989).

One more rat in the attic. It turns out that a major player in BP’s exploded drilling rig was our old friend Halliburton. They were the ones who did the concrete work that preceded not only the Gulf Oil spill, but another recent one off Australia. Here is what a recent piece in the Huffington Post (reprinted in Truthout) says:

“Giant oil-services provider Halliburton may be a primary suspect in the investigation into the oil rig explosion that has devastated the Gulf Coast, The Wall Street Journal reports …drilling experts agree that blame probably lies with flaws in the ‘cementing’ process - that is, plugging holes in the pipeline seal by pumping cement into it from the rig. Halliburton was in charge of cementing for Deepwater Horizon.” (“Was the Gulf Oil Spill an Act of War? You Betcha,” May 6, 2010)
So there you have it. British Petroleum, which touts itself as a major environmental player (save, of course, for its little oil-sands project in Canada—referred to in my recent blog on “Moral Economics”) ducked under environmental protection rules with a little government help, and used as its cementer, the great Halliburton of Dick Cheney and Iraq fame. Other than a minor environmental catastrophe, what could be bad?

Lawrence DiStasi
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Israel, Iran and Nukes

The latest public flap over the alleged nuclear weapons program engaged in by Iran, coupled with the deafening silence over the fact that Israel already has an estimated 200 nuclear weapons with no inspection by the IAEA, bespeaks more than just hypocrisy. What it also portends is an attack on Iran by Israel, with the possibility of nuclear retaliation by the United States if Iran tries to fight back. This is the opinion of Gareth Porter in a piece published on April 24 (“U.S. Nuclear Option on Iran Linked to Israeli Attack Threat”). In it, Porter noted that the Obama administration’s announced Nuclear Posture Review for the first time states publicly that “it is reserving the right to use nuclear weapons against Iran.” This is because “A war involving Iran that begins with an Israeli attack is the only plausible scenario that would fit the category of contingencies in the document.” Aside from the amazing nature of this proclamation by our so-called peacemaking nation, the question is why? Why would the Obama administration—one which most hopeful people had expected to REDUCE rather than increase the threat of nuclear war—need to publicly announce its right to use nukes, and against a nation which everyone knows has no nukes at all?

According to Porter’s analysis, which seems to make eminent sense, the announced threat is meant to persuade Iran that if Israel attacks its alleged nuclear sites (which Israel has continually threatened to do), the Iranians should not try to respond militarily against Israel. Why? Because in the event of such a ‘treacherous’ Iranian response, the United States could use its nuclear weapons against Iran. Indeed, it specifically reserves the right to do so, threatens to do so. For Iran this means that it now not only has to fear an attack by the most powerful nation in its region, Israel, but an attack by the most powerful nation in the world, the USA, and with its nuclear weapons bristling.

Now here is where it gets really disgusting. Monday, at the conference being held at the United Nations to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), President Ahmadinejad of Iran made a speech in which he fulminated against nuclear weapons themselves (“The nuclear bomb is a fire against humanity rather than a weapon for defense..”) and also criticized the United States for its above-noted threat to his nation. As the AP reported, “Ahmadinejad referred to the new U.S. Nuclear Posture Review’s provision retaining an option to use U.S. atomic arms against countries not in compliance with the nonproliferation pact, a charge Washington lays against Iran.” He also said, “Regrettably, the government of the United States has not only used nuclear weapons, but also continues to threaten to use such weapons against other countries, including Iran.” In response, of course, the United States and several of its European lap-dogs walked out on the Iranian President’s speech. When it came time for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to speak, she directed much of her talk at Ahmadinejad, saying that Iran was “flouting the rules” of the NPT, and trying to “do whatever it can to divert attention away from its own record and to attempt to evade accountability.” She also accused Iran of defying “the Security Council and the IAEA and plac(ing) the future of the nonproliferation regime in jeopardy.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of South Korea added that “the onus is on Iran” to clear up doubts about its uranium enrichment program (it should be noted that so far, all that exists are accusations; Iran is perfectly within its rights as an NPT signer to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes; what it cannot do is use that enriched uranium for nuclear weapons—which our most recent CIA review said it was NOT doing.)

No one, however, mentioned either Israel’s existing nuclear weapons and refusal to join the NPT (no doubts about that), or the similar possession and refusal of Pakistan and India. It’s the unmentionable 2-ton gorilla in the room. For, as Thalif Deen points out in a May 3 Interpress Service article,

“at last month’s nuclear security summit in Washington DC, U.S. President Barack Obama was asked about Israel’s nuclear weapons program. But he diplomatically sidestepped the question when he pointedly told reporters: ‘As far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their (nuclear weapons) program. What I’m going to point to is the fact that consistently we have urged all countries to become members of the NPT. So there’s no contradiction there. [Oh really?] And so whether we’re talking about Israel or any other country, we think that becoming part of the NPT is important.’”
Isn’t that cute? Though the President of the United States thinks it’s “important” to become part of the NPT, he just can’t comment on Israel’s nukes (Why? Would he be struck by lightning? Sent to jail? Caught in his own hypocrisy?). He will say, though, that he has “urged” all countries to join. So again—why won’t our closest ally join? What does Israel have to hide? What options—like using its weapons in a first strike, or obliterating one of its many enemies in the Middle East—does it refuse to give up? Indeed, how is it that the United States, the great peacemaker and promoter of the NPT, not only refuses to abandon its own nuclear arsenal (the Soviet Union no longer exists after all), but specifically claims the right to use nukes against those countries not in compliance with the NPT? (which, we are sure, does NOT refer to Pakistan or India, who never joined; or to North Korea which, though it’s not in compliance, has nukes of its own and that could be messy; could it be Iran?)

In fact, it is not just Iran, but much of the rest of the world that wants such questions answered. At the UN’s NPT Review conference, that is, 118 out of 192 nations demanded that Israel reveal its nuclear weapons program and join the NPT (NB: nations in the NPT which have nukes are pledged to make every effort to get rid of them). The 118 Non-Aligned Movement nations, through their spokesman, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natelagawa, asserted that Israel’s refusal to sign the NPT has exposed the entire region to nuclear threats from “the only country possessing these weapons of mass destruction.” With its “unsafeguarded nuclear facilities and activities of unknown safety standards,” (because by not joining the NPT, Israel does not have to submit to IAEA inspections) Israel’s nuclear program not only exposes its neighbors to great risks, but also threatens a nuclear arms race of “catastrophic regional and international potential.” Such a situation, Natelagawa said, jeopardizes the NPT itself, as well as the proposed creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, something Ahmadinejad also referred to (see Thalif Deen, “Israel, Iran Targeted at Nuke Non-Proliferation Meet,” commondreams.org, May 3, 2010).

What, then, can one say about the prospects for a revitalized NPT—especially in light of the fact that, with a United States assurance of nuclear backing, Israel may even now be planning a military strike against Iran? One would have to say the prospects are dim. Though President Obama seems sincere in his desire to rid the world of these weapons, or at least to bring them under greater control, he also seems hamstrung by the “special relationship” with the nuclear-armed pit bull known as Israel. He seems equally committed to creating a convenient scapegoat of Iran—whose loose cannon of a president, and fundamentalist mullahs in charge, make perfect whipping boys. With such elements in place, and with the United States’ reputation in tatters from a decade of unprovoked attacks against three Islamic nations, one would have to be far more of an optimist than I am to think things nuclear might resolve any time soon. On the other hand, if a sufficient body of world opinion decides to reject blatant nuclear hypocrisy and starts demanding something like full disclosure about nuclear weapons (including those of the thus-far unmentionable nations), it might happen. For our future’s sake, we should all hope and pray that it does.

Lawrence DiStasi

Food, Inc.

I recently watched the documentary, Food, Inc., by Robert Kenner, and I recommend that every person who is brave enough to know about the food he/she eats in America go out today and rent it, order it from Netflix, or get it from your local library (where I got mine; though I saw it first on my local PBS station). Now I, like many of you, have read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation; have read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both of whom star in Food, Inc.); have read many other books on food and genetic engineering. But this documentary packs a more powerful visual and emotional punch than any single book could. That’s because you can read about the horrors of industrial agriculture, of chicken/hog/cattle ‘food operations’ (CAFOs), but until you see one, you can’t really imagine the sheer filth, cruelty and torture imposed on creatures whose health cannot help but be related to our own. Indeed, at one point in the section on chicken farming (one cannot really call it “farming” any more; it is industrialized mass slaughter of the most brutal kind), where a chicken farmer named Carole Morrison, masked to keep from breathing in the dust and feces pervading the place, was culling dead birds from her barn floor (after explaining that because of the large breasts demanded by American fast food, modern chickens have become so top-heavy that their internal organs and bones can’t hold them up and they flop to the floor after a few steps)—I began to weep. My guess is that each person will be moved in this way by a different segment of the film, but my hope is that you’ll stick with it long enough to become outraged. For as the film points out, this story isn’t just about what we’re eating. It’s about what anyone can say about it. And that’s what everyone needs to know: the stranglehold that a few American corporations have over the production and distribution of food (and how that production is, or is not, regulated) in these United States is increasing daily.

It has not always been so. When I was growing up, we bought our chickens from a chicken store in our neighborhood that had live chickens in wooden cages. You selected one, the butcher would slaughter it right there, and you would bring it home to remove the tiny feather quills still in the chicken, clean out the guts, and cook it. You knew what you were eating. But since the beginning of industrial agriculture—which began in the 1930s with fast food drive-ins, and then really exploded when the McDonald brothers brought the factory system into the back of their drive-in restaurant (making each worker do one thing over and over, so unskilled workers could be hired more cheaply and the servers could be dispensed with completely), not just fast food but ALL food grown in America has changed utterly. That’s because of the gargantuan volume of meat and all else that fast-food chains buy. McDonald’s, for instance, is the largest purchaser of ground beef, potatoes and tomatoes in the United States. What they demand is uniformity: all ground beef the same, all potatoes the same variety. And all grown the same way, on a massive scale. The result: in the 1970s, the top five beef packers controlled only 25% of the market; today, the top four control 80% of the market. So virtually all meat is grown (corn-fed) and processed in the same way, and the hamburger that results comes from hugely varied places (and countries), all mixed together into ground beef that has a far higher chance of being contaminated with E. coli than when you were getting your hamburger from one steer part ground right in front of you at your local meat market. Of course, the meat packers know there’s this little problem (more about that later), so rather than change the way beef is fed and medicated and slaughtered, they try technological fixes. One such fix involves washing the beef with ammonia (ammonium hydroxide) in a gleaming stainless steel plant. As the documentary notes in print: “The finished product. Hamburger meat filler that’s been cleansed with ammonia to kill E. coli.” We see this stuff (mashed-up everything-left-over) being packed in plastic-lined boxes, but it doesn’t look like meat at all; it looks like a huge rectangle of white, pasty stuff that resembles glue. And the owner of this plant brags: “Our meat is 70% of the hamburger in the country and soon will be 100%.”

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching part of the film relates to this E. coli problem. Barbara Kowalcyk, a registered Republican, tells the story of her son Kevin, who at age 2 ½ ate some fast-food hamburger in Colorado. Poisoned by E. coli 157H7 (which never grew in the naturally acidic cow rumen before the feedlot revolution, which forces corn into an animal evolved to eat grass), he died in twelve days of kidney failure, begging for water he was not allowed to drink more than a few drops of due to his condition. Since then, Kowalcyk, with her mother, have been haunting the halls of Congress to get legislation passed to implement rules for meat contamination that would allow the USDA, once again, to shut down plants that repeatedly produce contaminated meat (in 1998, the courts ruled that the USDA did NOT have this authority). As of the time the documentary was produced, Kevin’s Law still had not passed the Congress. Kowalcyk is shown testifying:

“It has been seven years since my son died. All I wanted the company to do was say ‘we’re sorry we produced this defective product that killed your child and this is what we’re going to do to be sure it wouldn’t happen again.’ That’s all we wanted. And they couldn’t give me that.”

Moreover, later in the film Barbara Kowalcyk is asked about a specific product that is problematic, and she declines to answer, saying “they have made it against the law to criticize their products.” She cited the Oprah case, wherein a comment about not eating hamburger resulted in a lawsuit that cost the TV star over a million dollars to fight off, as well as a Colorado law making it a “felony under veggie libel law to criticize a product, so you could go to prison…” This sequence ends by noting that the food industry is now proposing laws to make it a crime to photograph a food-processing operation like a feedlot or chicken factory—a law which would have made Food, Inc. an illegal film.

Which is exactly the point. Industrial food corporations do not want American consumers to know where their food comes from (or rather, they want to maintain the illusion of pastoral farms with happy cows). If they did know, if every American watched Food, Inc., the whole sick structure would collapse. Corporate America, therefore, spends billions of dollars lobbying members of Congress for ever-more draconian laws to allow them to do whatever they want, and to restrict investigations into their evil practices. Monsanto (I have just noticed that this pesticidal, genetic-engineering monster now has a website devoted to answering questions about the issues raised by Food, Inc.—indicating that these bastards have been hit hard by the film and will stop at nothing to propagandize against it. See http://www.monsanto.com/foodinc/ ), for example, used to employ Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as one of its lawyers (they have legions of them). Instead of recusing himself (as Stephen Breyer did), Thomas is preparing to hear the latest case against Monsanto, currently making its third appeal in its genetically-engineered alfalfa case. Without Breyer, and with Thomas already in their pockets (he has written key decisions in previous cases favoring his former employer), a decision for Monsanto could end up giving them ownership over the fourth largest crop in the United States (along with their monopoly on soybeans.) For this compassionate purveyor of Agent Orange (the toxic Monsanto herbicide the U.S. Military used 72 million liters of, spraying it over 1 million Vietnamese civilians and 100,000 U.S. troops), it will be business as usual. This means that more and more farmers trying to grow conventional crops, saving seeds as farmers have always done, will be sued by Monsanto for “patent infringement.” Food, Inc., essentially ends with a Monsanto segment about this, interviewing desperate farmers who have been driven out of business by this techno-devil.

The trouble began in 1990, when Monsanto began selling Roundup Ready soybeans (a genetically-altered soybean seed that is able to survive spraying with the Monsanto pesticide, Roundup, while everything else dies). At the time, only 2% of soybeans in the United States contained Monsanto’s patented gene. By 2008, over 90% of soybeans in the U.S. contained it. Worse, Monsanto began sending out its team of 75 thugs to investigate (and intimidate) farmers suspected of saving their seeds. If Monsanto finds the farmer’s field contaminated with its seed (farmers hate such contamination, but are helpless to prevent it), these farmers can then be sued for patent infringement. Most farmers, faced with the grueling prospect of an expensive court fight wherein they have to prove they have not violated Monsanto’s patents (i.e. by intentionally stealing their seed), have quietly given up and succumbed to Roundup Ready seeds. But a few holdouts have been sticking to the old way, using seed cleaners to prepare their saved seeds for planting. Moe Parr, a seed cleaner who depends on traditional farmers who save seed, testifies that his is one of only six seed cleaners left in Indiana (there used to be three in every county, he asserts). He also reminds us that land grant colleges (most state universities) were in part founded to develop seed for their farmers, but “public breeding is a thing of the past.” Because of his alleged role in helping farmers to save seed (and resist Monsanto), Moe Parr was sued by Monsanto “on the basis that I’m encouraging farmers to break the patent by cleaning their own seed.”

Like other farmers, Parr tried to defend himself in a David vs. Goliath fight. The downward spiral progressed from farmers not wanting to be seen with him, to more and more of his money vanishing into court costs and lawyers. Parr is shown answering questions in court after Monsanto subpoenaed all of his financial records. Exposing each farmer who paid him, the records, if elaborated on, would force him to betray his friends. “This essentially puts me out of business,” he says. And in print we read: “Four months later, Moe Parr settles with Monsanto because he can no longer pay his legal bills.” The same scenario is repeated everywhere. Monsanto sues a farmer not because it has a legitimate case, but because it knows it can sustain endless legal costs while its victims cannot. The upshot is clear: Monsanto now owns the soybean, owns corn, and will soon own alfalfa.

There is far more in Food, Inc., but I think you get the idea. A few agribusiness giants now own all food production in this country, and their use of pesticides and other industrial processes is poisoning the crops, the animals, the waterways, the soil, and us. Since agribusiness also owns the Congress and other sectors of government (Anne Veneman, Bush’s Secretary of Agriculture, was on the Board of Directors of Monsanto’s Calgene Corp.), the likelihood of better regulation seems remote.

What can be done? Food, Inc. ends with some useful recommendations, all of which come down to this: know what you’re buying, and signal by your food choices that you reject corporatized industrial agriculture and all it stands for. Buy local if possible. And get involved through websites like the one produced by Organic Consumers: http://www.organicconsumers.org/ . It can’t hurt, and just might push the corporations hard enough to modify and eventually break up their cash cows. Meantime, if you happen to run into one of the CEOs of Monsanto, or Cargill, or Smithfield Corp (they slaughter 32,000 hogs per day in their Tar Heel, NC plant)., or Tyson Foods (they hire ‘farmers’ to raise those breast-heavy ‘chickens’ in dark windowless sheds that hold 300,000 birds; typical salary, $18,000; typical debt, $500,000.) , or McDonald’s, you have my permission and encouragement to give them a piece of your….mind, of course.



Lawrence DiStasi

Goldman: Doing God's Work

I’ve just read over my last blog (July 19 last year) on Goldman Sachs, and it’s déjà vu all over again. Paul Krugman wrote shortly before then that Goldman had been selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to its customers, while at the same time making billions by “selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed.”

The new twist in recent days is that Goldman Sachs was not only doing this, but that it neglected to tell its customers anything about its short selling. Just to keep you updated, “selling short” means that a stock trader bets that a given stock is about to go down—and when it does, he makes as much money as if he bet successfully on it going up. I first learned about this through a stock trader years ago, the new husband of an old friend, who the day I visited their New York apartment, happily informed me that he and his son had just made about $2 million dollars that day. His specialty, “selling short.” Though betting that a stock would go down seemed insane to me, Dick explained it was perfectly legitimate, and smart.

Apparently, the boys at Goldman think the same way. Only, again, they somehow forget to tell their customers about it, i.e., that the securities they’re pushing on them are, in their opinion, doomed and, as a result, they’re secretly selling those same securities short. Worse, in emails that have been made public by the Securities and Exchange Commission (which has brought legal action against Goldman for this type of fraud), Goldman managers have boasted of their cleverness in bilking widows and orphans out of their money. Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman trader, joked: “I’ve managed to sell a few Abacus (the name of the toxic portfolio) bonds to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport, apparently these Belgians adore (them).” (quoted by AP, 4/24/10). Tourre also quoted Dan Sparks, manager of Goldman’s subprime business, as saying that the business “is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!” Ho ho.

Evidently, a hedge-fund manager named John Paulson (his personal income in this hedge business during the crisis amounted to over $10 million a day! according to Gregory Zuckerman in “The Greatest Trade Ever”) helped Goldman select investments for Abacus knowing that it was going to go into the toilet (Paulson put the deal together as a hedge, i.e. betting that the securities would go down), and then pushed the deal to its customers. Those customers, kept in the dark, were mainly European banks who had no idea that the American housing market was so shaky. Goldman managers, like CFO David Viniar, referred to the Goldman strategy as “the big short.” Of course, Goldman is publicly denying that it had organized a strategy of going short, but the firm’s records show otherwise. Together with its role in bringing down AIG, its use of nearly interest-free government funds to make huge profits, and its use of exotic swaps to help Greece disguise its financial problems (while it bet against Greece by shorting Greece’s debt), this makes plain that the premiere investment bank in the world is indeed what Matt Taibbi called it last year: a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” As to the financial sector of which Goldman is the most shining example, its share of domestic corporate profits “never higher than 16 percent until 1986, hit 41 percent in the last decade” (Frank Rich, NY Times, 4/25/10). And you were wondering whatever happened to American manufacturing, to American firms which actually produce something other than fraud?

But the question I want to raise, again, is “who are these people?” What kind of flesh-devouring, soul-killing robots can bear to engage in this kind of criminality? From their point of view, it’s called “enlightened self interest.” From their CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s perspective, they are doing “God’s work.” I suppose if you believe that God is a sadistic, cruel, diabolical destroyer of hopes and dreams, lives and cities and whole countries, a deity who enjoys watching widows and orphans get screwed while wealthy dweebs (just watch them as they testify before the Senate Finance Committee) luxuriate in their pools and palaces, then perhaps it is God’s work. But if you question what kind of nation could allow this to go on, what kind of economic system could foster this kind of cruelty, fraud, inequality and sheer human suffering—then you may be thinking that something more than new regulations or new legislation is going to be needed. What that eventually turns out to be is still not clear. But I know one thing: if I were one of the executives in any of these so-called banks or brokerage houses, I wouldn’t walk too casually or conspicuously down the street these days.

P.S. In their testimony before the Senate yesterday, Goldman execs vigorously disputed the notion that they had an obligation to disclose anything whatsoever to their customers (suckers). Lloyd Blankfein insisted that Goldman was just acting as a marketer, selling the level of risk their customers wanted. In sum, these guys make used-car salesmen seem like (I was going to say Franciscans, but given the odor of priests these days, it might not be such a good metaphor) Mother Theresas.



Lawrence DiStasi

Myriad Genetics Patents Your Genes

I heard it first on the PBS News Hour, and then on CBS’ 60 Minutes on April 4. There is a company named Myriad Genetics, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, that has patented the genes that cause breast and ovarian cancer. They are known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Myriad Genetics also has tests for mutations on these two cancer-predisposition genes, tests that many women like May Girard want to have done so they can know if they are at risk for these cancers. It could save their lives. The problem for Ms. Girard is that Myriad’s BRACAnalysis test is costly—around $3000—and when she tried to find another company to test her for these genes, she was told that only Myriad has the patent so only Myriad can administer the tests. No other company is even allowed to work with these genes. They belong to Myriad. Even though they’re in Ms. Girard’s body, and possibly your body as well? Even so.

The very notion seems bizarre, even impossible. How can a company own your genes? But the grim truth is that biotech companies have been busy buying up genes to the extent that, according to 60 Minutes, some twenty percent of all human genes have been patented so far. That’s 20% of your body that’s now owned by some corporate entity or other. And the rest will no doubt be patented soon.

This was the situation that outraged Ms. Girard and the ACLU (and other groups), which sued Myriad Genetics in court. The good news is that on March 30, a U.S. District Court ruled against Myriad’s exclusive ownership of these genes, and in favor of the ACLU. Judge Robert Sweet said in his ruling, “Because the claimed isolated DNA is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature, it constitutes unpatentable subject matter” (AP, March 30, 2010). That is, companies cannot patent nature—which would seem to be a no-brainer. But to the geniuses of corporate America, it’s anything but. As a lawyer for Myriad, Brian Poissant, said: “This is not nature’s handiwork…this is the hard work of man” (Reuters, March 30). So Myriad’s reaction to the decision was, first, to say that the decision wouldn’t have much effect on its business (only a few of its patents were voided; it holds sixteen more on these genes); and, second, to say that it would ask the Court of Appeals to overturn the decision. Analysts noted that such appeals could keep the case in litigation limbo for years. Which is the reason that securities analysts opined that other companies, though apparently now allowed to produce competing tests for BRCA, will not do so, fearing that the ruling could be overturned by a higher court. Given the conservative makeup of the Supreme Court, this appeared to be a good bet.

So there you have it. The code to your body is fast becoming the patented property of corporate America—in much the same way that much of your food, when it is genetically modified, becomes the property of giant corporate monstrosities like Monsanto or Cargill. As to the wisdom of allowing the moral degenerates who run American business to own exclusive rights to the very template of your body, consider the advice that was given before Myriad ran into the above-named lawsuit. “My top idea for 2009 is Myriad Genetics” said one Mike Cintolo. In the Cabot Market Letter, Cintolo looked at what he called “the leader in the new field of cancer predisposition testing….Myriad Genetics has five tests on the market (covering colon, breast, ovarian, and skin cancer) that tell a patient if his genes make it more likely that he’ll get various types of cancer.” Which is to say, Myriad owns this stuff, and, medical ethics to the contrary, it ain’t giving it away. In addition, Myriad’s CEO and President, Peter Meldrum, was chosen best biotech CEO in 2008 by Adam Feuerstein. Why? For “pulling off one of the smartest drug licensing deals of all time.” What Meldrum did was sell Myriad’s already faltering Alzheimer’s treatment, Flurizan, to a Danish drugmaker, Lundbeck, in a deal that included “an up front $100 million payment. Unfortunately for Lundbeck, just a month later Flurizan went belly-up in a Phase III trial, but Myriad got to keep the non-refundable payment (the $100 million), which covered the cost of conducting a Phase III trial of the doomed drug. Meldrum effectively passed Myriad’s problem drug to Lundbeck and got $100 million in the process.” (http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/myriads-meldrum-picked-best-biotech-ceo/2008-12-18?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss&cmp-id=OTC-RSS-FB0 ).

In short, the clever (read 'sociopathic') head of Myriad gets high praise and adulation for what? for his ability to hoodwink another company into giving him $100 million for a drug he knew was doomed. Top businessman, CEO of the year! So what do you think? Feel comfortable entrusting your genes, your very life to the likes of Myriad Genetics and its CEO Meldrum? I mean, he’s probably a pillar of his community and his church as well. What could be bad?



Lawrence DiStasi

CSI: Vatican City

Crime scenes are so hairy
And sometimes so scary
That only the intrepid should go
Unless it is a new TV show
But real ones are more garish
In your favorite parish
Because they really strike home
When viewed by the Pope in Rome


All right, my mother told me not to talk of religion or politics, but these have recently fused; politics, religion…and crime. I know that my mother would approve this essay.

Pope Benedict, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, and a uniformed Hitler Youth decades before wearing robes, has, for the record, affirmed that sexual abusers should be reported to the police. Somehow, that message has not been executed effectively, if at all. For Bible readers, Matthew, Mark and Luke all recorded the parable of the coin where we are (advised, admonished, instructed, ordered) to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. That corroboration appears to support the history. I highlight this parable since the Church is struggling with the concept of Caesar and cannot balance secrecy with justice. The parable of the coin is the story behind the daily news of crisis in the Church.

While the Pope has gone on line to instruct bishops to report sexual abuse violations to the police, there are obvious lapses that continue to surface on this pool of corruption. Most recently, we have seen that a serial offender, Rev. John M. Fiala, accused of sexual abuse and the use of a handgun to threaten a 16 year old victim was allowed to languish in a series of 12 priestly assignments in Nebraska and Texas. Archbishop Gomez is being sued for his role in the cover-up while Fiala served in the Archdiocese of San Antonio. Pope Benedict, only days ago, appointed Archbishop Gomez to the Archdiocese of LA. How can the Pope condemn “gossip” about himself while appointing Gomez to the archdiocese of Los Angeles?

Archbishop Gomez, according to the 12 April 2010 Los Angeles Times has stated that he does not believe in the separation of church and state. Here we go again. The state as well as the Pope requires that crimes be reported to the police. Sexual abuse, including rape by priests is criminal, especially when the victims are children who, regardless of circumstances, are unable to consent. Crimes are to be reported to police and some in the hierarchy have failed to do so as is obvious in the settlement of civil cases amounting to some $680 million in the archdiocese of LA alone. What is it that these bishops including Gomez do not understand about the parable of the coin? Why is it that the Pope does not understand that Gomez is tainted due to his handling of Fiala? Does the Pope understand that his appointments color his own reputation?

The Pope has complained that criticism of the Church is unfair and yet it is his job to root out the abusers that have robbed the Church of her reputation and more. The critics only point out the failings and the hypocrisy of the hierarchy. Critics do not violate the law. Archbishop Gomez has publicly chastised politicians who accept the law regarding abortion. He is willing to withhold Communion from politicians who uphold the law but did he forbid Rev. Fiala to give and receive Communion? How, in good conscience, is a criminal given preference over one who upholds the law. Are rapists and abusers preferred because they are priests? The politicians are only giving unto Caesar. Guilty priests are committing crimes that damage the very youth that could have been healthy members of the Church. Instead, the hierarchy has remained silent on crimes that reduce the Church and create hurt that transcends generations and has, instead, become politically noisy over abortion. Abortion is abhorrent, but legal. Sexual abuse is abhorrent and illegal. This should not be difficult.
Instead of protecting all the children, the hierarchy has protected the very priests who have robbed the Church of her name. This is a cruel reward for the hundreds of priests whom I have known over my past 74 years. They were brave in combat in Vietnam and supportive and understanding in everyday crises. They were holy men who were sometimes learned and good teachers and sometimes humble and simply models of human behavior to emulate. They represent the vast majority of clerics and yet have been tarnished by criminals and cover-up.

By protecting her criminals, perhaps the hierarchy has tried to protect the reputation of the Church, but we all know that the cover-up of crimes is a crime in itself that further damages the Church. Would it not be more effective as well as more ethical and legally defensible to immediately suspend an accused priest and to have all religious and lay members report suspected crimes to the police who are trained and equipped to investigate crimes? Give unto Caesar and get back your reputation. Pedophiles are not curable and if the hierarchy continues to confuse sins with crimes, it will continue to seek sacramental confessions and reassignments instead of protecting children while obeying the law of Caesar. That will destroy the Church and continue to raid its treasures for a failed policy that, frankly, has more the scent of sexism and an old boys’ club than a path to redemption.

People are leaving the Church in high numbers to seek spirituality elsewhere or nowhere. I refuse to do so. This is my Church. It has a rich history of saints and sinners although it is sometimes slow to heal itself. The Spanish Inquisition should have proven to us that the Church is not well equipped to conduct investigations. After all these years she remains secret and silent about real crime and shuns the Caesar who has the people, training and other resources to root it out. We deserve better. My meager alms are better used to support corporal works of mercy instead of court defenses and the Church might also support corporal works of mercy by visiting imprisoned priests instead of pretending that crimes are mere sins in its power to be forgiven. Some sins are crimes and some are not, but all crimes are sins. Sins of commission by criminal priests cannot be followed by sins of omission by the hierarchy with the expectation that all is well. CSI: Vatican City is a hopeless show with some bad actors and it is losing audience. Bring on the clowns and distract us from this tragedy.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
15 April 2010

The Canary Always Dies

Short is the life of a canary
And that is sort of scary
Because they help all the miners
And their potential piners
By breathing in gases
That can sometimes get past us
So the bird craps out in its cage
And miners die of old age


Our world is becoming toxic in so many ways that we need to give recognition to the canaries in our midst. This piece is at once both philosophical and specific to some of the toxins that have become increasingly common and deadly. Some toxins are literal like those surrounding Kettlemen City, California. Residents have complained of high incidences of birth defects including cleft palate, cancers, and myriad other physiological problems for the city situated about 3 miles from the largest toxic dump in the West. Their “canaries” were mostly the unborn and infants that had no voice. Given that most of the town speaks Spanish or English with an accent, maybe the voices of the older residents are not easily understood. Some investigators say that nearby I 5 may be the culprit and not the toxic dump. It is amazing that we cannot use our considerable science resources to pin down the causes. But, who cares about canaries anyway?

We have all read recently of the invasion of Starbucks in the State of Washington by armed coffee drinkers. It seems that self-protection from over-caffeinated patrons needs to be balanced by over-caffeinated gun toters. In this case are we spinning the chambers to see who becomes the first canary? Can we already see that this is folly waiting for a volley, or do we need a victim?

More recently, we have seen a return of blatant racism in a Wal-Mart where a 16 year old used the public address system to order blacks out of the store. He is being charged. However, in demonstrations all last summer and most recently in protest of health insurance reform, the racism was equally blatant with effigy hangings of our president; screaming of angry and threatening epithets at Black members of Congress; sending symbolic nooses and gallows to Democrats, especially those of color. None have been charged. Who will be the first canary to die for this behavior?

Dr. George Tiller, who provided medical abortion services, was murdered in church by Scott Roeder, a person claiming to be acting for God to prevent killings. Tiller was a canary, but I see no mobilization to purge the toxins from our midst. I have never met a person who admitted to liking abortion, but how can anybody say he is pro-life and murder another person in cold blood? What good is the warning of a canary if the mine is not purged of the toxins? Yes, Roeder has been charged, but the rhetoric of talk radio and extreme continues to call for the “elimination” of all opposition.

In anger for the passage of the health insurance reform bill, Rush Limbaugh called for the “elimination of the bastards” that passed the legislation. How can we not understand that this is an incitement to violence. Rush has many followers and is the most prominent voice of the Republican party and yet nobody in that party has publicly condemned his incitement.
Sarah Palin has similarly called on followers to “reload” and literally used crosshairs to point to those Democrats she wants to eliminate at the polls. “Open carry” rallies are being organized across this nation to support gun rights and also to intimidate leaders and citizens alike. And it is not, I suspect, promoting bird shot to kill the canaries. These canaries are (currently) living and breathing humans who are increasingly at risk from one or more unbalanced and angry and irresponsible leaders and rabble-rousers and or followers. Who will be the next canary? Remember that the canary always dies as it gives a warning to us miners. Are we going to purge the mine or are we simply going to keep burying our canaries?


Peace,
George Giacoppe
24 March 2010

Moral Economics

The financial crisis in the world, (and “crisis” is a soft term; many call it a “collapse” or an “explosion”), has stimulated renewed thought about what is wrong not only with our financial system, but with the entire system of so-called free-market capitalism that has dominated our planet since the fall of Russian communism, and for centuries before. Works like the essays and talks of Kamran Mofid, the recent book by Curtis White (The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature, 2009), and the ongoing series of projects by Michael Albert of Z-Net (Participatory Economics) and Joel Kovel (Eco-Socialism), are some of the many initiatives in this direction. Here I’d like to focus on just two—the writings of Curtis White and Kamran Mofid—because they seem to dovetail into a common diagnosis of what’s wrong, and a common cure: a new infusion of morality, via spiritual and/or aesthetic means, into our economic and social life.

What this suggests is what many have analyzed as being at the heart of the aforementioned collapse: a complete lack of moral or ethical constraints in the hearts and minds of those, mainly bankers and traders on Wall Street, who knowingly engaged in practices that nearly brought down the entire system. With no concern for anything beyond their own enrichment, such people and institutions made a mockery of the so-called “invisible hand” of the free market that was supposed to regulate economic behavior (the failure of government agencies to pass and enforce regulation can be seen as yet another sign of this moral failure.). Hence the search for a new moral basis for human activity, one that would go beyond the idea that has reigned in the recent past—that humans are rational actors simply and exclusively motivated by the desire for money to obtain the goods that alone signify well-being and security. Aside from the fact that real security is impossible in a constantly changing world, the problem raised by both White and Mofid is that humans are far more than economic beings; they are equally, if not moreso, relational, moral and aesthetic beings. Any system, like capitalism, that ignores or denies these aspects of humanity—the reason for the denial being that taking morality or beauty into account would put capitalists at a disadvantage in the race for profits—is falsifying human life and leading humans and all other beings to disaster. As White puts it: “What is potentially fatal about our current situation is that in it an economic system has become the entirety of the social system.” And clearly, the crisis in the ecology of the planet, the degradation of land, oceans, and the atmosphere itself, much of it due to industrial practices in the service of capitalism, greatly increases the conviction that something in the system is seriously out of whack.

To begin with Kamran Mofid (see www.globalisationforthecommongood.info/) , his approach is basically to critique capitalism’s disregard for individuals, for cultures and civilizations that differ from those of the advanced industrial nations and their promotion of the neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation, low taxation, and free trade. Both a trained economist and a minister, he calls for a new kind of “ethical capitalism.” By this he means one that would have to answer questions such as: What (other than rampant consumerism and endless growth) is the source of happiness and well-being? What does it mean to be a human being living on a spaceship with finite resources? How can the global financial system become more responsive and just? How can the world make the global trade system more equitable and sustainable? How can society overcome poverty and scarcity with limited global resources? What religious or spiritual variables should be considered in economic/business ethics and economic behavior? The basic idea is that through training, both at the university and lower educational levels, humans might be educated to see that, first, the idea of a value-free economics is false. The morality that should undergird economics, and everything else, is the Golden Rule: Do unto others (including non-human others) as you would have them do to you. With humanity respected as the center of creation, the goal of any economy would then be to sustainably improve human well-being and quality of life, always taking account of the fact that real biophysical limits exist to the expansion of the market economy. With this in mind, Mofid argues that the earth needs something like the central reserve banks to look after “shares of the Earth’s ecological capacity, not just interest rates and the money supply.” An economy founded on and regulated by such principles, Mofid argues, would recognize the rights of all humans and all species to their place in the biosphere. In this effort, scientists morally committed to protecting the global commons would receive priority for research funds. The question, of course, reduces to a simple one: could such measures make possible an ethical, profitable, efficient and sustainable capitalism?

Where Mofid seems driven by a vision that capitalism might be morally brought under control, Curtis White, while also considering this question, moves well beyond it. As an environmentalist (he is first and foremost a professor of English in Illinois), White argues that the environmental movement, in its search for “sustainable” fixes to the capitalist system, is actually mitigating and even excusing the worst excesses of capitalism. It is operating under the illusion (the lies it tells itself) that it can reach an “accommodation with that form of market economics that we call capitalism.” White, in virtually every chapter, undermines and refutes that illusion. Capitalism, he says, has its own ethical core, and to deviate from it would make it no longer capitalism. Much of his critique demonstrates what that ethical core of capitalism—animated by the “Barbarian Heart” of his title—really is. Though each one of us has an element of this within us, modern capitalism embodies it most nakedly as “the willingness to pursue self-interest through violence with the hope of plunder while being steadfastly indifferent to the consequences of its activities for others, and, especially, for the natural world…” Herein lie the core values of a system we all recognize, and whose truth was demonstrated to us most vividly in the last few years: self-interest, violence and plunder, and indifference to the consequences of its actions to life and the planet itself. White presents us with telling examples of this: Goldman Sachs persuading AIG to sell it credit default swaps (insurance on its wild, sub-prime bets), knowing full well that a collapse was coming and that in the coming collapse, these debts owed by AIG would bring it and possibly the whole financial system down; the 2007 decision of British Petroleum to reverse its announced “green” policy by agreeing to develop 54,000 square miles of virgin Canadian forest to extract oil from tar sands, knowing full well that the CO2 released (100 million tons annually) would keep Canada from meeting its Kyoto targets, and knowing also that ground water pollution would be so extensive that tailing ponds to hold it would cover 20 square miles; the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, created by pesticide runoff from corn farms draining into the Mississippi River, thus creating a downstream graveyard of crabs, shrimp, fish and all the once-rich marine life of the Gulf. White then points out how such decisions relate to capitalism’s reigning creed: profit is not simply an option, it is a non-negotiable demand; and what modern capitalism has excelled at in its compulsive and compulsory race for profits is the distancing of the violence this involves: “ the genius of capitalism’s unique form of barbarity is that the effects of its pillaging are usually at a distance.” What farmer in Illinois, that is, when he plants his corn in April, considers the resultant “crab holocaust” in the Gulf of Mexico? What corporation cares about the pollution or worker deaths arising from its operations in China or Mexico or Haiti?

White, then, sees no future in trying to modify or ameliorate the damage done by capitalism; it is genetically, fatally flawed. For even on its own terms, capitalism—which loves to call itself “free-market capitalism”—violates its own free-market principles, and misrepresents its own founders like Adam Smith. Smith, White reminds us, wrote in large part to urge that capitalism’s excesses needed to be controlled; it was for this reason that he urged that corporations compete with each other, i.e., so that they might be diverted from directing their violence and pillage at workers and consumers, and for the State to control capitalism’s monopolistic tendencies. More telling is White’s argument that, though conservatives love to extol the virtues of free markets and personal responsibility, both turn out to be myths. The capitalist world is one in which no one takes responsibility for anything: your mortgage is too big for your income? your car is unsafe at any speed? too bad. Caveat emptor. As for “free” markets, White points out that the real truth is that everyone fears them: “a pension plan is a strategic retreat from the Market God, a look to the time when one is free from its “capriciousness and cruelty.” As for corporations, “the very point of a corporation is to achieve some degree of price control and not be exposed to the famous invisible, dead hand of the pitiless market.” Though White doesn’t mention corporations like Halliburton or Boeing or any of the pirates who lobby for military contracts so as to be free from bidding mistakes (read ‘cost overruns,’ as in the current doubling of the cost of the F-35 Fighter, built by Lockheed Martin, to over $100 million each!), their allergy to and avoidance of their beloved free market has long been legendary.

White also takes on “externalities,” capitalism’s term for those consequences of its operations that it refuses to take responsibility for. But it is not simply the well-known externalities of the rape of the natural world, the removal of whole mountaintops to mine coal, the pollution of ground water and the choking of oceans with islands of plastic White attends to. For him, poverty and war are also capitalism’s “externalities:”

“Poverty is not a fact of nature, it too is an externality. It is and always has been a product of economic systems, and that has been so since the earliest slave economics of the ancient world, the feudal peasant economies of the Middle Ages, the colonial economies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the wage-based economies of the last two centuries….It [capitalism] is maintaining poverty as a necessity of its own economic structures. As David Ricardo, the pioneering economist, said in 1920, “There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down.” Similarly, war is not a decision made by political leaders purely out of a desire to protect the lives of citizens. It is an economic necessity for those who feel that—in the case of Iraq—not to have war would result in the loss of control over natural resources, markets, production capacity, and ultimately profits.”

And of course, though their hero Adam Smith argued that the State’s proper function was to regulate corporations so that their tendencies to maximize profits through monopolies and wage slavery could be controlled, White points out that in our modern capitalist democracy, corporations and their lobbying armies “seek to undercut legitimate state function as Smith presented it by essentially buying up the state by, specifically, making politicians dependent on corporate campaign contributions.” The recent Supreme Court decision can only make this “buying up of the state” many times worse.

The result is that pleading with corporations to help save the redwoods or reduce carbon emissions is like spitting into the wind. What environmentalists should be working toward, in White’s view, is a complete reversal of the system, including the ethic that has made money the measure of all things: “Money under capitalism represents a fundamental inversion of value. Instead of money representing things, things come to represent so much money.” What environmentalists, all of us, should be working towards is an inversion of the money inversion: trying to create a culture in which things—valuable things, beautiful things, natural things—are more important than money.

Here is where White’s prescription comes in—though it should be said that he is not as sanguine as this might make him sound. He admits that all of us, not just capitalists, are endowed with a Barbaric Heart. The solution, then, lies in the human heart, in reversing the “spiritual impoverishment” that has reigned during the last 200 years of industrial capitalism. Rather than allowing ourselves to be treated like “automatons” (the industrial production line, not to mention the modern office cubicle, does just this), humans must confront/replace the economic “beast” with something like beauty, or spirit, the dignity of “things”. As White puts it, “environmentalism should look to create a common language of Care (a reverence for and commitment to the astonishing fact of Being) through which it could begin to create alternative principles by which we might live.” And here, as noted above, White’s prescriptions, though more radical and pessimistic, begin to jibe with those of Kamran Mofid noted above. Such principles of life would answer questions like: “What does it mean to be a human being? What is my relation to other human beings? What is my relation to Being as such, the ongoing miracle that there is something rather than nothing?” This cannot be done easily. It will require insistence and refusal—“refusal to be mere creatures, mere functions of a system we cannot in good conscience defend.” In this, one hears echoes of another radical who, in December of 1964, stood in Sproul Plaza in Berkeley California, and said something similar:

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Though Curtis White is not Mario Savio, and the 1960s have long since passed into legend, his message is similar. The workings of the capitalist machine, workings that it cannot change, have become odious, with the humans operating under the system allowing themselves to be shaped in its image, ethically, morally, spiritually. Such a distortion of humanity can only be done when humans lie to themselves. For White, that is the key: the lying and self-deception must stop. That is what he dedicates his book to—the end of lying—by the government and its business cronies, by the environmental movement, and by all of us individually and collectively. The first move in that larger, and, it must be said, daunting project, must be the end of self-deception—both about our complicity, and about what is at stake if we allow the beast to go unchallenged.



Lawrence DiStasi

Israel's Latest Insult

As almost everyone must know, the latest episode in the saga of Israeli contempt for the United States (literally, the hand that feeds this beast), exploded recently when Israel announced, at the very moment when Vice President Joe Biden was in Israel trying to pave the way for newly-announced peace negotiations, that it was building 1600 new dwellings in the area of East Jerusalem historically occupied by Palestinians. These will be illegal (International intergovernmental organizations such as the Conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, every major organ of the United Nations, and the European Union have declared that the settlements are a violation of international law. see wikipedia) dwellings for Israeli settlers—the most rabidly anti-Palestinian, violent members of the Israeli nation. The announcement clearly took Biden by surprise, and he responded with appropriate umbrage. So, in subsequent days, did the State Department, announcing that Secretary of State Clinton had upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (himself the most right-wing head of state Israel has had in a long time) for the “insult” to American peace-making attempts. More tellingly, perhaps, the American military, in the persons of Admiral Mike Mullen and General David Petraeus pointed out the same thing to Israel that Biden had: Israel’s actions, by further inflaming anti-American hatred among Muslims, endanger American troops in the Middle East. One might add that they also endanger American lives in general, both at home, and abroad.

None of this seems to matter, of course, to the zealots now in power in Israel, and their supporters in the United States. The pro-Israel lobby has been ringing the phones off the hook complaining about President Obama’s “anti-Israel policies” and even his alleged hatred of Israel and love for the Palestinians. This in the face of Obama’s having bent over backwards to curry favor with AIPAC during his presidential run, and for his recurrent announcements of the inseparable bonds joining the two nations. But for the pro-Israel lobby, nothing an American president does is ever good enough. It is not enough that for 60 years American presidents have been virtual handmaidens to Israel’s aggression against Palestinians; have pretended not to notice that Israel, alone among Middle Eastern nations, has developed nuclear weapons and now has a stockpile of more than 200 of the most advanced of them; and have supplied Israel with billions upon billions in military aid, to the point where it is now the 5th most powerful military on the planet—this with a tiny population of 5 million or so. Nor is it enough that American administrations have blocked all sanctions against Israel’s war crimes via its veto in the United Nations Security Council, and have propagandized almost as feverishly as Israel itself to characterize Palestinians and Arabs/Muslims in general as terrorists. No, it will apparently never be enough until every last Palestinian is hounded and terrorized and starved sufficiently to abandon the entire territory which Israel claims as its own—all of historic Palestine, which Israeli Zionists call Eretz Israel: greater Israel. That is the plan, and the United States of America is expected to go along with it, help implement it, no matter the danger to its own national interest and the safety of its citizens. To not do so is to be accused of being “anti-Semitic” by the pro-Israel lobby: AIPAC, the ADL (anti-defamation league), AIPAC-loyal Democrats in Congress, the propagandists on Commentary Magazine and in the general media, and on and on.

One example of this was the reaction of U.S. Representative Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) to the State Department’s criticism of Netanyahu; she called it an “irresponsible overreaction.” This was about the same as the Anti-Defamation League’s criticism, which called it a “gross overreaction” (could it be that the two worked out their language together?). No doubt more colorful and extreme language will be forthcoming. So will more extreme pressure on both Democrats in the Congress (a huge percentage of their funding comes from American Jews), and the Obama administration. Whether it will be able to weather the storm, maintain its perfectly legitimate stance, and/or pressure Israel to pull back from its illegal and inflammatory settlement activity, is an open question. But as Chris Hedges wrote recently on TruthDig, the current flap has inspired a perhaps more dangerous dilemma: it has put Liberal Jews on the Spot. Hedges means not only liberal Jews in the United States, but those in Israel as well—people like A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and the novelist Amos Oz. These are the people who have traditionally “anguished” over Israeli crimes, but taken a kind of strange pride in their anguish. As Norman Finkelstein described it in Hedges’ article, their stance said, “Isn’t it beautiful, the Israeli soul, how it is anguished over what it has done?” But the report of the classic Jewish liberal, Judge Richard Goldstone, whose Goldstone report on the Israeli invasion of Gaza noted the disproportionate military force used against Hamas militants and the failure to take adequate precautions to protect the civilian population, has blown the cover of these liberals. If a man who calls himself a Zionist, a man whose daughter moved to Israel, a man who sits on the board of governors of Hebrew University in Jersusalem and who has an honorary degree from that university—if such a man can condemn the Gaza invasion in such terms, and even indict Israel for its continuing occupation, its blockade, its torture of Palestinians, its willful decimation of their economy, and its erection of the so-called “security wall” creating an apartheid state—then Jewish liberals can no longer take refuge in their traditional anguish. As Finkelstein says:

“Goldstone did not perform the role of the Jewish liberal, which is to be anguished, but no consequences. And all of a sudden Israeli liberal Jews are discovering, hey, there are consequences for committing war crimes….’you have to go to the criminal court.’” (from Chris Hedges, Israeli Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot, TruthDig, 3/15/2010).

In short, if liberal means belief in the rule of law, then the Goldstone Report makes clear that “it is impossible to reconcile liberal convictions with Israel’s conduct.” Of course, many groups both within Israel and in the United States have known this for a long time. Many of my heroes in the American Jewish community, people like Noam Chomsky, Barbara Lubin, Norman Finkelstein, Dennis Bernstein and Nora Barrows Friedman of KPFA’s Flashpoints, and many many others, have for years researched and publicized and condemned Israeli brutality toward Palestinians. Many groups and individuals inside Israel itself have done the same thing, risking their positions and lives to condemn their own government’s policies: peace groups like B’Tselem, the New Israel Fund, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, as well as countless scholars like Uri Avnery, and young people—the so-called refuseniks—who refuse compulsory military service. The Israeli government has, to be sure, noted all this, and has recently undertaken a crackdown on all such groups, including NGOs trying to help the Palestinians survive. Whether it will succeed in silencing all dissent and aid within the country is not yet resolved.

What the two initiatives suggest, however, is that the right-wing zealots in Israel are gaining ground, and seem to be willing to risk alienating even the United States in their push to ethnically cleanse the territory they see as theirs by biblical right. Any effort by outside parties, such as the Obama administration, to seek peace—even so minimal and fraudulent a peace as the “peace process” has sought over the years—clearly thwarts this long-term goal. The only question that remains is the simple and obvious one: how long will the U.S. government tolerate the preferencing of this so-called ally over all other national interests, including the safety of its own citizens? How long will campaign contributions from wealthy American Jews so distort the political process that it puts the entire nation at risk? How long will government officials who take the oath of office to defend and protect this nation violate that oath by ignoring, and even amplifying obvious threats to its well-being and the well-being of its citizens? Does Obama have the courage to take this on, to threaten the cutoff of all aid if the insult is not rectified, if Israeli violations of international and humanitarian law are not stopped? The next few months should be very instructive in this regard.



Lawrence DiStasi

FOX uber alles

One of the most disturbing pieces of news I’ve read in a long time came from a poll about trust in news organizations. As Andy Barr, of Politico, reported on January 27, Fox is now the most trusted TV news network in the nation. That’s right, in a nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters conducted by Public Policy Polling, the home of Hannity and O’Reilly and Glenn Beck ranked HIGHEST in TRUST, at 49%, of any news network. It beat out CNN, trusted by only 39%, and the three “major” networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, none of whom even reached the high thirties (NBC led at 35%. Apparently, PBS wasn’t even included.)

For anyone who values accuracy, for anyone who values actual objective reporting rather than slash-and-burn “opinion” growled by conservative curs like the three mentioned above, the results of this poll are more than befuddling; they are alarming in the extreme. For what this confirms is what many of us have suspected for many years: Americans have now lost all connection with reality (the contempt of the Bush Administration for “reality-based” opinion seems prescient here), and prefer to be roused out of their shopping stupor by rabid demagogues. Americans do not have the patience to read; they do not want to be bothered with “facts.” They want someone to tell them what to think and how to think and to entertain them with simplistic savagery and rant that can penetrate their beaten-down skulls. They want quick solutions to complex problems that any four-year-old can understand. They want to know who the bad guys are and who the good guys are, and a program for rounding up and eliminating the bad—starting with the eggheads in government who make them feel stupid.

So here’s the situation. We now have many of the ingredients in place for an eruption of mob agitation and anger similar to the ones that erupted in Europe in the 1930s. We have an economic collapse. We have urban bankers receiving huge bailouts from a government that seems to be in their pockets, while average people get stuck with the bill—those who still have jobs and can pay the bill, that is. We have a nation reeling from the offshoring of the very economic engine—manufacturing—that brought it to the top of the global economy. We have corporations handed a Supreme Court decision that promises them even more power to buy politicians and collude in looting the national treasury than they already have. We have states going broke, major corporations going on the dole, the federal government going ever deeper into debt, and the stage set for a collapse of the dollar that could make savings and earnings worthless. And we have half the world pissed off at the USA for its years of high-handed domination of the global economy and the corresponding ruin and/or enslavement of countless local economies—not to mention its overwhelming military power and political meddling in nations all over the globe. And what Fox-devoted Americans want is a simple and easy solution to these problems, something that will restore quickly, easily, directly the “greatest nation ever” to its rightful place as NUMBER ONE.

In short, the ingredients of scalding discontent are in place (and more can be added at a moment’s notice via flood, storm, earthquake, or even a nice little military incident ginned up to get the blood boiling) and require only a little spark, a nice scapegoat towards which the good citizens of the nation can direct their wrath. These are the things that Fox does so well. Its pundits can rail about foreigners, immigrants, ragheads and assorted third-worlders without even a script. Its slanted news coverage can highlight the most wacky of paranoid fantasies—they’re arming, they’re developing nukes, they’re all on welfare, they’re sneaking onto our airplanes, into our subways, our ports, our ships, our nuclear plants—and make them reverberate throughout the land with the utter simple-mindedness and ferocity that its audience requires.

You get the picture.

Fortunately, we still lack the demagogue who can bring all this together. We still have a few reasonable voices counseling caution (and an unknown number who don’t watch networks at all). We still have no logical and helpless-enough target against which to direct the collective anger. But these things were lacking in Nazi Germany before 1930 as well. Then along came a house painter with a knack for boiling brain cells with his very voice. And the convulsion started.

Will it start here? Perhaps it already has. Just think of it: 49% of those polled said they actually trusted the Fox News Network. Fox more than any other. Fox über alles.

Can the bonfires be far behind?



Lawrence DiStasi

Stop the Games

Barack Obama and his Democratic Party colleagues are reeling. With the Republican victory in the special Senate election in Massachusetts, they now have no hope whatever of putting together the “required” super-majority of sixty votes to pass healthcare. Indeed, with the loss of the “sure” seat long occupied by Ted Kennedy, the Democrats may not be able to pass any legislation whatever. The President tried to address this situation in his State of the Union Address this week, haranguing and sometimes begging Republicans to stop being obstructionists and start being bipartisan. He reportedly did the same thing in his meeting with Republicans on January 28, accusing them of being obstructionist for political purposes and putting party loyalty before the good of the nation, and appealing to them to at least vote for the measures—tax cuts, support for states going bankrupt—that would normally be Republican pet projects. It appears, in short, that the President has learned almost nothing in the year since he’s been in office, and still sees himself as the great statesman who can bring the warring parties together under his bipartisan leadership.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Republicans have made no secret of their intention to bring the president down, to make him fail, and their equal determination to sacrifice the country they profess to serve in order to do it. This has been the Republican strategy since at the least the days of Richard Nixon, although it became most extreme during the Reagan-Newt Gingrich-George W. Bush era.

This being the case, it simply defies belief that Democrats, especially those in the Senate (backed no doubt by the Administration), continue to try to muster up the “super-majority” they say they need to pass legislation. Normally, legislation simply requires a simple majority—51 votes—which the Democrats could muster even in a flu epidemic. What they need 60 votes for is to override a Republican filibuster. The Republicans have threatened such a filibuster every day since the President was elected, a move which means that Senators can take the floor and read from a telephone book, one after another, for days and weeks on end, to prevent any vote from taking place. By doing this—or rather by threatening to do this—they force the pusillanimous Democrats to abandon every progressive measure they were elected to implement, in order to get the votes of heretofore mealy-mouthed mid-west senators like Max Baucus and Kent Conrad, or literal traitors like Joe Lieberman. They can also try to ass-kiss the so-called “liberal” Republicans like Olympia Snowe of Maine. It is a humiliating and doomed strategy, as a full year of trying to craft a “passable” health-care reform bill plainly indicates. And now, with the loss of the Massachusetts seat, the doom is palpable.

There is only one solution. Abandon the ‘super-majority’strategy. A bill can be passed with 51 votes. Therefore, the Senate should simply begin the process of bringing the bills that they truly support—and healthcare should include a public option—to the floor of the Senate for a vote. Call the Republicans’ bluff. Force them again and again to either vote on the healthcare bill, and all the other bills that are in process, or to filibuster. Force them to go public with their idiotic strategy of reading phone books on the floor of the senate while the country goes down in flames. Force them to take responsibility for bringing the business of the country—the business they are sworn to act upon—to a halt. And then have the President, with his bully pulpit, call them out daily for their obstructionism. For having no policy but a policy of “no.”

Yes, it will take some guts. Yes, it will require that the Democrats take the risk that the public will blame them as well. But the risk is worth it, especially from a position of action. This nation is being held hostage by a group of yahoos who wish only to win back their majority. The health of actual people, of actual citizens, means nothing to them. The welfare of the nation means nothing. The only welfare they care about is the welfare of their white, moneyed classes and their wealthy corporate sponsors—the ones who make a killing in privatized health care, medicine, warfare, and corporate and banking fraud. But the truth is, the big numbers are all on the other side. Democrats have to return to the ideals that they pretend to espouse: help for those who need it, help for the common people who work for a living and who yielded to so much hope when Obama was elected. They have to let the American public know that Democrats actually stand for something, and are willing to risk a defeat in the Congress to prove it. As it is, Americans see through the games, see through the compromises that have been employed to gut the health-care bill of any meaningful reform. And they have contempt for it, for a party that is unwilling to stand up and be counted.

The Republicans threaten to filibuster? Call their bluff. Let’s see how many are willing to announce to the nation that they have but one policy: NO; that they give not a damn for the pain of the people, or the ruin of the nation’s economy; that they have but one solution to the country’s ills: more wealth for the wealthy, their one and only constituency. Otherwise, the fate of the Democrats and their President will be more of the same: slow death by a thousand cuts from a party that a few months ago was in an advanced stage of rampant cell death. Otherwise, we could soon see the resurgence of this, the crew that gave us Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Yoo and that gang of criminals that nearly sank the nation, and would like nothing better than to try it again. This time with an even bigger yahoo like Sarah Palin.

Get some backbone, Democrats. Call their bluff. And then get on with the people’s business.



Lawrence DiStasi

No Colonsocopy Required

Wisdom is a lady, I heard
With never cigars or a beard
She notes among us the righteous
And would not try to fright us
She is fair and smart and serene
And won’t ever dirty the clean
But why was she missing
When the Supremes were just pissing
In the eyes of us human beings
To support the corporate extremes
And making justice blinding
Instead of just blind
So that dollars are finding
The twist of the corporate mind


According to Linda L. Berger of the Mercer University School of Law, there are cases on file that have challenged our basic beliefs about the purposes of Democracy. She cites the Buckley and Bellotti cases creating a concept that essentially say that 1) Money is speech; 2) that corporations are people; and 3) that elections are marketplaces. The latest legislation by the Supreme Court of the United States has entered some new realm that brings up those three serious concerns needing our attention. Many of us prefer the definition of Democracy as government “of the people; by the people and for the people.” Abraham Lincoln made that a statement part of his Gettysburg Address, but it has become the soul, the essential part, of our self-concept as Americans. Commercial speech was not part of the concept so well molded by Lincoln, a great Republican and our greatest republican. He spoke of real people.

Linda Berger has written a great piece (What Is the Sound of a Corporation
Speaking? How the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor Can Help Lawyers Shape the Law) that enables us to see some fallacies in using metaphor for personhood. It is worth your time to read it. Corporations do not actually speak. Controlling individuals within a corporation may speak, but there is very little direct connection between speech by a controlling individual in a corporation and the shareholders of that corporation. Shareholders of Nike, for example, had no influence on the day-to-day “communications” of the company. To treat Nike as an individual “speaker” would be ludicrous given the reality that Nike is made up of thousands of people and controlled by only a few executives who do not consult with the thousands, except that the metaphor of personhood is employed to permit the illusion. Further, it was shown by opposition that Nike had used false information and claims to present an image that was in contrast to exploitation of labor in foreign countries, so the “exchange” of information could easily be confused with advertising instead of speech. Nike does not speak in the original sense of the First Amendment by using communication as a means of self-expression, self-realization, and self-fulfillment as the original and basic characteristic of a person.

As we face the real impacts of the recent Supreme Court decision, we should be startled to learn that we not only gave personhood to corporations, but we also transferred rights to money that were heretofore granted to people by saying that spending money is equivalent to free speech. In a humorous way, we “hear” used car companies advertise “Money talks and nobody walks.” The reality is that money does not talk. It is a questionable metaphor at best. The third leg of the strange corporate metaphor is that elections are commercial marketplaces. If that is not enough to turn your stomach, then perhaps you have become so cynical about politics that you have given up on the notion that only real people should determine the nature of the government that they give power to.

Unfortunately, there is still a fourth dimension to the granting of rights to all corporations that we extended to American corporations which people do not have and was not considered by Linda Berger because her piece was written before the Supremes recent “legislation.” Given that money now “talks” and that elections are “marketplaces,” what is to prevent LUKOIL of Russia, or CITGO of Venezuela from entering that election marketplace as interested corporations exercising free speech?

The Constitution and its First Amendment cover and describe the rights of American citizens. By stretching the metaphor to cover corporations, the Supreme Court has also given foreign corporations the same right as ours to enter the “marketplace” and speak with money to send a message through buying an election. The report, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," shows that, from 1998-2008, Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates made $1.725 billion in political contributions and spent another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, a financial juggernaut aimed at undercutting federal regulation. Nearly 3,000 officially registered federal lobbyists worked for the industry in 2007 alone. The report documents a dozen distinct deregulatory moves that, together, led to the financial meltdown. These include prohibitions on regulating financial derivatives; the repeal of regulatory barriers between commercial banks and investment banks; a voluntary regulation scheme for big investment banks; and federal refusal to act to stop predatory sub-prime lending. The Supremes so “re-legislated” the existing law with its decision as to include foreign corporations, that Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin or some Saudi prince or Chinese politician could invest millions into candidates that favor those countries instead of our own as long as they do it through corporations. If you liked Wall St. in New York, you will love Nevsky Prospekt in Moscow.

There is a solution, of course. Require colonoscopies of any “person” engaging in “free speech.” I hope that our Congress will see the new law for what it is as a giveaway to international corporate interests and restore the balance to Lincoln’s concept of government of the people, for the people and by the people. If not, it may indeed perish from the earth.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
28 January 2010

A Cautionary Tale

There once were two brothers
Unless this is fable
Or perhaps twin others
So like Cain and Abel
That we find them today
In business and travel
When siblings they slay
And truth starts to ravel
Beyond our best senses
For unintended consequences


There are versions of the story of Cain and Abel emanating from many cultures, but there are some constant themes among them that we could take into our learning. Foremost among them is the notion of unintended consequences. Cain just did not know what to do with the corpse once he had killed Abel. Several versions imply that God sent a raven to Cain so that he could follow the raven’s example of burying a bird. It seems odd that Cain would be so determined to kill his brother but so unaware that Abel’s body would present problems. Maybe we are slow learners. Maybe each of us needs to learn directly and we tend to ignore history whether fact or fable.

When President Obama was swept into office, there was an almost histrionic expectation that everything would be resolved by the mere fact of his election. The truth is that there is nothing that simple. Worse, the behavior of progressives who fully expected that this election empowered them like the Enjoli advertisement where a woman was able to do it all. She could “bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan” and meanwhile be sexy and smart. The ad implies that there are no priorities. We can have it all…NOW. Guess what? Progressives have great expectations and there is something very positive about that. We need great expectations. We also need patience and we need to acknowledge that perhaps the agendas of same-sex unions or removal of all troops from Iraq are less critical than the American economy or health care.
Some versions of the Cain and Abel story have God questioning Cain as to the whereabouts of Abel. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Let me ask the question in today’s context. Are you your brother’s keeper? Do you need to keep your brother from harm? Do you need to know how your brother is solving his problems so you can be more helpful? Maybe there is no raven and maybe there never was a raven to give us a clue. Maybe all this is inductive reasoning that requires us to think before we act and especially before we speak. As attractive as the Enjoli ad was, it was grossly unrealistic. We do ourselves harm and perhaps even great harm by joining in the Enjoli chorus.

Perhaps the most flagrant of the unintended consequences is that by joining the Enjoli chorus, we are on the same tune as the “just say no” right wing extremists who want to return to the last eight years of Big Government supporting Big Pharma which is how we dug the hole we are in. We are now witnessing Progressives joining with right wing nuts damning Obama as though he was the enemy. In the cascade of unintended consequences, be careful what you wish for. Conservatives are arguing that the “underwear bomber” should be treated far differently than the “shoe bomber” who was convicted in a civilian court. Senator DeMint is refusing to allow a vote on the head of TSA arguing that TSA employees should not be unionized (implying both that the new director would do so and that doing so would weaken TSA more than no leadership at all). Do you really want to be counted among the rabid right? Maybe you are not your brother’s keeper, but killing him won’t get your wishes achieved.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
31 December 2009

Health Care and Other Sorrows

President Obama and various Democratic Senators trumpeted their “victory” this weekend, when they managed to bribe Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson to pledge his vote for the Health Care Bill in exchange for concessions on abortion (how abortion became part of the health care debate is another matter). Here is how an AP report characterized the concessions: Not only would health plans not have to offer coverage for abortions, but

“In plans that do cover abortion, beneficiaries would have to pay for it separately, and those funds would have to be kept in a separate account from taxpayer money.
Moreover, individual states would be able to prohibit abortion coverage in plans offered through the exchange, but after passing specific legislation to that effect.”
Thus, one reactionary senator from one corny state has dictated the health benefits offered to women in the entire nation.

The rest of the benefits once considered firmly in the bill have been torpedoed by other reactionary senators like Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. So gutted has the final bill become that Howard Dean, once a presidential candidate and until the party election this year, chairman of the party, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that appeared today, condemning the compromise in no uncertain terms. His words pretty much sum up the defeat of Senate liberals on healthcare:

“If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health care reform.
Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.
Real health care reform is supposed to eliminate discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. But the legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company…
If you want to read more of what Dean said, and it is powerful, check out his op-ed.

But the important thing here, as in numerous other initiatives of the Obama Administration and the craven Democrats who promised reform in this and other areas, is the continuing abandonment of long-held principles upon which they were elected. A recent article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone Magazine (“Obama’s Big Sellout” Dec. 9, 2009) cites these concessions chapter and verse. It is not a pretty picture. Basically, according to Taibbi, the Obama Adminstration took action as soon as Nov. 5 to abandon the promises (and people—Austin Goolsbee, Karen Kornbluh) that got him elected, and steered deliberately towards the center and the moneyed interests who reign there. It was clear in the appointments Obama made to his economic team—and which we have commented on before. People like Tim Geithner as Secretary of Treasury, Lawrence Summers as Head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, Michael Froman as head of the National Economic Council, and countless others, all came out of a very specific area of Wall Street, many of them aides or protégés of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. According to Taibbi, Rubin, who came originally from Goldman Sachs, has screwed up every job he’s ever had. Nonetheless, he has been consistently demoted upward, most recently to the Chairmanship of Citigroup, which the Federal Government has bailed out with billions (upwards of $300 billion) of taxpayer dollars. His legacy in the current administration has been extensive and toxic:

The significance of all of these appointments isn't that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It's that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. “Bob Rubin, these guys, they're classic limousine liberals,” says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. “These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they're willing to give a little more to the poor. That's the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else.
It is sickening to realize that this pretty much sums up the moves made by the Obama administration in virtually every arena of government: the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, the policy on torture and Guantanamo, health care reform, and global warming. It is always a compromise with the most reactionary forces, and justified by the catch-phrase that has now become their mantra: Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. But what good is a good that makes matters worse, as Dean says about the current health care compromise? What good is a Nobel Peace Prize for a president who has just ordered 30,000 more troops to a war that never should have been started in the first place?

All one can conclude is that one’s optimism that Obama was a “necessity” ran its course on Inauguration Day when people wept to see a black man as President. Since then, it’s been downhill all the way. The real power in this nation has remained unchanged, and firmly in the hands of Wall Street bankers, corporate CEOs, health-care moguls, and the same wealthy elites who have run things since the beginning. One might have thought that the near-catastrophe that brought the financial system to its knees would change this, but, if anything, it has made conditions for most of us worse. Now the health care “reform” bill threatens to add to the stench.

In this dark season, one cannot help but veer towards that prophetic question of William Butler Yeats:

“what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Lawrence DiStasi




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The Family, a book review

The Family, by Jeff Sharlet was published in 2008 by Harper Collins.

By now, most of you have seen on TV or read in a magazine or newspaper about the clique of politicians embroiled in sex scandals while living in a C-Street mansion in Washington, DC. While Senator Ensign and a host of other notables were using this address as a hangout and refuge and ignoring the commonly accepted rules for personal responsibility, they also prayed together. Yes, the family that prays together also preys together. What a concept! Unfortunately for them, since the book was published, their tax exemption for the house as a church has been revoked.

Jeff Sharlet conducted extensive research that required years of interviewing members of the Family in wide ranging settings from Washington, where he was accepted as a sort of research intern, to Colorado Springs where he joined fundamentalists in their everyday religious activities to develop information that uncovered an extra-legal and off-government influence of worldwide events.

The group began formally in 1935 when a Norwegian immigrant (Abraham Vereide) established the International Christian Leadership that became a front for American fundamentalism that has since expanded beyond any reasonable expectation. Now who could have any objection to prayer? That is a fair question that only reading the book will begin to answer. To start with, the name “Christian” has a different meaning for most of us because the theological base of the New Testament seems paramount in the mix of things. Not so for many fundamentalists who seem to be focused on the Old Testament and especially King David whose reputation for adultery and murder might seem at odds with a religion that touts the Beatitudes.

The answers seem rooted in the concept of power that the Family espouses. The powerful do not have to live by the rules of the ordinary folk. God chose David. This act gave David power and power does not have to answer to ordinary rules. You can see where this is going on the level of individuals in power, but what you cannot easily see is that a concept like this would go nowhere unless it was enabled by people in power. Note that the National Prayer Breakfast (formerly the Presidential Prayer Breakfast) is organized by the Family, so that the group creates access to those currently in power.

Some of you will probably see in this fabric the hint of a Calvinistic pre-ordained nature of humanity. Either you are saved or not, and nothing you do will change the outcome. This surely reinforces the powerful and it also makes the rest of us a little out of the picture unless we take sides and join with the powerful to get God’s work done. This is less an illusion and more a matter of secrecy and organization. Concentric organizational circles are drawn that offers something to everyone. Those on the inside touch power and make things happen. Those nearby such as in Ivanwald in Arlington, Virginia, support the Family directly and hope to grow from being congressional aides to men with real power. And, yes, men, because women have a different role in this scheme and direct access to power is not a fundamentalist role for women. Those several circles away take pride in doing God’s work as they see it, and they pray to support the aims of the leaders.

Sharlet carefully explains the links between economic Darwinism and political power through the policies that are promoted by the Family. This allows the group to endorse strong leadership without any flinching and also promotes the image of Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and even Mao as examples of how power gets things done. Abraham Vereide (Abram) expressed preference for Hitler over Roosevelt who dared to curtail the suffering of Americans during the Depression while Hitler took action against those who were adding nothing to the German community (as he saw it). Later, Doug Coe, taking over the Family from Abram, did likewise. Coe often told the story of how just seven men (Hitler’s closest group from the putsch) were able to do so much to change history (and that the Family should also do so by using power and secrecy).

Again, all this would mean little unless something happened to change “prayer groups” into action committees (cells) at home and abroad. The Family does that handily using Supreme Court judges, senators, representatives and ambassadors and generals in several of the concentric circles. If somebody in the Family feels that it is God’s will that the people of Uganda should have abstinence education instead of condoms to slow the ravage of AIDS, look to Senator Brownback and others to introduce legislation to do that for God and the Family. Unfortunately, the AIDS rate spiked up when he succeeded, but then, pain and suffering are part of God’s plan, so that is not a problem.

In the 40s and 50s the Family effort was to provide get-out-of-jail cards for Nazis. In the 60s and 70s, the Family took the side of Suharto against the citizens of East Timor. Over 600,000 were massacred according to Sharlet (men, women and children, if that makes a difference to the pure), while Wikipedia allows only 100,000 for those killings. What is also chilling is the language that Suharto used. He spoke of the “New Order.” That language was also used by Hitler, Abram Vereide and our own neocons. How could that be? Suharto was invited to the Family’s prayer groups and, incidentally, they never condemned his actions. The reason they supported Suharto was because he was anti-communist although communists did not control East Timor, Suharto was a strong man doing god’s will. The “New Order” calls for hegemony built on absolute acceptance of “Jesus plus nothing.” That is a concept where Jesus is stripped of everything but power and it is a tenet of the Family that separates it from most of Christianity.

This Family scenario is replicated with African and Central/South American dictators and with similar devastating results and, in each case, whether the excuse be homosexuality, communism, or even the lack of “free” markets, the results were the same and help was obtained through our own and allied elected and appointed officials who went to extraordinary efforts to support foreign murderers and thieves. The list includes Papa Doc Duvallier, Emporer Selassie, General Park of Korea and General Medici of Brazil. American resources were spent through foreign aid and other means to do what the Family could not do on its own but did through influencing power so that, in the end, the will of the Family prevailed.

Jeff Sharlet studied several religions for years and then got on the ground with hundreds of fundamentalists here and abroad to discover how this strange group with its concentric circles of faithful was able to get business done. The concentric circles have decreasing power and knowledge of the secrets of the Family as they become more distant from the small group of leaders. The common element appears to be a prayer breakfast. That is something most of us have participated in, so how could anything so innocuous become so powerful in a this-worldly and vicious manner?

Much of the present magnetism of the Family is derived from early American fundamentalists with the ingenious addition of the focus on power. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in today’s reality. I commend this book to anybody that is curious as to why things are as they are. It is a sobering look at how things get done, even when they are too horrible to contemplate.

George Giacoppe