Human Sacrifice is Basic to Capitalism

How the Free Market Leads to Famines

2009-12-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.truthout.org/1214096

How the Free Market Leads to Famines
Wednesday 09 December 2009
by: Laurent Pinsolle

The little African country of Malawi "imported 40 percent of its food in 2005, but the development of agricultural subsidies to the agricultural sector has transformed this country, since it now exports 50 percent of its production after "tripling its corn production in just four years."

The Economist's latest article on global developments in agriculture involuntarily provides arguments for critics of free trade: the stampede for poor countries' lands, price volatility and, above all, the success of national policies for food self-sufficiency. Laurent Pinsolle tells you more about it.

In its November 21 issue, The Economist looks into the fascinating theme of agriculture and wonders what we shall do to feed the world. Although it supports deregulation, the uber-capitalist free market weekly nonetheless provides arguments for its opponents.

Of course, this issue provides the opportunity for the British magazine to decry the limits set on market mechanisms. In fact, when faced with the 2007 surge in agricultural product prices, many countries took radical measures, such as forbidding exports, a policy which ricocheted, provoking serious crises in importing countries. The upsurge in prices provoked a historic increase of about a hundred million in the number of malnourished people in the world.

The Economist makes itself the advocate of free trade in agricultural markets and calls for the suppression of tariff and other trade barriers recently established. Yet, its exposition of this issue clearly shows that market mechanisms lead to the dramas we've experienced for several months. In fact, the invisible hand leads to concentration in production that makes prices for agricultural products more volatile, threatening the planet's poorest populations.

Even worse, The Economist spends quite a bit of time reviewing the phenomenon of the purchase of arable lands in Third World countries by agricultural product importers, such as China, South Korea or the oil-exporting countries. No less than 20 million hectares of the best lands in poor countries of Africa and Asia have been purchased in this way by richer countries, seriously handicapping those countries' ability to develop their own agriculture ...

Paradoxically, The Economist develops examples that demonstrate the value of public intervention. It cites the case of Malawi. This little African country imported 40 percent of its food in 2005. But the development of agricultural subsidies to the agricultural sector (amounting to 4 percent of GDP) has transformed this country, since it now exports 50 percent of its produce after having tripled its corn production in just four years. In the same way, following rice shortages, today the Philippines are zeroing in on self-sufficiency.

The overall dossier shows one thing very clearly: market liberalization leads to specialization and concentration in production, which makes agricultural prices more volatile. In fact, with a more concentrated market, the slightest incident in the big producing countries provokes major tension that may make prices soar or collapse. Even when socializing agricultural production is not the issue, less concentration may give stability to the system.

That's why self-sufficiency still has a bright future before it and the odds are that, in spite of the WTO, many countries, including developing countries, will prefer to regulate their domestic market to allow their agriculture to develop, an essential phase in economic development. And in any event, the predictable rise in carbon prices will end up making trade in agricultural products more expensive, which would have to promote relocalization of that activity.

The free trade record is there: the number of people suffering from malnutrition in the world has been increasing since 1995. Consequently, it is high time to return to a more local and more stable vision of agriculture that benefits everyone.

Getting Screwed Hard by Capitalism

2009-12-13T15:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/This-Week-In-Capitalism-by-mikel-weisser-091207-242.html

December 11, 2009
This Week In Capitalism
By mikel weisser

No -- aside from a blatant plug -- this week's title is NOT a ploy to once again promote Michael Moore or his new movie Capitalism.

This has been an exciting week for Capitalism folks, as in the economic enterprise that supposedly sails our ship of state through the stormiest of seas. If only we believe. If only we believe and remove the shackles of unfair unfree trade. Once again that definition of Free Trade -- anything Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh agree is good for business and they always agree with their bosses.

Broken down to its nuts and bolts: Capitalism means you screw people over as hard as you can for as much as you can. If they lose their homes, die from lack of medical service, or find themselves treading water next to a drowning polar bear, it is not your problem if you can successfully deny it through litigation. OR,another popular definition -- provide the absolute minimum in goods or services, all the while convincing customers that they are happy. OR, the one most of us live through, which is essentially slavery, except they also get to torture us with a math problem we'll never solve: how can we afford to live on the little bit we make. And the capitalists will tell you loud and long how they have done you a favor by inventing this system and your place in it; but the most important "place" in the system is theirs.

By these and numerous other standards, 2009 has been a very good year for capitalism. This year saw the number of billionaires in America nearly double at a time when the rest of the world lost over five trillion dollars. Where did the money go? Up the ladder. It's the destructive trickle-up theory made famous by Reaganomics-loving neocons way back when. There are now 793 billionaires in America. That's a lot of billions that had to go somewhere, such as away from our schools and roads and healthcare. But it sure made a lot of millionaires a whole lot richer.

In fact, among the factoids amid this week's news flotsam is that the 400 richest people in America got 30 billion richer. Whew. At a time when 3.5 million more homes are expected to go belly up, it warms my heart to know the money is safe.

Look how much happier we all are now that they have our money and not just our houses, but our taxes too. With a year like this, it is hard to keep straight which example of unfettered capitalism is the most audacious, so I personally have taken to breaking down my list to a week-by-week basis. With several outstanding examples of why this paradigm has been good for society in the current news cycle, there are so many choices to be dazzled by.

According to right-wing bloggers,the biggest news this week is that the entirety of global warming is a hoax and that every scientist everywhere who does not propound that Jesus dated dinosaurs is part of a conspiracy to ruin petrodollar profits and thus screw over Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney and several Bushes all at the same time and that, sir, is Un-American.

Those of you who know that Rush is always right also knew all along that it's those phony lying lefties who cooked up this whole fake global warming thing, and now they have been busted. Sure.

Where is my Hummer? Can I get it to reduce my mileage to like 5mph, maybe 3mph? And why not, if there's no global warming? Maybe you can get it rigged up to run on clubbed baby seal?

Anyway, all that was good red meat for the anti-environmentalists around the country. Except on the opposite side, the folks who say that quote scandal is a classic misdirection,who say it's all a conflation and intended to distract the public support away serious commitments at Copenhagen's Climate Change Conference, happen to be the majority of the world's scientists who are hoping we as a people will wise up before we destroy our planet beyond recognition.

They explain that the accusations being hurled against the emailing climate scientists in question are intentional outlandish distortions of language and intent. By the way, backers of the emailers include their bosses, and John Roberts, the CNN reporter sent to talk up the teapot into a tempest and even Bill Nye the Science Guy doing his level best to debunk the global warming would-be debunkers. The CNN coverage of the controversy was a load of bunk to be sure. But as Roberts noted, finishing his coverage, by the time the experts sort it out, Copenhagen will be over and Exxon-Mobile can continue to make billions by destroying our future for the mere cost a few hackers and a couple of bribed talking heads spreading a little doubt.

Capitalists win!

Over in the Banking sector which has been so inspiring this last year when it comes to doing dirt unto others and calling it good clean profit, many folks are impressed with Bank of America's honchos announcing they are attempting to return their TARP money so they can award themselves more profits and bonuses. But I am partial to that other Bail-Out Powerhouse AIG. In “Bailed-Out AIG Forcing Poor to Choose Between Running Water and Food,” Yasha Levine's not-that-astonishing expose on AIG going all Third world on the poverty stricken of Rural Kentucky. Taking a page from the Bechtel rape of Bolivia's water supply back in 2000, AIG subsidy Utilities, Inc. acquired the water supply for poor mountaineers who barely keep their families fed, and then jacked their rates by more than 51%. Phony, erroneous and repetitive billing ensued. Kidding aside, these are people whose per-capita income is $13,000. Through the rate hike and working out the “bugs” in their new billing system, AIG nets an additional three quarters of a million, and all they had to do was torment a few more poor people. Why not, they're good at it, they're capitalists.

But my choice for This Week in Capitalism's “Just Getting Down to the Brass Tacks of it All” Award for cutting to the essence of capitalist values, or at least the espoused capitalist values of our captains of capitalism in the press and the pubs of America actually goes to Mexico. That's right, the people who were once held as farm animals and concubines for their Spanish missionaries have now gone that ultimate last mile for capitalism --cut labor costs completely and just kidnapped themselves a bunch of slaves right in the heart of the biggest city in the world. That's right, on December 4, the Associated Press, among others, reported that a factory in Mexico City that disguised itself as a rehab center was actually kidnapping people off of the streets then forcing them to work 16-hour days making shopping bags and clothespins. One hundred and seven people were rescued having been found working as slaves, and 23 suspects allegedly working as their overseers and guards were taken into custody.

And I say,what happened here? Why has the free market failed capitalism? People need their cheap plastic bags and clothespins, and a business man has a right to make a profit doesn't he? Of course that's not that different from the occasional corporate faux pas here in America where dozens of undocumented immigrants happen to be working in the same meat packing plant, or restaurant, which just happens to be owned by some big American business --like Tyson, like McDonalds, like Swift.

Like another Swift might once have suggested, next thing you know the capitalists will be selling us our own babies to eat. Why not? It's pure capitalism in motion. They don't have to pay for the labor. They don't have to guarantee the product. They don't have to protect the consumer. Yipes, if the capitalists ever figure out how to make a buck on this, we're doomed.

‘Wall Street’s excesses caused more deaths among children than the tsunami four years ago'

2009-12-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00420

‘Wall Street’s excesses caused more deaths among children than the tsunami four years ago'
COMMENTARY | November 24, 2009
By Richard Parker

This is the text of the Kelman Seminar Lecture by Richard Parker at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard Nov. 10, co-sponsored with the Shorenstein Center, the Nieman Foundation and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

“Attitude and action are linked in a continuing reciprocal process, each generating the other in an endless chain.”
—Herbert C. Kelman

The Kelman Seminars honor Herbert Kelman, Cabot Prof of Social Ethics Emeritus, and the singularly eminent Harvard psychologist. Kelman’s work on reconciliation has done much to advance our understanding of the underlying psychological processes determining both conflict and the opportunity for reconciliation.

Of perhaps even greater importance, he has pioneered applied invaluable practical means for achieving reconciliation among conflicting parties. In this Prof. Kelman represents a model for us all in the social sciences on how to use scientific research in the solution of some of humankind’s most daunting problems.

Much of his work has focused on inter-national conflict, the underlying personal and group psychological bases for national and ethnic collective identity, and the role of reconciliation in altering the very coordinates of both national and ethnic identity as part of the process for achieving reconciliation. Given that body of work, its enormous importance, and in particular Prof. Kelman’s invaluable contributions in recent years to the hard and often frustrating work of peace and reconciliation in the Middle East, one might reasonably ask a simple question:

Dr. Parker, who invited you here today? It is, I must say, a fair question.

I am not a specialist in reconciliation, not a social psychologist, not even a psychologist. Instead I am an economist, a card-carrying member of a profession that has spent the past century running away from psychology and toward physics, a profession that has long avowed an almost irrational belief in the rational nature of human choice and human motivation, a profession that disdains any idea of reconciliation save the role of price to reconcile supply and demand.

Yet there is precedent here that my presence is not entirely in error. In 2000, Daniel Kahneman, the distinguished Princeton psychologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. His long-time research partner Amos Tversky would almost certainly have shared the prize, but Tversky by then was dead, and the Nobel’s rules allow its award only to living recipients.

Kahneman’s and Tversky’s work lies at the heart of a new field in my discipline called “behavioral economics”, which has rapidly become one of the hottest interests among a younger generation of economists—even as it has provoked widespread unease among many of the profession’s elders. The reason for excitement among the young and dis-ease among the elders of my tribe is simple: “behavioral economics” rejects one of the profession’s central tenets, that human beings are rational maximizers of their self-interest.

The goal of my Kelman Seminar lecture today is to explore with you some of the challenges that “behavioral economics” and its cousin “behavioral finance” are raising, specifically by looking at the current global financial crisis. I’ve chosen the global financial crisis, moreover, not simply as a heuristic opportunity to delve into this new paradigm in economics. I want to raise for you what amounts to a much larger, indeed for me, a daunting question: whether or not global civilization has reached a point at which the idea of “reconciliation” as Prof. Kelman and others have developed it requires new application to economics theory and real-world economic relations.
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As I understand reconciliation and its practitioners, to date most of their quite admirable work has focused on the consequences of the physical and psychological destruction caused by the hostility of large groups often within a single conflicted society (such as Rwanda or Northern Ireland), or to the aftermath of state-based oppression (as in post-communist Eastern Europe) or of more egregious state-based violence, especially when directed toward a large identifiable racial, ethnic, or political groups governed by the state (such as South Africa, Argentina, and East Timor).

My question is not whether such work is useful, indeed necessary—indeed that seems to me unchallengeable. Mine rather is a question about the extension of such work—whether the globalization of economic relations—the modern-day reconstitution and integration of societies as markets—has brought us to a new era in which we need to enlarge the scope of reconciliation’s work beyond the classic horrors of civil war, of political torture, and systemic political oppression to the consequences of economic relations, economic systems, and economic theories.
************

The global financial crisis is in that sense an immediate and familiar arena in which to ask that question—but not the only one. As both anthropogenic climate change and species destruction accelerates, I think it is fair to say that almost every aspect of modern globalization raises profound issues for those doing and theorizing about reconciliation. The twentieth century was, by all assessments, the most violent in human history in terms of the total dead caused by wars and other mass acts of state-organized violence, accounting for some 175-200 million deaths.

One scholar, Matthew White, has summarized the principal causes as follows:
Genocide and Tyranny: 83,000,000
Military Deaths in War: 42,000,000
Civilian Deaths in War: 19,000,000
Man-made Famine: 44,000,000
TOTAL: 188,000,000

Now if one estimates the total human deaths in the 20th century at four billion (a number subject to serious estimation error, given lack of systematic mortality records, but probably order-of-magnitude correct), that means that roughly five percent of all human deaths in the 20th century were induced by state-organized means, what one scholar has helpfully classified as “the democides” of the past century. If we are to avoid the cynicism alleged of Josef Stalin, who is said to have remarked that “one death is a tragedy, but a million a statistic” we need not only to reflect on the sheer scope of those 200 million dead but their nature, and their relevance to the work of reconciliation going forward.

Given that much of reconciliation’s work has been concentrated on post-conflict societies, four questions stand out for me:

Are we likely to see the sort of massive concentrated deaths caused by World War II repeated in this century, the kind that resulted in Nuremberg Trials as primogenitor form of systematic justice-seeking by means other than violent revenge?
Are the wars of the 21st century much likelier to be smaller in terms of casualties, but durable or even expanding in terms of number of wars, and hence total casualties? If so, have we in fact systematically been able to distinguish even analytically among causations that are ethnic, religious, political, and economic, and if possible analytically, are the distinctions of some significant use in shaping efforts at reconciliation?

Pertinent to my concerns about economics and reconciliation, what should we conclude from the list of 20th century democides which shows that a quarter of those deaths, nearly 50 million, were caused by famine—a figure equal to the number of military war deaths and twice the number of civilian war deaths?

Are we yet able to understand that an entire category of deaths not measured above—the category development economists now refer to as “preventable death, particularly from disease and malnutrition”—may indeed come to represent a greater challenge that the sum of likely wars and civil wars combined?

One recent estimate of such preventable mortality—measured as the gap between actual population size today and population size assuming globalized standards of modestly modern but not cutting edge nutrition, public health, and collective violence levels common among today’s OECD countries—estimates that more than 1.2 billion people, the great majority of them children under the age of five, have died needlessly by these standards since 1950 alone, a figure SIX TIMES the 200 million “democides” estimated above.

Why am I tracing out these differences? Because if in fact the concern of reconciliation is to reduce conflict, promote healing post-conflict, and generally create conditions for productive human life globally, these data suggest that the deep challenge of our age lies in grappling with systemic economic deprivation measured through means such as the UN’s Human Development Index.
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Why is this so, and why is economics relevant?

Let’s pause for a moment here and look back on those 50 million famine-induced deaths. What’s so singularly striking to me, first, is that the majority of them were caused by human beliefs about the proper economic organization of society rather than failures of nature. That is, by far the largest single cause of famine-induced deaths in the past century was in effect faith in scientific rationality: Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s and Mao’s in the 1950s. Put in none too bald terms, nearly 40 million people died in the 20th century as the result of an experiment in the economic organization of human societies meant to improve well-being.

When one looks at other large modern famines—which account for the bulk of the remaining famine-related deaths, what’s no less striking is the conclusion of Amartya Sen (in “Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation”) —that the vast majority of those dead fell victim not to an absolute shortage of food but to human-induced scarcity caused by hoarding and other forms of social misallocation in time of crisis. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in essence a second experiment in the economic organization carried out by those most likely to deplore Stalin’s and Mao’s handiwork.

These two factors—both of them ideologically-driven economic experimentation and allocational failure based on the exercise of unequal political and economic power—are, it seems to me, at the very heart of why I am so concerned about the need to advance the work of reconciliation beyond the classic boundaries it has to date assumed.
And this brings me to today’s global financial crisis in the first of several ways.

Perhaps the most overlooked feature of the crisis, at least here in the US, are the ways in which we have failed to recognize how it is actually increasing hunger across the planet as I speak.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the number of human beings living in outright hunger has soared past 1 billion—one in six of the world’s inhabitants, more than the combined population of all the developed nations of the world. That explosion is because 75-100 million have been added to their ranks in each of the last two years, and with similar growth expected ahead for three to five more years at least. The FAO is excoriating in linking this massive increase in malnutrition to the global financial crisis, including the role of commodity price speculation in foods, fuels, and fertilizers, as well as the collapse in both private-market credit and public-sector aid to the most vulnerable. (See also the World Bank’s analysis here.)

UNICEF has meanwhile estimated that global infant mortality has soared by 300,000 a year and will not begin to fall back to pre-financial crisis levels before 2014. In other words, Wall Street’s financial excesses caused more deaths among children than all those killed by the tsunami that struck Southeast Asia four years ago. Over the estimated cycle, it moreover will produce twice the total estimated death count for Rwanda, Darfur, and the Balkans combined.

And the ILO calculates that by the end of 2009, given the global slowdown of output and trade, 45 percent of all the world’s workers will be earning less than $2 A DAY. (See also IOM’s assessment of the impact on global migration and worker remittances here.)

I cite these data to underscore the scope of the impact of our global financial crisis on those whom I think of as the world’s invisibles—invisible that is to those of us with eyes to see. Here in America the tragic and malign consequences of Wall Street’s meltdown are by no means as horrific, but they are no less shocking.

By narrow measure, US employment is now 10 percent, and by better measures including those working part-time who want fulltime work, those who’ve given up looking for work, etc.—the figure is growing perilously close to 18 percent. The average length of unemployment is now twice what it was a decade ago, and there are 6 jobseekers for every job currently on offer.

Measured from the start of the current collapse, ten million American families will have lost their homes by the end of this calendar year. One in five homeowners owe more on their mortgages than they have equity in their homes.
Fifteen percent of Americans live in poverty, but forty percent will spend at least a year or more in poverty in the next ten years—and two-thirds of Americans will spend a year or more in poverty before the end of their working lives.

(On poverty per decade, see Michael Zweig, “What's Class Got to do With It, American Society in the Twenty-first Century.” On poverty rate over lifetime, see Jacob Hacker, “The great risk shift: The new insecurity and the decline of the American dream.”)

Over the past thirty years—the three decades that have defined the slow but steady deregulation of Wall Street, and the increased globalization of the American economy, the share of US income received by the top 1 percent has doubled from 10 percent to 20 percent. This represents the highest level of income inequality since the US began recording income data in the early 20th century, and now demarcates the US as the single most economically inegalitarian country among the developed nations of the world.
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All this—the compelling evidence of millions of needless deaths particularly among the youngest and most vulnerable, the measured increase of malnutrition by over 100 million in just two years, the troubling problems across the industrialized work including the US—all point, in the context of conflict resolution and reconciliation to what I think is a profound question:

In seeking to address and remedy sources of conflict and suffering through principled acts of reconciliation particularly in post-conflict societies, have the theorists and practitioners of reconciliation somehow misidentified a principal—if not the principal—identifiable cause of such conflict, i.e., unresolved issues of economic wellbeing, power, and identity, both individual and collective, arising from the very nature of our current economic relations globally?

In short, has the global financial crisis of the past two years—its effects visible far beyond the esoterics of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and the oblique questions of what new regulatory conditions (and whether they ought to be market-generated in the manner of the Basel II accords or resemble something more akin to the era of Glass-Steagall)—exposed a level of consistent global harm sufficient for us to redefine the work and scope of reconciliation itself.

It strikes me that we cannot here begin to define precisely what the shape of a new and better global financial architecture can look like without those of you most committed to the work of reconciliation asking the following four fundamental questions:

Will the rapid advance of globalized finance and globalized markets, with the systemic integration of economies from the most advanced to the most primitive, give reason to reorient the perceived primary challenge of reconciliation away from the geographically local nature of wars and civil wars and their consequences?

Has this process of market globalization—of highly mobile capital and means of production set against the fixed immobility of states and mostly fixed mobility of citizens—in some way marginalized the state, and the power of the state, that requires reconciliation workers to think increasingly in post-national terms?

Is the corporation—in particular the multinational private corporation as well as the growing role of state-owned and state-controlled corporation the fulcrum for conflict resolution in ways that only states were a century ago? That is, have we reached a century in which the control of the behavior of large corporations is as seminal to human wellbeing as control of state actors was in the 20th century?
In what sense does reconciliation work increasingly require a morally-framed vision of universal citizenship with universal rights and duties incumbent on both human beings and corporate legal entities alike as the necessary teleological goal toward which we must aim?

***********
I wish I could give an easy set of answers to those questions, but I cannot. What I hope I have done today is encourage those of you who work with far greater skill, knowledge, and experience in the field of reconciliation to use these reflections to enlarge and orient the ambit of your work, scholarly and applied.

Prof. Kellman long ago insisted that we must learn to distinguish ontological needs from values from interests in order to seek negotiable goals in the work of reconciliation. It would seem to me that something like this work remains to be done across the entire range of economic questions that encompass not only our current economic crisis, but the roles and identities we draw from economic life itself. Perhaps the greatest challenge to liberal democracy in the 21st century lies in using the skills of reconciliation to re-appropriate from the economic not simply the means but the purpose of being human.

Richard Parker is Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Fellow of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy University.

Each Day 16 Americans Get Killed Due to Poor Worker Safety Laws

2009-11-25T11:10:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Each-Day-16-Americans-Get-by-Press-Release-091116-281.html

November 16, 2009
Each Day 16 Americans Get Killed Due to Poor Worker Safety Laws
By Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Martha de Hoyos
(310) 204-0448, ext. 225

martha@bravenewfoundation.org

Each Day 16 Americans Get Killed Due to Poor Worker Safety Laws

Brave New Foundation Launches New Worker Safety Campaign

Culver City-Brave New Foundation launches a new worker health and safety campaign, highlighting the weak enforcement mechanisms and poor deterrents currently in place in worker safety laws. Under current worker safety laws, civil penalties are weak and rarely lead to criminal prosecutions.

To view the first installment of 16 Deaths Per Day please click the link below:

www.16deathsperday.com

"It is only a six month misdemeanor if [an employer] willfully commits a violation of worker safety laws. It is only considered a misdemeanor if a worker dies." David Uhlmann, Professor and Director of Environmental Law and Policy Programs at Michigan University.

"[The companies] consider OSHA a mosquito. They'd rather pay the fines than bring the plants into compliance [with the laws]. They think the law is so ineffective that it's more profitable for them to take the risk by not having safety programs in place than to comply with the law." Charles Jeffress, Former Assistant Secretary of Labor, OSHA

The goal of the 16 Deaths Per Day campaign is to strengthen support for the Protecting America's Workers Act (H.R. 2067), which aims at toughening both enforcement of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and penalties for violating the law. If H.R. 2067 passes, it will be the first time work and safety laws are strengthened in twenty-years.

Financial failure is simply the final, fatal blow

2009-11-25T11:09:00.001-08:00

Suicide is self-murder!

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46320,news-comment,news-politics,financial-failure-is-simply-the-final-fatal-blow-for-suicides

Financial failure is simply the final, fatal blow
Insurmountable anger, not losing millions, is often the determining factor in suicide cases linked to debt, says COLINE COVINGTON
FIRST POSTED JANUARY 19, 2009

How many more victims of the financial crisis will there be? The US, the UK, Japan, India, and Egypt have all reported growing concern over suicides linked to debt. They are wise to be worried: in Japan the suicide rate increased by 34 per cent during the 1998 financial crisis.

On the face of it, it is hardly surprising that a sudden downturn in an individual's finances can precipitate depression and, in certain cases, suicide. But what is most striking about many of the suicides reported here and in the US in the last few months is their extreme rage. Men who have lost their fortunes kill themselves and sometimes their families as well; wives kill themselves when their husbands lose everything; men and women kill themselves as their houses are repossessed.

These suicides may appear to be fuelled by despair, helplessness, shame, and in some cases guilt, but in many cases the suicide note reveals overwhelming anger. One woman, facing foreclosure on her house, wrote to the mortgage company: "You have failed to protect me. You have broken your promise. You have destroyed my life."

Italian poet Cesare Pavese coined the phrase ‘suicides are shy homicides’
Mortgage companies, banks, investment companies, and now governments are being blamed by many people for their devastating losses. Since they can't murder the institutions or the Madoffs of this world, people are killing themselves instead. The Italian poet Cesare Pavese coined the phrase "suicides are shy homicides". Recent suicides linked to the financial crisis are no exceptions.

But it is not simply the case that people who have suffered these huge financial losses feel angry, let down, and helpless. For many of these suicides, financial failure is the final blow in a long history of feeling inadequate, rejected and robbed of love. The murder that takes place is against an internal parental figure who has made the individual believe that he can only be loved if he is successful; more often than not, this also means self-reliant and hard working.

So, when financial loss occurs it is especially traumatic. The efforts to gain love in the eyes of the parent have been suddenly wiped out in one fell swoop, and further efforts seem utterly futile. There is a powerful sense that everything is doomed to fail because it will all be undone in the end. Being left with no money (or house) is equivalent to being left with a parent who has withdrawn love for no apparent reason.

More specifically, it is like

For many of these suicides, financial failure is the last straw in a long history of feeling inadequate, rejected and robbed of love
being let down by a parent who puts their own needs first, leaving the child at risk. What seemed safe and relatively secure no longer exists, and the failure of the banks and mortgage companies to go on providing this security inevitably triggers off memories of parental failure that can feel life-threatening.

In some cases, the parent who needs to be pleased may also be projected onto the wife or husband, and the experience of rejection may thus be twofold. Failing one's spouse can be humiliating and shameful but also persecuting. One banker, referring to a colleague's suicide, described it as an act of honour because his colleague had felt so responsible to his clients for inadvertently losing their money in the Madoff fraud.

The guilt and despair such failure elicits is enormous. But so is the rage. In the case of people who have traumatic histories of emotional insecurity, the combination of despair and rage can produce a fatal cocktail. Add to this the impotence in not being able to actually kill the parent who has failed you (that is, the person or institution on whom you depended and who has betrayed you), and you come up with suicide.

US rejects landmine ban treaty

2009-11-25T11:08:00.001-08:00

Wonder Why? Landmines and other implements of war and murder make a lot of money for capitalism!

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/11/2009112545638164209.html

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2009
US rejects landmine ban treaty

Landmines cause thousands of deaths and injuries each year.

The US administration has rejected a global treaty, supported by more than 150 countries, banning the use of landmines.

The state department explained the decision on Tuesday, saying a policy review had found the US could not meet its "national defence needs" without landmines.

"This administration undertook a policy review and we decided that our landmine policy remains in effect," Ian Kelly, the state department spokesman, said.

"We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defence needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention," he said.

The US decision comes just days before a review conference on the 10-year-old Mine Ban Treaty, credited with reducing landmine casualties around the world, is due to get under way in Cartegena, Colombia.

The treaty plans to end the production, use, stockpiling and trade in landmines.

Besides the US, countries holding out on the agreement include China, India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Russia.

'Lost opportunity'

Patrick Leahy, a US senator and a leading advocate for the treaty, called the decision "a default of US leadership" and criticised the state department's policy review as "cursory and half-hearted".

"It is a lost opportunity for the United States to show leadership instead of joining with China and Russia and impeding progress"

Patrick Leahy,
US senator

"It is a lost opportunity for the United States to show leadership instead of joining with China and Russia and impeding progress," Leahy said in a statement.
Landmines are known to have caused 5,197 casualties last year, a third of them children, according to the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Kelly said the US would still attend the conference next Sunday, which is expected to draw more than 1,000 delegates from more than 100 countries, including ministers and heads of state.

"As a global provider of security, we have an interest in the discussions there," he said.

"But we will be there as an observer, obviously, because we haven't signed the convention, nor do we plan to sign the convention."

US observers

Anti-landmine campaigners welcomed the development as it will be the first time the US will send observers to a gathering of states that have accepted the treaty.

"The very fact that they are showing up we take as a positive sign of movement on this issue within the [Barack] Obama administration," Steve Goose, director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, said, referring to the US president.

"We hope they're not coming empty-handed."

To some extent the US already abides by the provisions of the treaty.

Goose noted that America has not used anti-personnel mines since the 1991 Gulf War, has not exported any since 1992 and has not produced them since 1997.

Playing the Health Care Lottery

2009-11-21T06:24:00.001-08:00

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/playing-the-healthcare-lottery/

NOVEMBER 18, 2009, 10:40 AM
Playing the Health Care Lottery
By THERESA BROWN, R.N.
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times Theresa Brown

In the short story “The Lottery,” the author Shirley Jackson describes a small farming community in 1940s America, as picturesque a scene as anything you’d find in Norman Rockwell. It’s “Lottery Day,” and families gather in the June sun, the adults chatting while their children play, gathering up small piles of stones.

Mr. Summers, who runs the lottery, eventually shows up with a wooden box full of paper chits. As he checks a list, Tessie Hutchinson arrives late, exclaiming, “Wouldn’t have me leave m’dishes in the sink, now would you?”

The townspeople laugh, but the merriment is soon replaced by an anxious waiting as one by one the townspeople draw a folded slip of paper from the wooden box. Mrs. Hutchinson ends up with the single chit marked with a large black dot.

It turns out this lottery is a long-standing tradition, an annual ritual whereby the town selects a sacrifice to ensure a good harvest. As Old Man Warner, who has survived 77 lotteries, explains, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.” The reason for the piles of stones the children have been gathering soon becomes shockingly clear as the rest of the townspeople, grabbing rocks of their own, circle around Tessie and begin to stone her to death.

Anyone reading the story recognizes right away that the town’s “lottery” is barbaric, the rationale justifying it ridiculous.

But as a nurse, I see the American health care system as a similar lottery, a market-based system that is sustained only by the sacrifice of certain patients. Many of us who benefit from the current system accept these casualties as legitimate and sadly unavoidable.

One of those lottery players was a man who had endured chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, but his cancer had now returned and nothing more could be done. He was walking and talking and didn’t feel too bad a lot of the time, but along with the cancer he had a bacterial infection in his lungs. We planned to send him home on intravenous antibiotics to keep the infection at bay so he could feel well for as long as possible.

Every time I went into his room, his wife questioned the need for the drugs. Finally, she stepped out of the room and told me the reason for her concern. They were a very poor family, and her husband’s health insurance wouldn’t cover the extra cost of intravenous antibiotics.

I stood there dumbfounded. Her husband was dying, and she had to come to me privately, and apologetically, to reveal that the treatment he needed to stay feeling well for as long as possible had been put beyond her reach.

Many people, including many nurses, see situations like my patient’s and feel outraged, but in the end we shrug our shoulders, thinking, “Well, that’s the way it is with insurance companies.”

We accept these injustices, large and small, as the inevitable byproduct of a market-based, profit-driven health care system. It’s the only system available to most of us, so we grit our teeth and hope for the best, learning only when it’s too late that the vagaries of our particular health insurance policy mean we can’t afford the care we need, that we have drawn the black chit in our own grim health care lottery.

In the story told by Ms. Jackson, Old Man Warner admits that some towns have given up having a lottery to boost the harvest. “Pack of crazy fools,” he declaims. The system has kept him alive, and he’s a true believer — just like many of those now attacking plans for health reform.

But what about Mrs. Hutchinson, dying a painful and terrifying death, killed by her own neighbors and friends? What about my patient’s wife, resigned to stopping the drugs her husband needed to keep him alive?

A public insurance plan offers a real alternative to the morally bankrupt idea that health care can and should be big business. Unless health insurance companies are in some way compelled to change their definition of success, we will all be at the mercy of policies that put profits before a patient’s life-and-death needs.

In my patient’s case, luck prevailed. A hospital social worker got involved, and we were able to send the man home with the care he needed through a charity-based program. But it was only luck that helped this patient. Most of the time, charity care isn’t available. I’ve seen patients leave the hospital knowing they will not get the drugs they need to stay alive.

That’s the problem with playing the health care lottery. You’re a winner and the system keeps you safe and whole — until it doesn’t. And when that moment comes, when you draw the chit that says “claim denied” or “medication not on the approved list” or “treatment no longer covered,” well, as the story tells us, “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”

Study: Child, Forced Labor Behind Many Products

2009-09-11T03:49:00.001-07:00

Do the captains of capitalism know this? Of course they do! They're demonic psychopaths and enjoy the suffering plus the power! Not only that, in capitalism's lingo, this is 'efficiency'! Using child labor, 'saves' money, thus shareholders get more money plus the CEO's get more money as well! Cruel, selfish, evil, satanic system, huh? Because of the west's silence, acceptance and profiting on this system, pretty soon the whole world will become one sweat shop!

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE5896QD20090910

Child, forced labor behind many products: study
Marcy Nicholson
Reuters
Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:12 UTC

Children and forced laborers are mining gold, sewing clothing and harvesting cocoa around the world, and India is the source for the biggest number of products made by these workers, a U.S. government report said on Thursday.

The Department of Labor for the first time released a list of goods produced by child or forced labor in foreign countries after Congress told it to compile one. The department looked at 122 products in 58 countries.

Under international labor standards, child labor is defined as work performed by someone under the age of 15, or under 18 where specific forms of work are deemed harmful, the report said. Forced labor is involuntary or done under threat.

In the new U.S. report, India was linked to the highest number of products made with child labor or forced labor including soccer balls and clothing, according to report.

Myanmar was noted the most often for forced labor for other products like rice, sugar cane and rubber.

"The purpose for doing this is to shine a spotlight so more activities can take place that target these problems," said Sandra Polaski, deputy undersecretary for International Affairs in the U.S. Department of Labor.

"In our country we think of these at 19th century problems but these are 21st century problems," Polaski said.

Child labor laws vary widely and the practice is banned in many countries. An international convention ratified by 154 countries requires them to set a minimum working age and to work toward eradicating child labor.

According to the U.S. report, Brazil, Bangladesh, China and the Philippines were also in the top six countries linked to individual products that use child or forced labor.

The International Labor Organization has found that 69 percent of child labor worldwide is in agriculture, the report said.

The most common agricultural goods produced by child or forced labor are cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, coffee, rice and cocoa. Both forms of labor for cotton production were found in countries including China, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. In India, this was the case for cottonseed.

The listing of specific goods and countries, however, does not mean that total production of specific products involve forced or child labor. Instead, the report said it indicates a "significant incidence" of these types of labor.

For cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, countries found using both forms of labor include the world's biggest producer Ivory Coast, as well as Nigeria, the report showed.

The most common mined goods included gold, where Peru and Burkina Faso use both child and forced labor, according to the report.

"Elimination of exploitive child labor or forced labor from a sector or a country requires intensive, sustained commitment by governments, employers, workers, and civil society organizations," the report said.

Wal-Street Gambling Casino Reinvents Itself Again on Killing the Common Folk

2009-09-10T05:21:00.000-07:00

As always, someone has to suffer and die prematurely so the serpent oligarchy can get richer! Human sacrifice is basic to capitalism!

http://www.alternet.org/story/142531/wall_street_is_gambling_on_how_soon_old_people_will_die_

Wall Street Is Gambling on How Soon Old People Will Die
By Mark Ames, AlterNet
September 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142531/

Now we know why America's oligarchs are fighting to keep the rest of us stuck in the world's worst health care system: the more we die, the more billions Wall Street will earn. A recent article in The New York Times exposed how Wall Street is licking its lips over a new scheme to make hundreds of billions in profits by creating financial instruments that will profit off of millions of terminally-ill Americans' agony, desperation, and death. The only thing standing in the way of this massive new Wall Street scheme is the kind of health care reform that might allow Americans to live longer lives. Yep, this is what we spent trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street for: so that they can kill us for profit.

It sounds like something out of an old sci-fi flick like War of the Worlds, with America's billionaires as the brutal aliens harvesting our humanoid blood and tissue to fertilize their country club golf courses. Yet it makes logical sense: Wall Street has nowhere else to turn for its fat profits. Our banking class has already destroyed everything else in this country that had any value, from America's industrial base to the American Dream itself, its housing market--whatever Wall Street could securitize, leverage, flip or restructure, they destroyed for good. There's nothing left to strip and pawn -- except for our lives.

Yes, it's sick as hell, so vile and evil that it almost defies understanding. But I'll try: see, if I was a gambling man, I'd wager that the thing that gave our banker billionaires the idea to turn our deaths into "death bonds" was the way they so effortlessly looted trillions of taxpayer bailout dollars from us, so quickly, and with so little resistance. That puts bad ideas into bad people's heads. You and I, if we were the ones who got those trillions in our time of need (rather than having it stolen from us in our time of need), we might have a real sentimental epiphany, like, "Gee, the American taxpayers saved me from ruin! I promise from now on to change my ways and do whatever I can to repay these kind Americans!"

But in our real world, instead of having Scrooge epiphanies, our Wall Street bankers have Goodfelllas epiphanies. As in, "That was the easiest $23 trillion bucks anyone ever stole, fellas! Come on, let's go back and steal some more! There's gotta be a lot more where that came from!"

They're not only not scared of the consequences, they'd be crazy to worry given the recent evidence. By our passivity, we've emboldened our vampire-oligarchs to steal more from us, and drain our blood for good measure. So now they've come up with the most shameless profit scheme ever imagined: issuing "death bonds" and securities based on these "death bonds" which aim to profit from people suffering from agonizing terminal illnesses.

Here is how the Times explains it:

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.

The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash -- $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return -- though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money. [Author's emphasis]

So let's get this straight: Wall Street needs its hundreds of billions in paper profits. That's a given. But since they've already destroyed everything else while plundering that wealth, now Wall Street is going to suck those profits directly out of our veins:

[E]ven if a small fraction of policy holders do sell them, some in the industry predict the market could reach $500 billion. That would help Wall Street offset the loss of revenue from the collapse of the United States residential mortgage securities market, to $169 billion so far this year from a peak of $941 billion in 2005, according to Dealogic, a firm that tracks financial data.

The most common defense of securitization you hear from finance apologists is that securitization lowers the price of borrowing--without securitization, home mortgages would have been much more expensive, they say (ignoring of course how securitizing subprime loans destroyed the entire real estate market for millions upon millions of Americans). But in the case of securitizing life insurance payouts, the effect right away will be higher premiums on new life insurance policies, according to a Wharton professor--meaning securitization won't even pretend to lower premiums, but rather will put life insurance out of more Americans' reach before destroying the entire industry.

So, guess who's planning to profit from our terminal illnesses? Yup, our ol' friends at Goldman Sachs. The Bailout Barons at Goldman are so excited by all that juicy death that they've already invented a kind of death index "enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer than expected or die sooner than planned." That is not a made-up quote, folks: that's straight out of The New York Times business section.

Here's how the whole thing will work: life insurance is a $26 trillion industry. And of those $26 trillion in life insurance policies, there is always a certain percentage of policy holders who are facing imminent death. Not the kinds of deaths we all hope for -- quick, painless, unforeseen--but the more common kind: the slow, painful, devastating deaths by any number of ailments -- late-stage diabetes, lung cancer, devastating stroke, liver failure -- deaths that bankrupt you and your family as you wage a losing struggle with your health insurance company from your death bed to get your pain medication restored or your hospice care nurse partially covered. You desperately search for a new source of money wherever it can be found -- and wouldchaknowit, there's a budding industry of life insurance vultures who make their living by snatching up a terminally-ill policy holder's insurance for a discount. The life insurance vultures offer the desperate, dying holder that needed cash up-front, waits for the person to die, then cashes in on the full value of the policy. The quicker the death, the more the vulture earns. This transaction is what's called a "life settlement." (Wouldn't Dracula love it if he could just call it a "life settlement" when he sucks a victim's blood? "Look, I'm just securitizing your blood, hold still will ya? This is a free country, you know! Don't tread on my fangs, socialist!")

Now if you're going to have every Wall Street bank hungry for "life settlements" to package and securitize, you're going to need a lot of brokers to trawl the nursing homes, hospice centers and hospitals for "products" -- dying Americans. Much more than we have now (just as the number of mortgage brokers exploded when Wall Street needed mortgages for their securitized products). These brokers try to get to the dying American before his life insurance company does, or someone else -- and offers them a better cash settlement for the policy than the insurance company might offer. Everyone sees that dying policy-holder as a source of profit -- but only if that person dies as soon as possible after you snatch up the policy. As you can imagine, the kind of person who makes a living trawling around hospice centers for life insurance policy holders isn't the kind of guy you'd want to babysit your kid for the night -- Philip Garrido might be okay with them, but you and I wouldn't. Even before the Wall Street rush for "life settlements" to package, these brokers have already been accused of the lowest, vilest crimes:

[T]he industry has been plagued by fraud complaints. State insurance regulators, hamstrung by a patchwork of laws and regulations, have criticized life settlement brokers for coercing the ill and elderly to take out policies with the sole purpose of selling them back to the brokers, called "stranger-owned life insurance."

In 2006, while he was New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer sued Coventry, one of the largest life settlement companies, accusing it of engaging in bid-rigging with rivals to keep down prices offered to people who wanted to sell their policies. The case is continuing.

"Predators in the life settlement market have the motive, means and, if left unchecked by legislators and regulators and by their own community, the opportunity to take advantage of seniors," Stephan Leimberg, co-author of a book on life settlements, testified at a Senate Special Committee on Aging last April.

Okay, so one part of the equation is getting the product -- dying Americans' death policies. But the other part is calculating as accurately as possible the risk of the products. Now remember, the quicker the policy-holder dies, the bigger the profit. And this is where the vampire fangs come out. Because the biggest threat to investor profits is having these policy holders living longer than expected. As the article noted, such a thing has happened before:

[T]here is another potential risk for investors: that some people could live far longer than expected.

It is not just a hypothetical risk. That is what happened in the 1980s, when new treatments prolonged the life of AIDS patients. Investors who bought their policies on the expectation that the most victims would die within two years ended up losing money.

One way to deal with the "risk" of Americans not dying is by packing a bunch of dying people's policies together, because you can get lucky with one disease, but you can't help everyone live longer.

The solution? A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases -- leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet.

Ah but wait, there is one potential deal-killer out there: if America's health care system gets fixed, Americans might live longer, and Wall Street's "death bonds" could mean the death of Wall Street rather than Main Street:

How can a computer accurately predict what would happen if health reform passed, for example, and better care for a large number of Americans meant that people generally started living longer?

If the computer models were wrong, investors could lose a lot of money.

As unlikely as those assumptions may seem, that is effectively what happened with many securitized subprime loans.

Ah yes, we must make sure that that doesn't happen again!

So how will the billionaires make sure that they can harvest our blood and tissue like the War of the Worlds aliens, and turn it all into country club golf course fertilizer? First, by killing health care reform, which is all but accomplished. And then with their next fight, which they're already gearing up for: killing the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would protect Americans from exactly this sort of horrific predatory scheme.

Already, millions of finance industry dollars have been marshaled by finance industry-backed trade groups (millions that they stole from us taxpayers thanks to the bailout), including the Financial Services Roundtable, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the US Chamber of Commerce and the inconspicuous-sounding American Land Title Association.

This last one, the ALTA, is more important than it sounds in this fight, particularly since it's headed up by Kurt Pfotenhauer -- husband of the even more notorious Nancy Pfotenhauer. Together they're like the Wonder Goons henchmen couple working on behalf of America's billionaire vampires. Before heading up ALTA, Kurt Pfotenhauer was the lead lobbyist for the Mortgage Bankers Association -- which lobbied successfully to kill mortgage relief for distressed homeowners in order to protect securitization -- the same securitization that will be used to profit from Americans' deaths.

Nancy used to head up Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity until 2007 -- yup, that's the same group leading the town hall "grassroots" mob against health care reform, and which co-sponsored the early Tea Party protests. Nancy left AFP in 2007 to work for McCain's campaign -- she's the one who famously divided Virginia into "real America" and the rest of us.

Ever since McCain's campaign imploded, Nancy has been out there hitting the TV circuit attacking health care reform and financial regulatory reform, though I've yet to find out who's paying her to do it. No need to ask who's paying her husband Kurt, however. This past July, he headed an industry delegation to the White House to demand that Obama back off creating the CFPA agency. When he didn't get his way, he slithered back into the dark.

This week, a new advertising/AstroTurf campaign to kill the CFPA was launched, including a website Stopthecfpa.com, sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--the site prominently links up to ALTA. It's no surprise that the Chamber of Commerce is behind the move to keep American carotid veins as vulnerable as possible to billionaire fangs.

The head of the Chamber, Thomas Donohue, is the perfect man to play the role of Dracula's Assistant: his resume includes serving on the board of directors at Qwest during the period when Qwest was accused of one of the worst fraud scandals in corporate history, resulting in billions in overstated revenues, and criminal and civil charges against the CEO (who was sentenced to 10 years in prison) and eight others; the board of directors of Union Pacific Corp, when as head of the compensation committee Donohue approved some of the highest CEO compensation packages in history, including tens of millions to former CEO Richard Davidson, along with his $2.7 million annual pension when he retired in 2006; the board of directors of XM Radio, which is currently almost bankrupt and facing delisting; and the board of directors of a nursing home monolith, Sunrise Senior Living, which is being investigated by the SEC for fraud, and which today faces possible bankruptcy. (Not surprisingly, one of Donohue's longest-running goal is to protect billionaires from lawsuits.)

This is the man heading a $2 million campaign to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, so that our deaths can be more easily exploited.

It's as if the billionaires are just playing with us at this point. As if they're saying, "Hey, dumbfuck Americans! You can have your blood back when you suck it out of my cold dead veins! Oh wait, my veins are already cold 'n dead. And rich!Ha-ha! Ah, I kill myself sometimes. Now, give me your fuckin' neck, before I rip out your veins with my bare fangs!"

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

The Silence of the Wolves

2009-09-09T02:33:00.001-07:00

As long as reality is good for the elite, it is supposedly good for everyone else. That's what the propaganda says! (What's good for the elites is good for America)

Who cares if many of the economic powerless and weak die as long as the elite get theirs wealth?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Silence-of-the-Wolves-by-David-Glenn-Cox-090906-606.html

September 9, 2009
The Silence of the Wolves
By David Glenn Cox

There is a phrase that the media likes to use in their flirtations with reality. The phrase is the “jobless recovery.” It makes me angry enough to punch someone because it is a diminution of the millions of Americans that need jobs for basic survival.

It is saying that if we can stem the flooding to just third class and steerage decks then the problem is solved. As long as the first class and the promenade decks are clear, all will be well. The grand design is to alter the focus and draw the eye from the wreckage of the American economy. Not a half a mile from here are two large and empty used car lots, and directly across the street is a shiny new title loan building. Some politician is taking credit for creating those title loan jobs when they are societal parasites, legal loan sharks that don't add but subtract from the economy.

I read the following line in an article about the new unemployment numbers: “At the same time, the report did underscore that the economy is on the mend and pulling out of the deepest recession since the 1930s.” Except that there was no recession in the 1930s; there was a full-blown depression. And rather than ignoring it or putting flowers over it the administration of that time responded to it.

“This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.” - FDR

Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Employers kept Americans' working hours near a record low in August, signaling that economic growth is poised to reward companies with added profits while postponing any recovery in the job market.

“More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” - FDR

Here in Atlanta the grocery store chains of Kroger and Publix have begun to quietly close less profitable locations. It says one thing about the economy when FootLocker closes stores, but it says quite another when grocery stores begin to lock their doors.

The sanitized unemployment numbers are at 9.7%, unsanitized closer to 16%; the number of hours worked per week has fallen to an all time record low of just 33 hours. The number of part time workers rose to the highest level in over fifty years. The media scions cheer because the number of job losses in August has slowed to just 216,000; that is hailed as good news. Ignoring that true good news would be the addition of 216,000, or even just one new job. Even the ranks of temporary workers is beginning to fall, which is reflected in back-to-school retail sales figures being down.

“It's disappointing and it tells us that we are not quite there yet,” said Michael Feroli, an economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York who used to work at the Federal Reserve. “It's great for business and terrible for households,” Feroli said.

“Ian Morris, chief U.S. economist at HSBC Securities USA Inc., projects the economy will expand at a 4 percent to 6 percent pace this quarter, and says that means worker productivity may exceed the second quarter's 6.6 percent jump, which was the biggest gain in almost six years.

“This is set to flow straight into the corporate bottom line,” he said in an e-mail to clients. "That indicates the 'strong' earnings for companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index in the three months to June will continue this quarter," he said.”

This figure of productivity is the measure of how much work you do versus how much profit they earn. The equation of worker earnings being reflected in the company profits is considered archaic and obsolete in the modern economics.

“Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.” - FDR

I am beginning to wonder if this whole health care debate has been nothing but a brush fire to distract us from noticing that the economy is sliding and not recovering. It is becoming a vortex, a giant black hole. Without jobs there can be no recovery, and falling wages and shorter hours means less purchasing power and an increase of speed around the drain. I see universities advertising programs for bachelors' and advanced degrees, but zero job growth means zero jobs. There is no more need for an engineer with a master's degree than there is a shipping clerk if the company builds nothing.

The profit numbers are a temporary aberration as the economy collapses in on itself. Falling wages and shorter hours mean higher profits today but inevitably lead to a dead end.

“Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.” - FDR

What does our current government have to say? (cricket sounds) What does Congress have to say about this? (cricket sounds) The Obama administration passed a stimulus package that was 40% tax cuts so as far as they are concerned they are done with us. Wait two years and we'll see, was the answer from the White House, but two years is too long to wait. These are people and not numbers; they need something done and done now!

“This Nation asks for action, and action now.” - FDR

Our current administration finds itself in a crisis mode over healthcare reform. Despite a public mandate it has begun to back up and admit defeat in the face of difficulties and I begin to ask myself which is worse. A man with bad ideas who works to force them into law, or a man with good ideas who is unwilling to fight for those principles? A man who would rather win nothing than to risk losing anything, for what good is his victory if we lose out in the end? Contrast the two leadership styles.

“I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

"But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” - FDR

In other words, I'll do it with you, I'll do it without you, or I'll do it by myself. FDR called those of his era “The Forgotten Men,” and in this era we are not forgotten but ignored and marginalized by the media. Made to feel that we are alone in our suffering, but as our numbers continue to grow it will become ever harder to maintain the big lie.

“What we must do is this: revise our tariff on the basis of a reciprocal exchange of goods, allowing other Nations to buy and to pay for our goods by sending us such of their goods as will not seriously throw any of our industries out of balance, and incidentally making impossible in this country the continuance of pure monopolies which cause us to pay excessive prices for many of the necessities of life.

“Such objectives as these three, restoring farmers' buying power, relief to the small banks and home-owners and a reconstructed tariff policy, are only a part of ten or a dozen vital factors. But they seem to be beyond the concern of a national administration which can think in terms only of the top of the social and economic structure. It has sought temporary relief from the top down rather than permanent relief from the bottom up. It has totally failed to plan ahead in a comprehensive way. It has waited until something has cracked and then at the last moment has sought to prevent total collapse.” - FDR

Death Bonds: Wall Street Teams Up With Insurance Companies to Kill People, Reap Profits

2009-09-09T02:06:00.001-07:00

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/08-9

September 8, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Death Bonds: Wall Street Teams Up With Insurance Companies to Kill People, Reap Profits
by Sally Kohn

Any remaining doubt that a for-profit, private monopoly of our nation's health care system is a dangerous idea should be removed by the recent news that Wall Street plans to reap profits from people not living to collect their life insurance policies.

False accusations of plans for government "death panels" was ironic enough, given that private insurance companies have long entrenched real death panels deep within their profit-driven bureaucracy. One woman from Tennessee told a frightening story of how a hospital wouldn't give her husband a CAT scan because the hospital had cut a deal to not use the machine too often, which would cost the insurance company too much money. The financial interest of the insurance company was to provide less care to make more profit.

Now come "death bonds" to take things one step further. Having already ruined the mortgage market and plunged more families into foreclosure than ever before, Wall Street needs a new way to make money. And profiting off the sick and elderly has worked so well for insurance companies, why not expand the sector?

People with frail health who have life insurance have the option of selling their policies before they die for a lesser amount than the full value. Say you have $500,000 in life insurance. Depending on your life expectancy at the time you sell your policy, you might be able to sell it for, say, $250,000 in cash. Whoever bought it is taking a gamble. According to the New York Times:

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return -- though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

Now Wall Street's latest scam is to bundle life insurance policies purchased from the sick and the elderly into securitized death bonds and funds. The earlier the group of policyholders die, the bigger the return.

Insurance companies already had a financial incentive to deny care and increase profits. Now Wall Street banks are adding another incentive -- the sooner people die, the sooner death bond prices rise. And since it's really the same super-rich investors benefiting from both enterprises, the grand conclusion is simple -- poor health is good for profits. If the opponents of health care reform have their way, the quality of our health care will only get worse.

The stupidity of designing a health care system that gives a monopoly to private companies that puts profits ahead of patients is so self-evident that the only way to preserve this twisted system as-is is to attack and undermine any reasonable alternative. And so opponents of reform have tried to convince us that a publicly funded insurance program that puts the public and patients first is a bad idea while a big-money private monopoly that puts profits first is somehow virtuous and in the best interest of our nation. (Yet another example of the contortions required to make these warped arguments is columnist Charles Krauthammer arguing that preventative care is not cost effective and therefore not in the public's best interest!)

From health care to education to war, private companies have spent billions of dollars in advertising and messaging to try and convince us that private industry is better at providing public services than, um, the public is. In fact, the health care industry is spending $1.4 million per day trying to kill a public health insurance option. They have to fight so hard because the truth is so obvious -- public institutions are inherently better at looking out for public needs. Private health care will drop you if they can't make a profit off you, kill you if your care is costing to much. Public health insurance wants you to live because public health insurance cares about the American public -- all of us.

It's fitting that Congress returns to work on health care reform legislation just after Labor Day, which commemorates hard working Americans rising up to protest the profit-driven abuses of factories at the turn of the century. Everything from the 40 hour work week to restrictions on lead paint to seat belts came from the recognition that, left to its own devices, big, for-profit corporations would never put the health and safety needs of the American public before their own private profit. We continue to spend more on health care than any industrialized nation and yet have worse health outcomes on almost every measure. If the private insurance companies are so confident they can care for us better than publicly-funded insurance, what are they worried about? The public option makes them nervous because they know it will care for us better while cutting into their obscene profits.

When securitized bundles of subprime mortgages went sour, people lost their homes. When death bonds and the private insurance monopoly reach fruition, even more people will lose their lives. That, in addition to the piles of money we're already pouring down the insurance monopoly drain, is a tremendous price to pay to preserve a false ideology of private market supremacy in matters of the public interest.

Obama Regulation Czar Advocated Removing People's Organs Without Explicit Consent

2009-09-06T15:36:00.001-07:00

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53534

Matt Cover
cnsnews.com
Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:23 UTC

Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has advocated a policy under which the government would "presume" someone has consented to having his or her organs removed for transplantation into someone else when they die unless that person has explicitly indicated that his or her organs should not be taken.

Under such a policy, hospitals would harvest organs from people who never gave permission for this to be done.

Outlined in the 2008 book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness," Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler argued that the main reason that more people do not donate their organs is because they are required to choose donation.

Sunstein and Thaler pointed out that doctors often must ask the deceased's family members whether or not their dead relative would have wanted to donate his organs. These family members usually err on the side of caution and refuse to donate their loved one's organs.

"The major obstacle to increasing [organ] donations is the need to get the consent of surviving family members," said Sunstein and Thaler.

This problem could be remedied if governments changed the laws for organ donation, they said. Currently, unless a patient has explicitly chosen to be an organ donor, either on his driver's license or with a donor card, the doctors assume that the person did not want to donate and therefore do not harvest his organs. Thaler and Sunstein called this "explicit consent."

They argued that this could be remedied if government turned the law around and assumed that, unless people explicitly choose not to, then they want to donate their organs - a doctrine they call "presumed consent."

"Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate," they explained.

The difference between explicit and presumed consent is that under presumed consent, many more people "choose" to be organ donors. Sunstein and Thaler noted that in a 2003 study only 42 percent of people actively chose to be organ donors, while only 18 percent actively opted out when their consent was presumed.

In cases where the deceased's wishes are unclear, Sunstein and Thaler argued that a "presumed consent" system would make it easier for doctors to convince families to donate their loved one's organs.

Citing a 2006 study, Thaler and Sunstein wrote: "The next of kin can be approached quite differently when the decedent's silence is presumed to indicate a decision to donate rather than when it is presumed to indicate a decision not to donate. This shift may make it easier for the family to accept organ donation."

The problem of the deceased's family is only one issue, Sunstein and Thaler said, admitting that turning the idea of choice on its head will invariably run into major political problems, but these are problems they say the government can solve through a system of "mandated choice."

"Another [problem] is that it is a hard sell politically," wrote Sunstein and Thaler. "More than a few people object to the idea of 'presuming' anything when it comes to such a sensitive matter. For these reasons we think that the best choice architecture for organ donations is mandated choice."

Mandated choice is a process where government forces you to make a decision - in this case, whether to opt out of being an organ donor to get something you need, such as a driver's license.

"With mandated choice, renewal of your driver's license would be accompanied by a requirement that you check a box stating your organ donation preferences," the authors stated. "Your application would not be accepted unless you had checked one of the boxes."

To ensure that people's decisions align with the government policy of more organ donors, Sunstein and Thaler counseled that governments should follow the state of Illinois' example and try to influence people by making organ donation seem popular.

"First, the state stresses the importance of the overall problem (97,000 people [in Illinois] on the waiting list and then brings the problem home, literally (4,700 in Illinois)," they wrote.

"Second, social norms are directly brought into play in a way that build on the power of social influences [peer pressure]: '87 percent of adults in Illinois feel that registering as an organ donor is the right thing to do' and '60 percent of adults in Illinois are registered,'" they added.

Sunstein and Thaler reminded policymakers that people will generally do what they think others are doing and what they believe others think is right. These presumptions, which almost everyone has, act as powerful factors as policymakers seek to design choices.

"Recall that people like to do what most people think is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do," they wrote. "The state is enlisting existing norms in the direction of lifestyle choices."

Thaler and Sunstein believed that this and other policies are necessary because people don't really make the best decisions.

"The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better than the choices that would be made [for them] by someone else," they said.

This means that government "incentives and nudges" should replace "requirements and bans," they argued.

Neither Sunstein nor Thaler currently are commenting on their book, a spokesman for the publisher, Penguin Group, told CNSNews.com.

In a question-and-answer section on the Amazon.com Web site, Thaler and Sunstein answered a few questions about their book.

When asked what the title "Nudge" means and why people need to be nudged, the authors stated: "By a nudge we mean anything that influences our choices. A school cafeteria might try to nudge kids toward good diets by putting the healthiest foods at front.

"We think that it's time for institutions, including government, to become much more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life easier for people and by gently nudging them in directions that will make their lives better," they wrote.

"...The human brain is amazing, but it evolved for specific purposes, such as avoiding predators and finding food," said Thaler and Sunstein. "Those purposes do not include choosing good credit card plans, reducing harmful pollution, avoiding fatty foods, and planning for a decade or so from now. Fortunately, a few nudges can help a lot. ..."

Sick and Wrong

2009-09-06T06:05:00.000-07:00

Somebody has to die so the 'health' insurance companies can make their giant profits!

American capitalism is psychopathic: It's run by psychopaths, it's bought psychopathic politicians and the system is psychopathic. Few of the players have Consciences and the system doesn't have a Conscience. This rolls over into all capitalistic systems in America including health care and health care insurance: With few exceptions, All of it is PSYCHOPATHIC! Taibbi is one of my favorite writers! He always tells it like it is and with a world that tells little Truth, this writer is Golden! By the Way, psychopathy is mean; cruel.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong
Sick and Wrong
How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Sep 03, 2009

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.

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Here's where we are right now: Before Congress recessed in August, four of the five committees working to reform health care had produced draft bills. On the House side, bills were developed by the commerce, ways and means, and labor committees. On the Senate side, a bill was completed by the HELP committee (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Ted Kennedy). The only committee that didn't finish a bill is the one that's likely to matter most: the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by the infamous obfuscating dick Max Baucus, a right-leaning Democrat from Montana who has received $2,880,631 in campaign contributions from the health care industry.

The game in health care reform has mostly come down to whether or not the final bill that is hammered out from the work of these five committees will contain a public option — i.e., an option for citizens to buy in to a government-run health care plan. Because the plan wouldn't have any profit motive — and wouldn't have to waste money on executive bonuses and corporate marketing — it would automatically cost less than private insurance. Once such a public plan is on the market, it would also drive down prices offered by for-profit insurers — a move essential to offset the added cost of covering millions of uninsured Americans. Without a public option, any effort at health care reform will be as meaningful as a manicure for a gunshot victim. "The public option is the main thing on the table," says Michael Behan, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "It's really coming down to that."

The House versions all contain a public option, as does the HELP committee's version in the Senate. So whether or not there will be a public option in the end will likely come down to Baucus, one of the biggest whores for insurance-company money in the history of the United States. The early indications are that there is no public option in the Baucus version; the chairman hinted he favors the creation of nonprofit insurance cooperatives, a lame-ass alternative that even a total hack like Sen. Chuck Schumer has called a "fig leaf."

Even worse, Baucus has set things up so that the final Senate bill will be drawn up by six senators from his committee: a gang of three Republicans (Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming) and three Democrats (Baucus, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico) known by the weirdly Maoist sobriquet "Group of Six." The setup senselessly submarines the committee's Democratic majority, effectively preventing members who advocate a public option, like Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, from seriously influencing the bill. Getting movement on a public option — or any other meaningful reform — will now require the support of one of the three Republicans in the group: Grassley (who has received $2,034,000 from the health sector), Snowe ($756,000) or Enzi ($627,000).

This is what the prospects for real health care reform come down to — whether one of three Republicans from tiny states with no major urban populations decides, out of the goodness of his or her cash-fattened heart, to forsake forever any contributions from the health-insurance industry (and, probably, aid for their re-election efforts from the Republican National Committee).

This, of course, is the hugest of long shots. But just to hedge its bets even further and ensure that no real reforms pass, Congress has made sure to cover itself, sabotaging the bill long before it even got to Baucus' committee. To do this, they used a five-step system of subtle feints and legislative tricks to gut the measure until there was nothing left.

STEP ONE: AIM LOW

Heading into the health care debate, there was only ever one genuinely dangerous idea out there, and that was a single-payer system. Used by every single developed country outside the United States (with the partial exceptions of Holland and Switzerland, which offer limited and highly regulated private-insurance options), single-payer allows doctors and hospitals to bill and be reimbursed by a single government entity. In America, the system would eliminate private insurance, while allowing doctors to continue operating privately.

In the real world, nothing except a single-payer system makes any sense. There are currently more than 1,300 private insurers in this country, forcing doctors to fill out different forms and follow different reimbursement procedures for each and every one. This drowns medical facilities in idiotic paperwork and jacks up prices: Nearly a third of all health care costs in America are associated with wasteful administration. Fully $350 billion a year could be saved on paperwork alone if the U.S. went to a single-payer system — more than enough to pay for the whole goddamned thing, if anyone had the balls to stand up and say so.

Everyone knows this, including the president. Last spring, when he met with Rep. Lynn Woolsey, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Obama openly said so. "He said if he were starting from scratch, he would have a single-payer system," says Woolsey. "But he thought it wasn't possible, because it would disrupt the health care industry."

Huh? This isn't a small point: The president and the Democrats decided not to press for the only plan that makes sense for everyone, in order to preserve an industry that is not only cruel and stupid and dysfunctional, but through its rank inefficiency has necessitated the very reforms now being debated. Even though the Democrats enjoy a political monopoly and could have started from a very strong bargaining position, they chose instead to concede at least half the battle before it even began.

Obama wasn't the only big Democrat to mysteriously abandon his position on single-payer. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Henry Waxman, the influential chair of the House commerce committee, have both backed away from their longtime support of single-payer. Hell, even Max-freaking-Baucus once conceded the logic of single-payer, saying only that it isn't feasible politically. "There may come a time when we can push for single-payer," he said in February. "At this time, it's not going to get to first base in Congress."

And helping it not get to first base was … Max Baucus. It was Baucus' own committee that held the first round-table discussions on reform. In three days of hearings last May, he invited no fewer than 41 people to speak. The list featured all the usual industry hacks, including big insurers like America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Blue Cross and Aetna. It's worth noting that several of the organizations invited — including AHIP and Amgen — employ several former Baucus staffers as lobbyists, including two of his ex-chiefs of staff.

Not one of the 41 witnesses, however, was in favor of single-payer — even though eliminating the insurance companies enjoys broad public support. Leading advocates of single-payer, including doctors from the Physicians for a National Health Program, implored Baucus to allow them to testify. When he refused, a group of eight single-payer activists, including three doctors, stood up during the hearings and asked to be included in the discussion. One of the all-time classic moments in the health care reform movement came when the second protester to stand up, Katie Robbins of Health Care Now, declared, "We need single-payer health care!"

To which Baucus, who looked genuinely frightened, replied, "We need more police!"

The eight protesters were led away in handcuffs and spent about seven hours in jail. "It's funny, the policemen were all telling us their horror stories about health care," recalls Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of the physicians who was jailed. "One was telling us about his mother who was 62 and lost her job and was uninsured, waiting to get Medicare when she was 65." The protesters were sentenced to six months' probation. Baucus later met with them and conceded that not including single-payer advocates in the discussion had been a mistake, although it was "too late" to change that.

Single-payer advocates have had an equally tough time getting a hearing with the president. In March, the White House refused to allow Rep. John Conyers to invite two physicians who support single-payer to the health care summit that Obama was holding to kick off the reform effort. Three months later, a single-payer advocate named David Scheiner, who served as Obama's physician for 22 years, was mysteriously bumped from a prime-time forum on health care, where he had been invited to ask the president a question.

Many of the health care advisers in Obama's inner circle, meanwhile, are industry hacks — people like Nancy-Ann DeParle, the president's health care czar, who has served on the boards of for-profit companies like Medco Health Solutions and Triad Hospitals. DeParle is so unthreatening to the status quo that Karen Ignagni, the insurance industry's leading lobbyist-gorgon, praised her "extensive experience" and "strong track record."

Behind closed doors, Obama also moved to cut a deal with the drug industry. "It's a dirty deal," says Russell Mokhiber, one of the protesters whom Baucus had arrested. "The administration told them, 'Single-payer is off the table. In exchange, we want you on board.'" In August, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America announced that the industry would contribute an estimated $150 million to campaign for Obamacare.

Even the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose 80-plus members have overwhelmingly supported single-payer legislation in the past, decided not to draw a line in the sand. They agreed to back down on single-payer, seemingly with the understanding that Pelosi would push for a strong public option — a sort of miniversion of single-payer, a modest, government-run insurance plan that would serve as a test model for the real thing. But one of the immutable laws of politics in the U.S. Congress is that progressives will always be screwed by their own leaders, as soon as the opportunity presents itself. And with a bill the size and scope of health care, there was plenty of opportunity.

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STEP TWO: GUT THE PUBLIC OPTION

Once single-payer was off the table, the Democrats lost their best bargaining chip. Rather than being in a position to use the fear of radical legislation to extract concessions from the right — a position Obama seemingly gave away at the outset, by punting on single-payer — Republicans and conservative Blue Dog Democrats suddenly realized that they had the upper hand. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would now give away just about anything to avoid having to walk away without a real health care bill.

The situation was made worse as the flagging economy ate away at Obama's political capital. Polls showed the percentage of "highly engaged" Democrats plummeting, while the percentage of "highly engaged" Republicans — inspired by idiotic scare stories from Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin about socialized medicine and euthanasia — rose rapidly. By late summer, "the depth of Republican support was starting to rival the breadth of Democratic support," said noted statistician Nate Silver. The more the Republicans and Blue Dogs fidgeted and fucked around, the easier it would be for them to kill the public option. Democrats, who on the morning after Election Day could have passed a single-payer system without opposition, were now in a desperate hurry to make a deal.

The public option is hardly a cure-all: Among other things, it does nothing to reduce the $350 billion a year in unnecessary paperwork and administrative overhead that makes the current system so expensive and maddening. "That's one of the big issues," says an aide to a member of the progressive caucus. "None of this addresses the paperwork issue. It might even make it worse." But the basic idea of the public option is sound enough: create a government health plan that citizens could buy through regulated marketplaces called insurance "exchanges" run at the state level. Simply by removing the profit motive, the government plan would be cheaper than private insurance. "The goal here was to offer the rock-bottom price, the Walmart price, so that people could buy insurance practically at cost," says one Senate aide.

The logic behind the idea was so unassailable that its opponents often inadvertently found themselves arguing for it. "Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible," groused right-wing douchebag George Will. "Competition from the public option must be unfair, because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers." In other words, if you offer a public plan that doesn't systematically fuck every single person in the country by selling health care at inflated prices and raking in monster profits, private insurers just won't be able to compete.

Will wasn't the only prominent opponent of reform openly arguing in favor of the insurance industry's right to continue doing business inefficiently. Sen. Ben Nelson, who together with Baucus are the Laverne and Shirley of turncoat Democrats, complained that the public option "would win the game." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admitted that "private insurance will not be able to compete with a government option." This is a little like complaining that Keanu Reeves was robbed of an Oscar just because he can't act.

For a while, the public option looked like it might have a real chance at passing. In the House, both the ways and means committee and the labor committee passed draft bills that contained a genuine public option. But then conservative opponents of the plan, the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, mounted their counterattack. A powerful bloc composed primarily of drawling Southerners in ill-fitting suits, the Blue Dogs — a gang of puffed-up political mulattos hired by the DNC to pass as almost-Republicans in red-state battlegrounds — present themselves as a quasi-religious order, worshipping at the sacred altar of "fiscal responsibility" and "deficit reduction." On July 9th, in a harmless-sounding letter to Pelosi, 40 Blue Dogs expressed concern that doctors in the public option "must be fairly reimbursed at negotiated rates, and their participation must be voluntary." Paying doctors "using Medicare's below-market rates," they added, "would seriously weaken the financial stability of our local hospitals."

The letter was an amazing end run around the political problem posed by the public option — i.e., its unassailable status as a more efficient and cheaper health care alternative. The Blue Dogs were demanding that the very thing that makes the public option work — curbing costs to taxpayers by reimbursing doctors at Medicare rates plus five percent — be scrapped. Instead, the Blue Dogs wanted compensation rates for doctors to be jacked up, on the government's tab. The very Democrats who make a point of boasting about their unwavering commitment to fiscal conservatism were lobbying, in essence, for a big fat piece of government pork for doctors. "Cost should be the number-one concern to the Blue Dogs," grouses Rep. Woolsey. "That's why they're Blue Dogs."

In the end, the Blue Dogs won. When the House commerce committee passed its bill, the public option no longer paid Medicare-plus-five-percent. Instead, it required the government to negotiate rates with providers, ensuring that costs would be dramatically higher. According to one Democratic aide, the concession would bump the price of the public option by $1,800 a year for the average family of four.

In one fell swoop, the public plan went from being significantly cheaper than private insurance to costing, well, "about the same as what we have now," as one Senate aide puts it. This was the worst of both worlds, the kind of take-the-fork-in-the-road nonsolution that has been the peculiar specialty of Democrats ever since Bill Clinton invented a new way to smoke weed. The party could now sell voters on the idea that it was offering a "public option" without technically lying, while at the same time reassuring health care providers that the public option it was passing would not imperil the industry's market share.

Even more revolting, when Pelosi was asked on July 31st if she worried that progressives in the House would yank their support of the bill because of the sellout to conservatives, she literally laughed out loud. "Are the progressives going to take down universal, quality, affordable health care for all Americans?" she said, chuckling heartily to reporters. "I don't think so."

The laugh said everything about what the mainstream Democratic Party is all about. It finds the notion that it has to pay anything more than lip service to its professed values funny. "It's a joke," complains one Democratic aide. "This is all a game to these people — and they're good at it."

The concession to the Blue Dogs comes at a potentially disastrous price: Without a public option that drives down prices, the cost of other health care reforms being considered by Congress will almost certainly skyrocket. The trade-off with conservatives might be understandable, if those other reforms were actually useful. But this is Congress we're talking about.

STEP THREE: PACK IT WITH LOOPHOLES

Even seasoned congressional aides, who are accustomed to sitting through long and boring committee meetings, have found the debate over health care reform uniquely torturous. Unlike other congressional matters, where there is at least a feeling that the process might at some point be completed, the endless sessions over health care have led many staffers to fear that they will be locked in hearing rooms for the rest of their lives, listening to words like "target" and "mandate" and "doughnut hole" being repeated ad nauseam by weary, gray-faced, saggy-necked legislators — who begin, after weeks of self-inflated posturing, to look like the ugliest people in the universe. "You come out of these hearings," says Behan, the aide to Sen. Sanders, "and the number of interconnected, moving pieces going in and out of these bills is insane — the case for single-payer health insurance makes itself."

For those looking to fuck up health care reform — or to load it up with goodies for their rich pals — the tedium actually serves a broader purpose. Given that five different committees are weighing five different and often competing paths to reform, it's not surprising that all sorts of bizarre crap winds up buried in their bills, stuff no one could possibly have expected to be in there. The most glaring example, passed by Ted Kennedy's HELP committee, would allow the makers of complex drugs known as "biologics" to keep their formulas from being copied by rivals for 12 years — twice as long as the protection for ordinary pharmaceuticals. The notion that an effort ostensibly aimed at curbing health care costs would grant the pharmaceutical industry lucrative new protections against generic drugs is even weirder when you consider that earlier proposals, including one supported by Obama, would have protected brand-name drugs for only seven years.

Another favor to industry buried in the bills involves the issue of choice. From the outset, Democrats have been careful to make sure that a revamped system would not in any way force citizens to give up their existing health care plans. As Obama told the American Medical Association in June, "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

That sounds great, particularly in conjunction with the new set of standards for employer-provided insurance outlined in the House version of reform. Under the bill — known as HR 3200 — employers must provide "essential benefits" to workers or face a stiff penalty. "Essential benefits" includes elements often missing in the fly-by-night plans offered by big employers: drug benefits, outpatient care, hospitalization, mental health, the works. If your employer does not offer acceptable coverage, you then have the right to go into one of the state-run insurance "exchanges," where you can select from a number of insurance plans, including the public option.

There's a flip side, though: If your employer offers you acceptable care and you reject it, you are barred from buying insurance in the insurance "exchange." In other words, you must take the insurance offered to you at work. And that might have made sense if, as decreed in the House version, employers actually had to offer good care. But in the Senate version passed by the HELP committee, there is no real requirement for employers to provide any kind of minimal level of care. On the contrary, employers who currently offer sub-par coverage will have their shitty plans protected by a grandfather clause. Which means …

"If you have coverage you like, you can keep it," says Sen. Sanders. "But if you have coverage you don't like, you gotta keep it."

This grandfather clause has potentially wide-ranging consequences. One of the biggest health care problems we have in this country is the technique used by large employers — Walmart is the most notorious example — of offering dogshit, bare-bones health insurance that forces employees to take on steep co-pays and other massive charges. Low-wage workers currently offered these plans often reject them and join Medicaid, effectively shifting the health care burden for Walmart employees on to the taxpayer. If the HELP committee's grandfather clause survives to the final bill, those workers who did the sensible thing in rejecting Walmart's crap employer plan and taking the comparatively awesome insurance offered via Medicaid will now be rebuffed by the state and forced to take the dogshit Walmart offering.

This works out well for the states, who will get to purge all those Walmart workers from their Medicaid rolls. It also works great for Walmart, since any new competitors who appear on the horizon will be forced to offer genuine and more expensive health insurance — giving Walmart a clear competitive advantage. This little "glitch" is the essence of the health care reform effort: It changes things in a way that works for everyone except actual sick people.

Veteran legislators speak of this horrific loophole as if it were an accident — something that just sort of happened, while no one was looking. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon was looking at an early version of the bill several months ago, when he suddenly realized that it was going to leave people stuck with their employer insurance. "I woke up one morning and was like, 'Whoa, people aren't going to have choices,'" he recalls.

As a means of correcting the problem, Wyden wrote up a thing called the Free Choice Act, which like many of the prematurely sidelined ideas in this health care mess is actually quite sensible. The bill would open up the insurance "exchanges" to all consumers, regardless of who is offered employer-based insurance and who isn't. But Wyden has little hope of having his proposal included in later versions of the bill. Like Sanders, who hopes to correct the committee's giveaway to drugmakers, Wyden won't get a real shot at having an impact until the House and Senate meet to hammer out differences between their final bills. In a legislative sense, the bad ideas are already in the barn, and the solutions are fenced off in the fields, hoping to get in.

STEP FOUR: PROVIDE NO LEADERSHIP

One of the reasons for this chaos was the bizarre decision by the administration to provide absolutely no real oversight of the reform effort. From the start, Obama acted like a man still running for president, not someone already sitting in the White House, armed with 60 seats in the Senate. He spoke in generalities, offering as "guiding principles" the kind of I'm-for-puppies-and-sunshine platitudes we got used to on the campaign trail — investment in prevention and wellness, affordable health care for all, guaranteed choice of doctor. At no time has he come out and said what he wants Congress to do, in concrete terms. Even in June, when congressional leaders desperate for guidance met with chief of staff (and former legislative change-squelcher) Rahm Emanuel, they got no signal at all about what the White House wanted. On the question of a public option, Emanuel was agonizingly noncommittal, reportedly telling Senate Democrats that the president was still "open to alternatives."

On the same day Emanuel was passing the buck to senators, Obama was telling reporters that it's "still too early" to have a "strong opinion" on a public option. This was startling news indeed: Eight months after being elected president of the United States is too early to have an opinion on an issue that Obama himself made a central plank of his campaign? The president conceded only that a "public option makes sense."

This White House makes a serial vacillator like Bill Clinton look like Patton crossing the Rhine. Veterans from the Clinton White House, in fact, jumped on Obama. "The president may have overlearned the lesson of the Clinton health care plan fiasco, which was: Don't deliver a package to the Hill, let the Hill take ownership," said Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under Clinton. There were now so many competing ideas about how to pay for the plan and what kind of mandates to include that even after the five bills are completed, Congress will not be much closer to reform than it was at the beginning. "The president has got to go in there and give it coherence," Reich concluded.

But Reich's comment assumes that Obama wants to give the bill coherence. In many ways, the lily-livered method that Obama chose to push health care into being is a crystal-clear example of how the Democratic Party likes to act — showering a real problem with a blizzard of ineffectual decisions and verbose nonsense, then stepping aside at the last minute to reveal the true plan that all along was being forged off-camera in the furnace of moneyed interests and insider inertia. While the White House publicly eschewed any concrete "guiding principles," the People Who Mattered, it appeared, had already long ago settled on theirs. Those principles seem to have been: no single-payer system, no meaningful public option, no meaningful employer mandates and a very meaningful mandate for individual consumers. In other words, the only major reform with teeth would be the one forcing everyone to buy some form of private insurance, no matter how crappy, or suffer a tax penalty. If the public option is the sine qua non for progressives, then the "individual mandate" is the counterpart must-have requirement for the insurance industry.

"That was their major policy 'ask,' and it looks like they're going to get it," says Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a Boston physician who is a prominent single-payer advocate.

The so-called "individual mandate" is currently included in four of the five bills before Congress. The most likely version to survive into the final measure resembles the system in Massachusetts designed by Mormon glambot Mitt Romney, who imposed tax penalties on citizens who did not buy insurance. Several of Romney's former advisers are involved in the writing of Obamacare, including a key aide to Ted Kennedy who was instrumental in designing the HELP committee legislation. The federal version of the Massachusetts plan would slap the uninsured with a hefty tax penalty — making the HELP committee clause barring people from opting out of their employer-provided plan that much more outrageous.

If things go the way it looks like they will, health care reform will simply force great numbers of new people to buy or keep insurance of a type that has already been proved not to work. "The IRS and the government will force people to buy a defective product," says Woolhandler. "We know it's defective because three-quarters of all people who file for bankruptcy because of medical reasons have insurance when they get sick — and they're bankrupted anyway."

STEP FIVE: BLOW THE MATH

Health care is a beast — a monster. The House 3200 bill alone is 1,017 pages long and contains countless inscrutable references to other pieces of legislation, meaning that in order to fully comprehend even those thousand pages one really has to read upward of 9,000 or 10,000 pages. There are five different versions of this creature, each with its own nuances and shades, and solving a highly complex mathematical challenge like reconciling the costs of each of the five plans would be beyond even minds who were (a) expert at such things and (b) motivated to get it right. Imagine the same problem in the hands of a bunch of second-rate country lawyers and mall owners, and you about get the idea of what the congressional picture looks like.

For instance: All five of the bills envision a significant expansion of Medicaid. As it stands, the LBJ-era program, which celebrated its 44th birthday on the day before Nancy Pelosi laughed at the progressives, awards benefits according to a jumbled series of state-by-state criteria. Some states, like Vermont, offer Medicaid to citizens whose income is as high as 300 percent of the federal poverty level, while others, like Georgia, only offer Medicaid to those closer to or below the poverty level.

The House plan would expand Medicaid eligibility to automatically include every American whose income is 133 percent of the poverty level or less. For those earning somewhat more — up to 400 percent of the poverty level — federal subsidies would help pay for the cost of a public or private plan purchased via the insurance "exchanges." That worries state governments, which currently pay for almost half of Medicaid — and which are already seeing their Medicaid rolls swelled by the economic meltdown. A massive surge in new Medicaid members — as many as 11 million Americans under the current proposals, according to the Congressional Budget Office — might literally render many big states insolvent overnight.

Democrats pointed out that under the House plan, the federal government would pay the costs of any "newly eligible" members of Medicaid. But that phrasing, it turns out, was a semantic trick designed to undersell the cost to the states. When Massachusetts imposed a similar mandate under Romney, thousands of people who were already eligible for Medicaid, but had not enrolled, immediately joined the program in order to avoid the tax penalty for being uninsured. So while the House plan would pay for "newly eligible" patients, it won't cover the "oldly eligible."

Congress in this instance is behaving like corporations in the Enron age, orphaning hidden costs and complications through clever wording and accounting. Another neat trick involves the federal subsidies for low-income people who make up to 400 percent of the poverty level. The Congressional Budget Office projects that under the House bill, the subsidies will cost upward of $773 billion by 2019. But some aides think that number could end up being much higher. "Without a real public option to drive down costs, the federal support to make sure everyone gets coverage is going to get very expensive very fast," says Behan, the aide to Sen. Sanders.

Here's the other thing. By blowing off single-payer and cutting the heart out of the public option, the Obama administration robbed itself of its biggest argument — that health care reform is going to save a lot of money. That has left the Democrats vulnerable to charges that the plan is going to blow a mile-wide hole in the budget, one we'll be paying debt service on through the year 3000. It also left them scrambling to find other ways to pay for the plan, making it almost inevitable that they would step in political shit with seniors everywhere by trying surreptitiously to whittle down Medicare. As a result, the Democrats have become so oversensitive to charges of fiscal irresponsibility that they're taking their frustrations out on people who don't deserve it. Witness Nancy Pelosi's bizarre freakout over the Congressional Budget Office. When the CBO questioned Obama's projected cost savings, Pelosi blasted them for "always giving you the worst-case scenario" — which, of course, is exactly what the budget office is supposed to do. When you start asking your accountant to look on the bright side, you know you're not dealing from a position of strength.

To recap, here's what ended up happening with health care. First, they gave away single-payer before a single gavel had fallen, apparently as a bargaining chip to the very insurers mostly responsible for creating the crisis in the first place. Then they watered down the public option so as to make it almost meaningless, while simultaneously beefing up the individual mandate, which would force millions of people now uninsured to buy a product that is no longer certain to be either cheaper or more likely to prevent them from going bankrupt. The bill won't make drugs cheaper, and it might make paperwork for doctors even more unwieldy and complex than it is now. In fact, the various reform measures suck so badly that PhRMA, the notorious mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry which last year spent more than $20 million lobbying against health care reform, is now gratefully spending more than seven times that much on a marketing campaign to help the president get what he wants.

So what's left? Well, the bills do keep alive the so-called employer mandate, requiring companies to provide insurance to their employees. A good idea — except that the Blue Dogs managed to exempt employers with annual payrolls below $500,000, meaning that 87 percent of all businesses will be allowed to opt out of the best and toughest reform measure left. Thanks to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, we can now be assured that the 19 or 20 employers in America with payrolls above $500,000 who do not already provide insurance will be required to offer good solid health coverage. Hurray!

Or will they? At the end of July, word leaked out that the Senate Finance Committee, in addition to likely spiking the public option, had also decided to ditch the employer mandate. It was hard to be certain, because even Democrats on the committee don't know what's going on in the Group of Six selected by Baucus to craft the bill. Things got so bad that some Democrats on the committee — including John Kerry, Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez — were reduced to holding what amounts to shadow hearings on health care several times a week, while Baucus and his crew conducted their meetings in relative secrecy.

The chairman did not even bother to keep his fellow Democrats informed of the bill's developments, let alone what he has promised Republicans in return for their support of the bill. "The Group of Six has hijacked the process," says an aide to one of the left-out senators.

This leaves Democrats on the committee in the strange position of seriously considering pulling their support for a bill that will emerge from a panel on which they hold a clear majority. Other Democrats are also weighing an end run around their own leadership, hoping to sneak meaningful reforms back into the process. In the House, Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York refused to support the bill passed by the commerce committee unless he was allowed to attach an amendment that will enable Congress to vote on replacing the entire reform bill with a single-payer plan (Bernie Sanders is working on a similar measure in the Senate). On the labor committee, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio took a more nuanced tack, offering an amendment that would free up states to switch to a single-payer system of their own.

It's highly unlikely, though, that the party's leaders will agree to include such measures when the five competing reform bills are eventually combined. On the House side, "Pelosi has unfettered discretion to combine the bills as she pleases," observes one Democratic aide. Which leaves us where we are today, as Congress enjoys its vacation, and the various sides have taken to the airwaves in an advertising blitz to make sure the population is saturated with idiotic misconceptions before the bill is actually voted on in the fall.

The much-ballyhooed right-wing scare campaign, with its teabagger holdovers ridiculously disrupting town-hall meetings with their belligerent protests and their stoneheaded memes (the sign raised at a town hall held by Rep. Rick Larson of Washington — keep the guvmint out of my medicare — is destined to become a classic of conservative propaganda), has proved to be almost totally irrelevant to the entire enterprise. Aside from lowering even further the general level of civility (teabaggers urged Sen. Chris Dodd to off himself with painkillers; Rep. Brad Miller had his life threatened), the Limbaugh minions have accomplished nothing at all, except to look like morons for protesting as creeping socialism a reform effort designed specifically to change as little as possible and to preserve at all costs our malfunctioning system of private health care.

All that's left of health care reform is a collection of piece-of-shit, weakling proposals that are preposterously expensive and contain almost nothing meaningful — and that set of proposals, meanwhile, is being negotiated down even further by the endlessly negating Group of Six. It is a fight to the finish now between Really Bad and Even Worse. And it's virtually guaranteed to sour the public on reform efforts for years to come.

"They'll pass some weak, mediocre plan that breaks the bank and even in the best analysis leaves 37 million people uninsured," says Mokhiber, one of the single-payer activists arrested by Baucus. "It's going to give universal health care a bad name."

It's a joke, the whole thing, a parody of Solomonic governance. By the time all the various bills are combined, health care will be a baby not split in half but in fourths and eighths and fractions of eighths. It's what happens when a government accustomed to dealing on the level of perception tries to take on a profound emergency that exists in reality. No matter how hard Congress may try, though, it simply is not possible to paper over a crisis this vast.

Then again, some of the blame has to go to all of us. It's more than a little conspicuous that the same electorate that poured its heart out last year for the Hallmark-card story line of the Obama campaign has not been seen much in this health care debate. The handful of legislators — the Weiners, Kuciniches, Wydens and Sanderses — who are fighting for something real should be doing so with armies at their back. Instead, all the noise is being made on the other side. Not so stupid after all — they, at least, understand that politics is a fight that does not end with the wearing of a T-shirt in November.

[From Issue 1086 — September 3, 2009]

The Body Snatchers of Israel

2009-08-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

The Nazis harvested gold from the teeth from their victims plus hair (to stuff pillows). The Chinese harvest body parts of the prisoners they execute. Now the Israelis are harvesting organs from their victims. Someone has to pay for the Israeli government, its army/munitions/bombs/nuclear programs plus other expenses. Guess who's paying?
The Body Snatchers of Israel

Kawther Salam
Kawther Salam's Blog
Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:00
http://www.kawther.info/wpr/2009/08/23/the-body-snatchers-of-israel

Independently of the recently published article of the Swedish journalist Donald Boström about the Israelis murdering Palestinians in order to harvesting of organs for sale, and independently of the hysteric screeching and denials by the Israelis, I want to present my readers what I witnessed, saw, observed and heard during my 22 years of journalistic work under the Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. My personal experience confirms what Mr. Boström wrote: while I do not know the particular case which he describes, it is typical for what the Israelis do in Palestine all the time, what is "normal" since the early seventies.

The Israeli military occupation started in the early 1970s to capture and keep the bodies of the Palestinians who they murdered. Since the early seventies, thousands of Palestinians have been buried in secret and number graves of the Israeli military. Since the early seventies, thousands of Palestinian victims of the occupation were "autopsied", and many of their bodies kept in military numbered graves. Most members of the resistance who were killed were taken for "autopsy", and also those who were wounded were abducted from the hospital by the Israelis. This practice became somewhat less widespread only when the PA came to power, meaning that people murdered in areas controlled by the PA were not "autopsied" any more, but this would still happen to people murdered or wounded in areas controlled by the Israelis.

Numbered graves
The Israeli military leadership, the Central Command and the so-called "defense" Ministry cannot hide these well- and widely known facts: the Israeli military murders people all the time, and most if not all of the murdered are taken for "autopsy", many of them are buried in Israeli military cemeteries in numbered and secret graves. These facts cannot be hidden by the fancy statements issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel, by the deranged terrorist and war criminal Ehud Barak and the corrupt extremist Benjamin Netanyahu.

In many cases, the so-called "civil administration", military commanders and officers were returning to their families the bodies of Palestinians who they had murdered after the middle of the night, and after a few days "detention" of the bodies. The military officers would call the families of the victim after the middle of the night (usually at 1-3 in the morning), demanding that a few relatives, "not more than 10", wait on the street for burying the body.

The first condition of the military "civil" administration was that the burial should take place immediately after receiving the body, in the dark of the night, for "security reasons", the second condition of the Israelis was that women should not participate in the secret funeral, also for "security reasons" (actually they wanted to avoid that the screams of grieving mothers, sisters, daughters of the victim would be heard, so alerting the neighbourhood to the crime). The Israeli officers always used "security reasons" to justify and cover up their criminal activities!

On each such occasion returning the body of one of their murdered victims, the "civil" military administration officers would follow the funeral procession, driving their armored grey cars and waiting until the end of the burial. A number of other military vehicles filled with soldiers would surround the funeral, watching the burial of their victims, always ready to shoot the small number of participants in the funeral. Of course, the officers would always insistently make it clear to the family that they were doing them a great favor in returning the body of their beloved one and allowing them to bury it.

Empty Bodies, Stuffed With Cotton

What is the reason to bury somebody in middle of the night, with a company of IDF soldiers and the Israeli military "civil" administration officers surrounding the procession? If the burial is normal, and the organs of the victims were not stolen, then why should they be buried in the dark of the night? The families of the victims all knew that they were receiving empty bodies, filled with cotton, to be buried in the middle of the night.

One fact for Ehud Barak: near the end of the first Intifada, after the start of the so-called Oslo peace negotiations, the brother-in-law of one of my paternal uncles was murdered by the Israelis at the Qalandia checkpoint, he was returned to his family stuffed with cotton some days after the incident. My uncles relative, Monzer Naji Rashid Abdullah, was a small transportation entrepreneur; he was not involved in political activities of any kind. He was murdered on 14 April 1991, two days before Eid Al-Adha, a festivity comparable to Christmas. As a result of his to date unpunished murder by Israelis manning the checkpoint, his wife and children were reduced to dependency on charities.

The deranged war criminal Ehud Barak and his corrupt "state" should better stop denying what the Swedish writer Donald Boström published in Aftonbladet. I personally was witness of the Israeli soldiers and military vehicles kidnapping the bodies of dead Palestinians from the emergency rooms of hospitals, in some other cases I saw the soldiers following the Palestinians to the cemetery, to steal the body from the family before the burial. This vile practice became so widespread that many people started carrying the bodies of the murdered to be buried at home, in the garden, under the house or under trees, instead of waiting for the ambulance to take them to the hospital.

The Israelis always murder or gravely injure some people at demonstrations, and first the Israeli soldiers themselves would take the bodies, then they would besiege the hospitals where the bodies were taken by Palestinian ambulances - finally people present at demonstrations started taking the murdered and injured directly to their families. Everybody in Palestine knows that the Israeli soldiers besiege the hospitals in order to kidnap the bodies. The most disgusting thing I witnessed was when the criminal soldiers of Barak and Netanyahu were following Palestinian funeral processions to the cemetery to kidnap the bodies.

The issue of stealing the Palestinian organs is known to everybody in Palestine. I reported several times about this crime. In many cases my reports were rejected by the criminal military censorship of the occupation, these reports are until this moment stored at the military censorship office in "Bet Agron" in occupied Jerusalem.

I know that the criminal "state of Israel" was harvesting the organs of Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military from the emergency rooms of the Palestinian hospitals in Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, Jenin, and everywhere in the West Bank and Gaza, and transferred to the Israeli hospital (or rather, butchery) of Abu Kabir in Tel Aviv. The families of the victims know the criminal israeli officers of the so-called "civil administration" who were covering this crime. Everybody knew Captain Eyal, Col. Fuad Hahul, Col. Amnon Cohen (now head of the "infrastructure department" of the "civil" administration in occupied Palestine), Rafi Geoli, "Alex", and many other officers whose name I don't know, but who were always present.

Everybody knew the higher commanders, above them brigadier general (res.) Gadi Zohar, (former head of the civil administration, and IDF intelligence officer for 30 years), brigadier general (res.) David Shafi (former head of the civil administration), Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni (former IDF brigade in Hebron and the current head of the central command), Col. Baruch Goldstein (formerly with the IDF "civil" administration in Hebron and currently with the municipality of Jerusalem), Lt.Col. Baruch Nagar (former head of the civil administration and the current head of the water administration for the West Bank and Gaza), Col. Yigal Sharon, (former brigade of Hebron and the current, Coffee Salesman), Brigadier General (res.) Dov Sedaka, (former head of the civil administration and the current head of the zionist Chairman of the steering committee), Maj.Gen. Matan Vilnai, Brigadier General Noam Tivon, Col. Yehuda Fuchs , Lt. Col. Udi ben Muha, the military commander of Hebron, and others. And everybody knew that these people were involved in the harvesting of organs of their victims.

Captain Eyal, Col. Fuad Halhal, Col. Amnon Cohen, Rafi Geoli and many of those mentioned above and many others were the ones calling the families of the murdered Palestinians, in the middle of the night to inform them about the bodies of their loved ones. These criminals were telling the Palestinian families that they "had worked hard to make it possible to release the bodies of their relatives from the military headquarter" - implying that it was a favor, and that the military commanders Shamni, Goldstein, Nagar, ... had ordered that the bodies should be buried in the dark and that "not more than ten persons" were allowed to be present at the funeral.

Often the relatives of the murdered people were screaming and shouting, as they had received an empty body stuffed with cotton. These criminal officers and their soldiers forced them to shut up.

All this criminal activity is not only a clear violation of the human rights, a horrendous crime against humanity, but a disrespect of the sanctity of life which can only be explained with mental deficiencies of the perpetrators.

If Israel did not steal the ORGANS of the murdered Palestinians, and if Israel did not want to cover up their inhuman crimes, and if Israel respects the Geneva conventions and other humanitarian laws, in peace and in war, then Israel would not kidnap and transfer to the Abu Kabir "hospital" in Tel Aviv hundreds, perhaps thousands of Palestinians bodies of people who were murdered during PEACE demonstrations in the cities of the West Bank.

If it is not true that Israelis are harvesting the organs of murdered Palestinians, then why were they transferring the bodies of their victims to be butchered at Abu Kabir? The reasons of the death were known. The victims all received bullets in the head, or in the chest by Israeli snipers.

After all the whining and screeching of the Israelis after the Swedish newspaper article, the fact stands that hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies and even people known to have been alive were transferred to the Abu Kabir autopsy center and returned to their families stuffed with cotton. Hundreds of victims who were buried in the dark by their families, and hundreds or thousands more bodies which Israel keeps in their numbered graves.

During the first Intifada and during the so called peace time I personally witnessed how the Israeli military were kidnapping Palestinian bodies and gravely injured people from the emergency room of Princess Alia hospital in Hebron. Some years later I also witnessed how the Israeli army kidnapped the bodies of the Palestinian dead from the then new Al-Ahli hospital: All the area would be declared military zone, the hospital surrounded and invaded by troops, nobody was allowed to move inside the building. All these kidnapped bodies of Palestinians, and also people known to have been living, were killed before taken to Abu Kabir for "autopsy".

Taking in consideration these facts, everything I know, and until Israel comes clean on who are the members of the organ harvesting mafia, the only conclusion is that:
All the Israeli officers and civil personnel of the so-called civil administration who served in the West Bank since the early seventies were involved at least covering up the harvesting of organs from Palestinians, at the very least conniving, but probably taking part in the racket for money.

All the Israeli doctors and other personnel who worked in Abu Kabir since the early seventies were involved in harvesting and selling organs from Palestinians.

All the IDF snipers and other soldiers who shot Palestinian (and foreigners) at peace demonstrations are and were involved with the mafia which harvests and sells the organs of murdered Palestinians, at least some of the involved in the crimes are given money.

The IDF central command and most if not all officers in the chain of command until the field fully know what is going on, and they connive with the harvesting of organs from Palestinians they murder, they offer planning and logistics for the commission of the crimes, and make the families of the victims shut up. All the Israeli State and the whole Israeli Nation who accept the continued military occupation are involved in crimes against humanity.

Most if not all the Israeli medical establishment knows what is going on, and they keep silence because they either get money, or they are rewarded in other ways for conniving in these crimes. This is confirmed because of repeated complaints of doctors from other countries because Israel is one of the few jurisdictions which does not forbid commerce with human organs and body parts.

The Israeli health ministry is fully informed of what goes on. This would be corroborated by reports that organ traffickers captured in Brazil and South Africa in 2003 stated as much as that they had been given "business contacts" by "people from the Israeli government", and that the Israeli government financed organ transplants.
I think that the Israeli government and all those suspected of being involved have some hard questions to answer, rather than complaining about a well written report in a Swedish newspaper which speaks about only one case among thousands:
Where are the bodies of the two brothers Imad and Adel Awad Allah from Al-Bireh in the district of Ramallah, who were murdered on 10 September 1998 on the farm of Akram Maswadeh near Hebron?

Where are the bodies of Hani Ahmad Kharboush and Adel Mohammad Hadaideh who were murdered on 6 June 2003 in "Ateel", a town north of Tulkarem in the West Bank?

Where is the body of Sarhan Borhan who was murdered on 4 October 2003 in the Tulkarem refugee camp?

Where is the body of Hasan Isa Abbas who was murdered on 9 October 1994, in Jerusalem?

Where is the body of Hisham Hamad who was murdered in Gaza on 11 November 1993?

Where is the body of Salah Jad Allah Salem who was murdered on 14 October 1994?

Where are the bodies of the two Japanese citizens who were murdered in 1972?

Can Israel prove that the organs of these people, and those of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of Palestinians which are buried in numbered graves of the Israeli military, were not stolen?

Why does Israel bury the victims of their occupation in secret, numbered graves, if their organs were not stolen?
I know the answer of the criminal sophists of Israel in advance: they will say that all these people buried their numbered graves were "terrorists or unknown". But I say that these are LIES and the usual propaganda which Israel uses to cover their crimes. Many people who were buried in these graves were not "terrorists" but legitimate resistance, many of them were peace demonstrators, and none of them were unknown. The only thing unknown or silenced until now is that the israelis are murderers, thieves of organs, a criminal occupational state which commits to all kind of crimes against humanity for fun and profit.

Another issue about which the Israelis have some explaining to do is the story of three teenagers from Gaza. On the evening of Sunday 30 December 2001 the Israeli military occupation fired several artillery shells towards these three north of Beit Lahiya in Gaza. They were Ahmed Mohammed Banat, 15 years, Mohammed Abd El-Rahman Al- Madhoun, 16 years and Mohamed Ahmed Lebed, 17 years.

After murdering them with flechette shells, a military vehicle drove over one of them, and their bodies were delivered to Abu Kabir in Tel Aviv, for "autopsy", without the consent of their families, and without the issuance of a warrant to conduct an autopsy according to the law. The chief pathologist at Abu Kabir (the so-called "Israeli forensic institute") Dr. Yehuda Hiss, said that they received the children without knowing their names, they had all been found killed by nails which the tank shell contained (flechettes).

Hiss broke the law Israeli when he accepted the bodies of the children without knowing who are were and without the knowledge of their families, but that is of no concern. The bodies the three were given to the PA stuffed with cotton several days after their murder.

The director of the Jerusalem Center for Democracy and Human Rights, Salim Khalleh, stated that their organization has been able to document 270 cases of Palestinian bodies "reserved" in hands of the Israeli occupation, which are buried in numbered graves in secret military cemeteries, or in numbered compartments of cooling facilities. Among these cases, 24 are of Palestinian citizens of the city of Tulkarem. On 8 April 2009 the families of these persons whose bodies are still in the power of the israelis held a demonstration in Tulkarem. The demonstrators presented a petition to the director of Red Cross, in which they demanded that the international organizations make pressure on Israel to release the bodies of their sons.

What follows are some of the names of Palestinians published by the Jerusalem Center for Democracy and Human Rights and whose bodies still in the hands of Israel, among other hundreds. The question is, where are these bodies? Are they in the refrigerated facilities, or were they buried in numbered graves after their organs were harvested? Why are they not returned to their families if not because Israeli crimes must be covered up?
Abdel-Fattah Mohamed Badir - murdered near Jericho on 15-7-1975.

Murad Mohammed Abu Assal - murdered on 30-1-2002.

Sarhan Burhan Sarhan - murdered during the invasion of the Tulkarem refugee camp on 4-10-2003.

Saif Allah Bashir Badran - murdered near the illegal Mawr colony on 1-1-2003.

Adel Mohamed Hadaydeh - murdered in "Atteel", a town north of Tulkarem on 16-6 -2003.

Tarek Samir Sfaqeh - murdered in the illegal Hermesh colony on 30-10-2002 .

Faiz Mohammed Awad - murdered in Lebanon on 17-8-1967.

Ramzi Fakhri Ardah - murdered on 3-4 - 2004 in the illegal Avnei Hefetz colony.

Khalid Ahmed Abul-Ezz - murdered on 30-10-2002 in Zeita near the Apartheid wall.

Khaled Subhi Sandjak - murdered in the illegal colony of Sha'ar Ephraim.

Muaiad Mahmoud Salah Al-Din - blew himself up on 8-11-2001.

Abed El-Basset Mohamed Odeh - blew himself up on 27-3-2002.

Ahmed Sami Gawi - murdered in Netanya on 12-7-2005.

Mohammad Jamel Faraj.

Ahmed Ibrahim Abed Allah - murdered in Jerusalem June 1967.

Iyad Naeem Radad - murdered on 15-7-1979 in Al-Zawieh near Salfit.

Rami Mohammed Idris - murdered in Netanya on 31-3-2002.

Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash - blew himself up on 18-5-2001.

Mufed Mohammad Asrawi - murdered at Baqa Al-Garbiah on 21-2-2002.

Muhammad Ali Abu Zeneh - murdered in the Jordan Valley on 12-5-1969.

Lutfi Amin Abu Saada - blew himself up in Netanya on 25-12-2006.

Omani Ahmad Kryosh - murdered in "Atteel" town near Tulkarem on 5-6-2003.

Mashhour Aruri - murdered on 18 May 1976 together with other three persons from Lebanon.

The bodies of 88 Palestinian from Gaza who are known to be in the hand of Israel (no names given).

Abed Allah Kallab and his friends Mohamed Abed El-Qader Abu Al-Zulof and Mohamed Hanafi - all from the Rafah refugee camp, disappeared on 7 March 1988.

Fadi Ahmed Al-Amoudi age 22 years from Beit Hanoun - murdered on 17 April 2004 at the Erez military checkpoint.
Abed Al-Naser Ferwana, Director of the Department of Statistics, at the Ministry of Prisoners in the Palestinian National Authority, a former prisoner and researcher about Palestinian prisoners of Israel, a competent speaker for prisoners affairs, said that the number of Palestinian prisoners who were murdered after their arrest and detention in the Israeli jails sharply increased during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. They are in sum the double of the number of people who the Israelis murdered in a quarter of century since they occupied the West Bank and Gaza. The bodies of these murdered prisoners are also kept in the secret Israeli cemeteries, in a few cases the dead are released two weeks after the Israelis murder them. This is a new proof that the Israelis harvest their organs according to Ferawneh.

The deranged criminal Ehud Barak, the people from the Israeli Central Command, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the others involved in these subhuman crimes should stop threatening Swedish journalist Donald Boström with criminal complaints, as they are the first persons who should be investigated not only for these monstrosities, but also for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The time of silencing journalists and curtailing freedom of speech is over.

The public opinion of the world is loath the criminality of Israel and the repetitive and stupid screeching of "anti-semitism" whenever one of their crimes is uncovered. Constant and inappropriate invocation of the holocaust is boring to the point where nobody cares anymore, and it does not help anymore to cover up their crimes. The criminal sophists of Israel would better clarify were all these bodies are buried, and were their organs are.

If the Israelis go forward and cause troubles for Donald Boström in court, I will volunteer to testify in his favor about these disgusting crimes of the Israelis, and I appeal to all Palestinians who have such a case in their family, to also offer to testify in favor of Mr. Boström should this become necessary.

Gross National Product Never Measures Human Suffering

2009-08-25T13:11:00.000-07:00

Just like 'unemployment figures', the GNP is a fantasy calculation to hide capitalism's deficits including the suffering and death caused by capitalism!

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14886

Gross National Product (GNP): How is it Calculated? What does it Measure?
by Prof. John Kozy
Global Research, August 24, 2009

Although the Department of Commerce claims that GDP measures the final value of goods and services produced in the United States in a given period of time, it merely measures the income of the politically sanctioned commercial class. GDP is used as an indicator of how well that commercial class is doing; it is not a measure of the nation's well being.

Have you ever looked closely at how Gross National Product (GNP) is calculated? Have you ever thought about exactly what it measures? Have you ever wondered why it measures that?

The basic formula adds up all the money spent by different groups for specific products and services within a region over a specified period (usually a year).

GDP = C + I + G + (X - M)

Where:

C = Household and personal consumption expenditures
I = Gross private domestic investment expenditures
G = Government consumption and gross investment expenditures
X = Expenditures on goods and services exported
M = Expenditures on goods and services imported

(Removing X and M from the formula yields Gross Domestic Product.)

Many have pointed out the flaws in this measurement:
It does not measure production; it measures sales.
It omits all the money spent in the underground economy.
It doesn't distinguish between money spent in a gambling casino and money spent on a car. Money spent in a gambling casino doesn't buy a product or a service.
It doesn't distinguish between quality and quality.
But are these really flaws? The answer depends on what the measurement's purpose is. Consider the following three examples:

During prohibition (1919 to 1933), the sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States was prohibited, but alcoholic beverages were sold nevertheless. The money spent on them would not have been counted in GNP ("GNP" was first used in 1934). Since the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933, the money spent on alcoholic beverages is included in GNP. But even today, if there are any moon shiners selling alcoholic beverages in the hills of Appalachia, the money taken in is not included in GNP.
For many decades, cocaine was legally sold in the United States. Since 1914, its sale has been prohibited. Up until 1914, the money spent on cocaine would have been counted in GNP; since then, it is not.

Some of the money spent on gambling is included in GNP and some is not. Gambling has always existed in the United States. Attempts to prohibit it began in the early 19th century. Where it was prohibited, it was carried on by various "criminal" elements, principally the Cosa Nostra. Eventually some of the wealth amassed by the Mafia was laundered and used to build the casinos of Las Vegas where gambling was and is legal. The money gotten illegally was used to build Sin City. The money spent on legal gambling is included in GNP; the money spent on illegal gambling is not.

Although the Department of Commerce claims that GDP measures the final value of goods and services produced in the United States in a given period of time, it most certainly does not. What it measures is the money spent by consumers in a segment of the economy. As the three examples above show, not only are not all goods and services produced included in the measure, the same goods and services are sometimes included and sometimes not. The only relevant criterion is who gets the money. If the vendor is politically approved, the money gets included; if the vendor is not, the money is excluded. So in actuality, GNP measures the amount of money transferred from consumers to politically connected vendors. GNP merely measures the income of the politically sanctioned commercial class. When GNP goes up, the commercial class gets richer; when it goes down, that class gets poorer. GDP is used as an indicator of how well the commercial class is doing; it is not a measure of the nation's well being; it does not account for poverty, crime, hunger, homelessness, and a host of other "people" problems.

So why is the government concerned about only the wealth of the commercial class? Why isn't it concerned with the wealth and well being of the people? Well, it's the economic system, stupid! Capitalism is about the welfare of capitalists, nobody else.

When the first Adam in the garden of Edinburgh ate from the tree of patronage, he produced An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which still serves as the foundation of Classical economics and its numerous variations. The work was not hailed for the cogency of its argument or the systematic nature of its exposition. Criticisms of it emerged almost immediately. What it did, however, was provide a way for the English commercial class to rationalize what it had always done and wanted to continue doing. It gave the members of this class what appeared to be a "scientific" justification for the most outrageous, immoral activities that had always been employed to increase their wealth. It converted the Seven Deadly Sins into the Seven Commercial Virtues. It not only took the good out of goods and services, it took the good out of everything.

The wealth of the commercial class became equivalent to the wealth of the nation; it became GNP. That national wealth, however, does not reside in the nation's treasury, and nation states have become nothing more than means for increasing the wealth of politically connected commercial classes and the political establishment, political-economic oligarchies.

The consequences of this economic system have been deadly and disastrous. It was employed by all of the Western European imperial nations. It was employed by the British Empire from its inception to the end of World War II. What did it accomplish? Well, except for those colonies populated by English expatriates, in 1945, not a single British colony was viable and prosperous. Every colony had been raped to increase the wealth of English commercial interests. But the English people had not faired well either, so they put a socialist government in power. Winston Churchill, their Conservative, heroic leader during World War II, was unceremoniously removed from office to his dismay.

The British Empire lasted from the 16th to the 20th century–almost 400 years. If Adam Smith had been right, Capitalism should have increased the wealth of England enough to make the wealth of Midas look paltry. But England, the nation, never became wealthy. In fact, it could not even finance its colonial wars. It had to borrow fifty million dollars to finance the Boer War. It borrowed money from the United States to finance its defense in both World Wars I and II. Capitalism does not enrich either nations or their peoples. The fifteen nations that have the highest national debt also have the highest GNPs.

The United States of America is now the world's dominant imperial power. It too has the world's highest GNP and the world's largest national debt. It too cannot finance its wars, the rebuilding of its infrastructure, or social programs. Yet it can finance failed commercial enterprises by borrowing money it doesn't have from nations with lesser GNPs. In the current debate over healthcare reform, the major concern of many Congressmen, especially Republicans, is making certain that the nation's medical insurance companies are not forced out of business. To those Congressmen, that concern renders the premature deaths and suffering of Americans caused by curable illnesses inconsequential. If anyone doubts that America exists merely for the welfare of its commercial elite, this analysis of GDP should crush it. Is America the land of opportunity? Yes, but not for you and me. Most of us are merely chattel to be herded, burdened, and disposed of to accommodate the interests of commerce.

Gross National Product is not about products or nations, but it most certainly is gross.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who blogs on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

Israel Murdering Palestinians for Their Organs

2009-08-25T09:56:00.001-07:00

This behavior is *PSYCHOPATHIC*. More, it is *MUTANT/VAMPIRIC THINKING* and it is fascist utilitarian thinking (Why Not Make Money On People That Are Already Dead?)

Murdering Palestinians for their organs: "All facts on the ground prove Swedish report correct"

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14885
By Saed Bannoura

Global Research, August 23, 2009
Voltaire Network

Former Palestinian detainee, researcher Abdul-Nasser Farwana, stated that all facts on the ground, since decades, prove that the Israeli occupation executed Palestinian detainees after they surrendered and refused to hand their bodies to their families. Hundreds of bodies were transferred to the families days, months or even years after the fact, and when the bodies were sent back, they were missing vital internal organs.

Link for the Aftonbladet report by Swedish journalist Donald Boström:
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab

Farwana added that the Swedish report, written by Donald Boström and published by Aftonbladet, Stockholm daily paper, regarding illegal trafficking of body parts of Palestinians is directly connected to the execution of Palestinians after they surrendered to the army, and is connected with the arrest of 40 well-known figures, including Rabbis in New Jersey for money laundering and corruption, in a scheme that involved sales of Israeli kidneys in the US and other corruption rackets.

Farwana added that one of the illegal acts carried out by Israel is having secret detention facilities in which dozens of detainees were imprisoned and never heard of anymore. This is in addition to the “Numbers Graveyard” in which “unknown” Palestinian and Arab fighters are buried.

He said that Israel still denies it is holding hundreds of Palestinian and Arab fighter, and refuses to cooperate with the Red Cross on the issue.

The researcher added that Israel is the only state that had a policy of detaining the bodies of slain Arab and Palestinian fighters, and that some 300 fighters are buried in the numbers graveyard.

Hundreds of bodies were returned during prisoner-swap deals, including the latest swap-deal between Hezbollah and Israel in which some 200 bodies were moved to Lebanon.

Farwana further said that dozens of detainees died in Israeli prisons, some due to torture, and their bodies were not immediately sent to their families, but instead were moved to forensic center, and some of their body parts were removed before bodies were sent back to the Palestinians.

He said the Swedish paper said in its report that Palestinians youth were abducted by the Israeli army from their homes, were killed later on, and when their bodies were return, they were cut open and vital organs were missing.

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Rosenberg, who was recently arrested in New York, is believed to be involved in illegal trade of organs, and that he sold Kidney to patients in the United States for 160.000 USD.

The Aftonbladet report placed the Israeli-Swedish relations at odds, and some Israel officials demanded Sweden to officially apologize, while other officials said that this report in part of the efforts to demonize Israel and the Jews.

India: Feeding the Corporate World Close to $145 million Every Day for Two Years

2009-08-17T04:09:00.000-07:00

Someone has to feed the monsters and it's always the poorest and the weakest. That's how predators work!

http://www.counterpunch.org/sainath08172009.html

August 17, 2009

Drought of Justice, Flood of Funds

By P. SAINATH

Mumbai
Sure, August is proving an unusual month. But what an extraordinary one July was. We celebrated the delivery of the cheapest car in the world and the costliest tur dal (pigeon pea) in our history within the same 31 days. And it took some work to get there. The price of tur dal was around Rs.34 a kilogram just after the 2004 elections, Rs. 54 before the 2009 polls, Rs. 62 just after and now, at over Rs. 90, bids for three-figure status. (49 rupees = $1.)

The euphoria of July also saw Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia of the Planning Commission declare that the “worst is behind us.” (Though it must be conceded he had said that even in June and possibly earlier). That's good. I only wish they’d told us when the worst was upon us. It would have been nice to know. Otherwise, it gets hard to appreciate improvement.

As a matter of fact, the Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister suggest the worst could be ahead of us. And they don't mean the swine flu. Both appear to have written off much of the kharif (summer or monsoon) crop. They advise us to buckle up for a further rise in food prices due to the drought they now say affects 177 districts. That they've thrown in the towel on the kharif crop is evident in their calling for more efficient planning of the rabi (winter crop). Yet, the government had two months during which it could have opted for compensatory production of foodgrain in regions getting relatively better rainfall. But there was no effort at monsoon management.

Even today there are very useful things that could be done to counter the worst ahead. A positive step taken by the Rural Development Ministry now allows small but vital assets like farm ponds to be created on the lands of farmers through the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme NREGS . A pond on every farm should be the objective of every government. (Incidentally, this would help hugely with the rabi season. It would also ease the hostility of quite a few farmers towards the NREGS.) A massive expansion of the NREGS will also help cushion the hundreds of thousands of laborers struggling to find work and devastated by rising food costs. But it would call for throwing out the entirely destructive 100-days-per-household limit on work under the scheme. With the Prime Minister calling for anti-drought measures on "a war footing," this should be the time to do it.

The price-rise-due-to-drought warning is a fraud. Of course, a drought and major crop failure will push up prices further. But prices were steadily rising for five years since the 2004 elections, long before a drought. Take the years between 2004 and 2008 when you had some good monsoons. And more than one year in which we claimed "record production" of foodgrain. The price of rice went up 46 per cent, that of wheat by over 62 per cent, atta (whole wheat flour) 55 per cent, salt 42 per cent and more. By March 2008, the average increase in price of such items was already well over 40 per cent. Then these rose again till a little before the 2009 polls and have risen dramatically in the past three months.

The agriculture minister appears to have figured out that the stunning rise in the price of pulses may have little to do with drought. "There is no reason," he finds, "for prices to rise in this fashion merely on a supply-demand gap." He then went on to find a valid reason: "blackmarketing or hoarding." But he stayed silent on forward trading in agricultural commodities. Many senior ministers have long maintained that "there is no evidence" that speculation related to forward trading has had any impact on food prices. (The ban on trading in wheat futures was lifted even before the results of the 2009 polls were announced in May. And existing bans on other items have been challenged in interpretation.)

The price rise since 2004 could be the highest for any period in the country barring perhaps the pre-emergency period. For the media, of course, July was far more interesting for the political price in Parliament over the Gas war between the Ambani brothers. When these two barons brawl, governments can fall. Also, how could atta be more interesting than airline tickets (the prices of which fell dramatically over several years). Food prices may have gone up but airline travel costs went down and those are the prices that mattered.

So the price of aviation turbine fuel became a far more to-be-covered thing as private airlines threatened a strike demanding public money bailouts. At the time of writing, it appears the government will try and make things cheaper for them. These airline owners include some associated with the Indian Premier League cricket enterprise, which got crores of rupees worth of tax write-offs last year. Maharashtra waived entertainment tax on the IPL. And with so many games held in Mumbai that proved a bonanza for the barons paid for by the public.

There's always money for the Big Guys. Take a look at the budget and the "Revenues foregone under the central tax system." The estimate of revenues foregone from corporate revenues in 2008-09 $ 14.3 billion. By contrast, the NREGs covering tens of millions of impoverished human beings gets $ 8.1 billion in the 2009-10 budget.

Remember the great loan waiver of 2008, that historic write-off of the loans of indebted farmers? Recall the editorials whining about 'fiscal imprudence?' That was a one-time, one-off waiver covering countless millions of farmers and was claimed to touch $14.5 billion. But over $ 27 billion (in direct taxes) have been doled out in concessions in just two budgets to a tiny gaggle of merchants hogging at the public trough, without a whimper of protest in the media. Imagine what budget giveaways to corporates since 1991 would total. We'd be talking many trillions of rupees.

Imagine if we were able to calculate what the corporate mob has gained in terms of revenue foregone in indirect taxes. Those would be much higher and would mostly swell the corporate kitty for the simple reason that producers rarely pass on these gains to consumers. Let's take only what the budget tells us (Annexure 12, Table 12, p.58). Income foregone in 2007-08 due to direct tax concessions was $ 12.9 billion. That foregone on excise duty was $ 18.20 billion. And on customs duty $ 31.9 billion. That adds up to $ 63.1 billion. Even if we drop export credit from this, it comes to well over $ 41.6 billion. For 2008-09, that figure would be over $ 62.4 billion. That's a very conservative estimate. This is just from the union budget. It does not include all manner of subsidies and rate cuts and other freebies to the corporate sector. But it's big enough.

Simply put, the corporate world has grabbed concessions of over $104 billion in just two years that total more than seven times the 'fiscally imprudent' farm loan waiver. In fact, it means that on average we've been feeding the corporate world close to $ 145 million a day every day in those two years. Imagine calculating what this figure would be, in total rupees, since 1991. Ask for an expansion of the NREGS, seek universal access to the PDS, plead for more spending on public health and education - and there's no money. Yet there's enough to give away over $ 6 million an hour to the corporate world in concessions.

If Indian corporations saw their net profits rise in April-June this year, despite gloom and doom around them, there's a reason. All that feeding frenzy at the public trough. The same quarter saw 170,000 organized sector jobs lost in the very modest estimate of the Labour Ministry. That's not counting the 1.5 million said to have been lost in just the export sector between September and April by the then Commerce Secretary.

And now comes the drought. A convenient villain to hang all our man-made distress on -- and sure to oblige by adding greatly to that distress. A huge fall in farm incomes is in the offing. If the government wants to act on a war footing, it could start with a serious expansion of the NREGS (about the only lifejacket people in districts like Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh have at this point, for instance). It could launch, among many other things, the pond-in-every-farm program. It could restructure farm loan schedules. It could start getting the idea of monsoon management into its thinking. It could curb forward trading-linked speculation that was driving one of our worst price rises in history long before the drought was on the horizon. And it could declare universal access to the Public Distribution System. That cost could probably be easily covered by say, cancelling the dessert from the menu of the unending corporate free lunch in this country.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece appears, and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com.

Demonizing Single-Payer Health Care So Capitalism Can Continue Killing for Profits

2009-08-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

Capital will do anything to keep its profits including letting people die from lack of health insurance by demonizing any proposed change that will affect their profits!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-Care-Guide-for-Comp-by-Stephen-Pizzo-090812-752.html

August 12, 2009

Health Care Guide for Complete Dummies

By Stephen Pizzo

Frankly it really pisses me off that I even have to waste our time discussing these non-issues. But, if you have one of these right wingnuts in your family or on your email list, send them this cheat sheet.

The Advanced medical directive euthanasia trap "" "Sign here and Die"

Of course. Who could possibly doubt it? Killing bothersome and expensive oldsters is just a really, really, really, really late-term abortion, if you stop to think about it.

Which is exactly what people who believe this nonsense are not doing... thinking.

In fact the Advanced Medical Directive (AMD) is just the opposite of what these airheads are claiming. AMDs are not post-dated suicide notes. No one is taking your choice to live or die away, but rather memorializing that choice.

Say you want doctors to do all they can to keep you alive if you code out. Fine. Say so in your AMD and that's what you'll get. If you want them to pound on your chest until you're so tender the mortician stamps, "USDA Top Choice" on your forehead, the docs will do just that. They'll even bring in "the machine that goes 'BIGN.' If you want them to defibrillate you so many times with the zappers that you start picking up high-def TV channels in your head, they'll do that for you as well. But only if it's in your AMD.

But, if you're one of us who simply want the hospital let us pass away quietly, unzapped, un-tenderized, un-intubated, no one dragging you back from "the light" just to run up more billable procedures, and you have those wishes all signed and notarized in your AMD, then you'll get to slip away unmolested.

That's it. There's no "death panel," there's no government plot to euthanize anyone, of any age, for any reason, including Sarah Palin's baby.

In fact, the only places where medical people can legally use medical procedures to kill people is in our prisons. And conservatives think that's just as it should be.

We Don't Want Bureaucrats Getting Between Us and Our Doctors

Well, bureaucrats come in many flavors. There's your basic government bureaucrat, who follows federal, state and local laws, rules and ordinances. They're inflexible, myopic, often not terribly bright and almost always annoying.

Then there's your corporate bureaucrat. You know, the bean counters, the guys and gals who spend their work days combing spreadsheets for... hell, who knows what. Corporate bureaucrats have ice-water in the viens. And they too have their marching orders, orders they enforce with even greater tenacity since, unlike federal bureaucrats, corporate bureaucrats can be easily and quickly fired.

Now, which bureaucrat do you prefer involved in your health care?

Neither, you say. Oh, sorry. "None of the above," was not one of your choices. You get one, or you get the other, or you get a combination of the two. Right now most of you have the insurance company's corporate bureaucrat between you and your doctor. You will never see them, or for that matter probably ever have any form of direct contact with them. The only evidence they exist comes when your doctor returns to the exam room shaking his or her head and announces, "Sorry, Burt, but your insurance doesn't cover that... (. fill in the blank "" medication, procedure, hospital stay, treatment. )

That decision was made by an insurance company bureaucrat while you where sitting in that cold exam room doing your damnedest to keep the back of you exam robe closed. The denial of service was made either over the phone or computer with your very own insurance bureaucrat. It's sort of like the old movie Harvey... you have your own invisible insurance company bureaucrat who follows you where ever you go... if you go anywhere near the health care system.

So, how's that been working for you? If you like it, fine, keep it. But don't pretend that the current system doesn't inject a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.

One more observation: if replacing that corporate bureaucrat with a government bureaucrat is so socialistically awful, then why aren't you and your fellow morons out there demanding an end to Medicare? "Hell no, we won't take Medicare!"

And let's not forget the Veterans Administration. Let's make all those former soldiers go out and buy health insurance like everyone else, the little leeches. Right? Well, either that's right or you're wrong about the public option.

The Public Option is Socialized Medicine

"Paging doctor Marx, Dr. Marx, Dr. Engels needs the communal anal-thermometer, stat.."

Look you knuckleheads, we already have socialized medicine. Every time you figure out what you're paying for health insurance every year, add to it approximately $1100. That's what you're paying to cover the 50 million un- and under-insured Americans. Yep.. you're paying for all that "free government" health care that has to be provided by hospitals by law.

So, another hard choice confronts you: Do you want to change the law, or change the system? Want to just deny medical care to the uninsured? "Let'em eat camomile!"

Or we can change the system to enlarge the actuarial pool by making insurance affordable to 98% of Americans. One way to do that is to inject a low-cost public run plan into the mix, forcing down costs, creating real competition for private insurance companies for the first time, and sparking a revolution in medical industry efficiency, technology and delivery.

If you don't want to do that, then maybe you should reconsider your opposition to forced euthenasia, not for Sarah Palin's baby or granny, but uninsured patients.

They Will Ration Medical Care

Whatsamatta bucko? Were you born with an ugly nose? Got Gucci-size bags under your eyes? Want bigger, perkier boobs? Well if so, you're right. You're not getting them paid for.

If you really want your beak chopped and lowered, your bags emptied or your boobs hydraulically lifted, you're going to have pony up the dough yourself.

So, if that's what you mean by rationing of medical care, you're right.

Oh, and one more thing. You think there's no rationing right now? Just try to stick your private insurance company with those kind vanity procedures and see how fast they tell you to get used to your body the way it is.

Another one more thing. This isn't part of any of the reforms I've read about so far, but ought to be. We Baby Boomers are about as self-indulgent bunch as you'll ever meet. In our 60's now we insist on trying to do the same things we did when were 25. Which has meant we're two-legged ATM machines for the orthopedic industry.

Ortho docs see the same guys over and over, coming in for another knee job because they're still out there on the basketball court trying to slam dunk with the kids. Or the gal with her fourth torn rotator cuff from playing tennis. They come in with one demand, "Fix me again so I get back out there on the court."

If I were medical tsar I'd have a rule: One rotator cuff, one knee tendon, one ankle, one elbow fix, one sports-related fix per geriatric patient. If they come back in again, with the same problem, due to the same age-denying stupidity, they get handed a cane. At least that will keep them off the court, for good. Fixing the same people, over and over again, for the the same self-inflicted wound, is not good medical care, it's enabling. And we simply can't afford it. Some would call that "rationing." I call it tough love.

(Yeah, yeah, I know..."what about smokers and over-eaters." Hey, give me a break. I can't fix everything in a single column.)

The public option will destroy private health insurance

Last year the health insurance biz pocketed $12 billion in profits. They're not going anywhere. And here's a big reason why.

We Baby Boomers are just now seeing our body-odometers turn 250,000 miles. Our parts are starting to wear out. (Trust me on this you youngsters.) Prostates swell to the size kiwi fruit, hemorrhoids deserve their own athletic supporters, the old ticker misses beats, and the plumbing... don't even ask.

We Baby Boomers are going to be worth trillions upon trillions of bucks to the insurance industry over the next thirty years or so, and they're not about to cede all that gold to some government option.

What they will do is what all capitalist enterprises always do when conditions change "" adapt. They will find ways to compete with the public option. And if history is any gauge, the private sector usually does pretty damn well when it's main competitor is a public entity.

But the insurance industry claims that a public option would be non-competitive, and would destroy the private insurance system. (Before they made that claim they should have asked themselves if any of us would care, in the first place.) But what they really mean is that they want to talk about competitiveness, not actually have to compete against a worthy and capable opponent. To which I say, tough nuggies, assholes. You brought it on yourselves. You fouled your own nest. You killed your own golden goose in search of platinum eggs.

So, either compete or retreat. Either way is just fine with us.

Despite their threats of mass suicide, private insurance companies will compete. And they will compete hard against the public option. They will compete on service, which will result in better service "" for both public and private plans. They will compete by charging more for plans that cover "boutique" treatments and services the public plan doesn't cover "" and probably shouldn't anyway.

And they will suddenly "discover" ways to insurance some of those 50 million folks they once refused to cover who might now be attracted to an affordable public plan. They will do so by offering all kinds of "ala carte" and budget plans they now swear they just can't do.

Author's Bio: Stephen Pizzo has been published everywhere from The New York Times to Mother Jones magazine. His book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, was nominated for a Pulitzer.

Is Obama's Plan for Tackling Hunger Just Another Chance for Big Ag and Biotech to Cash In?

2009-08-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

The Poor Farmers must suffer and Poor People go hungry so Big Ag can make its money for the serpent puppet masters and stock holders!

Is Obama's Plan for Tackling Hunger Just Another Chance for Big Ag and Biotech to Cash In?
By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
August 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141800/

When Barack Obama's recently announced that he and other G8 nations will commit to funding a brand new global food security effort, who could really argue with his intentions? In his speech in Ghana, he described his plan, saying "our $3.5 billion food security initiative is focused on new methods and technologies for farmers -- not simply sending American producers or goods to Africa. Aid is not an end in itself. The purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it is no longer needed." Yet, despite the altruistic intent of this promise, some wonder if it may do more harm than good. Will it really help to slash the number of hungry people or is this really a puppet policy with big agricultural interests pulling the strings to ensure greater profits?

One reason to question America's efforts toward global food security is its rejection of something known as the IAASTD report, which focuses on using agricultural technology to meet the world's food needs. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development, a global report commissioned by the World Bank and the UN, is described by one of its lead authors, Jack Heinemann, as "the single largest research effort on this topic in all of human history," and "the most authoritative statement on current knowledge." The report was written by an intergovernmental body that involved over 400 scientists and 30 governments. When it was released last year, the United States, under the George W. Bush administration, was one of only three nations that did not approve it. (The other two were Canada and Australia). The U.S. rejection came as a result of fears that the report's conclusions were "protectionist," thus running counter to America's free-trade-at-all-costs agenda. Furthermore, the U.S. did not like the report's rejection of modern biotechnology as the key to solving the world's agricultural problems.

"The IAASTD calls upon rich and poor nations alike to build an agriculture that also builds sustainable societies," says Heinemann. "To do this, agriculture must acknowledge and reverse its true environmental and nonrenewable energy costs, food and biomaterials produced for export from rich countries must not be subsidized, the seeds and livestock must be owned locally, and the technologies chosen for agriculture must be the right ones, not just the commercially viable ones. This is a goal that we cannot simply delegate to the private sector and will require a renewed investment from governments that do not tie agricultural innovation to private profit."

The report points out that solving world hunger requires more than just producing more food or producing cheap food. In the past 50 years, growth in food production has outpaced population growth, and food prices, adjusted for inflation, have fallen. Yet a record number of people go to bed hungry every night. Thus, the problem is not merely one of increasing agricultural yields. And unfortunately, U.S. policies play a role in undermining poor farmers in developing nations by dumping cheap commodities on the world market, making it impossible for them to compete. Our role in causing global warming also jeopardizes poor farmers, as Africa loses arable farmland to rising temperatures and increasing drought. Yet changing our agricultural subsidies or enacting meaningful global warming legislation has not yet been politically possible in Obama's America. We may have a genuine desire to help the hungry, but so far we are unwilling to take steps that will actually create meaningful change for those without enough to eat.

In its assessment of agricultural technology, the IAASTD report found that genetically modified crops are not appropriate for subsistence farmers, such as those Obama pledged to help in Africa, for a number of reasons. Additionally, the report found questionable evidence of the benefits of GM crops (increased yield, decreased pesticide use) and cited a number of risks associated with GM crops (including safety and allergenicity). IAASTD lead author Molly Anderson sums up their findings, saying, "Imposing US-developed technology, including modern genetically-engineered crops, in places that do not have the capacity to monitor its full social, economic and environmental consequences risks repeating serious mistakes needlessly."

Instead, the report authors found that agroecological methods (farming methods that utilize the science of ecology, such as using cover crops or beneficial insects) are "competitive with or superior to conventional and genetic engineering-based methods of productivity... [and] not only lower the environmental impacts of agriculture, they may reverse past damage." Anderson calls for "relatively low-cost, high-return agricultural practices and systems-such as agroforestry, polycultures and organic farming," which she feels carry promise for raising production while improving environmental quality and farm incomes. Anderson says, "Agricultural support needs to target the people who have been underserved in the past: women small-scale farmers who produce most of the food in developing countries, landless workers, other marginalized populations, and poor people living in places most vulnerable to environmental and social threats such as climate change and water scarcity."

Yet, although the IAASTD report was rejected under Bush, the Obama administration has made no efforts yet to embrace it. While Obama himself has been vague, a look at members of his administration, like Nina Federoff, science advisor to Hillary Clinton and outspoken advocate for modern biotechnology, tell us what the government might be likely to do. Clinton's State Department oversees USAID, which will carry out any plans for food and agricultural aid in the developed world. USAID already participates in public-private partnerships with companies like Monsanto to develop genetically modified crops, so it's hardly a stretch to imagine they would continue in the same direction. (Also, citizens hoping to meet with USAID to discuss the findings of the IAASTD report were warned by a top Capitol Hill source to avoid using the term 'agroecological' when talking with USAID; apparently USAID is not open to the idea, even though it was a key recommendation of the IAASTD report.)

Another indication of the direction of the U.S. government comes from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which held a hearing in April 2009 that used a different report -- one by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs -- as a blueprint for America's plan to help feed the developing world. The vision of the Chicago Council report, which was written under the leadership of Dan Glickman and Catherine Bertini with funding by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, looks far more similar to pesticide and biotech industry talking points than it does to the IAASTD report. The pesticide and biotech industries frequently relate solving global hunger to increasing agricultural yield, and they claim to offer the best (if not only) methods of increasing yield. In the hearing, witnesses and Senators alike spoke of the need for hybrid and GM seeds, petroleum-based fertilizer, and pesticides in Africa and South Asia. The Chicago Council report received the endorsement of the other witnesses at the hearing, including the anti-hunger group Bread for the World, as well as other prominent anti-hunger groups like Oxfam. Why were these organizations so closely aligned in their talking points to agribusiness, and why weren't they considering the IAASTD report and its findings?

The connection between many of these groups is the Gates Foundation. Gates provided grant money to Bread for the World and Oxfam, and it funded the Chicago Council's report. Furthermore, Catherine Bertini is a senior fellow at Gates. She is also a former executive director of the UN's World Food Program. Dan Glickman, Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture and a former Congressman (D-KS), enters the picture when you examine his role on the board of Friends of the World Food Program where he served with the CEO of Yum! Brands (the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell), a vice president at agribusiness giant Cargill, and Big Ag lobbyist Marshall Matz. The World Food Program is basically a good program, but its success is in delivering emergency food aid, not in changing the system so that fewer humanitarian emergencies occur (as Obama pledges to do). Glickman also sits on the board of the Kansas Bioscience Authority, a group devoted to expanding the biotechnology industry in Kansas, and he is a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he sat on the international advisory board of Coca-Cola.

Going back to Gates, the president of the Global Development Program, the part of the foundation that leads its anti-hunger programs, is Sylvia Mathews Burwell. She held several senior posts in the Clinton Administration, including Chief of Staff to Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, and as Deputy Chief of Staff to President Clinton. Rubin was famous for his belief in free trade, including policies that the IAASTD report call out as harmful to the poor in the developing world. Both Rubin and Burwell sit on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, of which Glickman, as mentioned above, is a member.

Could it be, then, that part of the impetus for the ideas put forth by the Gates Foundation and the Chicago Council come from a worldview held by the Council on Foreign Relations? The website TheyRule.net shows a map of each of the directors on the Council on Foreign Relations's board and all of the other corporate boards they sit on. Between the 14 members of the board, they sit on 32 different corporate, academic, and institution boards, including a nice array of financial companies (AIG, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, Morgan Stanley), oil companies (Chevron Texaco and ConocoPhillips) and everything in between. A look at various agribusiness companies finds that Monsanto has a board member in the Council on Foreign Relations (George H. Poste). Additionally, the Council has a number of corporate members, ranging from Big Oil to Big Pharma to Big Food to Big Money (financial companies).

What does this mean? It does NOT mean that a conspiracy is afoot, or that the individuals involved are necessarily taking orders from corporations to manipulate foreign policy disguised as aid to their own benefit. And, obviously, the vast majority of corporations involved are not agribusiness giants. The Center for Media and Democracy's Sourcwatch site notes that the elitism of the Council on Foreign Relations "doesn't necessarily preclude the ability to provide unbiased and useful service." However, the fact of the matter is that the United States government -- the Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee, if not Obama himself -- are ignoring the recommendations of a comprehensive peer-reviewed study (the IAASTD report) and instead taking advice that more or less maintains the status quo of our agricultural and trade system while creating new markets for multinational corporations in Africa and South Asia.

But the connections named above hint at the potential biases and the motivations of the people involved. Certainly anyone sitting on a corporate board, despite a true wish to help the world's hungry, will have good reason not to advocate any solution to hunger that may jeopardize the profitability of that corporation. A more direct link between the wishes of biotech giant Monsanto and the recommendations of the Gates Foundation can be found in Robert Horsch, the former Monsanto vice president for international development who now holds a senior position at Gates. While the Gates Foundation probably does have a genuine interest to help the world's hungry, they are carrying out their agenda by privatizing the means of food production in Africa (via technologies like genetic engineering).

The problem (for multinational corporations) with the agroecological methods advocated by the IAASTD report authors is that they are free. It costs nothing to save seeds, fix nitrogen in the soil with cover crops, rely on beneficial insects and biodiversity to deal with pests, or fertilize with manure. In addition to requiring no seeds, commercial fertilizer, or pesticides, these technologies require no oil or banks. And if the poor farmers of the world grow crops to eat or sell locally, then their crops will not benefit corporations who rely on cheap commodities sold on the world market.

At best, the individuals like Dan Glickman, Catherine Bertini, and other leaders advocating the Chicago Council's report are guilty of poor judgment and perhaps ignorance. Most of these people are not farmers, nor have they studied related scientific fields like soil science or ecology. Furthermore, perhaps they are suffering from a "bubble" effect, as they are surrounded by other, powerful, well-educated, likeminded people. Straying from the conventional wisdom of such a group would be risky for any one of them. Still, it appears that the power structure is polluted by corporate money and influence. If Obama wishes to truly help the people of the developing world, he should take measures to avoid following corporate interests that are not in the best interest of the people he hopes to help.

A Canadian doctor diagnoses U.S. healthcare

2009-08-12T16:06:00.000-07:00

Americans can't get universal health insurance because capitalist profits come before people! Again, human sacrifice is basic to capitalism.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rachlis3-2009aug03,0,538126.story

A Canadian doctor diagnoses U.S. healthcare

Michael M. Rachlis
Los Angeles Times
Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:54 UTC

Universal health insurance is on the American policy agenda for the fifth time since World War II. In the 1960s, the U.S. chose public coverage for only the elderly and the very poor, while Canada opted for a universal program for hospitals and physicians' services. As a policy analyst, I know there are lessons to be learned from studying the effect of different approaches in similar jurisdictions. But, as a Canadian with lots of American friends and relatives, I am saddened that Americans seem incapable of learning them.

Our countries are joined at the hip. We peacefully share a continent, a British heritage of representative government and now ownership of GM. And, until 50 years ago, we had similar health systems, healthcare costs and vital statistics.

The U.S.' and Canada's different health insurance decisions make up the world's largest health policy experiment. And the results?

On coverage, all Canadians have insurance for hospital and physician services. There are no deductibles or co-pays. Most provinces also provide coverage for programs for home care, long-term care, pharmaceuticals and durable medical equipment, although there are co-pays.

On the U.S. side, 46 million people have no insurance, millions are underinsured and healthcare bills bankrupt more than 1 million Americans every year.

Lesson No. 1: A single-payer system would eliminate most U.S. coverage problems.

On costs, Canada spends 10% of its economy on healthcare; the U.S. spends 16%. The extra 6% of GDP amounts to more than $800 billion per year. The spending gap between the two nations is almost entirely because of higher overhead. Canadians don't need thousands of actuaries to set premiums or thousands of lawyers to deny care. Even the U.S. Medicare program has 80% to 90% lower administrative costs than private Medicare Advantage policies. And providers and suppliers can't charge as much when they have to deal with a single payer.

Lessons No. 2 and 3: Single-payer systems reduce duplicative administrative costs and can negotiate lower prices.

Because most of the difference in spending is for non-patient care, Canadians actually get more of most services. We see the doctor more often and take more drugs. We even have more lung transplant surgery. We do get less heart surgery, but not so much less that we are any more likely to die of heart attacks. And we now live nearly three years longer, and our infant mortality is 20% lower.

Lesson No. 4: Single-payer plans can deliver the goods because their funding goes to services, not overhead.

The Canadian system does have its problems, and these also provide important lessons. Notwithstanding a few well-publicized and misleading cases, Canadians needing urgent care get immediate treatment. But we do wait too long for much elective care, including appointments with family doctors and specialists and selected surgical procedures. We also do a poor job managing chronic disease.

However, according to the New York-based Commonwealth Fund, both the American and the Canadian systems fare badly in these areas. In fact, an April U.S. Government Accountability Office report noted that U.S. emergency room wait times have increased, and patients who should be seen immediately are now waiting an average of 28 minutes. The GAO has also raised concerns about two- to four-month waiting times for mammograms.

On closer examination, most of these problems have little to do with public insurance or even overall resources. Despite the delays, the GAO said there is enough mammogram capacity.

These problems are largely caused by our shared politico-cultural barriers to quality of care. In 19th century North America, doctors waged a campaign against quacks and snake-oil salesmen and attained a legislative monopoly on medical practice. In return, they promised to set and enforce standards of practice. By and large, it didn't happen. And perverse incentives like fee-for-service make things even worse.

Using techniques like those championed by the Boston-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement, providers can eliminate most delays. In Hamilton, Ontario, 17 psychiatrists have linked up with 100 family doctors and 80 social workers to offer some of the world's best access to mental health services. And in Toronto, simple process improvements mean you can now get your hip assessed in one week and get a new one, if you need it, within a month.

Lesson No. 5: Canadian healthcare delivery problems have nothing to do with our single-payer system and can be fixed by re-engineering for quality.

U.S. health policy would be miles ahead if policymakers could learn these lessons. But they seem less interested in Canada's, or any other nation's, experience than ever. Why?

American democracy runs on money. Pharmaceutical and insurance companies have the fuel. Analysts see hundreds of billions of premiums wasted on overhead that could fund care for the uninsured. But industry executives and shareholders see bonuses and dividends.

Compounding the confusion is traditional American ignorance of what happens north of the border, which makes it easy to mislead people. Boilerplate anti-government rhetoric does the same. The U.S. media, legislators and even presidents have claimed that our "socialized" system doesn't let us choose our own doctors. In fact, Canadians have free choice of physicians. It's Americans these days who are restricted to "in-plan" doctors.

Unfortunately, many Americans won't get to hear the straight goods because vested interests are promoting a caricature of the Canadian experience.

You Do Not Have Health Insurance

2009-08-09T04:56:00.001-07:00

And when you lose it, your chances of dying from a treatable illness increase 25%. The government has trillions to throw at the big banks so their CEO's and top psychopathic performers can get billions in bonuses but when it comes to making sure the average person is protected with health insurance, the government has no money for it. It is obvious that those who run the government want people to die from lack of decent, affordable health insurance! What can I say? It's a psychopathic system run by psychopaths! Psychopaths love power and they love the power over life and death! The psychopaths love to watch regular people die prematurely from these secretly engineered deaths from denying people of their basic human right to health care! Yes, we can also blame capitalism as human sacrifice is basic to capitalism.

http://baselinescenario.com/2009/08/05/you-do-not-have-health-insurance/

You Do Not Have Health Insurance
Wednesday 05 August 2009
by: James Kwak

Right now, it appears that the biggest barrier to health care reform is people who think that it will hurt them. According to a New York Times poll, "69 percent of respondents in the poll said they were concerned that the quality of their own care would decline if the government created a program that covers everyone." Since most Americans currently have health insurance, they see reform as a poverty program - something that helps poor people and hurts them. If that's what you think, then this post is for you.

You do not have health insurance. Let me repeat that. You do not have health insurance. (Unless you are over 65, in which case you do have health insurance. I'll come back to that later.)

The point of insurance is to protect you against unlikely but damaging events. You are generally happy to pay premiums in all the years that nothing goes wrong (your house doesn't burn down), because in exchange your insurer promises to be there in the one year that things do go wrong (your house burns down). That's why, when shopping for insurance, you are supposed to look for a company that is financially sound - so they will be there when you need them.

If, like most people, your health coverage is through your employer or your spouse's employer, that is not what you have. At some point in the future, you will get sick and need expensive health care. What are some of the things that could happen between now and then?

Your company could drop its health plan. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (see Table HIA-1), the percentage of the population covered by employer-based health insurance has fallen every year since 2000, from 64.2% to 59.3%. *
You could lose your job. I don't think I need to tell anyone what the unemployment rate is these days.**
You could voluntarily leave your job, for example because you have to move to take care of an elderly relative.
You could get divorced from the spouse you depend on for health coverage.
For all of these reasons, you can't count on your health insurer being there when you need it. That's not insurance; that's employer-subsidized health care for the duration of your employment.

Once you lose your employer-based coverage, for whatever reason, you're in the individual market, where, you may be surprised to find, you have no right to affordable health insurance. An insurer can refuse to insure you or can charge you a premium you can't afford because of your medical history. That's the way a free market works: an insurer would be crazy to charge you less than the expected cost of your medical care (unless they can make it up on their healthy customers, which they can't in the individual market).

In honor of the financial crisis, let's also point out that all of these risks are correlated: being sick increases your chances of losing your job (and, probably, getting divorced); losing your job reduces your ability to afford health insurance, either through COBRA or in the individual market; if your employer drops its health plan, that's either because health care is getting more expensive (meaning harder for you to afford individually) or the economy is in bad shape (making it harder for you to get a job that does offer health coverage).

In addition, there is the problem that even if you are nominally covered when you do get sick, your insurer could rescind your policy, or you may find out, as Karen Tumulty's brother did, that your insurance doesn't cover the treatment you need. But while important, this is a second-order problem. The first-order problem is that as long as your health insurance depends on your job, your health is only insured insofar as your job is insured - and your job isn't insured.

The basic solution is very simple. In Paul Krugman's words: "regulation of insurers, so that they can't cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance." I know that there are lots of details that consume people who know health care better than I do, and I know those details are important. But as an individual who is worried about his or her own health insurance (and that is the point of this post), that's what you want. You want to know that if you lose your job, you won't be shut out because you're too sick,*** and you won't be shut out because you're too poor.

But we won't get there as long as people remain convinced that health care reform is for poor people. It's for everyone - everyone, that is, who isn't independently wealthy or over the age of 65. Because all of us could lose our jobs. (Have I repeated that point enough?)

Now, I admit that if you are over 65, health care reform is not for you, because you are in the one group in our society that enjoys true health insurance - insurance that you cannot lose, that is paid for by taxes, and that is effectively guaranteed by the government. So maybe there's nothing in it for you, except perhaps an improvement to the prescription drug component of Medicare. But I cannot believe that, as the only people who have reliable health insurance, you would oppose health care reform that would provide reliable insurance for the rest of us.

* This doesn't necessarily mean that all those people lost employer-based health coverage because their employers dropped their plans; some of it could be that the employee contributions were increased to the point where they couldn't afford it anymore. 1.1 percentage points of the shift is due to people becoming eligible for Medicare or military health plans.

** If you lose your job, or you get divorced from a spouse through whom you get health coverage, you are eligible for continued coverage under COBRA. However: (a) this only necessarily applies if your employer has 20 or more employees; (b) you have to pay the full, unsubsidized cost of your health plan, which can be particularly difficult after losing your job; and (c) it only lasts for eighteen months.

*** I said earlier that insurers can't charge premiums that are less than the expected cost of your care unless they can make it up on the healthy customers, and they can't in the individual market. But if all insurers are prohibited from doing medical underwriting (pricing based on healthiness), then they will all have to overcharge the healthy customers, and the system could work. This is still a tricky issue - and single-payer (like Medicare) would be much simpler - but it can be made to work even in a competitive market.

Update: A couple of small things. and one big thing:

First, I called rescission a "second-order" problem, which was probably surprising, given that my post on it got over 100,000 page views (thanks to the Huffington Post). I meant "second-order" not to mean that it isn't important, but that it is logically subsequent to the question of whether you have health insurance in the first place, and this post is about whether you can count on having health insurance in the first place.

Second, J.D. points out in the comments that there is a problem with COBRA I didn't mention: If you relocate to an area where your employer doesn't have a plan, then you can't count on it at all.

Third, a few people said that it was the fault of the administration (or the Democrats generally) that health care reform is framed as a "poverty program." There's something to that point, but I don't think it's quite right (and I didn't put it right in the first paragraph above). I think it is a poverty program - but the vast majority of us are, actually, poor. The combination of job loss and serious illness could wipe out almost anyone (under the age of 65 - actually, anyone over 65 as well, since Medicare doesn't cover extended nursing home care), and we all suffer serious economic insecurity because of it. The political problem is that the median American doesn't identify as poor (although he probably thinks he needs more money) and thinks that poverty programs are for "other people." I think that middle-class and upper-class people should support poverty programs for other people, but that's an unnecessary discussion. My point here is that the vast majority of us are poor, when it comes to health care, and therefore we should get behind reform out of self-interest.

Profit Over People: Why the Sick Must Die in America

2009-08-08T07:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009083207/love-profit

For the Love of Profit

By Terrance Heath
08/07/2009

There is a simple answer to the far right's new favorite chant [1] against health care reform — "What's Wrong With Profit?" [2]. Nothing. There is nothing inherently wrong with making a profit. But their question misses a point that I recall from my Baptist upbringing and my days as a Sunday school teacher.

It's not money that's "the root of all evil," as the most common misquoting of particular bit of scripture would suggest. It's the love of money [3] that's the "root of all evil." Money itself is neither bad nor good. Money, or profit, is not the problem. It's what we do with it, and what we do for it, that makes the difference. If it becomes our only reason for doing anything we are, as a country, lost.

Profit, for a while now, hasn't been a problem for the health insurance industry. During the 20 years or so between our attempts at reforming health care, the industry's done quite well. CEOs like United Health's Stephen Hemsley [4] — with $13.2 million in earnings from 2007, and stock options totalling three quarters of a billion dollars — have done quite well. He's in good company.

In the same year, the CEOs of the top seven for-profit insurers averaged $14.2 million [5] in compensation. According to one report, the industry's profits were $65 billion in 2007 [6], down from $67.6 billion in 2006, but well above $48.8 billion in 2005. In 2003, they doubled their profits [7] from 2002.

In 2003, HMOs nearly doubled their profits from just a year before, adding $10 billion to their bottom line. That year, top executives at the 11 largest health insurers made a combined $85 million in one year. In the first three quarters of 2004, HMO profits increased by another 33 percent. The sheer numbers behind these profits are staggering: In 2004 alone, the four biggest health insurance companies reported $100 billion in revenues. That’s $273 million a day, every day, 365 days of the year.

They should be doing well. The last time a president tried to reform health care, Americans' health care spending totaled $912 billion. Today, we spend $2.5 trillion [8] — and we still have upwards of 50 million uninsured. Since September, nearly five million Americans have lost health insurance [9], mainly because 6.5 million of us have become employed since late 2007, and most Americans get their health coverage through their employers.

They get less of it, though, and pay more for it. Citing the recession, employers now offer fewer health care plans [10] — with fewer options and higher deductibles, at that. Those of us who still have jobs have seen our share of health care costs go up 10.6% since last year [11]. They went up 34% from 2004 to 2007 [12]. We can expect costs to go up in 2010, since employers are expected to see a 9% increase [13] in health care costs. Most of them will pass that cost on to employees who are already struggling with health care costs [14].

We're struggling with paying for our own care, and at the same time paying an average of $1,000 extra per household each year to cover the health care costs of the uninsured [15]. And we face an avalanche of health care costs when we become uninsured [16] through losing our jobs.

With unemployment rising to its highest level in more than a quarter century, more Americans are confronting the double crisis of losing both their jobs and their employer-sponsored insurance, which covers 177 million people.

Many unemployed Americans say they cannot afford the high premiums insurance companies charge for personal policies. People like Furchak and Drake who have pre-existing medical conditions have a tough time even finding coverage.

A recent study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said the number of uninsured Americans could jump to more than 65 million in 10 years as healthcare costs more than double. The U.S. Census Bureau says about 46 million Americans are currently without insurance.

So we postpone costs by postponing care until we end up crowing the emergency room.

In fact, medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of personal bankruptcies [17].

Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.

More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.

"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.

"For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection," he added.

But a dwindling number of insured people paying higher premiums can't account for the health insurance industry's incredible growth in profits. That's got more to do the employees they've added to their payrolls.

Between 2000 and 2005, the number of Americans with private health insurance coverage fell by 1 percent. But over the same period, employment at health insurance companies rose a remarkable 32 percent. What are all those extra employees doing?

Now we know at least part of the answer: they’re working harder than ever at identifying people who really need medical care, and ensuring that they don’t get it. In the past, they mainly concentrated on screening out applicants likely to get sick. Now, it seems, they’re also devoting a lot of effort to finding pretexts for revoking insurance after they’ve already granted it. They typically do this by claiming that they weren’t notified about some pre-existing condition, even if the insured wasn’t aware of that condition when he or she bought the policy.

It's practices like these: [Go to URL to watch video]

And stories like these: [Go to URL to watch video]

That add up to the kind of paydays that Hemsley and other insurance CEOs have enjoyed.

And that's the problem.

It's not the profits. It's that profits are prioritized over people. It's the logical extreme and inevitable end of the notion that profit is the only reason to do anything [18].

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

...And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "rescission," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

It's not profit that's the problem. It's what people are willing to do with it and for it that's the problem.

It's the love of profit, the pursuit of profit, and the protection of profit above all else — including people — that's the problem.

Did Free Trade Cause the Recession?

2009-08-08T06:49:00.000-07:00

That question is a no-brainer. The 'free market' caused the recession combined with the lifting of banking laws to keep banks honest and responsible. It makes one wonder how many tens of millions of good, decent people have died because of the greed of the evil elite!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-johnson/did-free-trade-cause-the_b_224461.html

By Dave Johnson
July 1, 2009

For many years the world has suffered under a "free trade" regime that eliminates good paying jobs in every country, sending the work to countries that keep wages low and restrict workers' ability to organize for a better life. The profits went to an already-wealthy few and the inequities increased, wealth concentrating massively at the very top.

And now consumers around the world have run out of money. This is not a surprise.

Did these "free" trade policies cause the recession?

Imagine a company in South Carolina that makes 20,000 pairs of shoes a week and distributes them to stores. Now, imagine that the company closes its South Carolina plant, opens a plant in a low-wage country, ships all the machines and raw materials there, ships back 20,000 pairs of shoes each week and distributes them to the same stores. Is that "trade?" Are the raw materials sent out of the country an "export?" Are the shoes brought back into the country an "import?"

The only thing that has been "traded" in this scenario is American jobs traded for huge executive bonuses. The workers in the low-wage country are not paid enough to buy any remaining American-made products. And, as the economic collapses as a result of shenanigans like this, American workers are no longer able to buy shoes so the executives won't be getting bonuses next year.

I submit that nothing in this example is "traded" except that our standard of living has been traded away. And this exchange brings little benefit to the workers in the low-wage country. This is exploitative trade, not free trade, and we need to protect our workers, the workers in other countries and the world's economy by demanding that our trade partners provide living wages and benefits. We can enforce this demand by attaching import tariffs at a level that makes our own goods competitive. This removes the advantage gained by exploiting workers - and the revenue reduces our own tax burden to maintain our competitive infrastructure. It is an incentive to pay their workers enough so they can reciprocate and buy the things we make here. Instead of the race to the bottom that led to this recession such tariffs create an incentive to raise standards of living around the world.

Let's have national policies that prevent exploitation of workers and the environment and that share prosperity. This is a choice between lifting each other up or continuing a spiral to the bottom.

Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson

The Health Insurance Racket: Getting Rich by Denying Americans Care

2009-08-08T00:39:00.000-07:00

Countless people have to die prematurely so the psychopathic elite can get their psychopathic kicks and thrills from power plus make tons of money at the same time!

http://sickforprofit.com/

Published on Friday, August 7, 2009 by Brave New Films
The Health Insurance Racket: Getting Rich by Denying Americans Care

UnitedHealthcare CEO Stephen Hemsley owns $744,232,068 in unexercised stock options. CIGNA’s Edward Hanway spends his holidays in a $13 million beach house in New Jersey. Meanwhile, regular Americans are routinely denied coverage for the care they need when they need it most.

Welcome to the American health insurance industry. Instead of helping policyholders attain the health security they need for their families, big insurance companies get rich by denying coverage to patients. Now they’re sending lobbyists to Washington, DC to twist the arms of lawmakers to oppose reform of the status quo. Why? Because the status quo pays.

Learn more about the glamorous lives of billionaire health insurance executives and tell us your story of being victimized by their greed. Then contribute to Brave New Films so we can continue to get the word out about the health insurance racket.

Healthcare or Disease Industry?

2009-08-07T16:18:00.000-07:00

Innocent people must die so the capitalists can make enormous profits...

http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=13995

August 6, 2009

Healthcare or Disease Industry?

By Walt Goodpastor

Medical care is one of the most corrupt industries in the world precisely because such an enormous amount of public wealth is made available to those who profit from it.

::::::::

Global Corruption Report 2006

Medical care is one of the most corrupt industries in the world precisely because such an enormous amount of public wealth is made available to those who profit from it.

A study conducted by the McKinsey Global Institutecalculated that the United States spends almost twice as much on health care each year as the average of other industrialized nations, to produce a level of equal or even inferior care. According to the McKinsey study:

• The U.S. spends $477 billion more on healthcare yearly than 13 other highly industrialized nations, even after adjusting for factors such as wealth and different population health profiles. This is 3.6 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

• U.S. medical doctors make a great deal more money than medical doctors in other developed countries, averaging $274,000 a year for specialists and $173,000 for general practitioners. This comes out to 6.6 and 4.2 times the income of their average patient, compared with 4 and 3.2 times in the other countries studied.

• Overspending on medical doctors to the tune of $58 billion a year, is due to the fact that U.S. doctors see more patients and order more procedures than those in other countries.

• Contrary to the illusion created by medical doctors, they are not forced to see more patients and prescribe more procedures in order to pay off their student loans. Medical doctors actually make more money relative to their debt at graduation than other professionals with advanced degrees.

• Patients in the U.S. also pay higher prices for hospitals (four times more per day) and higher prices for drugs (60 to 70 percent more) than those in other industrialized countries. This overspending amounts to $281 billion annually.

In reality, the U.S. does not have a “healthcare” system. It has a national socialist (fascist) disease treatment industry whereby certain politically favored entities are awarded a monopoly over the medical services market by government and allowed to defeat their competitors through restrictive government regulations and licensing. This philosophy of private profits obtained through public funding is the defining characteristic of all fascist systems, and in such systems, such human values as health and wellbeing always take a back seat to private profiteering.

This corrupt disease industry extracts, by a combination of deception and coercion, public funds in the form of taxes and insurance premiums from “we the people” and channels these funds into the private pockets of the disease industry cabal. This cabal consists of organized medicine, for-profit hospitals (these hospitals are anything but free-market entities), pharmaceutical corporations, biotech/medical equipment corporations, health insurance corporations, corporate executives and majority stockholders, and of course, an ever-growing horde of government bureaucrats. The cabal has control over the mass media; the ability to amass legions of lawyers and public relations experts to advance their interests; freedom from liability for their misdeeds and the right to amass unlimited property and financial resources. Because they are allowed to contribute to individual candidates, political parties and PACs and then deduct those contributions from taxable income, they are able to extend their control over democratic institutions. In addition, those who issue corporate stock often bribe politicians with insider information. In America, healthcare cost and risk are socialized, while healthcare profits are privatized.

Although the American people obviously want health and wellness, as signaled by their willingness to fund the growth of alternative medicine to the tune of several billion dollars a year out of pocket, the cabal has no interest in health and wellness. Its business plan is based on maximizing profits by keeping Americans dependent, ignorant, and in a state of chronic disease while pushing drugs, surgery and other treatments that do nothing to address the root causes of poor health. They have no interest in disease prevention, and none of them has a plan for making Americans well.

High profits are made through treating disease, not prevention. Therefore, “we-the-people” get toxic vaccines, toxic drugs, unnecessary mutilating surgeries, immune system destroying chemotherapy and radiation. Antibiotics, the only medications they offer that actually cure anything, have been overused to the point that they are becoming ineffective. When “we-the- people” ask about disease prevention, they change the subject to the obscenely profitable disease detection industry of diagnostic screening procedures designed to recruit us into the treatment meat grinder for further exploitation. For example, there is the false assertion that cancer screening (mammograms, PSA tests, colonoscopies) prolongs the life of cancer patients, when all these tests do is detect cancer at an earlier date, which makes it falsely appear cancer patients are living longer. Most cancer patients still die on the same calendar date regardless of screening or treatment. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fraudulent War on Cancer, no cancer is curable today that was not curable in 1973.

The cancer industry is simply a huge cash cow for vested interests in both government and the private sector… another uber fascist scam that has accomplished nothing but the transfer of hundreds of billions in public wealth into private pockets. This statement may seem counterintuitive, but by the ill-conceived throwing of unlimited wealth at the problem, we virtually guaranteed that it would take on a life of its own, become institutionalized, and never be solved.

True healthcare reform is sorely needed, but the proposals now under consideration would do nothing to improve the health of the American people because they “reform” nothing. They simply increase the velocity and volume of flow of public money into the pockets of politically favored private entities. If the current “reform” proposals were to be enacted into law, the astounding estimated cost of 1.2 trillion dollars would be a de facto transfer of unprecedented public wealth into these private pockets.

The only way any sanity and humanity may be restored to this situation is for individuals to take control of their own destiny by regaining control of their own healthcare dollars. The tax free Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSAs) established during the Bush administration are a step in the right direction. But these should be more strongly supported by allowing contributions to HSAs tax credit status instead of mere tax deduction status.

Since a virtuous society cares for its needy members, those requiring assistance (including Medicare and Medicaid) should receive it in the form of publicly funded vouchers to spend on the healthcare services of their choosing in a truly free healthcare market. This would relieve most of the hordes of government and insurance corporation bureaucrats from their task of micromanaging healthcare decisions that are not theirs to manage, so they can seek more productive, useful employment elsewhere.

In order to assure accountability to policyholders (there is none at present) insurance corporations should be restricted to the exclusive sale of reasonably priced individual policies to all comers that indemnify them against catastrophic financial loss. All benefit payments should be made directly to policyholders. Insurance companies should be prohibited from making any healthcare decisions. This would allow service providers to be paid directly by service recipients, and free them from the costs associated with insurance company interference in their practice.

Sadly, the vast financial and political power of the disease industry cabal makes it unlikely that any of this will ever happen. But anyone reading this journal is also likely to be possessed of the knowledge and intelligence to realize that the best answer while Nero fiddles, is to reform our own personal healthcare by doing everything we can to avoid these people. This means living a healthy lifestyle, consuming a nutrient-dense, biogenetically appropriate diet of uncontaminated food, and seeking out qualified natural health and wellness advisors when needed. So don’t eat corporate food, don’t take corporate drugs, avoid unnecessary medical procedures, and try very hard to stay out of hospitals!

The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

2009-08-05T13:44:00.000-07:00

Again, I will point out that this financial 'crisis' began a long time ago! I, with legions of other working class people, earned university degrees in the 1980's and 90's only to find them worthless in the job market because although the media said there was all kinds of work, the puppet masters were reducing the number of jobs plus keeping the 'system' as was and is: established middle-class men first before anyone else! I earned four university degrees and my testers say I'm one of the smartest people on the planet yet I could never get a decent job.

Not having decent work ruined my Life! I had no power in my marriage and my then-husband used my under-employment as a reason to rape, sodomize, burn and beat me! I couldn't leave him because after a month at the local women's shelter, I could stay at a county shelter for a month and then I would end up like other abused women: sleeping under the Eastside Bridge and being hunted by vigilante (goon) males who 'punish' women who 'fail' men and their world!

Now the Black middle-class is failing! No one cared when the educated working class failed to prosper all those years ago. Now there is no one to care for all middle class groups that are failing now. Poverty results in soft-kill premature death. This poverty (lack of jobs) is socially engineered! The souless, evil elite want most of us dead. The TRUTH is in Front of All of Us!!! Human Sacrifice is Basic to Capitalism!!!!

http://www.counterpunch.org/muhammad08052009.html

August 5, 2009

From Recession to Depression

By DEDRICK MUHAMMAD and BARBARA EHRENREICH

To judge from most of the commentary on the Gates-Crowley affair, you would think that a "black elite" has gotten dangerously out of hand. First Gates (Cambridge, Yale, Harvard) showed insufficient deference to Crowley, then Obama (Occidental, Harvard) piled on to accuse the police of having acted "stupidly." Was this "the end of white America" which the Atlantic had warned of in its January/February cover story? Or had the injuries of class - working class in Crowley's case - finally trumped the grievances of race?

Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment-or, we should say, re-impoverishment--of African Americans as a group. In fact, the most salient and lasting effect of the current recession may turn out to be the decimation of the black middle class. According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession. Gates and Obama, along with Oprah and Cosby, will no doubt remain in place, but millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley - from factory workers to bank tellers and white collar managers - are sliding down toward destitution.

For African Americans - and to a large extent, Latinos - the recession is over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During the seven-year long black recession, one third of black children lived in poverty and black unemployment-even among college graduates-- consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment. That was the black recession. What's happening now is a depression.

Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent, compared to 8.7 for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that 40 percent of African Americans will have experienced unemployment or underemployment by 2010, and this will increase child poverty from one-third of African-American children to slightly over half. No one can entirely explain the extraordinary rate of job loss among African Americans, though factors may include the relative concentration of blacks in the hard-hit retail and manufacturing sectors, as well as the lesser seniority of blacks in better-paying, white collar, positions.

But one thing is certain: The longstanding racial "wealth gap" makes African Americans particularly vulnerable to poverty when job loss strikes. In 1998, the net worth of white households on average was $100,700 higher than that of African-Americans. By 2007, this gap had increased to $142,600. The Survey of Consumer Finances, which is supported by the Federal Reserve Board, collects this data every three years -- and every time it has been collected, the racial wealth gap has widened. To put it another way: in 2004, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family had only one 12 cents. In 2007, it had exactly a dime. So when an African American breadwinner loses a job, there are usually no savings to fall back on, no well-heeled parents to hit up, no retirement accounts to raid.

All this comes on top of the highly racially skewed subprime mortgage calamity. After decades of being denied mortgages on racial grounds, African Americans made a tempting market for bubble-crazed lenders like Countrywide, with the result that high income blacks were almost twice as likely as low income white to receive high interest subprime loans. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, Latinos will end up losing between $75 billion and $98 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans, while blacks will lose between $71 billion and $92 billion. United for a Fair Economy has called this family net-worth catastrophe the "greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history."

Yet in the depths of this African American depression, some commentators, black as well as white, are still obsessing about the supposed cultural deficiencies of the black community. In a December op-ed in the Washington Post, Kay Hymowitz blamed black economic woes on the fact that 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers, not noticing that the white two-parent family has actually declined at a faster rate than the black two-parent family. The share of black children living in a single parent home increased by 155 percent between 1960 to 2006, while the share of white children living in single parent homes increased by a staggering 229 percent.

Just last month on NPR, commentator Juan Williams dismissed the NAACP by saying that more up-to-date and relevant groups focus on "people who have taken advantage of integration and opportunities for education, employment, versus those who seem caught in generational cycles of poverty," which he went on to characterize by drug use and crime. The fact that there is an ongoing recession disproportionately affecting the African American middle class - and brought on by Wall Street greed rather than "ghetto" values - seems to have eluded him.

We don't need any more moralizing or glib analyses of class and race that could have just as well been made in the 70s. The recession is changing everything. It's redrawing the class contours of America in ways that will leave us more polarized than ever, and, yes, profoundly hurting the erstwhile white middle and working classes. But the depression being experienced by people of color threatens to do something on an entirely different scale, and that is to eliminate the black middle class.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the president of United Professionals and author, most recently, of "This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation."

Dedrick Muhammad is the senior organizer and research associate for the Inequality and Common Good Project of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. - www.ips-dc.org

The Horrifying Hidden Story Behind Drug Company Profits

2009-08-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

People must die (be sacrificed) so the wealthy elite and pension funds can get their ransom through stock profits. I think tamiflu is a dangerous drug to take but there are many drugs that poor people/nations need and they can't have them because human sacrifice is basic to capitalism!

Johann Hari
Huffington Post
Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:01 UTC

This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations -- but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents -- and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system -- but we are choosing to ignore it.

To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organization (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people -- or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu -- the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives -- as they possibly can.

In the answer to this whodunit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist -- and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels -- is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes. Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for AIDS drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it -- which are just as effective -- for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version -- or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.

This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name -- or the fat patent payments to drug companies.

So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche -- the drug company that owns the patent -- doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment -- but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.

And the WHO seems to be backing Roche -- against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.

Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."

What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."

The argument in defense of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.

But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 percent of their budgets go on developing drugs -- usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 percent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs -- medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant." They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.

We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 percent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system -- money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.

Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3 billion on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."

There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."

Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody anywhere in the world could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.

The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same -- but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system -- spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them -- would end.

It isn't cheap -- it would cost 0.6 percent of GDP -- but in the medium-term, it would save us all a fortune, because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor -- and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.

Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies -- not the health of humanity.

The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system -- so the sick can live. Only then we can globalize the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."

The Suffering/Death Caused by the Conflict of Interests of War Machine GE

2009-08-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/03-11

Published on Monday, August 3, 2009 by Salon.com
The Scope -- and Dangers -- of GE's Control of NBC and MSNBC
by Glenn Greenwald

I want to return to the subject of GE's silencing of Keith Olbermann both because there are new facts I've obtained that shed light on what happened here and because this is one of the most blatant examples yet of pernicious corporate control over America's journalism. The most striking aspect of this episode is that GE isn't even bothering any longer to deny the fact that they exert control over MSNBC's journalism. They've brazenly dispensed with the long-held fiction of the sanctity of journalistic independence from interference by the corporate parents that own America's largest news organizations.

Instead, GE is now openly and proudly boasting of their editorial control over the news organizations they own, and publicly rubbing it in the faces of NBC News journalists that they're subservient to GE's corporate agenda. Look at this smug, creepy quote from GE executive spokesman Gary Sheffer explaining in The New York Times why GE issued its gag order preventing Olbermann from criticizing Fox and O'Reilly, all but mocking NBC and MSNBC journalists as nothing more than GE's office of corporate spokespeople:

"We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion," Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. "We’re happy that has happened."

Why is GE even speaking for MSNBC's editorial decisions at all? Needless to say, GE doesn't care in the slightest about "civility" in general. Mika Brzezinski can spout that people who dislike Sarah Palin aren't "real Americans" and Chris Matthews can say about George Bush that "everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs," and GE executives won't (and didn't) bat an eye. What they mean by "civility" is: "thou shalt not criticize anyone who can harm GE's business interests or who will report on our actions." Thus: GE's journalists will stop reporting critically on Fox and its top assets because Fox can expose actions of GE that we want to keep concealed.

Does anyone need it explained to them why it is so dangerous and destructive to have our political debates controlled by GE executives, sitting in their offices censoring the journalism of our leading media outlets in the name of "civility," code for: you will respect those who can harm us? Our entire political culture is already designed to ensure corporate control of our political institutions. Their lobbyists literally write the laws enacted by Congress and control their implementation. The reason the journalism industry insisted for so long on the ludicrous fiction that corporate parents never violated the sanctity of journalistic independence is precisely because everyone understood why that would be so dangerous. Apparently, they no longer feel a need to maintain that fiction.

* * * * *

GE's control over two major American news outlets -- NBC, which uses our public airways, and MSNBC -- is inherently dangerous even without evidence of its editorial interference. GE's corporate interests in the outcome of our political process is vast and impossible to overstate. In 2006, The Boston Globe reported:

General Electric Co. spent $21.5 million last year trying to influence the US government, the most of any corporation, as total lobbying costs rose even as Congress began looking at ways to rein in such activities.

GE's relationship with the U.S. Government is a vital aspect of its business:

Federal contracts for General Electric, based in Fairfield, Conn., rose to $3.8 billion during the two years ending Sept. 30, 2004, the last period for which figures are available.

In June of this year, in an article headlined "General Electric is Once Again the Lobbying Champion," The Washington Times reported:

General Electric spent more on lobbying in this year's first quarter than any other company, newly filed federal lobbying reports show. The company shelled out $7.2 million for lobbyists in April, May, and June--that's $160,000 each day Congress was in session.

The only other company to spend more than $6 million was Chevron, and GE almost equaled the Chamber of Commerce's lobbying budget.

GE is perenially atop this list, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company has spent $187 million on lobbying over the past decade, 44% more than runner-up Northrup Grumman.

Why? Because no other company is so intimately tied up with government -- a dynamic that has only intensified in the Obama administration.

And just today, by sweet coincidence, Fred Hiatt turned over his Washington Post Editorial Page to GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, along with Silicon Valley investor John Doerr, to argue that the U.S. government must spend more on wind power technology. Why? Because GE is the only American company in the world's top six largest wind technology manufacturers and had a major stake in the use of such technology by governments. GE constantly manipulates our political process and institutions for its own self-interest. And it now manipulates our political debates, through its control over our leading news outlets, for the same purposes. Who wouldn't be seriously disturbed by GE's control over substantial aspects of America's journalism?

* * * * *

Critically, GE's decree to silence Olbermann is only the most recent incident of GE's interference with the journalism decisions of NBC and MSNBC -- interference that has been triggering increasing (though largely impotent) anger and resentment among NBC employees. Much of the tension goes back to last year when GE executives directed MSNBC to remove Olbermman and Chris Matthews as election show anchors, according to an MSNBC source with management responsibilities, who insisted on anonymity because he is divulging information adverse to his bosses and because having his name attached to these leaks would jeopardize his job security (exactly the circumstances I've always argued renders anonymity appropriate).

Last year's GE/MSNBC controversy occurred because the McCain campaign -- which had been constantly complaining about MSNBC -- threatened to pull out of a presidential debate to be hosted by NBC's Tom Brokaw if Olbermann and Matthews continued anchoring election coverage. Brokaw then went to GE 's CEO Jeffrey Immelt -- not to NBC executives -- to demand that Olbermann and Matthews be removed as anchors in order to preserve his prestigious status as debate moderator. In fact, as The New York Observer reported at the time, Andrea Mitchell also wanted Olbermann and Matthews removed as anchors and thus raised the issue at a dinner for a handful of NBC stars hosted by Immelt.

Though MSNBC denied it at the time, it was GE -- just as they're doing now in barring Olbermann from talking about O'Reilly -- which capitulated to the Right's demands by instructing MSNBC to remove Olbermann and Matthews as election anchors. When it happened, I wrote about the removal of Olbermann/Matthews as anchors under the headline: "The Right dictates MSNBC's programming decisions."

That it is GE which controls the editorial decisions of NBC and MSNBC is an open secret in Washington. Just today, The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote about Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's actions after learning that the news networks were reluctant to broadcast Obama's most recent press conference on health care. Did Emanuel attempt to pressure NBC executives to capitulate to White House demands to broadcast that event? No; he obviously knew who really makes editorial decisions for those networks:

In the days before President Obama's last news conference, as the networks weighed whether to give up a chunk of their precious prime time, Rahm Emanuel went straight to the top.

Rather than calling ABC, the White House chief of staff phoned Bob Iger, chief executive of parent company Disney. Instead of contacting NBC, Emanuel went to Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric. He also spoke with Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, the company spun off from Viacom.

Apparently, Rahm Emanuel isn't confused about who the real bosses are at America's major news networks. Although Kurtz claims that Immelt -- who was named by Obama as a member of his Economics Advisory Board -- told Emanuel that this would be a decision for NBC's Jeff Zucker to make, all networks ultimately acceded to Emanuel's demands, directed to the CEOs of the parent corporations, and broadcast Obama's press conference, just as the White House demanded they do.

* * * * *

GE -- deeply concerned about Fox's reporting of its actions in Iran and other potential disclosures -- has long been discussing a quid pro quo with Rupert Murdoch, whereby GE would give in to O'Reilly's demands that Olbermann be barred from criticizing him in exchange for O'Reilly's agreement to cease reporting on GE's dubious corporate activities. More than a year ago, Howard Kurtz noted:

Asked about O'Reilly's motivation [in criticizing GE], [GE's] Sheffer said that executives at Murdoch's News Corp. "tell us if the attacks on O'Reilly end, the attacks on GE will end. They've had conversations with our news executives saying, 'If you stop, we'll stop' " . . . .

Early last year, the sources say, [NBC President Steve] Capus called [Fox's Roger] Ailes to say that O'Reilly had gone over the line with reckless attacks on Engel. But, the sources recounted, Ailes said he agreed that NBC was against the war and had aligned itself with Olbermann's mockery. Capus, he said, had the power to shut down the situation by telling Olbermann to back off.

Immelt was essentially being blackmailed by News Corp.: we will continue to report on GE's corporate activities unless you bar Keith Olbermann from criticizing Fox and O'Reilly. And now, Immelt has succumbed to those threats and ordered Olbermann to cease reporting on Fox. There is simply no doubt -- none -- that this happened. That is the reason that O'Reilly's name has not passed Olbermann's lips since June 1 -- because GE, petrified of further reporting by Fox of its corporate activities, has barred Olbermann from doing so. Another source who regularly appears on MSNBC -- demanding anonymity for fear of jeopardizing further appearances -- was recently told by a segment producer that explicit mentions of Fox News were prohibited.

According to the above-referenced MSNBC management source, there has been talk among MSNBC employees ever since the GE edict was issued about ways to protest it and to stand up for their journalistic freedom. Many are afraid that their journalistic reputations will suffer by being so publicly humiliated by GE, while others are concerned that they are no longer allowed to alienate the Right since GE has made clear that they will censor editorial content and publicy embarrass even highly profitable stars like Olbermann whenever the Right targets GE with grievances over NBC's reporting. Since the GE/Olbermann decree was issued, everything has been discussed at MSNBC from joint defiance of this edict to mini-strikes in the form of prolonged vacations and absences. Although Olbermann did take an unusually long vacation in the ratings-important month of July, there is little evidence yet that any genuine pushback has occurred or has been effective.

It's worth underscoring that these incidents of overt GE control over NBC and MSNBC are merely the ones that have been publicly described (David Sirota, who first raised concerns about corporate flack Richard Wolffe's guest-hosting Countdown, today documents similar examples of corporate interference at other networks). It is highly likely there are other undisclosed examples at NBC, but more important, corporate employees don't need to be told what their bosses want. They know without being told. GE's business vitally depends on favorable relationships with the Government, and they have signaled that they are unwilling to alienate the Right generally or News Corp. and Fox News specifically. It takes no effort to see how profoundly those corporate interests affect the "journalism" of NBC and MSNBC. Given GE's insistence that NBC advance its corporate agenda, do you think Brian Williams, earning $10 million a year, would ever do anything contrary to GE's corporate interests?

If corporations that own media outlets engage in quid pro quos to prevent critical reporting about one another, then large corporations -- which own the Congress and control regulatory agencies -- have no checks imposed on them at all. By law, the "public airwaves" are required to be used for the "public interest." Clearly, NBC News -- which depends on use of the public airwaves -- is used for GE's interests. They assume that they don't need to hide this any longer because nobody is willing to do anything about it.

UPDATE: Also regarding yesterday's column here about MSNBC: TPM today front-pages and headlines MSNBC's use of "corporate strategist" Richard Wolffe as a "political analyst" and guest-host, and TPM's Zachary Roth has an excellent analysis of why that relationship is so profoundly sleazy and how it further blurs the lines between corporate interests and "journalism."

UPDATE II: TPM's Roth reports that MSNBC, in response to inquiries about Richard Wolffe, now says it "should have disclosed Richard's connection to public strategies. We will do so in the future."

That solves nothing. It's better for them to disclose Wolffe's employment at Public Strategies than to conceal it as they've been doing. But for reasons too obvious to require explaining, it's completely inappropriate to employ a paid corporate propagandist as a "political analyst." Worse, the fact that they'll merely be disclosing Wolffe's employment at Public Strategies, but not the identity of the corporations that pay that firm and/or Wolffe to disseminate propaganda, makes the disclosure next to meaningless. How can a viewer possibly assess whether Wolffe is carrying out his corporate clients' agenda if the identity of those clients remains entirely concealed?

Is it OK to have a news organization employ a corporate lobbyist as a host of a news program as long as they disclose that the person is a lobbyist without disclosing on whose behalf they lobby? To ask the question is to answer it, at least for an organization with the most minimal division between corporate activities and real journalism.

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Consciousness Capitalism: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings

2009-08-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

By Joe Bageant, AlterNet

August 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/

A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:

"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.

"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."

My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.

I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.

For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.

The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.

For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.

Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.

DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"

"I am the Son of God."

"Grab a cross on the way out."

On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...

Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?

Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.

The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.

With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.

At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.

Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."

And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.

High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.

"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.

During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.

Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!

For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.

You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.

Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.

Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.

Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!

Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...

Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.

Rent a Life, Inc.

(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.

Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.

Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.

Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.

The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"

Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.

The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.

The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.

Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).

Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"

Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?

How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?

"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."

I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.

Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.

After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.

Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.

Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."

Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.

Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), a book about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class can be found on his Web site.

Cruel windfall: How wars, plagues, and urban disease propelled Europe's rise to riches

2009-08-02T13:40:00.001-07:00

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3823

Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth
VOX
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:15 UTC

In a pre-modern economy, incomes typically stagnate in the long run. Malthusian regimes are characterised by strongly declining marginal returns to labour. One-off improvements in technology can temporarily raise output per head. The additional income is spent on more (surviving) children, and population grows. As a result, output per head declines, and eventually labour productivity returns to its previous level. That is why, in HG Wells' phrase, earlier generations "spent the great gifts of science as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life" (Wells, 1905).

How could an economy ever escape from this trap? To learn more about this question, we should look more closely at the continent that managed to overcome stagnation first. Long before growth accelerated for good in most countries, a first divergence occurred. European incomes by 1700 exceeded those in the rest of the world by a large margin. We explain the emergence of this income gap by a number of uniquely European features - an unusually high frequency of war, particularly unhealthy cities, and numerous deadly disease outbreaks.

The puzzle: The first divergence in worldwide incomes

European incomes by 1700 were markedly higher than they had been in 1500. According to the figures compiled by Angus Maddison (2001), all European countries including Mediterranean ones saw income growth of 35% to 180%. Within Europe, the northwest did markedly better than the rest. English and Dutch real wages surged during the early modern period.

How exceptional was this performance? Pomeranz (2000) claimed that the Yangtze Delta in China was just as productive as England. Detailed work on output statistics suggests that his claims must be rejected. While real wages in terms of grain were some 15-170% higher in England, English silver wages exceeded those of China by 120% to 550%. Since grain was effectively an untraded good internationally before 1800, the proper standard of comparison is the silver wage. Estimates for India suggest a similar gap vis-à-vis Europe (Broadberry and Dasgupta, 2006).

Urbanisation figures support this conclusion. They serve as a good proxy since people in towns need to be fed by farmers in the countryside. This requires a surplus of food production, which implies high labour productivity. Since agriculture is the largest single sector in all pre-modern economies, a productive agricultural sector is equivalent to high per capita output overall. Figure 1 compares European and Chinese urbanisation rates after the year 1000 AD. Independent of the series used, European rates increase rapidly during the early modern period. Our preferred measure - the DeVries series - increases from 5% to nearly 10% between 1500 and 1800. The contrast with China is striking. There, urbanisation stagnated near the 3% mark.

Figure 1. Europe versus China urbanisation rates, 1000-1800

In a Malthusian world, a divergence in living standards should be puzzling. Income gains from one-off inventions should have been temporary. Even ongoing productivity gains cannot account for the "first divergence" - TFP growth probably did not exceed 0.2%, and cannot explain the marked rise in output per capita.

The answer: Rising death rates and lower fertility

In a Malthusian world, incomes can increase if birth rates fall or death rates increase (Clark, 2007). Figure 2 illustrates the basic logic. Incomes are pinned down by the intersection of birth and death schedules (denoted b and d). The initial equilibrium is E0. If death rates shift out, to d', incomes rise to the new equilibrium Ed1. Similarly, lower birth rates at any given level of income will lead to higher per capita incomes. In combination, shifts of the birth and death schedules to b' and d' will move the economy to equilibrium point E2.

Figure 2. Birth and death rates, and equilibrium per capita income

We argue that there were three factors - which we call the "Three Horsemen of Riches" - that shifted Europe's death schedule outwards: wars, epidemics, and urban disease. Wars were unusually frequent. Epidemics were common, with devastating consequences. Finally, cities were particularly unhealthy, with death rates there exceeding birth rates by a large margin - without in-migration, European cities before 1850 would have disappeared.

Figure 3 shows the percentage of the European population affected by wars (defined as those living in areas where wars were fought). It rises from a little over 10% to 60% by the late seventeenth century. Tilly (1992) estimated that, on average, there was a war being fought somewhere in nine out of every ten years in Europe in the early modern period.

Political fragmentation combined with religious strife after 1500 to form a potent mix that produced almost constant military conflict. While the fighting itself only killed few people, armies marching across Europe spread diseases. It has been estimated that a single army of 6,000 men, dispatched from La Rochelle to fight in the Mantuan war, killed up to a million people by spreading the plague (Landers, 2003).

Figure 3. Share of European population in war zones

European cities were much unhealthier than their Far Eastern counterparts. They probably had death rates that exceeded rural ones by 50%. In China, the rates were broadly the same in urban and rural areas. The reason has to do with differences in diets, urban densities, and sanitation:

Europeans ate more meat, and hence kept more animals in close proximity,

European cities were protected by walls due to frequent wars, which could not be moved without major expense, and

Europeans dumped their chamber pots out of their windows, while human refuse was collected in Chinese cities and used as fertiliser in the countryside.
Epidemics were also frequent. The plague did not disappear from Europe after 1348. Indeed, plague outbreaks continued until the 1720s, peaking at over 700 per decade in the early 17th century. In addition to wars, epidemics were spread by trade. The last outbreak of the plague in Western Europe occurred in Marseille in 1720; a merchant vessel from the Levant spread the disease, causing 100,000 men and women to perish. Since Europe has much greater variety in terms of geography and climate than China, disease pools remained largely separate. When they became increasingly connected as a result of more trade and wars, mortality spiked.

Triggering European "exceptionalism"

In combination, the "Three Horsemen" - war, urbanisation, and trade-driven disease - probably raised death rates by one percentage point by 1700. Once death rates were higher, incomes could remain at an elevated level even in a Malthusian world. The crucial question then becomes why Europe developed such a particular set of factors driving up mortality.

We argue that the Great Plague of 1348-50 was the key. Between one third and one half of Europeans died. With land-labour ratios now higher, per capita output and wages surged. Since population losses were massive, they could not be compensated quickly. For a few generations, the old continent experienced a "golden age of labour". British real wages only recovered their 1450s peak in the age of Queen Victoria (Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, 1981).

Temporarily higher wages changed the nature of demand. Despite having more children, people had more income than necessary for mere subsistence - population losses were too large to be absorbed entirely by the demographic response. Some of the surplus income was spent on manufactured goods. These goods were mainly produced in cities. Thus, urban centres grew in size. Higher incomes also generated more trade. Finally, the increasing number and wealth of cities expanded the size of the monetised sector of the economy. The wealth of cities could be taxed or seized by rulers. Resources available for fighting wars increased - war was effectively a superior good for early modern princes. Therefore, as per capita incomes increased, death rates rose in parallel. This generates a potential for multiple equilibria. Figure 4 illustrates the mechanism. The death rate increases over some part of the income range, which maps into urbanisation rates. Starting at E0, a sufficiently large shock will move the economy to point EH, where population is again stable.

Figure 4. Equilibria with "Horsemen effect"

In the discussion paper, we calibrate our model. The effect of higher mortality on living standards is large. We find that we can account for more than half of Europe's precocious rise in per capita incomes until 1700.

Conclusions

To raise incomes in a Malthusian setting, death rates have to rise or fertility rates have to decline. We argue that a number of uniquely European characteristics - the fragmented nature of politics, unhealthy cities, and a geographically heterogeneous terrain - interacted with the shock of the 1348 plague to create exceptionally high mortality rates. These underpinned a high level of per capita income, but the riches were bought at a high cost in terms of human lives.

At the same time, there are good reasons to think that it is not entirely accidental that the countries (and regions) that were ahead in per capita income terms in 1700 were also the first to industrialise. How the world could escape the Malthusian trap at all has become a matter of intense interest to economists in recent years (Galor and Weil, 2000, Jones, 2001, Hansen and Prescott, 2002). In a related paper, we calibrate a simple growth model to show why high per capita income at an early stage may have been key for Europe's rise after 1800 (Voigtländer and Voth, 2006).

In the "Three Horsemen of Riches", we ask how Europe got to be rich in the first place. Our answer is best summarised by the smuggler Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles in the 1948 classic "The Third Man":
"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
We argue that a similar logic held in economic terms before the Industrial Revolution. Europe's exceptional rise to early riches owed much to forces of destruction - war, aided by frequent disease outbreaks and deadly cities.

References

Bairoch, P., J. Batou, and P. Chèvre (1988). La Population des villes Europeennes de 800 à 1850: Banque de Données et Analyse Sommaire des Résultats. Geneva: Centre d'histoire economique Internationale de l'Université de Genève, Libraire Droz.

Broadberry, S. and B. Gupta (2006). "The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500-1800". Economic History Review 59, 2 - 31.

Chow, G. C. and A. Lin (1971). "Best Linear Unbiased Interpolation, Distribution, and Extrapolation of Time Series by Related Series". Review of Economics and Statistics 53(4), 372 - 375.

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

de Vries, J. (1984). European Urbanization 1500-1800. London: Methuen.

Galor, O. and D. N. Weil (2000). "Population, Technology and Growth: From the Malthusian Regime to the Demographic Transition and Beyond". American Economic Review 90(4), 806 - 828.

Hansen, G. and E. Prescott (2002). "Malthus to Solow". American Economic Review 92(4), 1205 - 1217.

Jones, C. I. (2001). "Was an Industrial Revolution Inevitable? Economic Growth Over the Very Long Run". Advances in Macroeconomics 1(2). Article 1.

Landers, J. (2003). The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-Industrial West. New York: Oxford University Press.

Maddison, A. (2001). The World Economy. A Millennial Perspective. Paris: OECD.

McEvedy, C. and R. Jones (1978). Atlas of World Population History, Facts on File. New York.

Pomeranz, K. (2000). The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Phelps-Brown, H. and S. V. Hopkins (1981). A Perspective of Wages and Prices. London. New York, Methuen.

Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992. Oxford: Blackwells.

Voigtländer, N. and H.-J. Voth (2008). "The Three Horsemen of Growth: Plague, War and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe". CEPR discussion paper 7275.

Voigtländer, N. and H.-J. Voth (2006). "Why England? Demographic Factors, Structural Change and Physical Capital Accumulation during the Industrial Revolution". Journal of Economic Growth 11, 319 - 361.

Wells, H. G. (1905). A Modern Utopia

Chinese workers lose their lives producing goods for America

2009-07-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

http://www.globalmon.org.hk/en/01news/021gp-battries-cadmium/gp-case-news-report/chinese-workers-lose-their-lives-producing-goods-for-america/

2007 DECEMBER 31

Salt Lake Tribune Special Report:
By Loretta Tofani
Special to the Tribune

GUANGZHOU, China — The patients arrive every day in Chinese hospitals with disabling and fatal diseases, acquired while making products for America. On the sixth floor of the Guangzhou Occupational Disease and Prevention Hospital, Wei Chaihua, 44, sits on his iron-rail bed, tethered to an oxygen tank. He is dying of the lung disease silicosis, a result of making Char-Broil gas stoves sold in Utah and throughout the U.S.

Down the hall, He Yuyun, 36, who for years brushed America’s furniture with paint containing benzene and other solvents, receives treatment for myelodysplastic anemia, a precursor to leukemia.

In another room rests Xiang Zhiqing, 39, her hair falling out and her kidneys beginning to fail from prolonged exposure to cadmium that she placed in batteries sent to the U.S.

“Do people in your country handle cadmium while they make batteries?” Xiang asks. “Do they also die from this?”

‘Big problem for Americans’

With each new report of lead detected on a made-in-China toy, Americans express outrage: These toys could poison children. But Chinese workers making the toys — and countless other products for America — touch and inhale carcinogenic materials every day, all day long: Benzene. Lead. Cadmium. Toluene. Nickel. Mercury.

Many are dying. They have fatal occupational diseases.

Mostly they are young, in their 20s and 30s and 40s. But they are dying, slow difficult deaths, caused by the hazardous substances they use to make products for the world — and for America. Some say these workers are paying the real price for America’s cheap goods from China.

“In terms of responsibility to Chinese society, this is a big problem for Americans,” said Zhou Litai, a lawyer from the city of Chongqing who has represented tens of thousands of dying workers in Chinese courts.

The toxins and hazards exist in virtually every industry, including furniture, shoes, car parts, electronic items, jewelry, clothes, toys and batteries interviews with workers confirm. The interviews were corroborated by legal documents, medical journal articles, medical records, import documents and official Chinese reports.

And although these products are being made for America most Chinese workers lack the health protections that for nearly half a century have protected U.S. workers, such as correct protective masks, booths that limit the spread of sprayed chemicals, proper ventilation systems and enforcement to ensure that their exposure to toxins will be limited to permissible doses measured in micrograms or milligrams.

Chinese workers also routinely lose fingers or arms while making American furniture, appliances and other metal goods. Their machines are too old to function properly or they lack safety guards required in the U.S.

In most cases, U.S. companies do not own these factories . American and multinational companies pay the factories to make products for America. From tiny A to Z Mining Tools in St. George to multinational corporations such as Reebok and IKEA, companies compete in the global marketplace by reducing costs — and that usually means outsourcing manufacturing to China. Last year, the U.S. imported $287.8 billion in goods from China, up from $51.5 billion a decade ago, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Those imports are expected only to increase.

Never even visit the factories

Worker health and safety are considered basic human rights. But in the global economy, responsibility to workers often gets lost amid vast distances and international boundaries.

“This is a big-picture problem,” said Garrett Brown, an industrial hygienist from California who has inspected Chinese factories that export to America. “Big-picture problems don’t have quick or easy solutions.”

The International Labor Organization (ILO) publishes international standards for workplaces. China agreed to many of those standards and also enacted a 2002 law setting its own rigorous standards. Under Chinese law, workers have the legal right to remain safe from fatal diseases and amputations at work.

But the law has not been enforced, Chinese and international experts agree. Economic growth has been a more important goal to China than worker safety.

Even the World Trade Organization, which maintains some barriers to trade to protect consumers’ health, does not concern itself with issues of workers’ health. As a result, enforcement of health and safety standards has been left to the governments of developing countries and the companies that outsource to those countries.

Often, smaller companies never even visit the factories where their products are made. Larger companies try with only limited success to audit operations, often complaining that their efforts are failing. Records are falsified and unsafe machines are used after audits. Safety guards are removed so workers can produce faster.

“Through auditing tours, we can make good improvements and changes, but those changes are not sustainable,” complained Wang Lin, a manager for IKEA based in Shanghai. “Chinese government law enforcement is greatly needed,” added Wang. “Without that, companies cannot sustain a good compliance program.”

In 2005, 390,000 died

The Chinese Ministry of Health in 2005 noted at least 200 million of China’s labor force of 700 million workers were routinely exposed to toxic chemicals and life-threatening diseases in factories. “More than 16 million enterprises in China have been subjecting workers to high, poisonous levels of toxic chemicals,” the ministry said at a conference on occupational diseases in Beijing, which was reported by the state-controlled media. The ministry particularly blamed “foreign-funded” enterprises that exported goods.

China has more deaths per capita from work-related illnesses each year than any other country, according to the ILO. In 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, 386,645 Chinese workers died of occupational illnesses, according to Chinese government data compiled by the ILO and cited in the July 14, 2006, Journal of Epidemiology. Millions more live with fatal diseases caused by factory work, other epidemiologists estimated in the article.

The number of workers living with fatal diseases does not include those who suffer amputations. Primitive, unsafe machines with blades that lack safety guards have caused millions of limb amputations since 1995, according to lawyers for Chinese workers.

The scale of the fatal diseases, deaths and amputations challenge the common wisdom — recited in both the Chinese and American press — that U.S. trade with China has helped Chinese factory workers improve their lives and living standards. “If I had known about the serious effects of the chemicals, I would not possibly have taken that job,” said Chen Honghuan, 40, who was poisoned while handling cadmium to make batteries for export to Rayovac, EverReady, Energizer and Panasonic in the U.S.

China’s 2002 Occupational Disease and Prevention Control Act established limits on workplace poisons, which in most cases are as strict or nearly as strict as U.S. regulations.

But Chinese and foreign experts agree enforcement has been lax. After the law was enacted, for example, the average benzene level in Chinese factories reported in 24 scientific journals from 2002 through 2004 was more than 11 times the allowable level, according to scientists from Fudan University of Public Health in Shanghai, writing in the November 2006 Journal of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.

Scientists reached the same conclusion about workers’ exposure to lead in the manufacture of paint, batteries, iron and steel, glass, cables and certain plastics.

“The data demonstrated that many facilities in the lead industries reported in the literature were not in compliance with the OELs [occupational exposure limits], wrote Xibiao Ye and Otto Wong in a 2006 medical journal article. “Similarly, there appeared to be only a minor impact of the 2002 Act on the reduction of occupational lead poisoning in China. The current overall occupational health-monitoring system appears inadequate, lacking the necessary enforcement.”

The visitors never see

Most American businesses that import from China are small and medium-sized, U.S. shipping records show. Unlike large companies, they ordinarily do not visit the factories or check on factory conditions.

“I found the factory on the Internet two years ago,” Michael Been, owner of A to Z Mining Tools in St. George, said of a factory he uses in Guizhou Province. “They have someone who writes English.”

Been has never been to the factory and has no plans to visit.

Some larger companies, however, pay auditors to monitor conditions in the factories they use. But auditors’ visits provide merely a “snapshot in time,” business owners say. Chinese workers suggest those snapshots often are staged, with the number of toxins reduced before the visits and workers reassigned to new and safer tasks. The glimpse that visitors get of Chinese factories often is incomplete for other reasons: Many large factories have small satellite “workshops,” which are much smaller factories nearby that visitors never see, according to Chinese workers interviewed for this story.

“These Americans visited the large factory, but never visited the workshop where I worked,” Chen Faju, 31, said as she pointed to numerous photos in her factory’s magazines of visiting Americans. “If they had visited, they would have smelled the poisons.”

Chen and colleagues from the workshop were hospitalized for chronic anemia and myelodysplastic anemia, beginning in 2002, a result of brushing toxic glues for years onto the soles of New Balance and other sport shoes sold in the U.S. The shoes were made by 30,000 workers in the Yue Yuen industrial park in the city of Dongguan.

Chen’s medical record, dated Feb. 14, 2007, advises that she be removed from a job of “working with organic chemicals.” A manager from Chen’s workshop, Du Masheng, said toxins are not used anymore.

In addition, auditors typically have been more concerned with fair wages than worker safety.

Derek Wang, a former auditor for Reebok, recalls that he and his former boss lurked outside factories at night to see if workers were working overtime so they could make sure they were paid for the additional work.

But asked for the ingredients of glues the factories used to make the shoes, Huang said he did not know. He never had glues tested for carcinogenic benzene or n-hexane.

No incentive to reform

Chinese provincial governments are responsible for checking compliance with Chinese law. But too often, officials have a financial stake in businesses, leading to corruption and 24-hour warnings before rare inspections occur, said Liu Kaiming, executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation, a Chinese think tank.

There are too few inspectors in China to monitor safety, experts say. There is one inspector for every 35,000 Chinese workers, Brown, the American industrial hygienist, calculated in a journal article. Local governments in China also do not fully understand the “adverse effects on workers’ health” of occupational hazards, according to an article this year in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.

“Chinese labor law is not that bad,” said Dominique Muller, the Hong Kong director of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. “The problem is the implementation.”

Added Guo Jianmei, a law professor at Beijing University who represents workers injured in factories: “The problem is that the Chinese government does not have an incentive to reform the enterprises.”

Unions outlawed

In most countries, trade unions help ensure that employers abide by occupational health and safety regulations. The unions also help train workers in proper use of machines and protective equipment.

China has only one trade union, controlled by the central government. Its function is to enhance production and maintain labor discipline. Workers who try to organize or establish their own free trade unions are arrested and face lengthy prison sentences.

Lawyers who have tried to help them also have been imprisoned.

“In China, there is absolutely nothing you can do,” said Au Loong-yu, a researcher for the nonprofit organization Globalization Monitor in Hong Kong. “Workers have been robbed of the basic tool of self-defense, forming independent unions. And the government is biased in favor of the business sector, so it cracks down on workers who try to speak up for themselves.”

Indeed, the Chinese government treats issues related to workers’ rights as sensitive matters of state security. Even those workers with diseases or amputations who try to help other workers with similar conditions — by forming independent non-government organizations (NGOs) — have had their organizations shut down by state security police, they said in interviews.

“Now we pose as a business, as a consulting firm,” said Zhu Qiang, an underground NGO leader in Shenzhen who lost his arm in a crude machine while making plastic bags for America.

Savings and profits for Americans

China’s failure to permit free trade unions translates into additional cost savings for American consumers and profits for American companies, reducing the cost of manufactured imports from China from 11 percent to 44 percent, according to Columbia University law professor Mark Barenberg.

The lack of unions also makes it even more lucrative to use Chinese workers to make goods.

“In the U.S., if you are a manufacturer, you have to contribute to unemployment insurance and worker compensation insurance, you have to buy workplace environmental insurance and liability insurance, and you have to comply with the occupational health and safety law,” said David Welker, research coordinator for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington, D.C.

U.S. businesses, while adamant they don’t want Chinese workers to get sick or hurt, know their costs are lower because the regulatory environment is more lax.

Meanwhile, the shipping containers from China arrive every day.
————–
Copyright 2007, The Salt Lake Tribune, http://extras.sltrib.com/china/

12,000 U.S. Children To Be Swine Flu Vaccine Guinea Pigs

2009-07-30T03:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=621206

Paul Joseph Watson
http://www.prisonplanet.com/
Mon, 27 Jul 2009

Kids to receive untested shots which include ingredient linked to Gulf War Syndrome.

Around 12,000 U.S. children will be used as guinea pigs for an experimental swine flu vaccine known to contain the dangerous ingredient squalene, which has been directly linked with cases of Gulf War Syndrome and a host of other debilitating diseases.

According to a report in the Oklahoman, 12,000 children nationwide will partake in "fast-tracked studies" to test the side-effects of the untested swine flu vaccine in trials set to begin next month.

"The trials will test the vaccine's effectiveness and whether or not it has negative side effects in patients," states the report.

Since less than 100 children in the U.S. die from regular seasonal flu each year, a reasonable estimate would be that around 100 children will die from swine flu over the course of the next year.

So in effect, the authorities will vaccinate millions of children in order to try and prevent 100 deaths. If the mass vaccination program mirrors the previous swine flu outbreak of 1976 then the vaccine is likely to kill more people than the actual virus.

Furthermore, since the swine flu vaccine includes squalene, a dangerous adjuvant that contributed to Gulf War Syndrome cases, there's little doubt that it will lead to debilitating lifelong diseases far more deadly than the swine flu virus itself for thousands of children if a mass vaccination campaign is conducted.

According to Meryl Nass, M.D., "A novel feature of the two H1N1 vaccines being developed by companies Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline is the addition of squalene-containing adjuvants to boost immunogenicity and dramatically reduce the amount of viral antigen needed. This translates to much faster production of desired vaccine quantities."

"Research shows that squalene is the experimental anthrax vaccine ingredient that caused devastating autoimmune diseases and deaths for many Gulf War veterans from the US, UK, and Australia, yet it continues in use today and for new vaccines development in labs," writes Stephen Lendman.

According to award-winning investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto, there's a "close match between the squalene-induced diseases in animals and those observed in humans injected with this oil: rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and systemic lupus erythematosus."

"There are now data in more than two dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers, from ten different laboratories in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia, documenting that squalene-based adjuvants can induce autoimmune diseases in animals...observed in mice, rats, guinea pigs and rabbits. Sweden's Karolinska Institute has demonstrated that squalene alone can induce the animal version of rheumatoid arthritis. The Polish Academy of Sciences has shown that in animals, squalene alone can produce catastrophic injury to the nervous system and the brain. The University of Florida Medical School has shown that in animals, squalene alone can induce production of antibodies specifically associated with systemic lupus erythematosus," writes Matsumoto.

Micropaleontologist Dr. Viera Scheibner, who conducted research into the adverse effects of adjuvants in vaccines, wrote the following about squalene.

Squalene, "contributed to the cascade of reactions called "Gulf War syndrome. (GIs developed) arthritis, fibromyalgia, lymphadenopathy, rashes, photosensitive rashes, malar rashes, chronic fatigue, chronic headaches, abnormal body hair loss, non-healing skin lesions, aphthous ulcers, dizziness, weakness, memory loss, seizures, mood changes, neuropsychiatric problems, anti-thyroid effects, anaemia, elevated ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate), systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Raynaud's phenomenon, Sjorgren's syndrome, chronic diarrhea, night sweats and low-grade fever."

Efforts on behalf of authorities to prepare the public for a mass vaccination campaign, which could even be made mandatory if the crisis escalates, have been intensifying in recent weeks.

And yet, as Richard Halvorsen, a Central London GP and medical director of BabyJabs, a children's immunisation service, writes in the London Times this week, all indications are that the swine flu vaccine will have the least effect in those most at risk from swine flu - children, the elderly and people with underlying health problems.

In his article, Mass flu vaccination would be madness, Halvorsen writes, "Is all this really necessary? To start with, swine flu is far milder than we first feared, so the case for vaccinating millions of healthy adults against a disease that is no more unpleasant than a bad cold is questionable," adding, "There is no good evidence that the vaccine helps those with chronic health problems or pregnant women. However, we do know that the immunisation offers no more than a modest benefit in the elderly; indeed, the effectiveness of the vaccine is known to decrease sharply after 70 years of age."

"We have experience of mass vaccination against swine flu from which lessons should be learnt. In America in 1976 a vaccine was offered to the whole population to prevent the spread of an epidemic of swine flu. Millions were rapidly immunised, but the vaccination campaign was stopped after a rise in cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) among recipients of the vaccine. GBS is an autoimmune disorder that causes paralysis of the arms or legs or, rarely, the whole body; the sufferer usually makes a complete recovery, but some suffer permanent paralysis and a few die. Research later estimated that there was one case of GBS caused by every 100,000 swine flu vaccines given. If the current vaccine caused a similar rate of cases, then we could expect hundreds of people to get GBS, some of whom will suffer permanent paralysis or die."

Given that the vaccine contains an ingredient directly linked with a plethora of horrific diseases, will you take measures to protect your child from a mass vaccination program?

What if the government decrees a mandatory vaccination program and tries to enforce it at gunpoint, as health authorities have already indicated could happen?

With increasing public awareness of the dangers of vaccines, allied with the bizarre eugenics policies embraced by people like John Holdren, Obama's top science advisor, it seems inevitable that millions will refuse to comply with a mass vaccination program even if the government attempts to implement it by force.

Private Prisons Turn a Handsome Profit

2009-07-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

Imprisoning innocent or non-violent/non-psychopathic people is another form of human sacrifice. It ruins their lives and sometimes takes them. Torture kills and incarceration in America is torture. Lack of medical care (to keep the bottom line fat) results in premature deaths. Putting goon-types in charge of prisoners only results in violence and a culture of corruption against inmates.

As long as imprisoning people is profitable, many good and decent people will be caught up in these serpent corporations' webs! Again, human sacrifice is basic to capitalism. People have to be sacrificed so the psychopathic captains of capitalism can make their handsome profits!

http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_09/mayjun_09_15.html

By Erin Rosa
May/June 2009

While the nation’s economy flounders, business is booming for The GEO Group Inc., a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates. In the last year and a half, GEO announced plans to add a total of at least 3,925 new beds to immigration lockups in five locations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the U.S. Marshals Service, which hire the company, will fill the beds with inmates awaiting court and deportation proceedings. GEO reported impressive quarterly earnings of $20 million on February 12, 2009, along with an annual income of $61 million for 2008—up from $38 million the year before. But the company’s share value is not the only thing that’s growing. Behind the financial success and expansion of the for-profit prison firm, there are increasing charges of negligence, civil rights violations, abuse and even death.

Detaining immigrants has become a profitable business, and the niche industry is showing no signs of slowing down. The number of undocumented immigrants the U.S. federal government jails has grown by at least 65 percent in the last six years. In 2002, the average daily population of immigration detainees was 20,838 people, according to ICE records. By 2008, the average daily population had grown to 31,345.

Since 2003, more than a million people have been processed through federal immigration lockups, which are part of a network of at least 300 local, state and federal lockups, including seven contracted detention facilities. GEO operates four of those seven for-profit prisons.

Numerous investigations and reports have documented problems at GEOs immigration detention facilities.

At the company’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, federal prosecutors charged a GEO prison administrator in September 2008 with “knowingly and willfully making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements to senior special agents” with ICE, according to court filings. A February 2008 audit found that over a period of more than two years ending in November 2005, GEO hired nearly 100 guards without performing the required criminal background checks. The GEO employee responsible, Sylvia Wong, pleaded guilty. In the plea agreement the federal government stated that Wong falsified documents “because of the pressure she felt” while working at the GEO lockup to get security personnel hired at the detention center “as quickly as possible.”

Two months before the fraud charges, a study by the Seattle University School of Law and the nonprofit group OneAmerica reported that conditions at the Tacoma facility violated both international and domestic laws that grant detained immigrants the right to food, due process and humane treatment.

Federal immigration officials have the authority to incarcerate undocumented immigrants, asylum-seekers, and even lawful permanent residents while they await hearings with immigration judges or appeal decisions. ICE reports the average length of stay is 30 days, but detentions can last years, according to a November 2008 ICE fact sheet.

Pramila Jayapal, executive director with OneAmerica, took part in interviewing a random sample of more than 40 immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center, which holds approximately 1,000 immigrants at any given time.

“It’s a very giant concrete box. It’s just like a jail,” said Jayapal. “You’re only supposed to meet in the client area, which is only a few rooms.”

One inmate from Mexico, Hector Pena-Ortiz, told interviewers that guards had interrogated and handcuffed him twice, demanding that he sign immediate deportation papers despite the fact that he had a pending appeal. Under federal law, immigrants cannot be deported from the United States if their immigration legal cases are still pending. During one of the incidents, guards admitted to having a file on the wrong inmate, Pena-Ortiz said.

In addition to violations of legal rights, inmates cited food as a major concern. The vast majority of the 40 prisoners interviewed at the facility said rations were inadequate and sometimes rotten. Inmates with financial resources depended on food bought from the lockup’s commissary. Others went hungry. A man identified in the study as “Ricardo” said he had lost 50 pounds of his original 190-pound weight since arriving at the detention center.

ICE officially denied the claims in the report, but in 2005, annual agency inspections at the Northwest Detention Center documented problems with the quality and quantity of food and found that some meals were so poor, guards had to collect and replace them.

Looking for opportunities

The Tacoma lockup, site of the most recent GEO controversy, is located on top of a former toxic waste dump that borders coastal wetlands near the Port of Tacoma, Washington. In August 2008, the firm announced plans to expand its 1,030-bed Northwest Detention Center to 1,575 beds, “to help meet the increased demand for detention bed space by federal, state, and local government agencies around the country.”

Just four months after GEOs announcement, ICE notified government contractors that the agency was looking for a contractor-owned and -operated detention facility. According to federal procurement data, the new facility should be capable of providing 1,575 beds—the same number GEO was set to build—to be completed no later than September 2009—the same date GEO had set for the completion of its own construction project.

Lorie Dankers, ICE spokeswoman in Washington State, implied that the similarity in numbers and date was a coincidence. “I would never comment, nor have I in the past, on what GEO is doing and why they’re doing it. That’s a business decision that GEO made,” said Dankers. “To insinuate that there was some kind of connection, or that they has some inside information as to the request, that would be incorrect.”

Dankers added that ICEs request for more space is still in the “pre-solicitation” phase, meaning that there is no guarantee a contract will be offered, and the agency is simply requesting information from contractors to “gauge interest.”

“I don’t have any information one way or the other as to what would happen,” Dankers said. “I think often times, if I had to speculate, they see where there’s a need. I think they’re always looking for opportunities.”

Canceled contracts

And opportunities, like prisoners, abound. GEO owns more than 62,000 prison beds in the United States, with approximately 3,000 beds used for detained immigrants. The company also claims a global market share of 25 percent of the private corrections industry. Currently, the Northwest Detention Center incarcerates immigrants mainly from Oregon, Washington and Alaska, according to Dankers.

In the last five years, criminal immigration prosecutions have surged by 388 percent according to federal court data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University in New York. The most recently available court information shows that there were 11,454 prosecutions in September 2008 alone. Adding to GEOs profitability and prospects are immigration laws introduced in the 1990s, the expanding use of immigration detention without bond, and a greater emphasis on prosecutions after 9/11.

The company’s relationship with government officials has also proven valuable in winning corrections contracts.

In 2006, while on the state payroll as director of prisons at the Colorado Department of Corrections, Nolin Renfrow helped GEO obtain a $14 million-per-year contract to detain 1,500 inmates in a proposed state prison project in the northern part of the state. Renfrow was moonlighting for GEO—with an expected compensation of $1 million—when a 2007 state audit and news reports uncovered the public servant’s business deal.

The audit found that Renfrow’s actions could “arguably present a conflict of interest and result in a breach of ... the public trust,” because state law prohibited an “employee from assisting any person for a fee or other compensation in obtaining any contract.”

The county district attorney with jurisdiction over Renfrow declined to press criminal charges, but in the wake of the scandal, officials with the state’s corrections department rescinded the contract.

Prisons as money makers

Immigrant facilities are not the only GEO lockups that have sparked claims of negligence and abuse.

In 2007, the firm settled a lawsuit with the family of an inmate for $200,000. LeTisha Tapia, a 23-year-old woman incarcerated at the GE0-owned Val Verde Correction Facility in southern Texas, told her family in July 2004 that she had been raped and beaten after being locked in the same cell-block with male inmates. Shortly after, she had hung herself in her cell. The nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project sued GEO on behalf of Tapia’s family.

“The jail drove this young woman to kill herself,” charged the family’s attorney, Scott Medlock, in a February 15, 2006 press release from the Texas Civil Rights Project. “GEO cuts corners by hiring poorly trained guards, providing inmates with cut rate medical care, and running their facility in a grossly unprofessional manner.” Citing confidentiality provisions in the settlement, Medlock refused further comment.

More recently, in 2008, civil liberties attorneys sued the company for failing to provide adequate medical attention to inmates outsourced from Washington, DC, to the Rivers Correctional Institute, located in North Carolina and overseen by GEO through a contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons. That same year, Idaho state authorities removed 125 inmates from a GEO prison after an investigation—spurred by the suicide of a detainee at the facility—revealed poor staff training and healthcare.

“Pretty immediately when people started going to Rivers we started to get letters about how bad the healthcare was, and just how people were really scared of dying there,” said Deborah Golden, an attorney with the DC Prisoners Project, a group that is representing inmates in the legal case against GEO. One inmate named in the report, Keith Mathis, claims he was denied medical treatment for a cavity until the tooth became infected and caused an open ulcer on his face that eventually “burst open,” requiring surgery and three days hospitalization.

“The more we looked into the situation the more we realized it was a systemic problem,” said Golden. “I suspect that it’s a pattern all over. When you try to run prisons as money makers what you do is cut back on the most expensive thing you can, which is medication and medical care.”

GEO has said it will not publicly comment on pending legal cases or abuse claims by third parties, including nonprofit groups. Company spokesman Pablo Paez says that on the subject of business plans, “we have no comment beyond what’s in our public disclosures.”

Despite a wide array of grievances and tragedies, GEO has accrued contracts worth more than $588 million in federal tax dollars since 1997, according to available federal procurement data. And as long as federal officials continue to remand a growing number of inmates and immigrants over to private businesses, without imposing strict oversight, GEO will likely remain profitable.

Oklahoma Children to Be Guinea Pigs for Swine Flu Vaccine

2009-07-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

How Many Will Be Maimed or Die?

http://www.reddirtreport.com/news.php?id=11938

RDR: LOOKING AT THE SWINE FLU VACCINE WITH A SKEPTICAL EYE

By Andrew W. Griffin
July 24, 2009 11:23 AM

Posted: July 24, 2009

reddirtreporter@gmail.com

OKLAHOMA CITY – The lead headline in today’s edition of The Oklahoman said it all : “State kids to get shot at swine flu vaccine.”

Yes, that swine flu. The one designated last month as a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

Anyway, reading the story, written by Oklahoman staff writer Vallery Brown, readers are told that up to 200 Oklahoma children between the ages of 3 and 8 will be encouraged to enroll in the swine flu (H1N1) vaccine trials.

These tests – which in effect use children as guinea pigs for this largely untested vaccine – will be conducted at IPS Research in Oklahoma City, the first Oklahoma company to be involved in the swine flu vaccine trials.

The medical director for IPS Research, Dr. Louise Thurman, said they will begin enrolling “patients” on August 17.

“From a science standpoint, it should work,” Thurman told The Oklahoman.

But then it explains that the trials will include up to 12,000 children nationwide with adult trials expected to follow.

The tone of The Oklahoman story is that with flu season rapidly approaching in the autumn, there is a rush to get these vaccines ready and available to be administered to the public.

Quoting Don Blose, chief of immunization services for the Oklahoma Health Department, Blose said the H1N1 strain “spreads more quickly than other influenzas and more than half of the reported cases have been in children.”

So, who will allow their children to be used to test these vaccines? We know that 200 people in Oklahoma and 40,000 nationwide have been sickened by swine flu. Celebrities, including Rupert Grint, who plays the Ron Weasley character in the Harry Potter movies contracted H1N1 and has successfully recovered. Nevertheless, only 263 people, many with compromised immune systems, have died, far less than the thousands that succumb to the regular seasonal flu each year.

But this is going to be rammed down the throats of the American public. There is already talk of have at-home “interventions” in the near future where government officials knock on your door and will try to persuade people to “take the shot.”

And who will benefit from these vaccines that some consider very dangerous to human health? Naturally, the drug manufacturers, like the sloppy operators of Baxter in Illinois and others like GlaxoSmithKline. Just check out this Reuters article headlined "Companies reaping the swine flu windfall."

In a July 17, 2009 article on WebMD.com, headlined “Swine flu vaccine fast-tracked to September?” health news reporter Daniel J. DeNoon noted that the National Biodefense Safety Board (NBSB), which answers to Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, recommended fast-tracking the new swine flu vaccines to be ready in time for the start of school.

And who is on the National Biodefense Safety Board? A list of “experts” from universities, pharmaceutical companies and medical groups, although they are not specifically listed. Non-voting members of NBSB include “representatives of the White House, the DHHS, national security agencies, the FDA and – believe it or not – NASA.

Already, the DHHS and the US Government are pledging $8.5 billion towards these swine flu vaccinations.

In an MSNBC interview with Sebelius and CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, the host talks to them live from a government-sponsored “swine flu summit” that included DHS, Department of Education, NIH, FDA, CDC and others, that, jokes the host, is “enough to get a conspiracy theorist salivating.”

Sebelius and CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden calmly talk about “keeping kids safe and secure” and “looking at a vaccine that might be targeted to school-age kids.”

The government can’t wait to jab the kids with these vaccines.

“We’re hopeful by mid-to-late fall have the first doses of vaccines available,” Frieden tells MSNBC.

Back to the WebMD.com article, DeNoon writes: “Getting swine flu vaccine by September means skipping all but the most preliminary clinical tests of vaccine safety and effectiveness.”

Between 60 and 80 million doses could be ready by mid-September, notes the WebMD.com reporter.

This is where the young “guinea pigs” come in. The tests start August 17, right before the start of school in many areas. And while the swine flu has ebbed in the United States, a “second wave” is expected within six weeks, therefore the hasty push to get the vaccines tested and out there.

Back to DeNoon’s WebMD article. In it, he writes that “initial does likely will go to those most severely hit by the pandemic so far: infants, toddlers, school-age children, pregnant women, and adults with risk factors for severe flu disease.”

DeNoon does ask Dr. Andrew Pavia, at the University of Utah, why the government should deploy a vaccine that “hasn’t completed safety and efficacy testing?”

Pavia replies by saying “Because we already have a lot of experience with similar vaccines” and notes that pandemic swine flu is a type A, H1N1 flu virus and that the regular seasonal flu vaccine and this new vaccine “is made exactly the same way.”

But then it gets worse. The article says that officials will guess at the best dose of vaccine. The question remains whether one or two doses will be effective. This, you must remember, to be injected into small children with developing brains and bodies.

And recall back in 1976 when the last swine flu swept the nation. Back then, the government wanted everyone to get vaccinated and for many who took the questionable vaccine at that time developed a rare side effect called Guillain-Barre syndrome., a paralyzing neuromuscular disorder.

And what to expect for those who do take the swine flu vaccine?

And, as PrisonPlanet.com reporter Paul Joseph Watson reports today, “the swine flu vaccine includes squalene, a dangerous adjuvant that contributed to Gulf War Syndrome cases.” Watson notes that those given the vaccine will face “debilitating lifelong diseases far more deadly than the swine flu virus itself for thousands of children if a mass vaccination campaign is conducted.”

And not surprisingly, the government has given vaccine makers legal immunity from lawsuits filed by people who may be injured or killed as a result of side effects from the vaccine. Consider that, when you or your child accepts the swine flu vaccine.

Red Dirt Report and Oklahoma Watchdog, a new investigative news website, will be looking more into the swine flu vaccine program.

Copyright 2009 West Marie Media

CEO's Are Paid Well Because They Are Psychopathic 'Sacred Executioners'

2009-07-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

In this article, 'sociopath' means 'psychopath'. Human Sacrifice/Death is basic to capitalism. It is the 'Sacred Executioner' (the psychopath who is willing to kill and/or suffer the masses) who must be paid his tribute.

It's Not Hard to Be a Job-Slashing, Pension-Grabbing CEO -- If You're a Sociopath
By Thom Hartmann, Smirking Chimp

Posted on July 28, 2009, Printed on July 29, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141615/

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that "Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US... Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available."

One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, "What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?"

It's an interesting question. If there is a "free market" of labor for CEOs, then you'd think there would be a lot of competition for the jobs. And a lot of people competing for the positions would drive down the pay. All UnitedHealth's stockholders would have to do to avoid paying more than $1 billion to McGuire is find somebody to do the same CEO job for half a billion. And all they'd have to do to save even more is find somebody to do the job for a mere $100 million. Or maybe even somebody who'd work the necessary sixty-hour weeks for only $1 million.

So why is executive pay so high?

I've examined this with both my psychotherapist hat on and my amateur economist hat on, and only one rational answer presents itself: CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it's such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.

But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult -- so impossible for mere mortals -- that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?

In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths -- people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

Today's modern transnational corporate CEOs -- who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us -- are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth.

Democracy in the workplace is known as a union. The most democratic workplaces are the least exploitative, because labor has a power to balance capital and management. And looking around the world, we can clearly see that those cultures that most embrace the largest number of their people in an egalitarian and democratic way (in and out of the workplace) are the ones that have the highest quality of life. Those that are the most despotic, from the workplace to the government, are those with the poorest quality of life.

Over time, balance and democratic oversight will always produce the best results. An "unregulated" marketplace is like an "unregulated" football game -- chaos. And chaos is a state perfectly exploited by sociopaths, be they serial killers, warlords, or CEOs.

By changing the rules of the game of business so that sociopathic business behavior is no longer rewarded (and, indeed, is punished -- as Teddy Roosevelt famously did as the "trustbuster" and FDR did when he threatened to send "war profiteers" to jail), we can create a less dysfunctional and more egalitarian society. And that's an important first step back from the thresholds to environmental and economic disaster we're now facing.

This article is largely excerpted from Thom Hartmann's new book "Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture."

Thom Hartmann is an author and nationally syndicated daily talk show host. His newest book is 'We The People: A Call To Take Back America.'

American Capitalism: The Murder Culture vs The Gift Culture

2009-07-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=785

By Justin Frambes

7/11/08

“What’s healthiest for the Earth is healthiest for humanity.” –Unknown

“The relationship of capitalism to a market economy is that of a cancer to a healthy body. Much as the cancer kills its host — and itself — by expropriating and consuming the host’senergy, the institutions of capitalism are expropriating and consuming the living energies of people, communities, and the planet. And like a cancer, the institutions of capitalism lack the foresight to anticipate and avoid the inevitable deathly outcome.” –David C. Korten, in “The Post-Corporate”

“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal — that there is no human relationship between master and slave.” – Leo Tolstoy

Centuries ago they came to the “New World”, the masses of European settlers escaping political and religious oppression, war, corrupt landlordism, etc. for freer, much greener pastures, but unknowing pawns as they were and slaves to a system so omnipresent they never saw it, let alone questioned it, they brought with them the monetary control system and systematically conquered the entire North American continent, ultimately resulting in the deaths of anywhere from 8 to 145 million American Indians through disease, dispossession of their land (most often illegal), and outright genocide, all in the name of [American] “progress” and profit. Along with the American Indians, the Gift Culture” passed into the pages of history.

As the United States established itself, so did capitalism and the modern corporate world under the monetary control system. Viewing the continent as a vast source of future wealth and American Indians and their way of life (Gift Culture, sustainability) as “savage,” “antiquated,” and standing directly in its way atop “waste and unappropriated lands” 1, it set upon its mission of removing them and plundering the land for every resource it had. Blinded by greed for the money and power to be obtained through acquisition of all the natural resources and growth of a taxpaying population, it never questioned its predatory way of service to self (where one serves self) at the expense of others — e.g. their disrespect, disregard, and brutality toward other peoples, other customs, animals, and nature itself (indeed, it lived completely out of touch with nature, where its only relationship to it was to prey upon it). Today, 232 years after its inception, the American empire having influenced almost every corner of the world (and led almost all other nations by example), its pursuit of material and financial wealth through capitalism has left the Earth’s air, land, rivers and sea polluted beyond human repair and humanity in a state of misery and disarray.

American Indians were (and had always been) free from the monetary control system, living under their humble Gift Culture, but efforts during the 18th and 19th centuries to force them into accepting “civilization”, being American citizens, and ultimately taxpayers subject to the jurisdiction (control) of the United States were relentless and unyielding, and eventually succeeded. What the world largely has today, as a result of the historically costly success of America and capitalism and abandonment of the Gift Culture (excluding the digital world where it still lives), is that of a convenient but ultimately regressive, debt-based, fast-paced, stressful, egocentric, self-important, individualistic, isolationist, unsustainable, anti-communal / anti-tribal, fear-based (fear of losing money, power, importance, normalcy, services, materialism, of death, and so on) way of life disconnected from nature and almost completely devoid of meaning and realism.

It is very revealing that most people cannot imagine what life would be like without money. The problem however is not necessarily money itself, it is humanity’s belief in and use of it (via the ego). Unfortunately it demands that life is a perpetual state of debt to someone or something other than oneself, something to be continuously earned until the end (”the cost of living”), and places an arbitrary numerical value on life itself, when in actuality all life is equal and sacred. Furthermore it gives only the illusion of balance; its very existence creates imbalance and poverty, the opposite of its purpose, which is to obtain security. And when accompanied by greed, hatred, or self-centeredness it becomes the tool of corruption, control (through ownership), and leads to destruction and disregard for others and loss of quality and integrity in its pursuit, namely that of profits.

Such things are incapable of existing under a Gift Culture, a free system that is not derived from the ego and based on pure self-interest, but one of codependence, coexistence, and care for others — where wealth is not in how much one acquires, as it is under capitalism, but how much one can give away freely. With no universal currency to acquire, there is no controllable economy or outlet for greed and hatred through ownership to be had. The American Indians, for instance, had not even a definition of private property:

“The Indians had no concept of “private property,” as applied to the land. Only among the Delawares was it customary for families, during certain times of the year, to be assigned specific hunting territories. Apparently this was an unusual practice, not found among other Indians. Certainly, the idea of an individual having exclusive use of a particular piece of land was completely strange to Native Americans.

The Indians practiced communal land ownership. That is, the entire community owned the land upon which it lived.” 2

Ownership of land is now at an all-time high and how much global corporations own is staggering. The capitalist system, having operated at full speed for over 200 years, has exhausted the world extensively, and is at this point showing blatant signs of impending failure, all due to its unsustainability and careless disregard for everything except itself. People are now, more than ever, finding themselves with less and less money and are becoming disillusioned with the monetary control system as a whole as the trillions of dollars of unpaid debt come full circle, causing prices to skyrocket due to the plummeting purchasing power of the dollar and the stock market to threaten a disastrous collapse.

With nothing being manufactured in the country anymore thanks to rampant outsourcing by corporations for higher profits and the Federal Reserve Corporation as usual looking out for its own interests and those of the banks, there is no solution in sight to the problem except to brace oneself for the impending great wave of changes.

In order to survive what seems to be coming, compassion (with discernment) for others, the slow formation of localized, self-sustaining communities, and free exchange of goods will become inevitable necessities, and perhaps with those, as the money itself and the belief in it collapses, will arrive a gradual return to the Gift Culture, where such selflessness, while at first provided out of necessity, will eventually be done so voluntarily as humanity realizes a better way of living.

[Footnotes]
1 Christopher Colles, Proposals for the Speedy Settlement of the Waste and
Unappropriated Lands on the Western Frontiers of the State of New York, and for the Improvement of the Inland Navigation Between Albany and Oswego (New York: Samuel London, 1785), 6.
2 John Alexander Williams, West Virginia: A History for Beginners
(Charleston, WV: Appalachian Editions, 1993), 64. via Native American Clashes with European
Settlers

[Resources]
For an example look into how one can exit the materialist mania of America and develop a life full of meaning, see: Luhrs, Janet. The Simple Living Guide. New York, N.Y.: Broadway Books, 1997.

Capitalism and Genocide

2009-07-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html

CAPITALISM AND GENOCIDE

Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic extermination of whole groups of human beings, have become an integral part of the social landscape of capitalism in its phase of decadence. Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not merely the names of discrete sites where human beings have been subjected to forms of industrialized mass death, but synecdoches for the death-world that is a component of the capitalist mode of production in this epoch. In that sense, I want to argue that the Holocaust, for example, was not a Jewish catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. Moreover, Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not "past", but rather futural events, objective-real possibilities on the Front of history, to use concepts first articulated by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The ethnic cleansing which has been unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the mass death to which Chechnya has been subjected, the prospect for a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent, are so many examples of the future which awaits the human species as the capitalist mode of production enters a new millenium. Indeed, it is just such a death-world that constitutes the meaning of one pole of the historic alternative which Rosa Luxemburg first posed in the midst of the slaughter inflicted on masses of conscripts during World War I: socialism or barbarism!

Yet, confronted by the horror of Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima, Marxist theory has been silent or uncomprehending. While I am convinced that there can be no adequate theory of mass death and genocide which does not link these phenomena to the unfolding of the logic of capital, revolutionary Marxists have so far failed to offer one. Worse, the few efforts of revolutionary Marxists to grapple with the Holocaust, for example, as I will briefly explain, have either degenerated into a crude economism, which is one of the hallmarks of so-called orthodox Marxism, or led to a fatal embrace of Holocaust denial; the former being an expression of theoretical bankruptcy, and the latter a quite literal crossing of the class line into the camp of capital itself. Economism, which is based on a crude base-superstructure model (or travesty) of Marxist theory, in which politics, for example, can only be conceived as a direct and immediate reflection of the economic base, in which events can only be conceived as a manifestation of the direct economic needs of a social class, and in the case of the capitalist class, the immediate need to extract a profit, shaped Amadeo Bordiga's attempt to "explain" the Holocaust. Thus, in his "Auschwitz ou le Grand Alibi" Bordiga explained the extermination of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, as the reaction of one part of the petty bourgeoisie to its historical demise at the hands of capital by "sacrificing" its other -- Jewish -- part so as to save the rest, an undertaking welcomed by big capital, which could thereby liquidate a part of the petty bourgeoisie with the support of the rest of that same class. Quite apart from an economism which simply ignores the dialectic between the economy on the one hand, and the political and ideological on the other (about which more later), such an "explanation" asks us to conceive of genocide not as the complex outcome of the unfolding of the operation of the law of value in the diverse spheres of social life, but as the direct outcome of the utilitarian calculation of segments of the petty bourgeoisie and big capital. Auschwitz, the veritable hallmark of the fundamental irrationality of late capital, is transformed by Bordiga into a rational calculation of its direct profit interests on the part of the capitalists. However, an undertaking which fatally diverted the scarce resources (material and financial) of Nazi Germany from the battlefields of the imperialist world war, simply cannot, in my view, be comprehended on the basis of a purely economic calculus of profit and loss on the part of "big capital."

While Bordiga's reaction to Auschwitz fails to provide even the minimal bases for its adequate theorization, the reaction of the militants of La Vieille Taupe, such as Pierre Guillaume, constitutes a political betrayal of the struggle for communist revolution by its incorporation into the politics of Holocaust denial. For Guillaume, Auschwitz can only be a myth, a fabrication of the allies, that is, of one of the imperialist blocs in the inter-imperialist world war, because it so clearly serves their interests in mobilizing the working class to die in the service of democracy; on the alter of anti-fascism. Hence, La Vieille Taupe's "fervor to contest the evidence of its [the Holocaust's] reality by every means possible, including the most fraudulent. For the evidence of genocide is just so many deceptions, so many traps laid for anticapitalist radicality, designed to force it into dishonest compromise and eventual loss of resolve." It is quite true that capital has utilized antifascism to assure its ideological hegemony over the working class, and that the Holocaust has been routinely wielded for more than a generation by the organs of mass manipulation in the service of the myth of "democracy" in the West (and by the state of Israel on behalf of its own imperialist aims in the Middle-East). And just as surely the ideology of antifascism and its functionality for capital must be exposed by revolutionaries. Nonetheless, this does not justify the claims of Holocaust denial, which not only cannot be dissociated from anti-Semitism, but which constitutes a denial of the most lethal tendencies inherent in the capitalist mode of production, of the very barbarism of capitalism, and thereby serves as a screen behind which the death-world wrought by capital can be safely hidden from its potential victims. This latter, in its own small way, is the despicable contribution of La Vieille Taupe, and the basis for my conviction that it must be politically located in the camp of capital.

Marxism is in need of a theory of mass death and genocide as immanent tendencies of capital, a way of comprehending the link (still obsure) between the death-world symbolized by the smokestacks of Auschwitz or the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the unfolding of the logic of a mode of production based on the capitalist law of value. I want to argue that we can best grasp the link between capitalism and genocide by focusing on two dialectically inter-related strands in the social fabric of late capitalism: first, are a series of phenomena linked to the actual unfolding of the law of value, and more specifically to the completion of the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital; second, are a series of phenomena linked to the political and ideological (this latter understood in a non-reductionist sense, as having a material existence) moments of the rule of capital, specifically to the forms of capitalist hegemony. It is through an analysis of the coalescence of vital elements of these two strands in the development of capital, that I hope to expose the bases for the death-world and genocide as integral features of capitalism in the present epoch.

The real domination of capital is characterized by the penetration of the law of value into every segment of social existence. As Georg Lukács put it in his History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity ceases to be "one form among many regulating the metabolism of human society," to become its "universal structuring principle." From its original locus at the point of production, in the capitalist factory, which is the hallmark of the formal domination of capital, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles to incorporate not just the production of commodities, but their circulation and consumption. Moreover, the law of value also penetrates and then comes to preside over the spheres of the political and ideological, including science and technology themselves. This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology and science into commodities, not just through the transformation of technological and scientific research itself (and the institutions in which it takes place) into commodities, but also, and especially, through what Lukács designates as the infiltration of thought itself by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the instrumentalization of reason; and, I would argue, the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere objects of manipulation and control. As Lukács could clearly see even in the age of Taylorism, "this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short, it affects not only his outward behavior, but her very internal, psychological, makeup.

The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its tendential penetration into the whole of social existence, which Lukács was one of the first to analyze, is a hallmark of the real domination of capital: "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a `phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." Reification, the seeming transformation of social relations into relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler designated as "the administered man" [Der verwaltete Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered, they are treated as things, thereby clearing the way for their removal or elimination by genocide. The outcome of such a process can be seen in the bureaucractic administration of the Final Solution, in which the organization of genocide was the responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project, and no sense that those who went to the gas chambers were human beings and not things. The features of the desk killer, in the person of Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt. He is the high-level functionary in a vast bureaucratic organization who does his killing from behind a desk, from which he rationally plans and organizes mass murder; treating it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of transporting scrap metal. The desk killer is the quintessential bureaucrat functioning according to the imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk killer, that embodiment of the triumph of instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the state apparatus of late capitalism.

Here, the Lukácsian concept of reification, the Adlerian concept of the administered man, and the Arendtian portrait of the desk killer, can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at Hiroshima.

While the reification which attains its culminating point in the real domination of capital may contain within itself the possibility of mass murder and its death-world, it does not in and of itself explain the actual unleashing of the genocidal potential which, because of it, is now firmly ensconced within the interstices of the capitalist mode of production. To confront that issue, I want to elucidate two concepts which, while not directly linked by their authors to the unfolding of the capitalist law of value, can be refunctioned to forge such a link, and have already been effectively wielded in the effort to explain genocide: the concept of the obsolescence of man [Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen], articulated by the German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders, and the concept of bio-politics, articulated by Michel Foucault.

For Anders, the first industrial revolution introduced the machine with its own source of power as a means of production, while the second industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity production to the whole of society, and the subordination of man to the machine. According to Anders, the third industrial revolution, in the epoch of which humanity now lives, has made humans obsolete, preparing the way for their replacement by machines, and the end of history (Endzeit). For Anders, the Holocaust marked the first attempt at the systematic extermination of a whole group of people by industrial means, opening the way for the extension of the process of extermination to virtually the whole of the human species; a stage which he designates as "post-civilized cannibalism" [postzivilisatorischen Kannibalismus], in which the world is "overmanned", and in which Hiroshima marks the point at which "humanity as a whole is eliminatable"[tötbar]. Anders's philosophy of technology is unabashedly pessimistic, leaving virtually no room for Marxist hope (communist revolution). Nonetheless, his vision of a totally reified world, and technology as the subject of history, culminating in an Endzeit, corresponds to one side of the dialectic of socialism or barbarism which presides over the present epoch. Moreover, Anders's concept of an overmanned world can be fruitfully linked to the immanent tendency of the law of value to generate an ever higher organic composition of capital, culminating in the present stage of automation, robotics, computers, and information technology, on the bases of which ever larger masses of living labor are ejected from the process of production, and, indeed, from the cycle of accumulation as a whole, ceasing to be -- even potentially -- a productive force, a source of exchange-value, in order to become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight, which, so long as it lives and breathes, threatens its profitability.

This "obsolescence of man" can at the level of total capital thereby create the necessity for mass murder; inserting the industrial extermination of whole groups of people into the very logic of capital: genocide as the apotheosis of instrumental reason! Reason transmogrified into the nihilistic engine of destruction which shapes the late capitalist world.

Michel Foucault's concept of bio-power can also be refunctioned to explicitly link it to the basic tendencies of the development of capitalism, in which case it provides a point of intersection between the triumph of the real domination of capital economically, and the political and ideological transformation of capitalist rule, while at the same time making it possible to grasp those features of capital which propel it in the direction of genocide. The extension of the law of value into every sphere of human existence, the culminating point of the real domination of capital, is marked by the subordination of the biological realm itself to the logic of capital. This stage corresponds to what Foucault designates as bio-politics, which encapsulates both the "statification of the biological", and the "birth of state racism". Bio-politics entails the positive power to administer, manage, and regulate the intimate details of the life -- and death -- of whole populations in the form of technologies of domination: "In concrete terms ... this power over life evolved in two basic forms ... they constituted ... two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles ... centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second ... focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary.

Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population." Such a bio-politics represents the subjugation of biological life in its diverse human forms to the imperatives of the law of value. It allows capital to mobilize all the human resources of the nation in the service of its expansion and aggrandizement, economic and military.

The other side of bio-politics, of this power over life, for Foucault, is what he terms "thanatopolitics," entailing an awesome power to inflict mass death, both on the population of one's enemy, and on one's own population: "the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. .... If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers ... it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." Nuclear, chemical, and biological, weapons make it possible to wield this power to condemn whole populations to death. Bio-politics, for Foucault, also necessarily entails racism, by which he means making a cut in the biological continuum of human life, designating the very existence of a determinate group as a danger to the population, to its health and well-being, and even to its very life. Such a group, I would argue, then, becomes a biological (in the case of Nazism) or class enemy (in the case of Stalinism, though the latter also claimed that biological and hereditary characteristics were linked to one's class origins). And the danger represented by such an enemy race can necessitate its elimination through physical removal (ethnic cleansing) or extermination (genocide).

The Foucauldian concept of bio-politics allows us to see how, on the basis of technologies of domination, it is possible to subject biological life itself to a formidable degree of control, and to be able to inflict mass death on populations or races designated as a biological threat. Moreover, by linking this concept to the real domination of capital, we are able to see how the value-form invades even the biological realm in the phase of the real domination of capital. However, while bio-power entails the horrific possibility of genocide, it is Foucault's ruminations on the binary division of a population into a "pure community" and its Other, which allows us to better grasp its necessity. Such a perspective, however, intersects with the transformations at the level of the political and ideological moment of capital, and it is to these, and what I see as vital contributions to their theorization by Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch, that I now want to turn in an effort to better elucidate the factors that propel capital in the direction of mass death and genocide.

What is at issue here is not Gramsci's politics, his political practice, his interventions in the debates on strategy and tactics within the Italian Communist Party, where he followed the counter-revolutionary line of the Stalinist Comintern, but rather his theorization of the political and ideological moment of capital, and in particular his concept of the "integral state", his understanding of the state as incorporating both political and civil society, his concept of hegemony, and his understanding of ideology as inscribed in practices and materialized in institutions, which exploded the crude base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxism and its vision of ideology as simply false consciousness, all of which have enriched Marxist theory, and which revolutionaries ignore at their peril.

In contrast to orthodox Marxism which has equated the state with coercion, Gramsci's insistence that the state incorporates both political and civil society, and that class rule is instanciated both by domination (coercion) and hegemony (leadership) allows us to better grasp the complex and crisscrossing strands that coalesce in capitalist class rule, especially in the phase of the real domination of capital and the epoch of state capitalism. For Gramsci, hegemony is the way in which a dominant class installs its rule over society through the intermediary of ideology, establishing its intellectual and cultural leadership over other classes, and thereby reducing its dependence on coercion. Ideology, for Gramsci, is not mere false consciousness, but rather is the form in which humans acquire consciousness, become subjects and act, constituting what he terms a "collective will".

Moreover, for him, ideology is no mere superstructure, but has a material existence, is materialized in praxis. The state which rests on a combination of coercion and hegemony is what Gramsci designates as an integral state. It seems to me, that one major weakness of the Gramscian concept of hegemony is that he does not seem to apply it to the control exercised over an antagonistic class. Thus, Gramsci asserts that one dominates, coerces, antagonistic classes, but leads only allied classes. Gramsci's seeming exclusion of antagonistic classes from the ideological hegemony of the dominant class seems to me to be misplaced, especially in the epoch of state capitalism, when the capitalist class, the functionaries of capital, acquire hegemony, cultural and intellectual leadership and control, not just of allied classes and strata (e.g. the middle classes, petty bourgeoisie, etc.), but also over broad strata of the antagonistic class, the working class itself. Indeed, such hegemony, though never total, and always subject to reversal (revolution), is the veritable key to capitalist class rule in this epoch.

One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over broad strata of the population, including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the monstrous impact of capitalism upon their lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing", at the point of production, insecurity and poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and its population.

One of the most dramatic effects of the inexorable penetration of the law of value into every pore of social life, and geographically across the face of the whole planet, has been the destruction of all primitive, organic, and pre-capitalist communities. Capitalism, as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, shatters the bonds of immemorial custom and tradition, replacing them with its exchange mechanism and contract. While Marx and Engels stressed the positive features of this development in the Manifesto, we cannot ignore its negative side, particularly in light of the fact that the path to a human Gemeinwesen has so far been successfully blocked by capital, with disastrous consequences for the human species. The negative side of that development includes the relentless process of atomization, leaving in its wake an ever growing mass of rootless individuals, for whom the only human contact is by way of the cash nexus. Those who have been uprooted geographically, economically, politically, and culturally, are frequently left with a powerful longing for their lost communities (even where those communities were hierarchically organized and based on inequality), for the certainties and "truths" of the past, which are idealized the more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure, the world of capital becomes. Such longings are most powerfully felt within what Ernst Bloch has termed non-synchronous strata and classes. These are stata and classes whose material or mental conditions of life are linked to a past mode of production, who exist economically or culturally in the past, even as they chronologically dwell in the present. In contrast to the two historic classes in the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which are synchronous, the products of the capitalist present, these non-synchronous strata include the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and -- by virtue of their mental or cultural state -- youth and white-collar workers. In my view, Bloch's understanding of non-synchronicity needs to be extended to segments of the working class, in particular those strata of the blue-collar proletariat which are no longer materially synchronous with the high-tech production process upon which late capitalism rests, and the mass of workers ejected from the production process by the rising organic composition of capital and its comcomitant down-sizing. In addition, the even greater mass of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by their non-synchronicity, their inability to be incorporated into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to a growing nostalgia for the past, a longing for community, including the blue-collar communities and their institutional networks which were one of the features of the social landscape of capitalism earlier in the twentieth century.

However, no matter how powerful this nostalgia for past community becomes, it cannot be satisfied. The organic communities of the past cannot be recreated; their destruction by capital is irreversible. At the same time, the path to a future Gemeinwesen, to which the cultural material and longings embodied in the non-synchronous classes and strata can make a signal contribution, according to Bloch, remains obstructed by the power of capital. So long as this is the case, the genuine longing for community of masses of people, and especially the nostalgia for past communities especially felt by the non-synchronous strata and classes, including the newly non-synchronous elements which I have just argued must be added to them, leaves them exposed to the lure of a "pure community" ideologically constructed by capital itself. In place of real organic and communal bonds, in such an ideologically constructed pure community, a racial, ethnic, or religious identification is merely superimposed on the existing condition of atomization in which the mass of the population finds itself. In addition to providing some gratification for the longing for community animating broad strata of the population, such a pure community can also provide an ideological bond which ties the bulk of the population to the capitalist state on the basis of a race, ethnicity, or religion which it shares with the ruling class. This latter is extremely important to capital, because the atomization which it has brought about not only leaves the mass of humanity bereft, but also leaves the ruling class itself vulnerable because it lacks any basis upon which it can mobilize the population, physically or ideologically.

The basis upon which such a pure community is constituted, race, nationality, religion, even a categorization by "class" in the Stalinist world, necessarily means the exclusion of those categories of the population which do not conform to the criteria for inclusion, the embodiments of alterity, even while they inhabit the same geographical space as the members of the pure community. Those excluded, the "races" on the other side of the biological continuum, to use Foucauldian terminology, the Other, become alien elements within an otherwise homogeneous world of the pure community. As a threat to its very existence, the role of this Other is to become the scapegoat for the inability of the pure community to provide authentic communal bonds between people, for its abject failure to overcome the alienation that is a hallmark of a reified world. The Jew in Nazi Germany, the Kulak in Stalinist Russia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, blacks in the US, the Albanian or the Serb in Kosovo, the Arab in France, the Turk in contemporary Germany, the Bahai in Iran, for example, become the embodiment of alterity, and the target against which the hatred of the members of the pure community is directed. The more crisis ridden a society becomes, the greater the need to find an appropriate scapegoat; the more urgent the need for mass mobilization behind the integral state, the more imperious the need to focus rage against the Other. In an extreme situation of social crisis and political turmoil, the demonization and victimization of the Other can lead to his (mass) murder. In the absence of a working class conscious of its historic task and possibilities, this hatred of alterity which permits capital to mobilize the population in defense of the pure community, can become its own impetus to genocide.

The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of production which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also drive it towards mass murder and genocide. In that sense, the death-world, and the prospect of an Endzeit cannot be separated from the continued existence of humanity's subordination to the law of value. Reification, the overmanned world, bio-politics, state racism, the constitution of a pure community directed against alterity, each of them features of the economic and ideological topography of the real domination of capital, create the possibility and the need for genocide. We should have no doubt that the survival of capitalism into this new millenium will entail more and more frequent recourse to mass murder.

MAC INTOSH
[from Internationalist Perspective #36, spring 2000]

REFERENCES
--Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p.28.
-- Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971), p.85.
--See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1977).
--Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Band II, Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (München: Verlag C.H.Beck, 1986), p.26, and Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der Zweiten industriellen Revolution (München: Verlag C.H.Beck, 1961), p.243.
--Michel Foucault, "Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme," Les Temps Modernes, 535 (Février 1991), pp.37-38.
-- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.I, An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p.139.
--Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971) passim.
--See Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), especially pp.97-148.

Capitalist Mass Murder of American Workers

2009-07-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.hermes-press.com/capitalist_genocide.htm

Capitalist Mass Murder of American Workers

The capitalist class has historically committed and is now committing genocide, deliberately murdering American workers as a class!

No, you won't find David Rockefeller, Barak Obama, Tim Geithner, or Ben Bernanke pulling hit jobs on individual workers. But they--and their fellow cabal members--have created and are perpetuating a deadly system that is ineluctably murdering the entire class of American workers. 1

In America, every 2 minutes a baby is born into poverty

Every hour a baby dies before turning one year old

Every 15 minutes a baby is born to a mother who received late or no prenatal care

Every 7 minutes a baby is born at low birth weight

One out of every 4 American veterans is now homeless

Twenty-two thousand Americans will die needlessly this year because of private, over-expensive, capitalist healthcare insurance companies

35.9 million Americans now live below the poverty line, including 12.9 million children

At least 25% of American workers are unemployed, though the rigged government figures report it to be only 9.4 %.

Over 2 million Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure since January, 2007; 12,000 homes a day continuing to go into foreclosure

American workers have lost $10 to $15 trillion in the value of their homes

4 million Americans are now homeless, subsisting on the streets or in tent cities (right)

American retirees have lost $2 trillion in retirement funds (of the total of $9 trillion in late 2007) due to the fall in the stock market

Home foreclosure filings have surged 100 percent from 2007 to 2009

Bank repossessions have soared 200 percent from 2007 to 2009

Of the 1.6 million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, 38% of Army and 50% of National Guard service members have been diagnosed with mental illness. (2007 Pentagon report)

The United States has the third worst level of income inequality and poverty among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 30 member states (only Mexico and Turkey ranked worse in those categories)
Capitalists have looted and continue to loot over $7.4 trillion taxpayer dollars (as revealed by Bloomberg News), pretending it's a necessary bailout or stimulus program--pocketing the money themselves

The criminal capitalists have seen that finance institution executives receive millions in salary and bonuses while workers lose their jobs or take pay cuts

Capitalists have destroyed the American economy and are now perpetrating the lie that the only way to "maintain the confidence of the financial markets" is to cut Social Security and Medicare

"The Geithner plan is very badly flawed" and "amounts to robbery of the American people."
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, March 2009

Workers Are Being Murdered

You must wake up to the undeniable fact that the entire American working class is being targeted by capitalists for mass murder: genocide. You must shake off your stupor and do whatever it takes to save your life.

You've allowed your mind to be degraded by capitalist brainwashing, propaganda and subversion of education. And you've become complicit in your country devolving into:

A totalitarian police state

A militaristic aggressor nation

An aggressor state that has started pre-emptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the purpose of war profiteering and world economic conquest

A world destroyer
A nation whose Constitutional freedoms have been decimated

The capitalist class believes American workers are sub-human and that as many as possible should be killed off through unemployment, homelessness, poverty, sickness, and mental impairment.

They're now attacking Social Security (a program self-funded by workers and employers), which keeps forty-two percent of American senior citizens from living in poverty. Nearly one in five Americans receives Social Security benefits and ninety-five percent of Americans have the Social Security benefit protection program. The poverty rate of the elderly was 35% as late as 1959. Now it's about 10%, because of Social Security.

We Must Speak in the Starkest Terms to Convey the Truth

It's necessary to refer to capitalist actions as genocide because any other depiction is simply too mild, euphemistic, and equivocating.

The term "genocide" was coined by Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) in his paper "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe." Lemkin defined genocide as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Genocide, he said, may consist of diverse political, social, legal, intellectual, spiritual, economic, biological, physiological, religious, and moral methods directed at the “foundations of life” of a collectivity.

Lemkin’s political activism ultimately culminated in the recognition of genocide as an international legal category. The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention delimited the definition of genocide as a number of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

The difficulty with a term such as "genocide" is that cabal propagandists like to restrict its use to situations such as Nazi Germany's extermination of 6 million Jews and 22 million other Europeans, the Soviet Communist extermination of 62 million, and the Chinese Communist murder of 35 million.

"The world’s power structures have always ‘divided to conquer’ and have always ‘kept divided to keep conquered.’ As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity--not only into special function categories but into religious and language and color categories--that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore, they feel almost utterly helpless.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

Workers Uniting In Solidarity Is the Only Solution

Contrary to Fuller's claim above, intelligent members of the working class don't feel "helpless" in the present situation; they know that they can--and must--join in solidarity with other workers to take back their nation and create commonwealth communities to benefit all their members.

Workers first have to rid themselves of illusions about outside assistance and White Knights on white horses:

Labor unions: Unlike the 1930s when activist workers organized labor unions and demanded better conditions, today's labor leaders and organizations are merely shills for right-wing big business, not only leaving millions of working people disenfranchised but facilitating an historically unprecedented undermining of the social position of the working class.

The US Congress: Not a single member of either house of Congress is actively working for the benefit of the American working class. Both political parties are the creatures of the cabal, as is clearly evident from the exposure of the con-man Obama as perpetuating the same brand of capitalist fascism of his Republican predecessor.

The Democratic Party: "The Democratic Party has been the principal instrument employed by the American capitalists for more than a century to block the development of an independent working class party, preserve the hegemony of the capitalist two-party system, and maintain the capitalist class' monopoly of political power."

Protesting and petitioning: Workers cannot hope to reason with--or intimidate--their capitalist assassins--capitalists will never change or compromise, as their past record proves. In fact, as capitalists become aware of the enormity of worker opposition to their genocidal policies it will expand the police state measures undertaken by the government during the past decade, not from the so-called "terrorist threat," but from the extreme sharpening of social and class tensions within American society.

Other nations challenging the international cabal: "China is the cheap-labor foundation upon which the survival of world capitalism presently depends. Subtract China from the equations of modern world economy and what would be the present position of American capitalism?"

A new workers' right movement: The earlier civil rights movement, taken over by a section of the black middle class, ultimately degenerated into a striving for privileges among a small section of the black middle class within the framework of capitalism, ultimately ending in the con-job of the cabal placing a white-black man in the presidency.

Reversion to violent revolutionary means: Unlike the creation of our American nation through armed revolution against British tyranny in 1776, we must reconstitute our present society through entirely peaceful means. Not only is this necessary because our means of recreating our nation must be based on non-violent principles consistent with our goals, but because the reality is that the criminal cabal controlling our country possesses a dominating force in military, police, and propaganda weapons. It would be suicidal to attempt armed insurrection against such barbaric power.

Pretense that communism or socialism offers a solution
Public opinion and the United Nations: "The political conceptions that accompanied these [2003] protests—that war could be prevented through the force of public opinion, either by dissuading Washington or by rallying the European powers and the United Nations to curb the excesses of US imperialism—have been thoroughly refuted by the course of events." 5

"I expect suicides, premature deaths, a horrible disruption of the social fabric. . . . We're headed toward market-based social Darwinism where only the fittest will survive."
A down-and-out California woman

The capitalist cabal that's seized control of the political and economic systems in the United States suffers under the totally insane delusion that it can loot as much money from worker-taxpayers as it wants--and still come out with a viable society.

The cabal delusively believes that while millions of workers are being laid off, denied welfare, their tax money stolen by wealthy looters, their homes foreclosed because of criminal subprime mortgages, and their very lives threatened with extinction they will continue to tolerate such abuse indefinitely.

American workers will--and must--rise up against their genocidal oppressors, not just to enact minor revisions in their capitalist society but to build a completely new commonwealth culture for the benefit of all citizens.

"Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Declaration of Independence

American workers must--and will--act immediately in these ways:

Stop allowing cabal thugs to brainwash and con us
Expose every outrage of the demonic cabal
Build a Unified Activist Citizen Taskforce
Learn to work together to take back our nation
Understand the features of a Commonwealth society
Discern current exigencies
Most important, build Free Communities

Human Sacrifice for Fun and Profit

2009-07-28T03:00:00.000-07:00

http://thinkorbeeaten.blogspot.com/2009/02/human-sacrifice-for-fun-and-profit.html

March 2nd, 2009 4:17 AM
Angie Riedel

Pretend, if you would for a short moment, that I have in my hands a magic camera which will allow us to take a snapshot of this moment in time, and freeze everything in the whole wide world in place. We'll then be able to step into the photograph and with everything frozen around us, we can explore and investigate, up close and personal, anything and everything we like.

The aim and purpose of doing this would be to figure out once and for all who's who and what's what and what goes on where and how, so that we will finally know why things are the way they are in this world. Because things are all messed up. Why are our stated values lived in direct opposites? Why do we claim to be moral people when the world around us, in many and varied ways, has devolved into phalanges of pornography?

The pornography of death and violence saturates us. The trauma, mass violence and destruction of war, tearing families apart, mocking justice, decency and life itself. The obscenity of this planet slowly choking to death from the toxification of military, industrial and chemical pollutants, pouring out nonstop belching streams in the millions upon millions of tons, poisoning our food by intent, our air and our water by unavoidable result, and penetrating every human body, including the unborn.

The pornography of influence, of power's demands, of profit's insistence that it is this world's highest good and single most important factor of life on earth and as such private profit must take precedence over all else and must always come first against all other interests, is an unstated truth. It is the obscene reality of our world. This degradation of life's beauty and meaning is an insulting and grotesque lie and yet it wins out over the same lingering unfulfilled needs and wants of the people no matter how many times these needs and desires have been expressed and demanded.

The unprofitable needs and wants of human life conflict with the pornographic greed and lust of influential desire. Battles must be constantly fought for rights and territory and ultimate dominance, and it is almost always the unprofitable human needs that lose out. The pornography soaked minds of the people have no problem with this due to misguided concepts of patriotism, compromised politicized religiosity, and the unwavering belief that might makes right, that the stronger deserve to win and the weaker deserve nothing. For the strong "right" is automatic. "We are number one" is the answer no matter what the question is. Hearts may strongly desire to be in the right place yet our physical bodies are by choice, by habit or by force pushed and directed into all the wrong places. To all who truly want to find their way in this world it becomes obvious that the externally generated road map of life we are given, is incorrect.

The worst sorts of people rule the world and influence our minds. Redefining all that is pornographic, ugly and destructive they present them back to us as the greatest and noblest things to embrace and take home to our children. We are slowly but certainly mentally morphing into something that others desire us to be, in a world others are designing with an undeniably heavy, central pornography motif. It is hardly surprising that those who would undertake such grand projects would not really be doing so out of the desire to do good for others. They will claim so when asked, but it's easy enough to lie about that. It's a necessary lie because the world does not want to be morphed into someone else's vision, it wants to be what it naturally is.

It would be fascinating to find out what it naturally could be but that is something we can only speculate about. Humanity will never be left alone to evolve on its own. The very concept of letting humanity be, of letting it evolve in freedom, unfettered, uncommanded, undriven, uninterfered with goes against every principle of so called civilization.

Indigenous peoples the world over have long been under siege from civilization. Natural humanity represents everything civilized people find intolerable and untenable. Somehow natural people living natural lives, not bothering anyone or holding up civilization from doing its civilized thing, are a threat to civilization. Natural people are savages we are told. Ungodly people with no morality, no shame running around with their genitalia and breasts exposed. They are vicious warriors and cannibals, worshippers of trees and earthly spirits, unable to read or write. They are less than human, an affront to our decency and nobility. Either through some notion of a mission of higher good or just out of hatred and ignorance, indigenous peoples everywhere have been slaughtered and mutilated, baptized and subjugated, enslaved, robbed and taught to serve their civilized masters.

There are those who would adamantly argue that this is all good. That it is right and noble, even a duty. The proselytizing Christians have the self elected mission of spreading their belief system to all corners of the world, and then to come around and do it all again. They will not be dissuaded from their task, believing that they are bringing the most valuable thing in the world to the wretched and forgotten, to the savage and the ignorant. They see themselves as workers for a higher good, a nobler cause, a last chance for salvation and acceptance into heaven by God.

Right behind them come their natural partners who also have a mission to spread their own belief system across the world. The state, specifically the state's military forces who exist for only one reason and purpose, to kill people. They are true believers and protectors of their faith who are never dissuaded or discouraged from their goal no matter the cost to others. We are fortunate that at least for the time being our military prefers to kill people somewhere else than here, though as they run out of easy foreign victims it is inevitable they will turn their gun barrels on us. After all, they need people to shoot or they'll be out of business, and that is simply unthinkable.

Speaking of business, the third mutant entity in this capitalist trinity, is business. Big business. Privately owned corporate enterprises who preach the gospel of the eternal growth of capitalism. Larger private corporate enterprises benefit profoundly from the religious/military extermination of indigenous peoples across the globe. It's nothing personal, it's just business. That justifies everything.

To the holy and faithful corporateers, indigenous peoples have no money, they buy or use no products, they are neither consumers nor workers. They have no saving graces in the eyes of business magnates and yet they rudely exist in defiance of holy capitalist growth doctrine. All of the earth's abundant natural resources that indigenous peoples live in, on and around are going to sinful waste when they should be put to good use, the best use of course being commodification and processing for resale in the endless teaming ocean of products and sellable materials of all kinds.

This is not trade in any sense of the word, it is the simple permanent crushing of bothersome competition in order to freely plunder the prosperity of others. Actual trade requires recognizing other's ownership rights of land and resources and the striking of deals and agreements of mutual benefit. Capitalism, once firmly established as Earth's prevailing religion, our trenchant right and noblest purpose, our savior and the answer to all life's questions, has no time to engage in trade. Genocide is quicker and much more profitable. Religious folk, armies and corporations have long gone out to remote and private paradises claiming only the highest purposes and have either subjugated or flat exterminated countless native populations, just as they continue to do today, minus the old fashioned version of on site religious folk. These have been incorporated into the military forces directly, lending a much needed air of righteousness and the bonus of guaranteed blessed approval from heaven itself. Today it is military force and corporate lawyers that arrive on foreign shores not bearing gifts but bringing death, misery, violence, exotic experimental weapons and depleted uranium munitions, lawless military contractors, terror, senseless destruction, mass murder and ready to sign business contracts generously allowing the vanquished to retain up to 5% of the profits made by selling 100% of their natural resources to corporations. These unbeatable teams cleanse the land of all but those who make up the necessary workers and facilitators of resource extraction and to direct the newest source of profitability into the Capitalist wealth stream.

Capitalism is much like a monster that must always keep eating or it will die. The apologist myth is that should capitalism ever be slowed, restricted or required to respect life, it would surely die. Hence wide berth is given all capitalist enterprise, rather all approved enterprise, and little to nothing is said or suffered to be mentioned about the continuous genocides that nourish the beast. Human blood and mass sacrifice is the food of this monster and its appetite is never appeased. It only grows more hungry, more voracious, no matter how much it eats. And when it looses its bowels upon the earth, out pours death and poison, babies bones and partially digested flesh, pollution and waste, depravity and degradation of the pristine, undermining of human rights, and denial of the sanctity of life. Capitalism exists for itself, in spite of life, in spite of the world. It never connects the fact of its own existence being parasitically dependent on its prey and consumer base. So it kills both and consumes all with gusto and lusts for its next meal. Capitalism is a glutton that can never be satisfied and it will consume this world to death.

The exercise of capitalism is a great planetary blood sacrifice in a literal sense. All human life and much non human life is routinely, knowingly, and very specifically targeted for slow and steady, or fast and efficient, ever increasing acts of involuntary extinction. Is the blood of innocents being offered up to some unknown god in the grandest blood sacrifice that any god could be offered in true devotion by its faithful worshippers?

What god is it that capitalism worships? It isn't the God of Abraham and Isaac. It is not the God of life and love and Thou Shalt Not Kill, or steal, or covet thy neighbor's wife, or life. It's not the Do Unto Others God. It's not that God at all. It's some other god. A god who ostensibly created this world in order to have it murdered back for him in his honor? That does not make sense.

The question then is who benefits from this? Who is undeniably benefiting the most from the pursuit of capitalism? Who benefits beyond mundane levels, beyond the norm, beyond the minimal benefit of the vast numbers of people who still after centuries of capitalism, after working their entire lives away have nothing much to show for it but failing health, mounting debts and unwanted excess body fat? Who becomes more free because capitalism rules the world? Who is better educated? Healthier? More empowered? Who is truly stronger as a result of it? Who is getting rich?

The answer is, roughly, five percent of the world's population. Five percent, and within that even more so, the top one percent who alone reap the sweeping majority of all of the wealth capitalism creates. It is interesting too that this small percentage of people don't have to work for their wealth. They get it simply by taking it out of the wealth that other people labor to create. The excess production of capitalism, that which is not needed after those who do the work get what they need to stay alive and keep working, the entirety of that excess is the wealth that is taken and given to the wealthiest people in the world. That is the portion of the worlds' wealth that is unwaveringly reserved for the few, the very few, who have entrenched themselves into government, into military power, into religious icons, into every avenue of influence and power, into fiction and myth, into the minds of people everywhere who are trained to believe that they too can be amongst the richest of the rich and live the lifestyles of the richest people in the world, if only they keep on working hard. It doesn't strike a great many people that this is preposterous to the point of idiocy, but reality is no deterrent when fantasy is so compelling.

Indeed there is something profoundly exciting at the idea of being able to have anything one desires at any time one desires it and to have it in the form of the finest there is to offer. Money becomes personal power, personal achievement, the only measure of success in life. Money is a great replacement for good looks and for manners too. With money you don't need an education. With money you can be a depraved child molesting murderer and it's fine. Money is one heck of a handy tool and it's the road to human happiness and fulfillment.

Everyone needs money to survive, everyone wants money to accumulate well beyond survival levels. They want to express their personal success for everyone else to see. They know with money they will be treated better, be respected, be given more, have more opportunity, a greater voice, and will possess the ability to make their own rules and impose those rules on others even though those others hate their rules. Money provides their families with the finer things in life, the better education, the better clothing and entertainment and a much greater quality of life and existence on this earth than those without money can even daydream about. The pursuit of personal wealth is the number one activity on planet earth and all else must by necessity fall by the wayside. Nothing must stand in the way of capitalism and profits. There must always be more to be had, more to shoot for, more to compete over. We can never run out of more. For if we do it will all come to a crashing halt and there would be no more products. No more food. No more hospitals. No more opportunity. No more schools or higher education. No more travel or entertainment or hope for the future. If we ran out of more then only those who had all the money in the world to themselves at the moment the supply ran out would survive. Five percent of the world's population would survive.

They would survive and survive comfortably and they would no doubt continue practicing their capitalist religion. They would continue their worship of money. They would continue seeking ways to exploit whatever was left to exploit and since they'd have little else to do, far fewer left to exploit and plunder they would be unable to curb their bottomless appetites for more and would inevitably turn to exploiting, consuming and conquering each other.

This has been the natural, accepted, expected, condoned and protected course of global capitalism. In the end there can be only one "winner" left standing. Winner take all. All of the world's life. All of the world's people and cultures and children and grandparents. All of the artists and singers and musicians, the writers, teachers and story tellers. The actors and librarians and bakers, the care givers and healers, the chefs and engineers, scientists and athletes, farmers and historians, the accountants and lovers and parents and friends. The life in the finally dead oceans, the life forms dependent on those life forms starved to death in the unavoidable domino effect of species after species dying out for lack of food and environments conducive to life. But there will be one man left standing with all of the gold, and all of the paperwork on digital disc that mathematically proves he owns every inch of soil and every drop of water, every plant and organism, every right and every thought and action in the whole wide world. He is the consummate winner. The king of the world. Who unfortunately has nothing to do and no one to brag about himself to.

And therein lies the truth of capitalism. It is all for naught. It achieves the opposite of what it says on the box. It is not the great provider of opportunity and prosperity, it is the grand and final destroyer of these things. It is an every man for himself belief system, a financial warrior's way of doing pussy battle, a life and death competition for the never ending quest of getting more and more and more for no reason. The monopolies that cut off and murder the competition, that favor the strong and steal from the weak, that force the workers to work ever harder and ever longer for ever less and then die, are the cumulative result of the strong joining forces against the weak, true to form, to take their prosperity and land and lives. They would say this is all an absolute necessity to keep capitalism alive and growing. To the capitalists, capitalism must survive. Everyone else can die but capitalism must go on. It must continue and grow forever because if it doesn't, they themselves will finally die. They will lose it all.

Wouldn't you agree that when any one contrived belief becomes supreme, when ideology, an idea, a political vision is held, defended and protected above the sanctity of life itself, and when such a concept fails to respect others, fails to follow the basic rules of life and morality and common sense, that it proves itself invalid? When someone believes that they alone are entitled to life and prosperity and may take it by killing others, by cheating others, by lying to others, by brutalizing others and that it is all good because it benefits them, in other words when greed is good, don't we already know it isn't good? Aren't these the beliefs of an enemy? Have we yet recognized that everyone, including us, is on the menu of this monster that must consume to survive?

Is there something about the idea of being the last one left standing on a smoking, toxic earth, with all of the gold and all of the ownership that is attractive to us? Do we have a desire to annihilate our world? Is it just a projected death wish that feels better carried out on others? Are we subconsciously enamored with the idea of blood sacrifice? Do we believe like the primitive peoples did that we must offer up babies and young virgins and entire races to a god who delights in the scent of their burning flesh on his altars?

More than likely the vast majority of people don't think about it. They just want and need to get money for themselves in order to survive because life itself has been commodified. Birth costs money and death costs money. Healing medicines cost money. Food costs money. Water costs money and if there was a way to prevent people from getting air to breathe unless they paid for it, that would cost money too. It costs money to stay alive, and it requires someone's death or exploitation to get money. Every dollar in our pockets is covered in blood, the blood of indigenous people from all over the world, throughout time and history. The paper itself is woven from the flesh and bones of children and old people, poor people and working people, good people, innocent people, ordinary people of all kinds, hundreds of millions of people who are all dead. Every dollar is the symbol of a dead body, somewhere, sometime. Dollars are not backed by gold but by human sacrifice. The accumulation of dollars, unneeded dollars, excessive personal wealth is the collective agreement and acceptance of the doctrine of human sacrifice for personal fun and profit far beyond levels of wealth that could ever be needed, used, reasonable or necessary. The richest people in the world are the planet's sacrificial priests, who themselves will never be forced to lay down on their altars for their god. They are facilitators of human death and suffering, the waiters and waitresses to their death loving god, who rewards them with tickets that represent their kills.

It is not our choice by and large to live in a system based on human sacrifice and the sacrifice and death of all life forms. Yet we are dependent on the system of sacrifice to sustain our own lives. It is forced on us and all other choices are precluded and illegal. We are in a cage that only feeds us when someone else dies. It is little wonder that we can watch horror and death in films we call entertainment and have no interest in the horrors and deaths being carried out around us to keep our system empowered and forever growing. Opportunities come to us when children are slaughtered on the altar of private wealth, and we call this democracy and freedom. We call it the best system in the world, even though we know it isn't. Yet it is sacrilege to suggest otherwise.

Those who rule our world are not the pictures they have painted of themselves for us like Egypt's pharaohs commissioned grand statues to make the people see them as gods. The images portrayed to the people are of heroes and kindly decent people who are leaders possessing wisdom and truth and knowledge. That they always call for war is not noticed. That they themselves always live in the lap of luxury is excused and even expected. Why they call for war, why they are always very wealthy, we never ask ourselves.

The only way to survive in this modern world is to not care about others. It is to not care who is dying from our bullets and bombs. It is to not care who is homeless in our streets and which cops are beating the poor to death for fun, out of hate, out of the misguided notion that poverty is the sign of the enemy. Those who have nothing are nothing. We don't have to care about them. Those who are different offend us, we don't have to care about them. Those of a different color, a different race, a different belief system, a different church, they are unwanted competition, they threaten our system of accumulation through human sacrifice, we don't have to care about them. War is good for the economy. Economic crashes are good for the economy because those with money can swallow up what everyone else is forced to lose. True patriots support this so much they will sacrifice themselves in order to perpetuate the system and enrich their leaders who always profit very nicely from every war. They profit more with each annihilation of any sector of society that competes with them, any message that undermines their own, any trace of other perspectives or viewpoints. All such alternative views and values are called evil and will not be tolerated. All such are traitorous and undemocratic, they are communist and socialist and evil. We must all support the system of human sacrifice to enrich the few because it is good and noble and right and the church itself will agree and tell you that God is on our side.

None of this could happen, none of it would go on if indeed we the people were truly moral. If we honestly knew right from wrong and if right and wrong really mattered to us. If we honestly believed in the sanctity of life, if we truly felt that life was precious and that life mattered more than profits for the rich, we would not participate in this system. We would not admire and envy those who symbolize what success looks like in our system of human sacrifice for personal wealth. We would not condone the lying and thieving of the rich and powerful and protected, we would not excuse their law breaking and wrong doing, we would not reward them with legal loopholes and special laws that excuse them from all responsibility for the pollution, death, inequality, genocide and harm they do. We would not idolize them, be jealous of them, want to be them, if indeed we were truly moral people.

Are we too cowardly to experience hunger en masse for a while if it means ridding ourselves of this death cult that rules our world and our lives? Is it more important that others should die so that we may have cell phones, buy green cars and pay our rent? Is it just that the messages of human sacrifice for private wealth so thoroughly saturate our TV sets and magazines and school curriculums and boy scout clubs and secret societies that we can't find each other any more to talk about it and do something to stop it? Do we care? Do we believe we are powerless? Do we think it would be wrong to stand against it without their permission? They would never give permission, they would only come back at us with deadly force. Do we think that is reasonable?

At some point some generation of brave and moral people will not be impressed with the system of human sacrifice for fun and profit we have been forced to, led to, addicted to and become dependent on, then accepted as normal, then embraced as good, and now extol as supreme. They will simply stop. They will not participate. They will silently stand still until the last machine comes to a grinding halt. Until the last gun stops firing and the last bombs stop dropping. And when the bankers run screaming from their boardrooms in panic, when the government officials are besieged with angry phone calls from the rich, when the corporations aren't selling any more poisoned sugar water and chemicalized pseudo food products, they will be down on their knees to those moral people. Down where they belong. Because it is true that they are wholly dependent on the rest of us to play out their games and carry out their human sacrifices in the name of personal wealth accumulation. What little good they've done society is only that which is necessary to perpetuate the myth that capitalism is good. It is good for them, it is great for them, but it is not good for anyone else.

Unless and until that day comes when truly moral people cannot be swayed from what they know is right, who will not sell their souls for wealth and pleasures and comforts and prestige, the high priests of some unknown god who loves the smell of burning flesh and the sounds of human suffering, those priests will continue to tighten their control over all our lives, until they can literally shut off everything at the flick of a switch and watch the whole world starve to death. The greatest human sacrifice of all time, the ultimate gift of love and worship to their god of death and destruction. And if you doubt they would ever go that far ask yourself why not, if they've come this far already.

May I ask, who or what is your God? What are your morals? What matters most to you in life? What kind of world do you want to live in? These are questions we should ask ourselves. We already know the answers we've been given by external entities, our leaders in politics, religion, education, science and business. Are their answers the right answers for the rest of us? Do they know or seem concerned about what the right answers are for the rest of us?

Who else do you think will be alone with your conscience in the solitude of your dark and lonely nights? Who else will be there to bear responsibility for your life and your own actions?

What mortal men would guide us more faithfully than we could guide ourselves? Which of them should we trust with our lives without knowing who they are? Which men among us have such superior wisdom that they should dictate to us what is right and what is wrong but more importantly, which men would care more than we do about the right and wrong we do?

We have long taken our answers from the powerful men of this world who have nothing in common with us but eternally preach the gospel of human sacrifice for personal profit and power. These ordinary mortal men say they are our masters, our superiors and betters to whom we must forever be devoted, obligated to, obedient and dutiful to; and to win their approval we must kill others to bring more profit to the world, for them.

It's a fair question to ask. What God are you worshipping, really? Are you sure? Whose covenants are you upholding and living and standing for no matter the cost? Don't tell me your answer, tell yourself. I only asked because I was afraid that if I didn't, neither would you.

When Did Making a Profit Become the Only Reason to Do Anything?

2009-07-28T01:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com//141577/

Bill Maher: When Did Making a Profit Become the Only Reason to Do Anything?
By Bill Maher, Huffington Post
July 28, 2009

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves -- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason -- who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world's largest prison population -- because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."

But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!

But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Bill Maher hosts "Real Time with Bill Maher."

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