GOP to Akin: Abort! Abort!

Some use science for certain
While others use guesses
To open the curtain
On life’s many messes
But Missouri’s Todd Akin
Spit out a new theory
That I guess he had taken
From a man old and weary
Uttered without fact
By a misguided quack
The spinning continues;
The safety net unravels
And the poor have no menus
While the leaders bang gavels




Wow. I knew that the GOP was entertaining some extreme positions on issues, but I had no idea that they did not know where babies come from. First, Akin was off the GOP reservation when he spoke of “legitimate rape.” The preferred party language is “forcible rape.” His theory, taken from a physician (no joke) is that under the stress of “legitimate” or forcible rape, a woman’s reproductive system shuts down and she will not become pregnant. The idea behind all this is that the GOP wants no exceptions to allow for abortions, even for rape or incest. In fact, Jack C. Willke, the physician who proposed this bizarre 14th century theory was a surrogate for Romney in his 2007 presidential bid. Don’t laugh just yet. GOP insanity may be deliberate.

They seem to wait for a reaction and, if it is too negative, they back away and offer up reactive disclaimers; “Akin was way off base and should drop his bid for the Senate.” Nobody has disclaimed Willke, the quack physician who offered the “theory,” or Paul Ryan who co-wrote extreme social engineering legislation with Todd Akin. Akin and Ryan are upset that their anti-woman bills are being described as anti-woman. One of those bills they co-wrote specifically attempted to narrow the definition of rape; hence the very careful use of ”forcible rape” by the GOP to propel the notion that rape is more acceptable as long as it is not forcible. This would mean that statutory rape or rape of anyone unable to give consent would be treated differently in order to forbid all abortions. It also creates the subordination of the raped woman to the GOP “small government” and even to the fetus in cases of pregnancy through rape. There are approximately 32,000 reported pregnancies due to rape in the United States each year. The actual pregnancy rate for rape victims is 6.4%, incidentally, and that is more than twice the rate of pregnancy due to consensual sex despite the unscientific proclamation by Akin, a member of the House Science Committee. The rationale: rape victims are usually younger and in their more fecund years. Nonetheless, this feigned GOP horror at Akin’s screw-up is questionable. The only difference is Akin’s deployment of “legitimate.” Otherwise, the GOP position is identical with both Ryan and Akin. The original version of H.R. 3 would have narrowed that exception to cases of "forcible rape." Perhaps the GOP doth protest too much, especially while advocating small government.

Hypocrisy abounds in this fertile climate. Not only are the leading Republicans throwing Akin under their bus, but they are silent on a related issue of healthcare. If I were to ask you for the only major difference between the Affordable Care Act and Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare bill, would you know that Romneycare pays for abortions while Obamacare does not? Yet we now see Cardinal Dolan (top US Catholic prelate) ready to speak out at a right wing rally headlined by Paul Ryan. That hypocrisy is difficult to understand since Ryan has been outspoken in support of Ayn Rand (the atheist egoist) who condemned government but applauded abortion. Not incidentally at all, Rand, staunch opponent of the common good and powerful advocate for individualism and the free market took Social Security in her latter years although she condemned it in her writings. Aid for the poor? Never. Let them fend for themselves. This is the Ryan offering with a sprig of vouchers thrown in for color in the presentation to the people. Will Cardinal Dolan condemn Ryan for taking the safety net from under the poor? Right! That is why Ryan invited him, of course. And if you think that Dolan has the guts to do so, then I would ask why he has not already done it since the Conference of Catholic Bishops has already condemned the GOP platform planks that threaten the poor. We already have a poverty rate so severe that 30% of children in these United States go hungry every day. Let the poor be better shoppers, then they won’t be hungry. Think of it like Ryan’s vouchers for healthcare. If they are good shoppers, then they can pocket what they don’t spend on food. Hmm, thought for food. That is a new approach. Even the New Testament implies that that we need bread since “Man does not live by bread alone….” Ryan is billed as the thinker for the GOP and he credits Ayn Rand as the biggest influence on his life, so we begin to know what he is thinking. So now we await his rationale for the trickle down theory that has never worked. Economic Darwinism. I can’t wait. Maybe we simply did not give enough to the top tenth of the top 1% to fill their money reservoir. They need more to start the trickle. Surely, that will do it if the government they love to hate can control the riots from the losers in the new economic model, or is it the old and failed economic model of the 20s?

In the meantime, we suffer through pseudo-science and Science R Us research purchased by the Koch brothers. There is no global warming. There is no harm to pollution. Carbon is a vegetable? This would be humorous if only it were not true. It would be harmless if our citizens did not believe it. Alas, we have FOX News quoting the same purchased “scientists.” One of the bought scientists recently rebelled. Richard A. Muller, physicist of the University of California stated: "Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.” The Koch’s probably won’t hire him again, and FOX won’t quote him.

We have a recent study from the non-partisan Tax Policy Center that shows, if GOP/Romney policy is implemented, that he would keep the current Bush tax cuts and cut rates an additional 20%. He would eliminate investment taxes completely for households making less than $200,000 and abolish the alternative minimum income tax. There are no details as to how the budget would be balanced given this clear decline in revenue. The study shows that eliminating tax breaks to offset the drop in rates would hurt the middle class. Elimination of deductions such as mortgage interest will reduce home ownership. The net effect is a tax cut for high-income households coupled with a tax increase for middle-income households. The study assumes that the GOP will not change its policies, although if voters catch on, they may be forced to modify their policies on the run.
We have the Religious Right preaching that we have dominion over the earth, but largely forgetting good stewardship of this earth. They also preach obedience, but that lesson may be hard to hear by the hungry over the growling of their empty stomachs. I do see a possibility of repeating the harsh government of the 20s with violence in demonstrations and enforcement and possibly even sanctioned repression. I hope that never happens, but the mechanisms are there and so are the developing conditions of providing people less and less to lose. In a 22 August Pew report this year, the share of income for the middle class had fallen from 62% to 45% from 1970-2010. Net worth fell to $93,150 from $129,582. Good jobs were outsourced overseas by Bain, GE and others and most recently some medical services are being outsourced to India and China through our own high-tech communications systems. With tax incentives for investment and for out-sourcing work, what jobs will remain or be created? Can China both fill our pot-holes and the holes in the stomachs of the poor?

How long can this go on without seeing it play out in the streets? The GOP wants Akin to abort his run for the Senate, but that has not changed their agenda as they continue to pound the House gavel and to restrict voting by the old, young and the poor, as in PA. A GOP leader has guaranteed a Mitt victory.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
24 August 2012

A U.S. of Zombies

There is not much profit in expatiating once again on the perils of an armed-to-the-teeth populace in the United States—thanks to the National Rifle Association (NRA). We all know the false mantra that has become so sickening in our time: guns don’t kill, people do. If you want to read chapter and verse about this organized insanity, check out Saturday’s Reader Supported News piece by Matthew Chapman, “What Will it Take for Americans to Reject the NRA?” I also just saw an interesting statistic from a similar piece today: there are 58 murders a year by firearms in Britain, and 8,775 in the United States.

For me, though, the Aurora, Colorado massacre evokes other sadnesses and ironies. To begin with, isn’t it fitting that a 24-year-old all-honors grad student should enter a theatre premiering the latest violence fantasy, style himself as The Joker, and open fire on the crowd? Batman in the films based on the comic is always battling evil geniuses—the Joker being the most memorable—who commit virtually motiveless violence. They’re just evil. James Holmes seems to be, or want to be, one of these. No one had done him any harm. He doesn’t seem to have been psychologically maimed in any obvious way—indeed, his latest project was investigating the "Biological Basis of Psychiatric and Neurological Disorders." And yet, he carefully plans his murderous spree, entering the theater normally, exiting from a side exit whose door he carefully leaves ajar, arms himself with assault weapons, tear gas, body armor and a gas mask, and re-enters to begin his slaughter of people he knows nothing about. He apparently just wanted to kill people.



Lawrence DiStasi

He is Not One of Us

He acts kind of funny
And has scads of money
He doesn’t have hooves
But puts dogs on car roofs
He has homes everywhere
And sports perfect hair
His laughs seem so forced
And he’s not even hoarse
And he won’t drink or cuss
He’s not one of us



As we exit the Republican primary circus and enter the face-off between a black incumbent president and a white opponent, we are forced to encounter ourselves along the way. It is interesting on so many levels that I know that many of you readers will tell me how many factors that I have missed during the journey. When we compare the two major candidates on a personal basis as happened during the electioneering for the GW Bush presidency where lots of folks simply went on their gut reaction “I’d like to sit down and have a beer with W.” Somehow, I don’t think that any of us would qualify to sit in the same beer tent with the non-drinking Romney. While I can afford a beer, I cannot afford getting into a $10,000 bet, or a fund raising event in the Hamptons. I will attempt to compare the candidates to each other as well as the candidates to you and me. I am going to make a non-monetary wager right up front, however. I’ll bet that you have more in common with Mr. Obama than you do with Mr. Romney. I hope that does not spoil your day.

Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother moved several times in childhood. She lived in California, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Washington. Obama was born into the middle class and had a single parent mother whose husband left her and Barack to fend for themselves after 4 years. Stanley Ann Dunham was only 18 when Barack was born. She and her family valued education highly and sacrificed for it. Stanley (“Ann” in college) moved between the US and Indonesia as an adult as she studied and raised her son. She married a second time (to Lolo Soetoro) and divorced him in 1980. Barack’s father went to Harvard for his Master’s degree while his mother received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1992. Her 20 year study covered blacksmithing in Indonesia and both her M.A. and PhD degrees were awarded by the University of Hawaii. The Obamas were dependent upon public education for some schooling although Barack spent eight years at the Punahou (prep) School in Honolulu. Although Punahou is heavily endowed, Barack’s family sacrificed to provide tuition. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, was born into wealth in Michigan and never attended a public school after grammar school, nor did he send his children to public schools. George Romney chose to surround his children with other kids of privilege, as did his son Mitt. Both Barack and Mitt are distinguished Harvard JD graduates although Barack was elected President of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama’s grandparents were interesting in their own right. Stanley Ann’s father, Stanley Armour Dunham, volunteered and served in the US Army during WW II. He is related to six presidents (James Madison, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and both George H. W. Bush and GW Bush). Obama’s great-uncle Ralph Dunham also served in WW II and landed on Omaha Beach on D +4. Stanley Dunham never was quite able to open a furniture store as he had hoped, but Barack’s grandmother Madelyn Dunham worked in a Honolulu bank and ended her career as vice president of the bank. Ralph Dunham was especially proud of his service under General Patton in Europe. The Dunham family seemed solidly middle class and patriotic Americans who did their duty and served when called as did millions of others. They participated in the economy and did the best they could with the resources they had including educating Barack. They intermingled with others as part of the American melting pot.

Romney’s parents and grandparents were interesting as well. Mitt’s actual first name is Willard; named for J. Willard Marriott, the hotel magnate. When the US government made it clear that the Mormon practice of polygamy was going to be outlawed, Mitt’s grandfather moved his family to Mexico in 1885 where George Romney was born later. Mitt’s grandfather moved back to the United States in 1910 to escape the Mexican Revolution. In that sense, the Romneys faced some obstacles due to polygamy, but George Romney became monogamous and a successful businessman who entered politics as a Republican in Michigan. Mormon polygamist colonies in Mexico were assisted by the US government with transportation and payments to return from Mexico about 20 years after renouncing polygamy as a tenet of the Mormon religion. Later, Mexico paid reparation, although many Mormons remained in colonies there. George Romney was eligible for dual citizenship due to his birth in Mexico. By Mexican law, Mexican citizenship eligibility extends to Mitt Romney. He could be a reverse “anchor baby.”

Mitt’s family faced little deprivation in the US and his father George Romney became a successful automobile executive in Michigan although he was criticized for moving American Motors to Wisconsin almost as a precursor to Mitt’s practice with Bain; moving jobs and shrinking employment to increase profits. George Romney did become the Governor of Michigan and served three two-year terms. He ran for the Republican nomination for president, but was seriously hampered by his statement that he was “brainwashed” by the military over the Vietnam War. His opposition to the war put George Romney in direct conflict with Barry Goldwater who was far more conservative. Mitt, however, strongly defended the war during his thirty-month missionary tour in France and was surprised by his father’s opposition to it when he returned home. Mitt had a total of four deferments matching the achievement of Dick Cheney, another advocate for the Vietnam War, as long as war was not personal.

There has been little discussion of an odd similarity with the two families in that both were polygamist at some point; Mitt’s great grandfather and Barack’s grandfather and perhaps even his father, were polygamists. Ooh, small world.

Ironically, days ago, on 17 July 2012, John Sununu set up our situational questions with his campaign conference call: “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.” That has been the GOP talking point since before Obama took office. “He is not one of us.” We have endured “birthers” and pundits from the right shouting how Obama just does not act like the rest of us. “He had foreign training in a Madrassa?” “I don’t believe he can be a Christian.” Putting aside the obvious question as to whether Mormons can be Christians for the moment, can we change this flow and ask a few questions that let us examine similarities among Romney and Obama and us.

How many of you have elevators for your three Cadillacs? How many of you have made public $10,000 bets? How many of you have never put your kids into a public school? How many of you have mansions scattered across this nation and overseas? How many of you never had to fight for work or shelter(s) or education? How many of you have been able to avoid income taxes? How many of you got draft exemptions for the Vietnam War? How many of you outsourced jobs? How many of you assaulted an effeminate classmate; forcibly cut his hair and humiliate him using other classmates to hold him down? How many of you raided pension plans to increase your profits (and had the government make up pension shortfalls)? How many of you have tax shelters in the Caymans? How many of you have Swiss bank accounts? How many of you have not had to provide tax returns to get a home loan? How many of you agree “Corporations are people, my friend?”

You get the point. Yes, Obama is black. Is that what makes him “less American?” Think about it. When was the last time you traveled with a live dog on the top of your car? Finally, how many of you agree: Mitt Romney said he finds "it hard to disagree with Rush Limbaugh on topics?"

Definitely, Romney is not one of us. This is just the opposite of what the noise machine has blared since before Obama was elected. It is time to consider whom you are most like. It may make a huge difference when decisions are made on jobs and taxes and privileges versus rights and responsibilities. Come to think of it, wouldn’t you also rather have a beer with Obama?


Peace,
George Giacoppe
18 July 2012

Higgs Bosons: What’s the Big Deal?

The news wires have been buzzing this week with the possible discovery, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, of the long-sought Higgs Boson—aka the “God particle.” Just that nickname is enough to set journalistic hearts a-flutter. But, as always in high-energy physics, there’s more to the drama than meets the eye via standard news accounts. This is not to say that I, a mere dilletante, really understand it, but reading lots of accounts and seeing several videos has made some things clearer. Perhaps I can convey that to a few readers.

To begin with, the real action here lies with the proposed Higgs field, the Higgs Boson being only an indication that the theorized field actually exists. But the Higgs field is not like the usual fields—the magnetic field around earth, or the gravitational field around our sun, or an electromagnetic field around a generator—we’re familiar with. Those fields require an energy source, like the sun, to generate them; furthermore, the size of the force (of gravity, say, from the sun) varies with the distance from the energy source. So, the farther we get from the sun or the earth, the less force we feel from its gravity field. In short, most fields dissipate with distance because the number of particles constituting the field (virtual particles) is fewer (this last is due to the quantum understanding of fields, which used to be thought of as continuous, but are now thought of as composed of particles, like all else).

The Higgs field is not like that. Theoretically at least, the Higgs field remains the same throughout the universe even though there’s no source generating it (if I understand it correctly, the Higgs field would have been generated in the first nano-seconds of and by the Big Bang). Its force doesn’t dissipate with distance because of this lack of a specific energy source. It’s everywhere.



Lawrence DiStasi

DO REPUBLICANS HATE SENIORS?

Why do Republicans consistently vote against legislation that benefits seniors? We are familiar with the Republican war on science, women, the environment and unions, but what have they got against older Americans?
Just in case you aren't aware of how Republicans have been voting on issues that are important to seniors and retired people there is an organization that is an advocate for those very people and keeps track of how everyone in Congress votes. The Alliance for Retired Americans is a non-partisan organization whose website will tell you what bills effect seniors and how your representative voted. You can also find this information on Project Vote Smart on the web. Needless to say votes speak louder than words.

As an example, let's take my Congressman Dana Rorhabacher in the newly formed 48th Congressional District. For over 22 years Dana has been re-elected to represent a district that includes Leisure World in Seal Beach, a senior community of about 9,000 people who tend to be registered voters. Every couple of years Dana comes to Leisure World to visit the Republican Club. The message of all the great things Dana is doing is reinforced by the glossy mailers. What he doesn't mention to the good people of Leisure World is that for 22 years he has voted against their Medicare, social security, long-term care, aid to seniors in poverty, protecting their pension and even a modest raise in their minimum wage.

The Alliance for Retired Americans lists ten senior issues the House voted on in 2011. Dana and one other House Republican from California voted for seniors once and against their interests the other nine times. You might think that 10% is a terrible voting record, and it is, but the other 17 House Republicans were zero for ten!

Contrast this with the Democratic House members from California who had 31 with 100%, one with 90% and one with 80% and you see what a dramatic difference there is. Also, both Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer had a 100% rating on senior issues in their ten Senate votes.

It's not like these bills were inconsequential to seniors. The House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act but were blocked in the Senate. Repeal would have cost the average senior hundreds of dollars a year in prescriptions just so HMOs and drug companies could make more profit. Then the Republicans passed a bill to block funding for health care and were blocked in the Senate.

Democrats supported funding HR 830, so seniors could stay in their homes instead of facing foreclosure but Republicans sided with the banks and voted it down. The House passed the notorious Ryan budget to essentially privitise Medicare by a 235 - 193 vote. Republicans also voted for reducing middle class benefits, including social security and Medicare.

On December 14, 2011 the House voted 261 -165 for a balanced budget amendment that would have created the sort of gridlock California has endured for decades by requiring an undemocratic 2/3 vote to pass a budget. This would allow Republicans to block any future programs that would benefit seniors and retired Americans. There were senior nutrition programs, HR 2112 the Republicans tried to slash by $400 million from low income seniors. On December 8, Republicans filibustered a bill that would have provided financial protections for seniors against unfair and abusive practices. They also filibustered a bill Democrats passed that would have allowed Americans to save money by buying prescriptions from Canada.

I don't think that Republicans really hate seniors. Seniors and retired Americans are simply the innocent victims of Republicans rigid belief that government should only spend money to benefit corporations or the military. Part of the problem is you might hear about senior issues in the headlines or on the TV news. You might have to dig around because it isn't a hot button topic. If you are a senior, or plan to be one, you need to be aware of who is voting to protect your interests and who is not. So, wake up seniors! It just makes sense to vote for the representatives who will vote for you.

Hooked on the ‘Net

A history teacher on the Frontline documentary “Digital Nation” put the problem succinctly: “these kids (his high school students) are natives in this world; we (pre-computer types) are immigrants.” That’s more or less the way I feel. The computer is essentially a typewriter to me. The internet helps in the way a library used to: it provides a quick source for necessary facts, but it is not the place where I live. For the internet generation, however—the one that has been using computers since almost birth—it is where they live. And more and more of them cannot imagine a world without that constant connection. Either via iPhones or laptops or game consoles or iPods or all and more at the same time, the internet generation now in schools like your neighborhood grammar school or high school or MIT is constantly connected, multitasking at all hours of the day and night, including when they’re in class, eating with friends, or studying at home or in the library. They’re googling, chatting, texting, posting on Facebook or Twitter, indulging in their online second life, listening to their playlists, and doing their homework all at the same time.

There have been many warnings about this, and about what the constant distraction might be doing not only to the competence, but to the brains of these kids. But there are also those who pooh-pooh the warnings and insist that the world in which the current generation will have to function requires them to be adept at multiple tasks and “problem-solving” rather than the old style of memorizing facts and dates. Still, a segment with a teenager in South Korea, where the government has actually had to step in and institute a program to teach children how not to misuse the internet, is sobering. One teen named Kim got so addicted to constant computer gaming that his mother sent him to one of the Internet Rescue Camps where teen internet addicts learn to do outdoors-y things with their peers—like actually communicating in person. Kim wasn’t so sanguine about the camp, though. He said he was obsessing about computer gaming constantly, and couldn’t wait to get home so he could get back online. Others have not been so lucky: several teens actually died after spending 50 hours constantly gaming without a break for either food or water.

Neuroscientists have begun to seriously investigate what all this constant screen-interaction (average kids spend over 50 hours a week on digital media while real devotees—i.e. addicts—spend considerably more) is doing to youthful brains. Where most young people are certain that their multitasking is very efficient, Prof. Clifford Nass at Stanford had doubts even before his research: “a great deal of research has already shown us that the brain can only attend to one thing at a time,” Nass said. His subsequent research on the efficiency of multitaskers (these were young college kids who regularly work on five or six things at once) showed that, contrary to their own assessment that they were efficient multitaskers, most were significantly slower at simple tasks than normal, and basically terrible at every aspect of multitasking. Nass concluded by saying, “We worry that this may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.” Another research project, by Dr. Gary Small of UCLA, gave a more graphic picture—neuroimages of some brains reading, compared to other brains doing google searches. At first the results seemed comforting: the brains of those “googling” showed about twice as much brain activity as those reading a book, thus prompting initial news reports that net surfing is good for the brain, and makes us smarter. But Dr. Small cautioned that in brain imaging, “bigger is not necessarily better.” In fact, Dr. Small pointed out, one could well argue that smaller is better, because, as with a well-trained athlete, the fit body needs to use less energy to do a given physical task than the unfit one. The same applies to brains: reading a book, for a good reader, requires less brain effort to get information (and even pleasure and relaxation).

Being a book man, of course, I would agree. Reading a book is far easier on the eyes, and far more cozy than staring at a screen all day jumping from one graphic stimulant to another. But those who have been reared on computers do not agree; they’re bored with books. Said one high school student named Greg: “I never read books. If there were 27 hours in a day, I’d read Hamlet maybe. But there aren’t.” Greg, therefore, like most of his peers, gets his “information” about a play like Romeo and Juliet from the internet sites that, in a few paragraphs, provide him with the plot and all he needs for a test. Other sites provide pre-written essays on any aspect of any literary work. That leaves students ample time for all the other joys of the net like Facebooking and texting and gaming. Prof. Mark Bauerlein, of Emory University, has written about such kids and their generation—in a book he titles The Dumbest Generation. He refers to a study by the Chronicle of Higher Education referring to them as ‘the new bibliophobes.’ What the study found was that while use of the internet can raise reading skills in the early grades, as students get more wired, their reading and thinking skills deteriorate. As Professor Bauerlein noted, their writing skills are equally atrocious. Most of his colleagues, he said, agree, noting that less than 10% of students come to college actually prepared to write, and/or think. The aforementioned Professor Nass, of Stanford, was more specific: “Instead of writing an essay, they write paragraphs. They’re good for one or two paragraphs. Then they’re distracted and onto Facebook or some other online destination.” The result, he said, is that there are no connections between paragraphs, no sense of the big picture. Several students actually admitted that this was true of their own writing and the way they go about it.

Of course, there are always the apologists: a principal of a public school in the Bronx claimed to have turned his school around by equipping every student with a laptop, insisting that this is what these kids will need when they enter the ‘real world.’ An even grander apologist was Mark Trensky, CEO of a digital company called “Games2Train.” He opined that he didn’t at all agree that the book “is the best way to train people for the 21st century,” adding that alarmists also cried havoc when print first replaced memorized epics and when mechanical printing first made books available to the masses.

Perhaps. Perhaps the digital way of the internet really is opening the world to a more democratic, better-informed, more equitable society of instantly-linked brains. But some cautions might be in order here as well. One commenter on the frontline blog had this to say:



Facebook and the internet in general, a potentially momentous tool for pushing society forwards, seems to actually be limiting activism. As my peers noted, its easy to browse Facebook, find a cause, and join a group, and simply state that you support the fight against cancer, or say that America should not go to war. These groups could be a potential starting point for activism, mobilizing and connecting people with common values and causes, but from what I've seen, usually nothing moves beyond simply joining a group.



A more deeply-thought out criticism comes from Joshua Sperber on Counterpunch, in a piece called “We’re All Porn-stars Now.” What Sperber suggests is that the internet has actually co-opted all of us, getting us to internalize the ethics and behaviors of our capitalist masters. This results in profits for those who own the sites and tools that we love—Google and Facebook and even online dating sites—by entrapping us into furnishing the information about ourselves which allows them to sell advertising. This is, of course, why all those “free” sites elicit our information—to provide the means for advertising to be targeted at specific audiences likely to succumb to their appeal. And of course, thousands of sites are direct peddlers of every kind of product from foods to clothes to porn to willing dates ready to provide all of what we desire. Sperber notes, in fact, that

..online dating sites have recently become more profitable than porn sites…This effectively means that people who post pictures on dating sites, or engage in amateur porn, are “giving it away for free.” More accurately, given their extraction of profit through user input and advertisements, as well as the fees that many sites charge, online dating sites establish a relationship of reverse prostitution. Notwithstanding their offer of “efficiency” (which makes their promise of “romance” oxymoronic) and exhibitionism, the material basis of the relationship is that you pay to work for them.

It’s hilarious, really. The internet was supposed to be the essence of “freedom.” Information free, entertainment free, social networking free, the whole world connected in this free, open flow of human togetherness and sharing and learning. And yet, according to Sperber’s account of it, we’ve all become colluders with the money-makers and hucksters, as when we go on Yelp and criticize the service at a restaurant, thus placing the blame for a bad experience on the poor waiter or waitress, while the employer who pays that person a minimum wage gets off scot free. And by “marketing” ourselves online—on Facebook or Linked-In or even Craigslist—we are unknowingly making ourselves into the very thing we say we deplore: commodities. Here’s how Sperber puts it:

..we attempt to make money marketing ourselves online not merely as laborers but as aspiring capitalists, trying to extract surplus value from any conceivable trade, skill, or gimmick. Selling one’s personality, purpose, and essence, the division of labor has been seemingly resolved online: we own the (would be) means of production, which actually means that we have become utterly commodified.

In short, we don’t have the Internet. The Internet has us, and it’s virtually impossible these days to get away. We’re hooked, cooked, and addicted to our own beloved technology. As my father used to say, “What a revolting development this is.”

(Postcript: since writing this on June 20, my internet connection has failed. After nearly an hour talking to an ATT rep, I was told my modem is kaput and no longer able to make the connection to online consciousness. So I’m waiting, bereft of my connection, for a new modem to be shipped by UPS overnight, the whole thing to cost me nearly $100 and a couple of days inability to function as I’ve been brainwashed to expect. Not sure whether this is the revenge of the Internet Gods re: the above critique, but one way or the other, they really have us by the short hairs.)

(PPS: It’s Saturday and I’ve just gotten back online. Should anyone be surprised that, in fact, there was nothing wrong with my modem—I learned this after finally getting the new one working—but rather with some connection prior to the modem fixed by ATT repair. Aarrggh!)

Lawrence DiStasi

Land Grab in Africa…Princess Grab in America

There really is no obvious connection between the two elements in my title, but both are on my mind so we’ll see if they come together.

Africa first. The continent whence we all came (and not that long ago; most archeologists now think it was a mere 50,000 years), Mommy Africa, has been the object of colonial exploitation for centuries, so you’d think that in this “post-colonial era” our continent of origin might be given a break. Not a chance. Now that the slave catchers and British plantation owners and apartheiders have been given the boot, the exploiters simply line up for the next, slightly more subtle phase: getting title to the farmland. The facilitators are the post-colonial governments, all desperately in need of cash and development. The victims are, as usual, the poor farmers trying to eke out a living on small plots they’ve always depended on for subsistence. The villains are big multinational corporations seeking to cash in on what they see as the next big profit-generator: food in a world moving towards mass starvation. So the smart money is going towards the buying up or long-term leasing of farmland in areas already half starving themselves—sub-Saharan Africa, in countries like Sierra Leone and Ethiopia. That it will put small farmers and their families out of business, push millions more of these victims into large cities or refugee camps where they will be unable to work or feed themselves and provide the next images of babies with swollen stomachs and flies feeding on their eyes—this doesn’t seem to bother or deter these captains of finance. Their only goal is to find the next big cash cow, and food-growing is apparently where they think it’s at.

The Oakland Institute (www.oaklandinstitute.org) is at the forefront of trying to draw attention to the developing bonanza (or catastrophe, depending on which view you take). Its website features several articles drawing attention to what it calls the “growing global concern about the race for prime farmland in the world’s poorest countries.” The article “Sierra Leone: Local Resistance Grows as Investors Snap up Land,” Guardian, April 11, 2012, for example, points out that between 2000 and 2010, the rush for land had claimed upwards of 200 million hectares of land, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, including 17% of Sierra Leone’s arable land. Another article reporting on a conference sponsored by the Oakland Institute itself, filled in what kinds of commodities the new industrial plantations grow for export: sugarcane for ethanol, crude oil palm, rubber, and large-scale rice production. Speakers at the conference decried these developments, pointing out that just as small farm holdings (they employ about 3.5 million people—roughly 2/3 of the population) were beginning to come back after Sierra Leone’s long civil war, their recovery is being threatened by the land grab. As one farmer, who has lost her cropland to the Swiss investor, Addax Bioenergy, lamented:

“How are we going to get food security if you give all the upland land to the investors? We beg you to listen to us….We are suffering because we have nowhere to go. You come out from war, build a house and now when you speak out, they lock you up.”

A landowner and member of parliament, Sheka Musa Sam, referred to the recent lease of 6,500 hectares of land in his district by Socfin Agricultural Company:

“There is no way we can just sit down for 50 years without getting a living. We need to come together and form a united front. We can’t let them make us slaves on our own land. This evil thing will make the poor people even poorer.”

What Musa Sam and others referred to were the endless problems caused by the land deals:

"the overwhelming negative impacts on women who lose their livelihoods and food production; the effect on children’s education who have to drop out of school because their mothers can no longer pay their school fees; increased hunger, rising food prices and despoiled water supplies; the devastating environmental effects of the investors’ operations; and also concerns about the way the industrial plantations shred the social fabric of rural communities, causing marriage breakdowns, unwanted teenage pregnancies, increased incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, and even the loss of self-esteem when one loses one’s self-employment."

In short, what is being reproduced in Africa are all the ills of industrial farming and industrial development we have seen globally.

The Oakland Institute recently wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to discuss the issues of the land-grab in a May 19 meeting he had with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Whether the letter did any good is anyone’s guess, but we can imagine that concern for African farmers was not nearly as high on the U.S. priority list as keeping Ethiopia from becoming a ‘safe haven’ for terrorists. What was probably also high on that list was making Africa equally ‘safe’ for genetically-engineered seed from the likes of Monsanto. For although this President has direct roots in Africa, he can never forget what another president (the great Calvin Coolidge) once memorably said:

..the chief business of the American people is business.

Which forms a nice segue into the second topic at hand: the business of Princess making. This is the preoccupation of Berkeley writer Peggy Orenstein—who calls it the Princess Industrial Complex. Her recent book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, suggests the idea. What Orenstein, herself the mother of a young girl, has found over several years is that American girls are everywhere bombarded with a self-image that seems cute and harmless on the surface, but in reality masks its own kind of grab: a grab for the minds of children and the dollars of parents so eager to indulge their daughters in the fantasy that they are innocent royals, as to be blind to the gross commercialism in which they are partaking and to the underlying dynamics of this fantasy. In a recent article on the subject, “Dodging Disney in the Delivery Room,” (NPR, Feb. 9, 2011) Orenstein quotes from a NY Times report that

“Disney has begun sending sales reps into 580 hospitals nationwide. The reps are offering new moms, within hours of giving birth, a free Disney Cuddly Bodysuit for their babies if they sign up for e-mail alerts from DisneyBaby.com. The idea is to encourage mothers to infuse their infants with brand loyalty as if it is mother's milk.”

Yes. You read that right: now, not even the delivery room is safe from the predatory sales pitches of corporate America. This sales “push” is meant to do two things: first, to duplicate the success among preschool girls of the Disney Princess line, hyped up in 2000 to earn a staggering $4 billion annually from a product line numbering no less than 26,000 items! And second, to rectify what Disney execs noticed as a gap in their sales: little girls were not becoming consumers until preschool, “resulting in a good three years of potential revenue loss.” If Disney could get expectant mothers thinking about Disney outfits in the delivery room or earlier, it would be, according to one Disney exec, a “home run.” No wonder. The Advertising Educational Foundation sees 1-year-old infants as an “informed, influential and compelling audience,” able at 12 months to recognize brands and be “strongly influenced” by advertising! Orenstein rightly counters this, pointing out that “studies show that children under 8 years old can’t distinguish between ads and entertainment. Until then, they don’t fully comprehend that advertising is trying to sell them something…” But tell that to the predatory bastards in the executive suites and the ad agencies.

Orenstein has a lot more to say about the perils of the Princess Industrial Complex, specifically that beneath the cute pink that is pushed upon girls everywhere, even in supermarkets, there is a cultural demand: you are what you look like, what people who look at you think of you. Therefore, what you look like as a girl, as a princess in cute pink dresses, and later as a teen and woman obsessed with appearance, should be your constant, your sole preoccupation in life. Nevermind your ability to run and jump, nevermind your ability to read or calculate or think, nevermind your ability to carve out your own, decent path in life. You are, you better be, a clean, pretty and pink object, period. Orenstein also points out what is less obvious: that beneath this preoccupation with pink innocence lies a parental fear of their daughters growing up, of adulthood, of adult sexuality. It’s of course a mixed message because on the one hand, girls are being schooled to think of themselves as pretty and desirable, but on the other are being schooled in maintaining an impossible innocence. The same dual appeal, of course, lies at the heart of the Disney world in general: a mania to represent historical eras, but stripped of all threat and dirt and reality, rendered innocent and clean as they may exist in fantasy, but never in reality. And the rubes just love it.

What can never be forgotten, though, is the main objective here: making money off innocence or the promise of innocence, making a profit from the impulse to escape reality and dwell in the land of Cinderella (her wicked stepmother and sisters cleansed of the reality of the original fairy tale) and the handsome prince who will come to rescue her.

Think about it next time you are tempted to buy a princess-themed present for the delightful little girl in your life. And about how perhaps, just perhaps, the African land grab and the American princess grab are cut from the same cloth after all.

Lawrence DiStasi

Quiet Wars

The New York Times has been doing a bang-up job on President Obama these days, the latest being David Sanger’s June 1 article, “Obama Order Sped up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran.” This follows an earlier piece in the May 29 Times describing the President’s hands-on approach to Drone attacks, noting in particular that Obama early on took direct control of that targeted assassination program started by W, insisting that he (Obama) have the last word in selecting who should die via drone (“Obama’s Secret Kill List” by Jo Becker & Scott Shane). What is not clear is whether the Obama administration is approving these pieces, on the theory that the publicity confers ‘street cred’ on the mild-mannered compromiser, demonstrating that under that mild exterior lies a fierce warrior implementing all kinds of mayhem on America’s terrorist enemies. Forget secret prisons. Forget torture and all the attendant messy publicity. With drones—and Obama has increased the use of drones by a huge percentage since taking office, especially in Pakistan and now in Yemen—the President can just pick out a face from those presented to him, approve it as a target, and the drones do the rest—focusing on the alleged terrorist and dropping a missile on his home, car, hideout, or wherever he can be located. No risk of American boys being shot down or exposed. No tearful widows of fallen soldiers to console. As to collateral damage, an even bigger No problema. Wives and children obliterated by missile are fair game; as for the others, the CIA has solved the problem by simply declaring that any male over age 14 killed in a drone attack can be considered a terrorist. After all, what other kind of male would be in the vicinity of a known terrorist?

It’s a lovely little formula. We send out our drones to attack specified targets already selected by (presumably) on-the-ground spies, and in a puff of smoke away goes one more of our alleged enemies. It’s the perfect type of warfare for our squeamish age. No flag-draped, tearful coffins on our side, no broken brains or limbs to have to deal with for years, and no messy trials where terrorists might be able to justify themselves. Just take them out from the sky via smart un-manned vehicles and you’re done. It’s the Israelis who perfected this targeted assassination mode, of course, and who no doubt sold it to their BFFs, Us. Same type of enemy suspects. Same solution: kill and ask questions later. No evidence needed.

Now we are finding out that this type of cyber warfare (and drones qualify as cyber warfare, no question about that, being operated by young cyber warriors directing them via computer keyboards in distant places like upstate New York or Colorado) has another strand. We had heard about the Stuxnet virus when it suddenly went public some time in 2010. It wasn’t supposed to go public of course. It was created by US and Israeli intelligence starting in 2006, code name Olympic Games (these guys have a sense of humor, no doubt about it) in the hopes that the Bush Administration could sabotage Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by getting a super-bug into the computers that run their Natanz centrifuges. Apparently, when Bush left office, he urged Obama to keep at least two of his programs going, this being one of them. Obama did so, and put it on steroids. Stuxnet was then said to have successfully caused hundreds of Iran’s centrifuges to self-destruct, before it somehow slipped out of Natanz and onto the internet. Oops. More recently, we have learned of yet another, more general cyber attack via computer virus, this one called Flame. It too has gone public, causing some consternation, since like all viruses, these things spread beyond what their creators might originally have intended. But the main emotion has been gloating, since once again, our super-smart American techies, along with their fiendishly smart Israeli counterparts, have been able to sabotage those dumb A-rabs, and wreak havoc on their primitive cyber systems. We, the public, are no doubt meant to feel comforted by this. After all, while the messy hot wars are being wound down, these clean, clever little cyber wars have been ramping up with all possible speed to keep us safe in consumer heaven.

The problem, as even David Sanger has admitted, is that little old blowback problem. Because if our techies can come up with computer viruses (and eager beavers in government are now urging the same kinds of attacks on North Korea, on China, and anywhere else we have ‘enemies’), won’t those in the Arab, Korean, and Chinese world soon be able to do the same? And if we have taken off the gloves by attacking another nation’s key facilities, won’t American cyber facilities—far more numerous and perhaps far more vulnerable—also become targets sooner rather than later? Do ya think? Here’s how Sanger puts it:

Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using — and particularly to overusing — the weapon. In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

Well, yeah. And if the United States has now gone totally drone in targeting and killing its putative enemies in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and god knows where else, isn’t the same thing going to come back to the United States? Because one thing is certain: once a technology is developed, it quickly becomes part of the arsenal of all states, not just those who invent it. We’ve been learning this lesson since at least the invention of gunpowder. Drones and cyberwarfare will be no different. And with respect to drones, we also now know that these weapons from hell are already coming back to haunt us. For one thing, they simply make war much easier, and for the reasons already stated: no messy foot soldiers to deal with, no deaths in combat to have to apologize for, no nasty wounds to have to take care of. The drone does it all from its invulnerable position in the sky. If it gets shot down, no problem. Just buy another one. And send it out to kill its target, rain or shine, rough terrain or smooth, impregnable enemy fortress or open battlefield. The traditional petty concerns of normal warfare—much less petty concerns about guilt or innocence—no longer apply. Just kill the “bad guys” (and there’s never a shortage of those) and be done with it. For another, these drone things have been selling like hot cakes domestically as well. That’s right. Police departments all over America—New York and L.A. and Chicago already have a supply—are now lining up to stockpile their own drones for use against domestic ‘lawbreakers.’ Because drones make great spies—able to aim their cameras into any walled-in yard or junkyard or forest, able to track bad guys into the most remote hideouts. And in a pinch, they make great assassins too: just send them up to kill whoever has shot first. The drone could probably even document its reasons for implementing a kill: take a video, for example, of some dark assailant who resisted it, and then, voila, it simply had to retaliate to ‘protect’ itself.

You get the picture. We’re all in the cyber pot, now. And why not. We’ve gotten used to helicopters patrolling our skies. Why not drones? You got something to hide? Something on your computer to hide from Flame? Some conversation on your cell phone or words in your email you’d rather not reveal to Big Brother?

And it’s all coming from our Brother in the White House. What could be bad?



Lawrence DiStasi

Election (Hold-your-nose) Time

I have to tell you I’m not looking forward to the upcoming presidential election. Even though he has the advantage of incumbency, President Obama appears to be faltering already, with a recent poll giving Mitt Romney a 46% to 43% lead over the President. This is an ominous sign—a sign of an electorate fed up with incumbents and too susceptible to propaganda to be able to figure out the Republican strategy of crippling government at all levels to get gullible voters to conclude it’s really government that’s the problem. Not to mention the sheer racism that is a brisk wind at Republican backs. And the loony right that characterizes anyone left of Attila the Hun as a Socialist.

Of course we know Obama is anything but. The man who seemed at least progressive has now revealed an inner core so concerned about making nice with power elites (due to his training at private schools and Harvard?) that he has compromised virtually everything he ever seemed to stand for. His health care bill is a joke, and probably about to be struck down. His response to the economic collapse is an even bigger joke. And he seems allergic to saying anything about the “poor” or “working classes,” both of whom have disappeared from his political lexicon. Two videos are key documents in this regard: both from Frontline, they are “The Warning,” and the more recent two-part series, “Money, Power & Wall Street.” Both show that Obama was totally mesmerized, if not poisoned, by the Clintons and their brand of democratic “pragmatism,” i.e. cozying up to money power. “The Warning” is perhaps the most infuriating, even though the action it depicts took place in the waning years of the Clinton presidency. It portrays the drama of Brooksley Born (brought into the government through her contact with Hillary, and named not the Attorney General [Bill found her cold and dull], but head of the sleepy Commodity Futures Trading Commission, charged with overseeing then-obscure over-the-counter derivatives trading). Born immediately saw big problems with this growing and totally unregulated market, and began to draft regulations to control it. The Clinton economic team—Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary, Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chief and alleged economic magician, and Larry Summers as Rubin’s right-hand man and enforcer—went ballistic and tried every ploy to bulldoze her into silence. Greenspan early on took her into his office to convey his bizarre take on market fraud. As Born recounted it, “he explained there wasn’t a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him.” In short, the free market would take care of fraud, as it took care of everything else, no regulations needed.

They were wrong, as the world found out in 2008, but as these economic geniuses found out even before then, in September 1998 when the huge hedge fund betting heavily on derivatives, Long Term Capital Management, nearly failed—for precisely the reasons Born had laid out. But did they change? Not on your life. Instead of now agreeing to regulations, the big three managed to coerce over a dozen banks to bolster LTCM with a huge infusion of cash, and “save” the system. They also saved their plan to get Congress to pass a moratorium on Born’s planned regulations. Notwithstanding Congressional hearings at which Born insisted that the LTCM collapse “should serve as a wake-up call about the unknown risks in the over-the-counter derivatives market,” the Rubin-Greenspan-Summers troika upped the pressure, and Congress passed the moratorium icing regulations. They got rid of Born in the bargain: Two months later, in April 1999, Brooksley Born announced she would leave the now-muzzled agency she headed.

Cassandra (Born) finally did get her day of reckoning when she recently, and for the Nth time, warned about the danger of “Dark Markets,” still unregulated, whose size now exceeds $680 trillion dollars—more than 10 times the gross national product of all the nations of the world. And we were reminded of the hazards of these “dark markets” just this month when the nation’s largest bank, JP Morgan-Chase, reported that it had lost some $2 billion in a bad bet on derivatives, a loss that is now $5 billion and climbing.

In light of all this, it’s worth remembering what Obama did when he entered office in 2008. He brought the unregenerate Larry Summers back to be his chief economic advisor; chose, instead of Paul Volcker, Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary; and thus cemented in place the noxious notions of Robert Rubin, by then back in business as CEO of Citibank, another failing behemoth on the dole (Rubin had left his post as CEO of Goldman Sachs to become Clinton’s treasury secretary). With such people shaping his perceptions of what makes sense economically, there was no way Barack Obama could institute policies on behalf of ordinary people rather than the Bigs of Finance. And he did as he was told. Sadly, he has done this in virtually every area of government (including the most repressive areas: he has brought more cases against whistleblowers than even Bush did, and his drone warfare—simply killing suspects ala Israel, rather than trying to bring them to justice—has become a national scandal). It seems the president has serious trouble standing up to the established powers gathered around him, and that includes the Republican leadership with whom he continues, despite endless spittle in his face and stabs in his back, to try to compromise.

Is there even a need to speak about the other guy, Willard (that’s his name) Romney? Bain Capital was his golden goose, being a takeover company that made billions in the go-go 80s and 90s by buying up overvalued companies, firing half their labor force to “make them profitable,” loading them with debt to finance their very takeover, and then selling them to gullible buyers or into bankruptcy. Such takeover artists are the creeps who helped eviscerate a once-productive economy. And yet, we find 46% of the American people aiming to put this raptor in charge of the entire government. Are there so many rabid idiots and racists willing to vote for anyone to get rid of the black man in the White House? So many who are willing to ignore the staggering hypocrisy of the man (a recent piece by Timothy Eagan about Romney points out that the candidate’s prating about his firm principle to marriage “as a relationship between one man and one woman” hardly squares with his illustrious Mormon forebears—a great grandfather, Miles P. Romney, who had 5 wives, and a great-great grandfather, Parley Pratt, who had an even dozen!)? It seems there are.

This leaves most of the electorate with the most odoriferous of choices. Either hold your nose and vote for the guy who betrayed almost every hope he engendered, with the promise of more to come; or vote for the latest oligarch tripping over himself currying favor with the bat-shit crazies of the right.

Unless—one decides to vote Green. I have recently heard and read about Jill Stein, on the brink of getting the Green Party’s presidential nomination. I think she deserves everyone’s consideration. She’s an MD—a doctor who specializes in environmental health— and an advocate for everything we thought Obama might accomplish, or at least bring up: a New-Deal-type plan to create 25 million mostly Green jobs, at a price similar to what the bank bailout cost; a pledge to break up the big Wall Street banks, emphasizing smaller state development banks catering to local businesses and homeowners; and a vow to implement real single payer health care for all. In addition, she’s not afraid to call for some actual policy changes regarding the United States’ long-running support of Israel’s illegal occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. She’s smart, not afraid to say what she thinks, and attractive and articulate in laying out her views. I am seriously thinking that Green might be the way to go this year, especially in light of what appears to be yet another “hold your nose” election. Even though the last time progressives made such a choice and the vote for Ralph Nader helped to elect the Bushwah, it may be time to try again. After all, how long can these stomach-souring, least-evil choices be tolerated? Obama may get beaten anyway; in which case voting for him would feel bitter indeed. But if millions of people vote Green, perhaps, even without winning, the long-term stranglehold over the electoral process—a voting trap between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dumber—can begin to be broken. Perhaps the related stranglehold of money and finance in our politics, of business as usual, can also be loosened. (For myself, I would like to see elections in which air time on TV is given free to major candidates; that is the least the corporations who hold rights to the people’s airwaves should pay back; and it would, at a stroke, eliminate the necessity for expensive ads.) At the least, the allowable limits of what can and cannot be said by a major candidate would change radically. To get more details, go to http://www.jillstein.org/.

One thing is certain. Something has to be done to change the way politics is played and won in this country. Voting Green might just be a good beginning.



Lawrence DiStasi

Ouroboros

A recent class I taught left me with residues of discontent. What I was not able to resolve, to my own satisfaction, at least, was how to reconcile modern science—especially physics—with the root mystery of life: how life originates, how human consciousness can arise from “meat” or neurons in the brain, how, or if, meaning arises at all. To hear many physicists talk about it, it’s all very straightforward. Everything proceeds by inexorable laws of motion, gravity, quantum mechanics, and mathematics. Particles appear out of something (or nothing) called quantum foam, or quantum jitters, or simply empty space, and once they appear, the whole shebang moves in quite orderly and predictable ways to clouds of expanding gas, galaxies, suns, planets, and, over billions of years, cells, multicellulars, and us.

Of course not everyone is buying this determinism, and increasingly some scientists—mostly in the biological sciences—are raising objections. Stuart Kauffman, for example, wrote a book recently called Reinventing the Sacred. Appearing at lots of conferences to present his theory, Kauffman suggests that, though no creator God is needed, humans may need to attribute the mystery of being to something like a god, so why not name the immense “creativity” in the universe “God.” But it’s not just a renaming that Kauffman is after; it’s proving that the reductionism of physics—that all proceeds deterministically according to physical laws—simply can no longer be sustained. His reasons are complex, and I’ll cite some below, but basically what he says is that in order for a physical law to be applicable, one needs to know the state of the space in which it applies. Once life enters the picture, however, and even well before, the space is simply not predictable. Especially in biology is this true. Evolution proceeds by mutation and natural selection, yes; but the space or niche that any organism will be selected to fill can never be known ahead of time. Therefore, no law can predict what will be created (or selected to fill a niche that is unknowable beforehand). Equally important, life and matter seem to organize themselves in unpredictable ways, in Kauffman’s view, by something he calls “autocatalysis”:

…the basis of life…rests in some way on catalysis, the speeding up of chemical reactions by enzymes. My second intuition is that life is based on some form of autocatalysis, in which the molecules in a set catalyze one another’s formation. (p. 55).
Kauffman then cites experiments by Gunter von Kiedrowski where DNA strands with 6 nucleotides (a hexamer) were able to bind with a DNA strand with 3 nucleotides (a trimer), to make the first “reproducing molecular system.” That is, the hexamer proved to be autocatalytic: “it builds a second copy of itself by ‘ligating’ the two trimers into a new hexamer.” Further experiments showed that this same “self-organization” could be achieved by peptide fragments, each fragment catalyzing the other in a kind of feedback loop.

What interests me is that other scientists have focused on this same idea of self-organization or emergence to rethink how life works. Kauffman, for example, says flat out that “consciousness is emergent” and that not just conscious humans but a huge portion of living beings are “agents.” This means that they act in a purposeful way (not as deterministic automatons), and that those scientifically-forbidden concepts of value and meaning spring naturally from this. As Kauffman says: “you and I are agents; we act on our own behalf; we do things. In physics, there are only happenings, not doings” (p. 4). Other scientists, like Nobel chemist Ilya Prigogine, have also contested the alleged “passivity” of matter by pointing out how molecules, such as those in chemical suspensions, or, on a larger scale, in whirlpools, can organize themselves. As explained by Brian Swimme,

Prigogine’s experiments demonstrated that under certain conditions, chemicals could organize themselves into complex patterns requiring the coordination of trillions of molecules. And they did this with no instructions. No humans organized them. Nor did they have a genetic blueprint that guided their actions. Instead, their own intrinsic self-organizing dynamics directed these complex interactions. (Swimme, Journey of the Universe, p. 106).
The late Francisco Varela took this idea of self-organization or emergence up to cell formation. Varela coined the term “autopoesis,” or self-creation. The term referred specifically to how, evolutionarily, groups of molecules were somehow able to bootstrap themselves into making a boundary, a membrane, that created a primary cell (i.e., by holding all together, the boundary literally creates the cell,):

This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produced the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what’s unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. (Swimme, p. 49)
Here is where it gets fascinating for me, for I begin to think of the self-referential implications in all of this. In a way, it almost defies our imaginations. Something creates that which is still “itself” but which changes the very nature of what it is. Our consciousness—or rather our self-consciousness—is like that. We see ourselves being ourselves. We are not only conscious—which is magical enough (especially if we take neuroscientists at their word that the brain, “meat”, somehow creates an immaterial entity like the mind)—but we are conscious of being conscious. It gets a bit dizzying, especially when, as in meditation, one is advised to focus on that which is the observer of, say, one’s thoughts. Who is that observer? Is it (he? she?), too, created by the “meat” of neurons? Very hard to say. What seems clear to me is that we are here in the realm of the emergent “self-organization” that seems to run through virtually all creation.

There was a Pulitzer-prize winning book written around 1979 by Douglas Hofstadter called Godel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter’s reason for putting these three geniuses together had to do with the link between them, the link of self-reference. Bach’s fugues, Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and Escher’s prints all referred, each in their own ways, to the idea of self-reference. Escher’s prints provide the most graphic way to think of this: in one iconic drawing, the hands of the artist are depicted in a way that makes it seem that each drawn hand is drawing the other hand, drawing the drawing itself. It is a logical impossibility, but we know instantly what it means. We have a sense of its “rightness,” somehow. The same goes for Bach’s fugues and the Godel theorem—the latter deriving its logic from the fact that one can never see (or mathematically represent) a whole situation. The see-er can never include his seeing in what he sees, and thus never takes in the whole. And yet, there are these representations.

My own take on this comes from an Italian folk tale collected by Italo Calvino in his classic Italian Folktales (1956). In Giovannin Senza Paura (Little John without fear), the main character has a reputation for being fearless. But one day, he goes into battle with a fearsome adversary, who cuts off our hero’s head. Calmly, Giovannin stoops and puts his head back on, confident of continuing the battle. But alas, he puts his head on backwards, looks at his backside, and dies of fright. What is it that frightens the fearless one to death? It is not explained, but we can guess it’s something like ‘the sight which is not to be seen.’ The sight of oneself whole, perhaps. The sight of the whole. And it reminds us of other sights, in mythology, that are not permitted to humans, and thereby to what we’ve been discussing:

Tiresias sees snakes copulating (or Athena naked) and, transformed into a woman for 7 years, is then asked by Hera to judge who gets the greater pleasure in sex, man or woman. Tiresias claims it is woman, and Hera strikes him blind. He has seen what is not to be seen (so he becomes a blind ‘seer’). Similarly, Actaeon sees the Goddess Artemis naked, whereupon she turns him into a stag, to then be devoured by his own hounds who do not recognize him. All these tales—and there are many more—refer to the idea of humans seeing what is prohibited—seeing into the mystery. Notably, the seeing is always the normal kind of seeing, sensory seeing, seeing from a specific, objectifying point of view. I have written about this in my Mal Occhio book, but here the question becomes, ‘what is that which cannot be seen by the naked eye?’ by the normal human, rational, objectifying eye? From a Godelian point of view, completeness, perhaps, or wholeness. We cannot reduce the whole to a consistent formula. In many evil eye traditions, that which is at risk of harm from eyes is any hint of perfection. Perfection, including the fundamental mysteries of nature, cannot be seen. Thoreau referred to this in one of his Notebooks: he wrote something like, ‘Man cannot afford to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye.’ In other words, there is something inherently forbidden or un-seeable (it may be that physicists have already reached this level, for none has ever seen a quark or a “string” and no one ever will apparently—photons of light interfere with entities this small), and it clusters around ideas of wholeness, perfection, the mystery of life self-organizing, perhaps, improbably bootstrapping itself from one level of organization to another, as in consciousness.

And yet we know it. Bach knew it. Escher knew it. And I think this knowing is symbolized by the ancient symbol of the ouroboros: the snake eating its own tail. This is an ancient symbol of deep mystery: a creature nourishing itself on itself. Eating not another, but itself in an act of incomprehensible self-creation (and self-sacrifice), of leaping improbably to another level. And depicted not as acquisitive or destructive, but as a self-renewing, infinite circle. In a way, we do this daily. For if we are all constructed of the same basic ingredients, which we are—all living cells being constructed on the same basic plan of the same basic elements, so we are related to every one of the bacteria whose numbers and creativity overwhelm our imaginations—then each time we eat a frog or a pig or a chicken or a fish or any vegetable or grain, we are eating ourselves. We are the ouroboros. We are the mystery whose most recent bootstrap miracle is consciousness.

And given that we do not know, cannot know what might be the next phase space for the next emergence, it may be that bootstrapping ourselves to another more global form of consciousness is right around the corner. I am comforted by that. Because if we are ever to get out of the current mess our celebrated, rational brains have got us into, it will have to be via a leap to something more, a more inclusive, less intrusive level of seeing and knowing and, most of all, accepting that from which we have come, that which we truly are.

Perhaps the words of another cell biologist, Ursula Goodenough, provide a fitting end here, for Goodenough also places emergence at the center of her meditations on what she calls The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford U Press: 1998). And that she, too, makes use of the “snake eating its tail” metaphor here strikes me as, well, uncanny:

For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no superordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides.


Lawrence DiStasi

Big Brother Wants More

There is a proposed law being discussed in Congress right now that aims to expand the reach of spying on United States citizens within the country. The law is abbreviated as CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, HR 3523. First, it’s important to note the newspeak, making this law sound as if it’s protecting the patriotic sharing of intelligence by our loyal corporations. It’s anything but. What it’s really about is facilitating and legalizing the access by spy agencies like the NSA—which already has access to all your emails, phone calls, cell calls—to all this and more. To do this, the law will provide protection to U.S. companies so that, doing their patriotic duty, they can voluntarily provide information to the government about any ‘suspect’ (and suspicion is in the mind of the beholder) activities that come through their web sites or communications lines. The bill, not incidentally, is authored by ex-FBI agent and now Chair of the House Intelligence Committtee, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers. This is the guy who said in a public interview that he thought anyone (Bradley Manning specifically, who considered his leaks to Wikileaks to be the exposure of war crimes) who revealed classified information ought to be charged with treason—the penalty for which is death.

According to Michelle Richardson, an ACLU attorney interviewed on this morning’s Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org ), the proposed law creates an exception to all existing privacy laws (requiring such outdated niceties as warrants or subpoenas), by providing protection to companies like ATT or Google that wish to “share” their information with Federal spies. Most major internet companies support the law, and for good reason: in the event that these companies do share private information, they are completely protected from future lawsuits and actions by those exposed, including protection from FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests in the future. In other words, if a person wants to bring action for violation of privacy, he is shit out of luck: even if he could bring a suit, none of the evidence will be available! The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) also notes that the law includes a truncated 2-year statute of limitations—clearly not enough time to even discover you’ve been spied on, much less gather data and bring any action whatever.

The law is expected to pass the House—it’s full of Republican dinosaurs who love giving the Feds more power when it’s repressive power that puts people in jail, rather than helping them with food or health care. It may have more trouble in the Senate, now controlled by the Democrats, and with President Obama, who has promised to veto the bill if it comes to him in its present form. However, the Pres has reneged on such promises before, so one can’t place much hope in that.

Perhaps the best thing to do is listen to some of the guests Democracy Now has been featuring in the past week. William Binney, for example, worked for 40 years at the NSA until, shortly after 9/11, he was so appalled by the amount of illegal surveillance the NSA was doing—he cited the figure 20 trillion! transactions the NSA has assembled on U.S. citizens, which doesn’t even include internet searches or bank transactions—that he resigned in October of 2001. When he became a whistleblower, he was attacked by the FBI, his home was raided (while he was in the shower), a gun was pointed to his head and he was interrogated right there. His colleague, Thomas Drake, was formally charged with violating the Espionage Act for talking to a reporter about his concerns with the NSA spying practices. This type of intimidation against whistleblowers has taken an alarming upturn in the Obama administration, and shows no sign of letting up (five prosecutions so far, described by Gabriel Schoenfeld as “the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history;” cited in “The Secret Sharer,” by Jane Mayer, New Yorker, May 23, 2011). Democracy Now also interviewed Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher for the Tor Project (torproject.org), working to provide software that offers a way to browse the net anonymously. This has earned him all kinds of harassment, to the point where he never, he says, communicates by phone or internet in the United States since he knows that all such communications are monitored. He has also been detained at a dozen or so airports:

I was put into a special room, where they frisked me, put me up against the wall. ... Another one held my wrists. ... They implied that if I didn't make a deal with them, that I'd be sexually assaulted in prison. ... They took my cellphones, they took my laptop. They wanted, essentially, to ask me questions about the Iraq War, the Afghan War, what I thought politically. (Amy Goodman, “The NSA Is Watcing You,” Truthdig, April 26, 2012)
Welcome to the Brave New World of America’s surveillance society. How did that song go:
“Every move you make; every step you take; I’ll be watching you…”
Long story short: Don’t waste time folks. Don’t let CISPA pass unnoticed. Don’t think it’s only those who “have something to hide” who have to worry. As David Cole observed several years ago when commenting about the wartime violations imposed on enemy aliens: once the government gets away with violating the rights of those without citizenship, it’s never long before they can, and will violate the rights of citizens as well. Once the information is collected—Binney says he is sure the NSA already has copies of every email sent in the U.S., gleaned from interception points in most big cities—it will sooner or later be used. Go to www.eff.org and sign the petition. Call your senators. Raise hell. Liberties, once taken, rarely return.



Lawrence DiStasi

Cheney and the Undead

No. This blog is not about zombies—though in one sense it could be. It’s about the way the recent heart transplant for our beloved former VP, Dick Cheney, was trumpeted all over the world, first as a miracle of life-saving American medicine, then as a tribute to the great VP managing to survive five heart attacks and what appeared to be imminent death. But thanks to a heart transplant—the word evokes images of gardening, where we buy packets of baby plants to transplant lovingly in our backyard patch—our snarling VP has survived to hunt another day. Hosanna. Just by the way, Cheney has also thanked the donor from whom he received his heart, that donor being an unknown unperson, of course.

And that’s where things start to smell fishy. Cheney’s heart transplant, were he not on the government dole, would have cost him about $1 million. This is according to Dick Teresi, who’s written a book called The Undead (Pantheon: 2012) about precisely this transplant industry. And it is an industry—a $20 billion-a-year business at last count. Transplant surgeons make on average $400,000 a year, while procurement alone, for a heart like Cheney’s, runs about $150,000. Then all the immunosuppressant drugs for all the 30,000 or so yearly transplants come to another $1 billion a year; and the donors? the ones whose hearts and lungs and livers and kidneys and eyes and bone marrow make all these thousands of miracles possible? They get nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero. Because it’s against the law to pay them. Or even know who they were.

It’s worse than that, though--something I personally found out the hard way. Several years ago, my ex-wife was stricken with a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, which flooded her brain with blood, essentially knocking it out of commission. She was rushed to the nearby hospital and put on a ventilator and heart stimulants—life support basically—while we, her family, waited to see if a miracle might save her. It didn’t look good: though appearing to be asleep, she was nonreponsive. Still, my son was flying in from Chicago and we hoped she would survive until he could see her. That’s when the OPO ladies entered. OPO stands for Organ Procurement Organization. Until then, few of us had thought of it other than as a check-off box on a driver’s license. But suddenly these two ladies appeared and began talking to my daughter and me about organ donation. We knew my ex-wife had expressed interest in this on her will, so we were receptive—until one of the ladies mentioned “brain death.” It was the first we’d heard of this and it shocked us, me especially, since I’d had occasion to research the term due to a comp class I was teaching. The term stems from the Harvard Commission of 1968, which, with the advent of transplants, felt a need to find a new definition of death (beyond the stoppage of heartbeat and breathing) that would clarify when a patient might be a donor. As they said in their opening statement: “Obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.” They, and a subsequent committee, came up with the term “brain dead” to signify a person whose brain no longer maintained normal consciousness, sensory responses, motor activity, and in some cases breathing and heartbeat. Such a person could be considered, for all practical purposes (i.e. the “harvesting” of organs) dead. In our case, it was now clear that the hospital, or someone, was now considering my ex-wife brain-dead. The problem was, no one had informed us, the ones most interested in such a decision. Long story short, we exploded, roughly dismissed the OPO people, then unloaded on the surgeon who came out to explain—he was clearly worried that a breach of ethics (calling the OPO before doing the required tests to confirm brain death) had occurred.

As it turned out—though after reading Teresi’s book, I am no longer sure—my ex-wife settled things on her own. Her heart stopped and she was unable to be revived. Nor was the OPO able to “harvest” her organs. And here was the lesson we got: in order to “harvest” a “brain dead” person’s organs, that person must be kept alive or semi-alive (the language here becomes bizarre, oxymoronic). Such a person is referred to in the industry as a BHC, a “beating-heart-cadaver.” The organs, to be harvestable, must be kept irrigated by blood and oxygen; hence, the need to keep donors on ventilators and heart stimulating drugs not only up to, but including organ removal. As Teresi points out in his book, the patient who is a prospective donor gets the best medical treatment of his or her “life.” This “preharvest” treatment was being done to my ex-wife—until, that is, the possibility of organ donation had been dashed by our reaction.

Though I wrote a long essay on this (see “Ladies in Black” on my website, www.lawrencedistasi.com ) I really didn’t know the half of it. Teresi, however, has done the research, and what he has found, and what you don’t know about organ donation, can literally fill a book. Most important is the basic fact: the designation of death itself. Though the Harvard Committee, and virtually all neurosurgeons, transplant surgeons, and the people who work for OPOs will insist that the “brain dead person”—one who exhibits no reactions—is really dead, too much contrary research indicates that such a verdict rests on shaky ground. That’s because the basic test for brain death is what Teresi terms flash-splash-gasp: a flashlight is shined in the patient’s eyes to see if there’s a reaction, ice water is poured into the ears (a responsive person will shudder), and the ventilator is disconnected for a time (a normal person will attempt to gasp for air). In states like New Jersey, all these tests must be repeated twice, usually six hours apart, with two different doctors administering the tests. If the patient passes (or fails; again the language gets tricky), then brain death is confirmed. Significantly, no EEG (electroencephalograph), to test for brain wave activity, especially in the cortex, is required. That means, as Teresi humorously puts it (his sense of humor in some ways makes a grim book palatable), that a patient “could have been calculating the cross section of the bottom quark using Heisenberg’s matrices, and no amount of ice water squirted into her ear would have detected it.” In short, the standard brain-death tests focus on the activities of the brain stem (which controls basic functions), not the cortex itself.

Can someone who is comatose still have cortical activity? Here Teresi narrates some cases of coma, locked-in syndrome and persistent vegetative state (PVS), and what he finds is startling. In one famous case from Belgium, Rom Houben had been apparently comatose for 5 years after a car accident. But then an fMRI showed that he had significant brain activity, so much so that he soon learned to imagine playing tennis, and by using that as a “yes” response, was able to answer questions about himself and his family with 100% accuracy. Clearly, while apparently ‘brain dead’ (at least insofar as his brain stem functions), Houben was alive and very conscious. Teresi comments: “The netherwolds of coma reveal our profound ignorance about what the mind is and what constitutes consciousness…it may even be possible to have consciousness without a working brain” (197). When we consider that the verdict “brain dead” focuses specifically on consciousness as the sine qua non of being alive, we see that this is no idle debate. It is also quite relevant to some of the more horrifying information Teresi provides—i.e. that so-called brain dead patients have been recorded as having reacted to the initial surgery that takes their organs. Dr. Andrew Shewmon of UCLA takes very seriously these “stress responses” exhibited by patients when transplant surgeons cut into their bodies to remove organs. One observer, Kathleen Stein wrote an article in Omni magazine (“Last Rights,” Sept. 1987) in which she saw a donor’s heartbeat accelerate from 100 to 200 beats per minute with the beginning of the “harvest” procedure—at which point the alarmed surgeons shocked it back to normalcy. Teresi comments that anesthesiologists “are beginning to wonder about those racing heartbeats and other suspicious symptoms exhibited by donors. What does a “pretty dead” patient experience during a three- to five-hour harvest sans anesthetic?” (150) One hardly wants to know.

Teresi’s information on NDEs (near-death experiences) only adds to the puzzle (i.e. what is “alive” and what is “dead”? what is “conscious” and what is not, and is it solely located in the brain?) One case in particular is stunning (remembering always that the NDE is by nature anecdotal): a woman Teresi calls ‘Pam’ (a pseudonym) had an operation to remove a brain aneurysm which required that she be frozen (to 60 degrees F), her brain emptied of blood, and her heart stopped for 60 minutes—minimal blood flow being maintained by a bypass machine. Pam had a lengthy and detailed near-death experience whereby her ‘consciousness’ left her body and observed the entire operation from above—all details being precise and true to what was done to her body. She also says she saw the usual white light, and met relatives who nourished her and convinced her she had to go back to her body. The point of these experiences (of 334 patients with cardiac arrest Dr. Pim van Lommel found that 44 or 18% had NDEs) is not to affirm or deny life after death but just to ask the key question here: if Pam’s heart was stopped and her brain was emptied of blood for at least 5 minutes, just what was having the experience she remembered so vividly?

The answer any individual comes to is critical, not simply because it’s interesting philosophically, but because life-and-death decisions are being made every day in negligence, or ignorance of the answer. The heart Dick Cheney got came from someone—and he was probably young, with a good chance of having been treated in an inner-city hospital where, as Dr. Abraham Verghese wrote in Cutting for Stone, transplant teams from wealthy hospitals helicopter in to ‘harvest’ organs—someone whose life was judged to be over by doctors doing routine, and, possibly perfunctory tests. As I wrote nearly a decade ago in “Ladies in Black,” the least Americans can do is to become informed about what such procedures involve, what “brain death” means, and whether they are comfortable with doctors (as many as 65% being unfamiliar with precisely the tests needed to confirm brain death) deciding who is dead and who isn’t. Beyond that, Americans should know that the incentives to reaching a “brain-dead” conclusion are pretty strong—given the need for organs, and given the amount of money involved in the entire industry.

In the end, the basic conflict comes down to a basic one: on the one side, the transplant industry insisting, with Dr. Fred Plum (the neurologist who coined the term “persistent vegetative state”), that “The brain is the person, the evolved person, not the machine person. Consciousness is the ultimate.”(271) And on the other, increasing numbers of observers who, like Dr. Candace Pert (the neuroscientist who discovered opiate receptors), conclude that “Consciousness is a property of the entire body.”(272) That is, life, consciousness, personhood cannot be limited to the brain alone. To conclude that it is, and to, on the basis of that conclusion, urge more and more people to commit to procedures they are kept ignorant of, is to reduce humans and their death, like so much else in our culture, to commodities for harvest. It is the final indignity.



Lawrence DiStasi

Creating a Permanent Underclass

Life isn’t sunny without money
Body and soul separate too soon
We’ve learned there is no Easter Bunny
You must work hard and cannot swoon
Yet, to inherit the earth, you must first die
So test your freedoms as you fly
You have so little choice
And so I say: Rejoice
Especially you women
Take the day off to go swimmin’


As the GOP commits to fight for freedom, you may begin to ask for whom? Surely, there is no freedom for women to control their own bodies as now a couple dozen “conservative” states are enacting laws that mandate that women asking for an abortion undergo a forced sonogram as a way to shame them. Even if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, this denial of 4th amendment rights will be done by state functionaries with the cost to be borne by the woman despite the fact that she gets no medical benefit from the intrusion. Wisconsin, that last year slashed the rights of unions to negotiate, has also declared that women have no right to equal pay for equal work with the bill just signed by Scott Walker. That puts a consistent and official face on Republican policy no matter their utterings.

Several states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors are moving rapidly to tear rights away from women. While the given rationale is to enhance Christian morality, the consistent outcome is to reduce the power of women in our democratic society. Recent presidential candidate Rick Santorum, or “Sanitarium” as some of his Southern supporters call him, has said that he wants to “throw up” when he hears JFK talk about separation of Church and State. He sees this as a rejection of the concept of getting our basic rights from God. There is an almost delicious irony that it is exactly his theme that rights given by states can be taken by states that is being executed by right wing state governments across this great republic. No serious voter would have imagined that law settled in the1950s that guaranteed women the right to contraceptives would be threatened in 2012. Surely nobody imagined that the democratic process of voting for representatives would be shelved in favor of autocratic rule by unelected petty/party czars as now in Michigan. Of all the threats to democracy, I cannot imagine one worse than that now thriving in Michigan. In that state, controlled by an ultra-conservative majority, the governor has absolute authority to disenfranchise legally elected representatives and replace them with highly paid czars who report only to the governor and not to the people. Governor Snyder has, in fact, appointed single authorities to replace the governments of Benton Harbor, Flint, Highland Park, Ecorse, Pontiac and Hamtramck as well as several school districts. In other words, the governor has the power to void the elections of any Michigan political entity and supplant the elected with his appointment. If that sounds totalitarian, and it does, it has been executed in a totalitarian manner as well by violation of the Michigan rule that laws not specifically endorsed by 2/3 of the state legislature cannot be immediately put into effect. The second aberration has been fulfilled in the state legislature where the majority has not allowed a count to prove/disprove that 2/3 voted to support “immediate effect.” No Democrats have voted to support the aberration and video shows Democrats trying to get that count and being rejected by the Majority Speaker. It is a putsch in America.

Surely, Michigan is not the first state to experience money issues or even to have elected politicians who cannot immediately solve a financial crisis. In other states, a receiver has been appointed, often by a court, to guide elected politicians and even manage money. I have known where a receiver was required to sign city checks over a given amount, say $5,000. This is the very first time that I have known of a complete takeover by a governor with the abrogation of duly elected officials. Further, the local czars appointed by Governor Snyder can dispose of city property by selling it to friends or otherwise deprive the city of property/revenue without review. Those are dictatorial powers, not compatible with democracy. Another unique aspect of this dictatorship is that only minority cities and towns were grabbed. This alone poses a threat of creating a permanent underclass of minorities in Michigan. Women have long been subject to deprivation by systems that pay men more for equal work and by systems that block access to women’s healthcare such as that offered by Planned Parenthood. Mittens Romney, when asked by a woman how she could get healthcare if Planned Parenthood were eliminated callously remarked that she “was free to seek the healthcare anywhere,” as if she had the money to do so. Please tell me how a woman who is so resource poor that she depends upon Planned Parenthood for her healthcare can possibly shop for healthcare. This is an insidious sentence to permanent poverty because the woman will be denied healthcare and accelerated in her cycle of poverty. Contraceptives may be available for women with money to pay for them, but poor women simply are not able. The poverty cycle gets boosted by unwanted pregnancies. Women susceptible to complicated gynecological issues need special and expensive contraceptives. Otherwise, they are unable to get meaningful and fairly compensated work. So we have a concentrated effort by the right wing that now controls the GOP to worsen the status quo for women and minorities. Combine this with a tax code that favors the wealthy and demands no sacrifice from them and we begin to see the concrete harden for an ever more permanent underclass.

Historically, we once saw men and women, especially women, lift themselves by their bootstraps with two major components being available to them. We actually had 1) a safety net in healthcare and aid for food subsistence as well as 2) an affordable secondary education system. By using the circular argument that women have no right to equal pay (Wisconsin, 2012 despite Lilly Ledbetter Act) because they may have to leave the workplace due to unwanted pregnancies or health issues and then denying women cheap healthcare and contraception, we have denied them equal access to the workplace. Policies that support outrageously high secondary education costs, seal off the last remaining exit from poverty. So the cycle of the illogical is completed. Women are not entitled to equal pay for equal work because they may not become qualified in the workplace, and our policies will ensure that the women cannot become qualified. While some may see a religious message in all that, I see an economic message. Across this nation, women are being told that the Viagra so needed to enable men to get them pregnant is economically justified, but contraception is not economically justified. Everybody knows that preventive healthcare is about 90% cheaper than emergency room visits or pregnancies. Is the motive for this policy religion or economics? Have women become too competitive for us men in the workplace? Women and minorities suffered most from the 2007 recession. Is it best to write them off as a permanent underclass? When we do hire them (women and minorities), we can pay them less, thus achieving greater competitive power and allowing even higher profits for the real people: “Corporations are people, my friend.” (Mitt Romney, August 11, 2011, Iowa State Fair).

As we continue to lower the cost of labor and compete for the lowest available markets, we need fewer educated people and can return to the good old days of Charles Dickens. The wealthy will protect us and our children by putting us all to work for less. “God Bless us, every one.”

We have an election coming and we need to see what has happened to our nation through the current redistribution of wealth from the have littles to the have lots through corporate welfare/socialism and tax systems that reward wealth (Romney pays less that 15%?) We must take on that mission with as much determination as we have to stop the reverse. Real tax rates are the lowest they have been in more than 50 years and wealth inequity charts demonstrate that we are out of balance. Did we learn that trickle down does not work? The Bush tax cuts have been operating for more than 10 years. Has that helped anybody in the middle or lower classes climb the economic ladder?
Summer will soon be upon us. It is nearly time to go swimming, but keep your eyes peeled for the sharks out there. They will have a feeding frenzy at election time. The chum is in the water.





Peace,
George Giacoppe
14 April 2012