Yet, it was. These victims identified a problem and named it "predatory lending" in the late 1990s. Their campaign to reform Household International (also known as Household Finance and as Beneficial) played out from 2001 to 2003, concluding with a settlement that includes a ban on badmouthing the company. That's why more people haven't heard about this. The families who fought back and defeated Household are barred from bragging about it or teaching the lessons they learned, because that would require recounting the damage that Household did to homes and neighborhoods. These families are members of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

I was ACORN's communications coordinator during much of the Household campaign, but left before it ended. No one has asked me not to tell this story.

In low-income minority neighborhoods in the United States, what little wealth there is, is in home equity. Home equity makes up 74.9 percent of the net wealth for Hispanics in the bottom two income quintiles (0-40 percent) and 78.7 percent of the net wealth for African Americans in the second income quintile (20-40 percent). There have been gains in minority home ownership over the past few decades, in part as a result of the work by community groups like ACORN and National People's Action to force banks to make loans in these communities, but the home ownership is fragile and not protected by additional savings. Lenders in the past decade have focused on stripping away equity and community groups have been forced to focus on keeping out loans that are worse than no loans at all.

Most high-cost loans are refinance loans. Too often they are marketed aggressively and deceptively, including through live- checks in the mail that result in very high-cost loans that the lender will be only too happy to refinance into a new mortgage. Often these loans are made with excessive, sometimes variable, interest rates, outrageously high fees, and fees financed into the loans so that the borrower pays interest on them and often is not told about them. They are made with bogus products built in, on which the borrower also pays interest. Hidden balloon payments force repeated refinancings for additional fees each time. Mandatory arbitration clauses attempt to prevent borrowers from taking lenders to court. The practice of loaning more than the value of a home traps borrowers in loans they cannot refinance with a responsible lender. Consolidation of additional debts further decreases equity, placing the home at greater risk. Quiet omission of taxes and insurance from a mortgage that previously included those charges results in a crisis when yearly bills arrive.

Predatory lenders turn the usual logic of lending upside down. They make their money by intentionally making loans that the borrowers will be unable to repay. They charge fees for each refinancing until finally seizing the house. Fannie Mae has estimated that as many as half of all borrowers in subprime (high-cost) loans could have qualified for a lower cost mortgage.

High-cost loans are not just made to people with poor credit. They're often made to people who have poor banking services in their neighborhoods.

ACORN members don't take abuse of their neighborhoods lying down, and Household was a leading cause of the rows of vacant houses appearing in ACORN neighborhoods in the 1990s. ACORN launched a campaign to reform Household that included numerous strategies. One, an ACORN stand-by, was direct action. Repeatedly, ACORN members in numerous cities around the country simultaneously protested in Household offices to demand reform. At the same time, ACORN was working to pass anti-predatory lending legislation in local and state governments and Congress. ACORN members made sure that in each case the victims testifying were victims of Household and that Household's abuses were highlighted. When ACORN released major reports on predatory lending, the examples included were always from Household.

ACORN also worked with the Coalition for Responsible Wealth to advance a shareholder resolution that would have tied Household's executives' compensation to ending its predatory lending. In 2001 Household held its shareholders meeting in an out-of-the-way suburb of Tampa, Florida. A crowd of ACORN members was there with shark suits and shark balloons to protest.

The resolution won 5 percent. Over the next year, ACORN pressured state pension funds and other shareholders. Household held its 2002 meeting an hour and a half from the nearest airport in rural Kentucky. Members made the trip by car from all over the country. The protest may have been the biggest thing the town of London, Kentucky had seen in years. The resolution won 30 percent.

As a result, various local and state governments threatened to divest from Household. ACORN also put pressure on stores like Best Buy that used Household credit cards. At the same time, ACORN Housing Corporation was assisting many Household victims in either refinancing out of their Household loans or at least canceling some of the rip-off services built into their loans, such as credit insurance. ACORN was also getting the word out to stay away from Household.

ACORN wrote up numerous accounts of Household predatory loans and took them to the attorney generals in state after state urging investigations. ACORN similarly pressured federal regulators to act. ACORN assisted borrowers in filing a number of class-action suits against Household targeting those of its practices that were clearly illegal even under existing law. They let Wall Street analysts know what Household stood to lose from these lawsuits, as well as from various reforms that Household periodically announced in its attempt to hold off the pressure.

But ACORN members never let up. They protested again and again at Household offices and held press conferences in front of homes about to be lost to Household. They protested the secondary market that was putting up capital for these predatory loans and they held a major protest at the trade group that lobbied in Washington for Household and its fellow sharks. Then, in the summer of 2002, in the wealthy suburbs north of Chicago, victims of Household from around the country poured out of busses by the thousands onto the lawns of the board members and the CEO of Household. They knocked on doors and spoke to those who had hurt them from a distance. When the police made them leave, ACORN members plastered "Wanted" posters all over the neighborhood telling the board members' neighbors what crimes the Household executives were guilty of.

Through all of this, we worked the media. I kept a database of victims' stories and contact information and put them in touch with reporters whenever the reporters were willing to tell not just the victimization story but also the story of fighting back. We generated several hundred print articles and several hundred TV and radio stories about Household's predatory lending practices. We worked the small neighborhood papers, flyers in churches, posters on walls. We provoked lengthy articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times , and Forbes Magazine . We kept up an endless barrage in the trade press: the American Banker, National Mortgage News, etc.

A handful of ACORN staff people with great expertise and unrelenting effort organized thousands of members to drive this campaign until Household agreed to pay victims $489 million through the 50 states attorneys general, and later agreed to pay millions more through ACORN, as well as to reform its practices.

This campaign was an example of what can be done if enough different angles are pursued at once and the company ripping you off is put on the defensive and constantly hit with the unexpected. This campaign increased the size and power of ACORN to effect future progressive change. This is good news for low-income neighborhoods, but bad news for Wells Fargo, the predatory lender next on ACORN's list.

DAVID SWANSON is a longtime activist for social justice. He has worked hard in recent years to obtain an impeachment against the Bush camarilla. He is also the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union

Women are less likely than men to qualify for their employer's insurance program, because they are more likely to work part-time and to have lower-wage jobs. Instead, since they are more likely to depend on their spouse's policy than men, they are more susceptible to losing insurance because of divorce or widowhood.

In 38 states, it is legal to discriminate on the basis of gender when selling insurance. Policies sold to women or their employers can cost 40 percent more than insurance for men -- even when maternity benefits are excluded. Currently permissible practices, such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or charging more for those with a history of health problems, disproportionately affect women, who are more likely to seek help from a doctor and to need ongoing care. One of the most egregious current practices allows insurance companies in eight states and the District of Columbia to deem domestic violence a ``pre-existing condition'' and deny coverage to its victims.

For women, healthcare reform must embrace principles and practices that will end gender discrimination and provide affordable quality healthcare for all, including access to the full range of reproductive health options. Tinkering around the edges and adding stopgaps won't be enough. Relying on the insurance industry alone to accomplish what it has been unable or unwilling to do for the last 50 years will only prolong an untenable situation.

New solutions must involve innovation and imagination, including creation of a public health insurance plan option to lower costs and ensure universal affordable coverage. Such an innovation has the support of three-quarters of Americans according to a recent SurveyUSA report -- a result that hasn't changed since 2003. A new poll published in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that 73 percent of all doctors favor a public option. Yet the public option is repeatedly dismissed out of hand in the back rooms on Capitol Hill, even by supposed moderates.

It's up to us to ensure that our elected representatives understand that half-measures won't do. The dire consequences of our patchwork healthcare system are both morally and fiscally indefensible. The 2006 estimate of ``excess deaths'' attributed to being uninsured was between 22,000 and 27,000 among all adults age 25-64. Our system's failures earned us a ranking of 35th among countries with a national healthcare system, while we pay the most for poorer results.

Discrimination against women must be rooted out, and we must insist on a public option. Only then will all of us enjoy a standard of health care that Congress itself takes for granted."

*******

I would add to those points Ms. Ratzan made that health care concerns for women are not only questions of accessibility and cost, but also the quality of care provided once inside the examining room and/or hospital door.

So engrained is the prejudicial, and therefore dangerous Freudian idea that women are "hysterical" that all of us could list dozens of instances in which -- regardless of ethnic or educational background -- the health issues of women were dismissed as psychosomatic. Conditions which later proved to be, among other things, herniated discs, a heart attack and fatal ovarian, bladder and kidney cancers.

But the gender bias does not stop there. Treatments, as well as observations made during them, can reflect engrained prejudices and therefore become abusive. Many of these abuses are definitely gender-specific in that they are age and appearance related. The elderly neighbor I cited with herniated discs -- the who had been telling her neighbors and friends that she was in so much pain she had not been able to sit or stand or lie down comfortably for days -- was actually accused by the male resident on duty in the ER as being nothing more than "an addict seeking painkillers." She was sent home without a proper diagnosis and without any pain relief; she alleged, later, that the resident had " alerted the authorities" (I don't know what authorities) that her name should be added to a list (I don't know what list) of potential drug abusers. When taken to task for his behavior by my neighbor's daughter, his initial response was: "Well, sorry. But we all know that women of that generation are prone to be pill poppers."

At the opposite end of the age spectrum, another neighbor -- a young, attractive woman -- learned, much later, that she had suffered nerve damage during uterine surgery for fibroids -- damage that was so severe that it created permanent red/ purple patches on her inner thighs. Nonetheless, she was told by her surgeon in a follow-up exam that "it must be an outbreak of Herpes." Despite the fact that the young woman swore she did not have, nor had she ever had Herpes and invited the surgeon to check with her Ob/Gyn, the surgeon insisted he was correct. So one is left to surmise that either the surgeon was attempting to cover his tracks, in the literal sense, or he made snap judgments based on her age and appearance.

Gender bias is an important point that has not been part of the healthcare reform discussion. For reform to be meaningful to women, it must include reforms in attitude as well as in accessibility and cost.

Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked the Justice Department to investigate [5] whether Rep. Ross had "engaged in bribery and honest services fraud" in relation to the sale. 

While Rep. Ross refused to discuss the story with ProPublica, Maddow or CNN, he did issue a statement yesterday to which we promptly responded [6] noting that Ross did not "deny that he received significantly more than an arms-length fair-market price for the building."  Additionally, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published an article today (available on his Web site [7]) quoting two pharmacy experts who say the assets were sold "well within the ballpark" of what similar assets would bring; neither expert has knowledge of this particular sale.

We will continue to follow this story as it develops.

The buyer: an Arkansas-based pharmacy chain with a keen interest in how the debate plays out.

Ross sold Holly's Health Mart in Prescott, Ark., to USA Drug for $420,000 -- an eye-popping price for real estate in a tiny train and lumber town about 100 miles southwest of Little Rock.

"You can buy half the town for $420,000," said Adam Guthrie, chairman of the county Board of Equalization and the only licensed real estate appraiser in Prescott.

But the $420,000 that USA Drug paid for the pharmacy's building and land was just the beginning of what Ross and his wife, Holly, made from the sale of Holly's Health Mart. USA Drug owner Stephen L. LaFrance Sr. also paid the Rosses $500,000 to $1 million for the pharmacy's assets and paid Holly Ross an additional $100,000 to $250,000 for signing a noncompete agreement. Those numbers, which Mike Ross listed on the financial disclosure reports he files as a member of Congress, bring the total value of the transaction to between $1 million and $1.67 million.

And that's not counting the $2,300 campaign contribution Ross received from LaFrance two weeks after the sale closed.

Holly Ross remains the pharmacist at Holly's Health Mart under USA Drug. Neither she nor her husband agreed to speak with ProPublica for this story.

At the time of the 2007 sale, the county assessor's office valued the pharmacy's building and the land on which it sits at $263,000 -- nearly $160,000 less than the Rosses got for it.

Because an assessor's valuations don't always reflect true market value, ProPublica hired Guthrie to appraise the property. He placed the current value of the lot and building at $198,000, substantially lower than the county's assessment, which was raised from $263,000 to $269,000 this year. Guthrie explained the difference between his appraisal and the county assessment by saying county assessments have been running higher than actual market value.

Mike Ross frequently speaks for the coalition of House moderates known as the Blue Dogs, a group that helped force changes to the version of the health care reform bill drafted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The role has lifted him to national prominence in recent months.

"We held the bill hostage in committee for 10 days to make it better," Ross, a member of the committee, told reporters Aug. 5 in Little Rock. "We protected small businesses. ... And we ensured that if there is a government option, it will be just that, an option. It will not be mandated on anybody."

Ross bristled at suggestions he was trying to kill the bill.

"I wasn't trying to kill health care reform," he said. "If I was, I wouldn't have been in negotiations for 10 days." LaFrance has amassed a privately held chain of more than 150 pharmacies operating in five Southern and Midwestern states under a variety of names, including USA Drug. It was the 15th-largest drug chain in the country in 2008, with an estimated $906 million in sales, according to Racher Press, which publishes business intelligence reports.

The pharmacy industry is aggressively lobbying Congress in an effort to protect its interests in the health care debate. Ross, who belongs to the 52-member Congressional Community Pharmacy Coalition, has introduced and supported legislation backed by pharmacy trade groups.

On Aug. 1, the National Community Pharmacist Association issued a news release thanking Ross for an amendment to the health care reform bill that would create greater transparency in the operations of pharmacy benefit managers, who act as clearinghouses for insurance company reimbursements for pharmaceuticals.

In June the National Association of Chain Drug Stores issued a news release thanking Ross for introducing legislation authorizing payments to pharmacists to train patients in how to manage their medications.

Health-related interests have donated $342,475 to Ross since 2007, according to federal campaign data maintained by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. No other business sector has given Ross as much.

Ross and LaFrance declined to be interviewed for this story. LaFrance's son, Stephen L. LaFrance Jr., who helps run the chain, asked for questions to be submitted in writing but didn't respond to them.

Ross's spokesman, Brad Howard, said the real estate deal was "open, honest and by the books." He described Ross and LaFrance as "acquaintances" but declined to say whether they have discussed the pending legislation, adding that Ross has discussed health care reform with many of his constituents.

The $157,000 gap between the property's assessed value and the price LaFrance paid wasn't unusual, Howard said, because assessments are done for tax purposes and typically don't reflect the full market value of the real estate.

"The appraisal always differs from the assessment, and you can't really compare the two," Howard said.

In an interview on Sept. 2, Howard told ProPublica that the appraised value of the real estate at the time of the sale "was somewhere around where the purchase price was, which was, you know, I think was, like, $420,000." He said he didn't have a copy of any such appraisal and suggested obtaining it from LaFrance, who did not respond to requests for a copy. Last Friday, however, Howard said he could "only assume there was an appraisal done on the property by the buyer in 2007" and that he "never said" the property was appraised at $420,000.

Nevada County, which includes Prescott, hires an outside firm -- Arkansas CAMA Technology Inc. -- to update its assessments every five years. After LaFrance bought Holly's Health Mart in 2007, someone from CAMA called the headquarters of LaFrance's pharmacy chain to verify the sale price for the lot and building, in part because "it was such an expensive sale for that area," CAMA employee Mike Shepherd told ProPublica.

"Commercial property values in Nevada County "have stayed flat" in recent years, Shepherd said, adding, "I would say flat or a slight increase, maybe. That would be pretty slight, though."

Brenda Williams of Nevada County Real Estate in Prescott said county property assessments tend to be slightly below market value but usually "no more than 5 percent."

"Being in the real estate business, I know that I see the tax card every time, and it's usually assessed a little bit less than the actual value or sales price, a little bit less but not that much less," she said. Asked about the value of the lot and building housing Holly's Health Mart, she said, "It might cost $250,000 to build it. I wouldn't have a problem with that $200 and something thousand. But not over $400 [thousand]."

The Rosses bought the lot in 1999 for $10,000, then constructed a building that the county assessed at $225,000.

Two months after the 2007 sale, LaFrance's concerns about health care reform were spelled out in an article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

"Universal health care will ruin our health care in America," LaFrance told the reporter. "There'll be long lines, they won't be able to get treated, potential doctors will be afraid to go into medical school, there will be an outflux of doctors -- in my opinion. It's not broke, and don't fix it."

Describing the drug industry as "very big business," he said the high prices charged for prescription drugs are possible only because insurance companies and the government underwrite about 95 percent of the cost.

"So when the customer pays $7, $10, $15, $20 [for a prescription co-pay], it doesn't hurt him. They don't realize that the insurance company is paying the other $125. That's kind of a double-edged sword; if it wasn't for insurance, the American pharmaceutical industry wouldn't be able to charge the prices it charges today, because the public wouldn't put up with it," LaFrance told the Democrat-Gazette.

"Our sales are higher because it affects the top line of sales," he added. If the government doesn't interfere, there are "nothing but good days ahead."

-- ProPublica Research Director Lisa Schwartz and Researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this story. ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

n this interview she talks about the collapse of industrial civilization - what it may look like, reasons for its occurrence, the effects of collapse and, how to relocalize and create sustainable communities in the throes of collapse. Through the lenses of psychology, spiritualism, and history Carolyn explicates that collapse is a dynamic affair, not sudden, but a drawn out process of erosion that will test our subjective relations and our consciousness, while shaking off old paradigms, and what we can do to maintain a sense of peace, pragmatism, and community.

Frank Joseph Smecker: You maintain that the collapse of industrial civilization is occurring now ; can you define collapse? And explain why industrial civilization is eroding at its very foundations?

Carolyn Baker: First of all, I'm talking about a process that is slow - not like falling off of a cliff but more like rolling down a bumpy hill. Most of us know what collapse is beginning to look like. It begins to look like massive departures from organized religions alongside Catholic diocese child-sex scandals. It begins to look like rising unemployment and a growing gap between classes. Wouldn't you agree that an educational system that can only produce standardized children by forcing them to take standardized tests five hours a day, four days a week, is functioning in a state of abject disintegration? Or what about the health care system that is so broken and unequal? Collapse is primarily the demise of the chief institutions such as education, health care, political, financial -

FJS: Collapse can also be recognized on account of its effects upon the ecological balance of the planet such as a burgeoning endangered species list, climate change and melting glaciers - the desiccation of arctic permafrost, the acceleration of droughts and desertification... the list is damn long...

CB: Absolutely - everyday the endangerment or imminent extinction of a species, if not several, is announced. We are reminded of the melting polar ice caps, the plummeting of giant ice shelves into the sea; fires raging in places they seldom had in the past. Yes, the list is sadly long. Aside from the effects and appearance, collapse is mainly the demise of a paradigm of growth, expansion - of domination and control, of separateness. This paradigm is vanishing and it will have to be replaced. My work not only points this out, but is also a tool to educate about inclusion, local community-geared organization, and small-scale production versus pyramidal hierarchy - which clearly doesn't work. It's apparent that the large institutions don't work: federal and state governments are rapidly going bankrupt. Solutions will have to come from relocalized communities. In terms of energy, it's pretty clear now that we've passed 'peak' regarding oil production. This is crucial because we've relied so long on cheap and abundant fossil fuels. No longer is production easy and cheap; we are now moving away from affordable hydrocarbon energy. And the truth is, the whole hierarchy-from-the-top-down approach is no longer working. The big secret (which is really no secret at all) is that the institutions themselves are collapsing and, you can't have a recovery without access to energy and you can't access energy without money - it's a catch twenty-two! We're printing more money to access more energy, which is becoming harder and more expensive to access and produce and, in turn, we are going further into debt thence more bankruptcy. We have come to the end of large bureaucratic government institutions.

FJS: You assert that there is nothing government can do to stop collapse - that there is no large-scale political change that will mitigate collapse, not even major reformation like replacing capitalism with socialism will stop the dominant culture from destroying the planet and marching toward collapse. How so?

CB: Let's face it, a presidential candidate cannot even receive substantial votes, let alone be elected, unless he is solidly in the pocket of the corporate interests of the US - the same corporate interests that rely on unsustainable growth and exploitation of the natural world. Besides, no one candidate is remotely capable of executing a fundamental paradigm shift within the span of four to eight years. As for our 'democratic' process, during the initial stages of the economic meltdown many players in Congress looked the other way - there may be no more than six people in congress I can say I absolutely trust; it truly is the fox guarding the chicken house! Anyway, as I stated earlier, collapse is occurring as a result of specific paradigms that have been held for centuries that are resulting in the destruction of the human and non-human realms. Merely replacing capitalism with socialism will not work. Changing systems is ineffectual not only because an opposite system is still a system but also, most importantly, only the political and economic structures are altered, while the fundamental paradigm - one of control and domination, remains intact. Father Thomas Berry wrote in The Dream Of The Earth , "both liberal capitalism and Marxist socialism committed themselves totally to the vision of industrial progress which more than any other single cause has brought about the disintegration that is taking place throughout the entire planet."

FJS: Apparently, the collapse of industrial civilization is the inevitable outcome of a contrived system inherently intent on growing exponentially in a finite world with set - i.e. invariable - limits. Do you believe that the purpose of "limitless growth" is designated for the notion of progress, a philosophical idea that was latent in the "Christian notion of self-perfection for divine ends," an end in which the future is static and "Heavenly?"

CB: Since the Enlightenment, it has all been about reaching a static age of perfection - which goes against all indigenous wisdom. The first thing that was done to the indigenous by Westerners after colonization was the taking away of indigenous rituals because they were seen as impediments to 'progress.'

FJS: So the whole proselytizing thing can also be seen as a swapping of religions, so to speak - supplanting an indigenous worldview with a 'civilized' worldview that worships production and progress?

CB: To call it a 'swap' is an understatement. To shift indigenous religions with Christianity is a rape - a violation that has led us to where we are now. And if we don't stop to recognize this and don't understand why we are where we are, there is no chance of a new paradigm. I wrote a book a while back called U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You . It's basically a history of the US from 1865 to now, and can be a useful read to know how we got from even there to here, and it is available at my website or at Amazon.

FJS: In your recent book, Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path Of Industrial Civilization's Collapse , you have written that "the more we honor and celebrate our inherent animal nature, the more likely we are to effortlessly honor our limits." Would you agree that civilization's transgressions of natural limits is linked to the suppression of our inherent, intuitive animal instincts?

CB: Absolutely. Derrick Jensen wrote in Endgame, Volume I, that: "The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of any economic system." And that, "Any economic system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and really stupid." We're the only species, that I'm aware of, that doesn't honor limits. One of the deeper layers explaining our disconnect from nature is our "fear and loathing of the body," of our instinctual wildness and, our vulnerability to death. This all causes us to distance ourselves from the reality that we are indeed animals. And also, native peoples, as a result of their intimate connection with nature, are glaring reminders of our animal-ness. To be 'civilized' is synonymous with being domesticated, restrained, and repressed, and if we are to participate in instinctual behavior, let's use sex as an example, we are encouraged to do it in a controlled, sanitized, or even surreptitious fashion. I think it's pretty important we all begin to realize that it isn't wild animals that are soiling their nests and desecrating their habitat, but rather humans. I'm sitting here right now looking out at beautiful rolling green hills. I often see deer grazing along the hillside, and you know what? They don't ever come to my house because they have limits! Animals live within the limits of their environment because their lives depend on doing so. In the new paradigm, other animals and creatures will be the elders; they will be the wise ones who will help us remember our animal origins and animal destiny. Animals already teach us surrender, acceptance, and limits. There's a great quote by Eckhart Tolle in which he states: "No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the earth that sustains it...Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them cats.

FJS: Why do you suppose so many people reject the truth, or at the very least, the notion of, collapse and refuse to ask these necessary questions?

CB: Collapse is terrifying; we're not going to bounce back. Besides, many people are still entrenched in the 'Myth of America' - that anyone, or the US as a whole, can be triumphant. Plus, people who are hurting from bankruptcy, foreclosure, unemployment - it's hard for these folks to accept that this is permanent: it's not going away.

FJS: Decades ago, psychiatrist R.D. Laing developed three rules by which he believed a pathological family (one suffering from abuse, alcoholism, etc.) can keep its pathology hidden from even its own family members. Adherence to these three rules allows perpetrators, victims, and observers to maintain the fantasy that they are all one big, happy family. The rules are: Rule A: Don't [talk about the problems and abject conditions]; Rule A1: Rule A does not exist; Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A1, and/or A2. These rules aren't exclusive to nuclear families but also apply to larger cultures, especially cultures that are violently abusive to its own people and the land, lest the people recognized the flaws of such abject behavior. Would you agree that these rules are adhered to within the dominant culture, heightening collective denial and silence in the wake of collapse?

CB: Exactly - without question. The American culture can be compared to one large dysfunctional family, and it can also be compared to an addiction model. By maintaining denial we enter a very dangerous realm. As Carl Jung emphasized, whatever we deny or pretend to ignore does not go away, but only becomes larger in its power and influence, not only within the psyche, but throughout our external world too. And anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. In 2007, the Pentagon announced that it is conducting simulation exercises in specific US cities in preparation for possible chaotic scenarios resulting from climate change, a nuclear attack, pandemics, or natural disasters. Clearly, law enforcement and the military are anticipating the possibility of dealing with an unruly citizenry. The possibilities of martial law, suspension of the Constitution, and immediate imprisonment for dissenters or generally unruly individuals are daunting - it's no wonder we don't want to think about the reality of collapse and the full extent of its consequences. But again, whatever we deny or ignore only becomes a larger threat. If we don't attend to the reality of collapse that is happening now, we risk not only encountering it without a lack of pragmatic preparation, but we're very likely to deprive the deeper, eternal layers of ourselves, obviating any effective community building.

FJS: Would you agree that hope, righteousness, and 'keeping a positive outlook' also keeps the truth at bay while galvanizing complacency?

CB: Ah yes, hopium .

(There's a brief pause as we both chuckle)

CB: The longer we dwell on false hopes - which I would define a false hope as an external hope: that something out there will fix this, that technology will save us, or that a newly elected president will bring change - the longer we persist in this the harder the collapse will be. Hope must come from within, from inside you, and really, I don't like to use the word 'hope', I don't like it - I prefer 'inspiration.' And let's be honest, calling someone 'doomerish' or 'keeping a positive attitude' that doesn't honestly address today's daunting conditions doesn't change the fact that we are witnessing the unprecedented extinction of 200 species per day; it won't reverse peak-oil or stop famine or resource wars. I believe that new solutions come from holding the dark reality alongside one's vision - what many indigenous called 'holding the tension of opposites.' I say down with hope, up with holding the tension of opposites! As for righteousness, I wrote in Sacred Demise that a righteous attitude often leads to detachment from reality: it bypasses any emotional response one may have to the desperate situation we and all other life are in on this planet - it makes the state of the planet someone else's problem, not ' my ' problem. It implies that one is above emotions and doesn't want to soil his/her 'sanitized' psyche with them. And as for the addiction to a 'positive attitude,' well, upholding the latter in the face of the end of the world as we have known it is beyond irrational - it's a humancentric obsession, as if the only thing that matters as the world burns is to feel good about oneself. And to add to your previous mentioning of R.D. Laing's three rules for a pathological family - anyone who keeps a positive attitude in this culture - the culture of civilization that is killing the planet - killing all of the people and species we all love - that person is not only irrational and deeply afflicted with denial, but is exactly like a member of an abusive family system in which physical and sexual assault are occurring in the home on a daily basis, but that family member insists on 'thinking good thoughts' and resents anyone and everyone who says what is so about the abusive system.

FJS: You also wrote in Sacred Demise that collapse can be seen as a metaphor for growth. For starters, what is the connection, if any, between the dominant culture's fear of death and the ubiquitous fear to confront the reality of collapse? And moreso, can you discuss how growth cannot be attained without requisite loss?

CB: The bottom line of confronting collapse is facing our own mortality. If we refuse to do this, collapse will be horrifying. We need to be more of a culture of adults then of children. We need to accept that there is an end - there is an end to this 'party' we've been having for the last two hundred years or so, as there's an end to each and every one of our individual lives. An integral part of restoring life is the willingness to be present with death. Acknowledging this will help us weather the collapse. The indigenous have known for thousands of years that life is comprised of loss - their traditions, rituals, and ceremonies help deal with loss: they devote a great deal of time and energy into preparation for life's losses and, their traditions teach that loss is an enormous and necessary part of the human experience. Part of becoming a mature, initiated adult is to learn and grow from loss. We just can't grow without it, and, despite the pain, it is food for growth. A huge point in Sacred Demise is my view on the collapse process as comparable to the indigenous view of the cycle of life. First the child is born into life, then later on there is the puberty-initiation process - which is far greater than just a rite of passage - it is a brush with death, a connection with loss, and an emergence into adulthood. What we're experiencing globally with collapse is a global initiation into new growth and true adulthood, elderhood - not age per se - it has more to do with wisdom than age.

FJS: In your introduction to Sacred Demise you write that the collapse of industrial civilization is a "necessary evolutionary trauma in the odyssey of planet earth." Can you explain what you mean by this?

CB: Collapse is undeniably going to be painful. But it will also be an enormous precedent for the transformation of the human consciousness. Again, with loss comes growth - or at the very least, the conditions for growth. We can embrace collapse and accomplish small tribal living and local problem solving - this is really a tremendous opportunity to organize locally. It's very important to hold the visions and potentialities of transitioning in the wake of collapse. One initiative I have become a part of is Transition Town ; this is not a magic, silver bullet but it is a viable option and vision, and much better to hold onto than only the dark realities. Remember the tension of opposites.

FJS: Can you talk a little about Transition Town ?

CB: Absolutely. Basically, Transition Town is a worldwide network organizing around energy breakdown, but is also a community response to climate change, economic meltdown, and even the possibility of the complete evaporation of the dollar; some Transition Towns are working on creating local currencies. The Transition Town group in Montpelier , Vermont (Transition Town Montpelier) is currently holding a nine-day Village-Building Convergence to educate the local communities regarding the exigencies of collapse such as emergency response and feeding communities. This is a prime example of embracing collapse in order to strengthen community relations and redefine social arrangements so as to be sustainable and non-hierarchical.

FJS: You write that one can find beauty in collapse; what role does beauty play in the throes of collapse?

CB: We must find beauty in everything we do. Part of the reason we're in the paradigm we're in now is that many people lost a sense of, and connection to, beauty in life, in nature on earth. As for collapse, there can be tremendous beauty in preparation for collapse and community organizing. In a section in his book, A World Made By Hand , James Howard Kunstler writes about homemade musical instruments, for example. Combined with dance, voice and music can solidify the community in sacred ritual, merriment, and conviviality as they have for thousands of years among our ancestors. This to me is beautiful. Poetry, too, is so important. Music, art, story telling, and ritual - all of this we must express and enjoy. We have the opportunity to relearn the language of soul. The language of industrial civilization is so linear - the soul wants us to learn a new language. Beauty is that magnificent and mysterious bridge to nature, to ourselves, and to the sacred. If our work is to further open our hearts, allow our egos to die, and fully surrender to the greater self, then beauty is the consummate facilitator of that process.

FJS: There is a poem written by Clarissa Pinkola Estes that you share with your readers in Sacred Demise -

CB: Yes, it's titled Father Earth .

FJS: Yeah, that's the one - it's a very beautiful poem.

There's a two million year-old man no one knows.

And the soil beneath her is fertile and black with her tears.

Like the Manson Family, Limbaugh's Lackeys completely accept the paranoid fantasies of a manipulative con artist as reality. Like Charlie Manson, Rush Limbaugh exercises his control over his Pavlonian-trained dogs irresponsibly and capriciously with no regard for the consequences to his followers. And always at a distance.

Like Manson, Rush never confronts his targets personally but dispatches his programmed pooches to do his dirty work.

Lately, those pathetic puppies have been yapping away at public meetings, trying to prevent healthcare that would help them and their families live longer, healthier lives.

But these performing dogs care little for their families or their future and do as they are told. Their lack of understanding of the issues is as evident as their inability to think, speak or act on their own. The less they know, the louder they howl.

Just a word from Rush "Goebbels" Limbaugh and they are falling all over themselves, and each other, in a frantic rush to kowtow to the Fat Mouth Manson and his corporate handlers.

They would rather live on their knees than stand up for themselves and their families and demand health care reform, higher wages and better lives. These are the real family values that can only be achieved by an aggressive left-wing agenda that will begin our journey up the firm and verdant slope to socialism.

After getting their asses handed to them on this issue for months precisely because of the never-ending snipe hunt for a bipartisan healthcare reform bill and then throughout August being publicly bullied, taunted, bitch slapped and manipulated while staring like a deer into the headlights it seems the oh so smart corporate Democrats running the show in DC have learned absolutely nothing. How can this be? What can those people be thinking if the answer they've come up with is essentially more of the same? How can they conclude that what we need is more capitulation, further retreat and finally sacrificing real healthcare reform for an insurance company subsidy program that will fatten those malevolent interests even more than they are, that costs far too much, and returns far too little to the common people? Do they know how weak they are making themselves look in the eyes of the American people as they insist on playing the submissive role to the Republicans' and how it demonstrates anything but leadership as they keep the sworn enemies of any healthcare reform in the driver's seat even though the legislative and executive branches are controlled by Democrats?

It is embarrassing and shocking really to come to grips with just how isolated and out of touch the DC Democrats are on this issue (excepting of course the relative handful of committed progressives who have been vocal in their opposition to further capitulation). From day one the corporate DC Dems have played the obsequious handmaidens of the parasitical special interests on healthcare and to their allies, the congressional Republicans, who openly declare not only that they are against reform but that the President is a foreigner hell bent on imposing Soviet style totalitarianism on America combined with Nazi style euthanasia policies and taking the guns from crazy white people everywhere. They handed control of the message to the Republicans from day one too, making the fundamental question one of cost instead of whether or not healthcare will no longer be a privilege in America but a right that every citizen is entitled to in this country just as citizens are in all the other industrialized countries on earth.

When will it occur, and what will it take at long last, for the DC Dems to understand that they cannot represent the corporate interests and the interests of the common people of this nation on healthcare not to mention most other important issues facing the nation? When, at long last will they understand that the situation has become so acute and out of balance that the Washington game of buying off corporate support with massive giveaways to special interests and throwing a bone or two to the people is no longer acceptable? When will they realize that healthcare for all is not an academic mind tease or a parlor game but a life and death issue for 18,000 Americans annually and that it is the difference between keeping their lives together and bankruptcy for a million families every year now? Establishing a viable healthcare system worth having and that serves every citizen is a moral question, not a question of cost. How the lack of healthcare, skyrocketing costs for premiums and deductibles, the lack of good insurance and the denial of benefits are harming human beings are the fundamental issues at stake when you get right down to it, not the cost of covering everyone for the benefit of the for profit insurance industry. And when oh when will the ever so smart minds of the DC Dems realize that the costliest possible approach is the one they seem to want to foist upon us which is one that does not cover everyone, keeps our grotesque and broken system in tact while enriching the insurance companies yet only tinkering at the margins of reform? Providing massive subsidies for people to pay for rotten insurance policies is not a solution to anything and it isn't acceptable. If that's what we get in the end it's hard to imagine what it is we've won other than a pig in a poke for the common American citizen and his or her family.

The bottom line is that sometimes you simply have to fight for what you really believe in and let the chips fall where they may. Yes, you risk losing but winning isn't the only thing that matters. It matters what you win too. If you fight for what is right, but lose, at least you have done so with some honor and the whole world knows what side you are on. To whimper and whine and capitulate to the greediest and most parasitical special interests only to "win" a bill that is no longer worth having can be worse than losing.

It is long past time for the President to come out in his speech to Congress next week strongly in favor of real healthcare reform: not merely insurance reform. It's time for the President to lead by fighting for what he said he believes in on healthcare reform and not to turn tail and run on the public option and instead hide behind weak euphemisms like "choice" and "competition" which means the score at the end of the game will be 100-0 in favor of the interests of the insurance companies vs the interests of the nation, our people and our businesses. If the President fails to do this but instead tries to sell the nation on a watered down, pale imitation of reform that isn't really worth having then why should the common people waste their time supporting it? If people are rational and act according to their interests there would be no reason for the people, in that case, to waste their time and energy. I hope the reports are wrong and the President is going to really change his strategy. I hope that instead of what is being reported, the President comes out of the gate next week no longer burdened by the bipartisan fantasy of what never was and never will be and instead comes out swinging as he should have been doing all along. If he does that the people will support him. Anything less and the people will turn away with a sour taste in their mouths because the DC Dems once again decided that being weak was smarter than being strong and fighting for the interests of the common people.

In a new report [2], the Center for Public Integrity found that "of the 25 top participants in the program, at least 21 were heavily involved in the subprime lending industry," most through specializing in servicing subprime loans, but several both serviced and originated the loans. By far the largest is scandal-ridden Countrywide [3], now a part of Bank of America. More than 10 percent of the $50 billion of TARP funds earmarked for the foreclosure program has been set aside for Countrywide [4]. The money will be used to pay Countrywide for modifying loans, but will also go to investors in the loans and Countrywide borrowers who keep current after modification. Despite these carrots, a recent Treasury Department report showed Bank of America lagging behind the other major lenders [5] in its pace of modifying loans.

The Center for Public Integrity's report is a follow-up to an earlier one that identified the top 25 subprime lenders from 2005-2007 [6] and their financial backers, many of which were financial firms that received TARP funds [7] through other programs.

If you are not already familiar with this situation, the background is in this 50-minute video by John McTiernan, director of Die Hard 1 and 3, Hunt for Red October and Predator: The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove. OpEdNews.com will be on a mission to set this wrong right-- and we hope you will help. (I never recommend videos, but this one is sooo important. You will not regret watching it.)

When Thomas Jefferson faced similar prospects, he fired the attorneys, freed the wrongly- prosecuted and imprisoned and began impeachment hearings. We expect nothing less of President Obama. Not only US Attorneys but judges have abused their office for politically-motivated witch hunts. The most famous case is Don Siegelman, former Governor of Alabama, who became a target of Rove's machine after he had the audacity to ask for a recount in the suspicious 2002 election in which he 'lost' to Bob Riley. This must not stand. As John McTiernan says, Americans must not reach a point where they fear the judicial system and that has happened to over 700 victims of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct.

Obama has has invited us to push him. Let's take him at his word! Lives and families have been destroyed by the monsters still in their jobs as prosecutors and judges. Obama, through Holder, must insist on investigations and prosecutions.

Dana Jill Simpson was an Alabama Republican who worked for the Riley campaign, until she became aware that Rove was concocting charges of 'corruption' against Siegelman in order to influence the election. She bravely came forward with this story, but her house has since burned down, and she has repeatedly been threatened. When Karl Rove lied about his role in the Siegelman case, she wrote this article; My Response to the article "Closing in on Rove". There are over 700 victims, like her, who deserve justice.

Ironically, if these shameful bush initiated, GOP backed practices were brought to the public's attention, the right wingers who are now afflicting the Obama Health Reform efforts like swarms of gnats would be in retreat, doing all they could to clean up their image and distance themselves from these horrendous perpetrations.

Meanwhile, Governor Don Siegelman still awaits sentencing and incarceration. How can Holder allow this to stand when he has released Alaska's senator Stevens who was clearly a red herring meant to distract from the otherwise massively partisan witch hunt Rove directed in his corruption of the DOJ?

The fact that the attorneys who perpetrated such injustices are still at their jobs, still threatening people is insupportable. We must create a huge uproar, a massive demand from all corners of the media, from the blogosphere, that he fire the remaining attorneys immediately.

Some argue that the Republicans, like Jeff Sessions, are holding back appointments of replacements. That is a pathetic argument. You don't leave a fox guarding the henhouse just because you haven't found a solid guard dog yet. First, you get rid of the fox.

Judges, too, appointed by Bush with a political agenda, played a role in partisan prosecutions. They must be investigated, impeached and prosecuted. Those who are found guilty should be imprisoned.

There is plenty of evidence of a strong connection between the Federalist Society and these tainted attorneys and judges. Perhaps that's where the search should begin... starting with Holder. And if Holder doesn't start cleaning this Katrina-level catastrophe very soon, he should be cast out. America deserves better.

You can play a role. Write to your local daily paper. Educate your friends and colleagues. Contact the DOJ. Conctact John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee, contact Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary committee. Write to Obama. Tell your local Democratic leaders. Blog about it. Tell the mainstream media they should be covering this daily, that they should be counting down every day that Holder and Obama have failed to removed these rogue attorneys. Do it today.

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com.

Instead, let's make it simple. Please let us buy into Medicare.

It would be so easy. You don't have to reinvent the wheel with this so-called "public option" that's a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it, others won't - just like the Post Office versus FedEx analogy you're so comfortable with.

Just pass a simple bill - it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people - that says that any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it.

So it's revenue neutral!

To make it available to people of low income, raise the rates slightly for all currently non-eligible people (like me - under 65) to cover the cost of below-200%-of-poverty people. Revenue neutral again.

Most of us will do damn near anything to get out from under the thumbs of the multi-millionaire CEOs who are running our current insurance programs. Sign me up!

This lets you blow up all the rumors about death panels and grandma and everything else: everybody knows what Medicare is. Those who scorn it can go with Blue Cross. Those who like it can buy into it. Simplicity itself.

Of course, we'd like a few fixes, like letting Medicare negotiate drug prices and filling some of the holes Republicans and AARP and the big insurance lobbyists have drilled into Medicare so people have to buy "supplemental" insurance, but that can wait for the second round. Let's get this done first.

Simple stuff. Medicare for anybody who wants it. Private health insurance for those who don't. Easy message. Even Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley can understand it. Sarah Palin can buy into it, or ignore it. No death panels, no granny plugs, nothing. Just a few sentences.

Replace the "you must be disabled or 65" with "here's what it'll cost if you want to buy in, and here's the sliding scale of subsidies we'll give you if you're poor, paid for by everybody else who's buying in." (You could roll back the Reagan tax cuts and make it all free, but that's another rant.)

We elected you because we expected you to have the courage of your convictions. Here's how. Not the "single payer Medicare for all" that many of us would prefer, but a simple, "Medicare for anybody who wants to buy in."

Respectfully,

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

There are individuals who have been aware of these issues for decades; however, nothing has been done to address them due to the sociopathic nature of greed and lust for power at the highest levels of politics, governance, and commerce. Moreover, the vast majority of the populace has been only too happy to remain in blissful ignorance in order to avoid taking any responsibility and in order to be able to continue to deny that our culture is rotten from within. Apparently, most of us would prefer to watch some fake "reality" television program. We evidently prefer a fabricated reproduction of the real to that which is truly real - rather than face, head on, the truth of life as it actually exists.

The only solution to this trinity of situations anywhere in the world is the creation of sustainable community. There are many kinds of communities in the world, few of which are sustainable, Cuba being an exception.

Sustainable community is critical to the continuation of human life on earth, and many are beginning to rhapsodize about creating local communities. The reality is that the vast majority of individuals in Western culture have absolutely no clue about fashioning such.

This series of articles will attempt to identify, confront, and address the deep challenges of creating and living in sustainable community. It will, of necessity, be a good example of a complex living system. A simple definition of a complex system from Wikipedia states that "a complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts. This characteristic of every system is called emergence and is true of any system, not just complex ones."

This means that, with respect to the emergence of these articles, fluidity, change and chaos are and will be factors as we go along.

The Big Trinity

Climate change is finally making its way into public consciousness and discourse. Increasingly, we will find that our daily lives are irrevocably changed due to changes in climate. Simply put, the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 parts per million. We've already surpassed that number and even if the whole world stopped putting more carbon into the atmosphere this very moment, the carbon levels would continue to climb for a long time.

Clearly, the US, China, Great Britain and India are not about to stop gorging on and spewing non-renewable poison. Coal is the dirtiest of all fuels and coal plants continue to befoul and destroy the planet and the atmosphere, particularly in China and the US. By the way, there is no such thing as "Clean Coal." "Clean Coal" is an oxymoron, and one has to be a moron to believe it.

The US, in particular, rather than creating an all-out mandate for renewable resources, is perfectly willing to engage in endless war. This, in itself, requires enormous infusions of oil. This means that we will be fighting to gain the few remaining drops, and that humanity (not to mention all other forms of life on earth) is in big, deep trouble.

The fossil fuel situation (Peak Oil and Gas) is not understood by the vast majority of the citizenry. That will shortly change, bringing with it tremendous shocks to the public. Everything that we depend upon for life, such as food, water, heating and cooling, transportation, health and medical care, and access to other affordable staples that we have long taken for granted, will become less and less available to the average person.

Economic meltdown is already here - in spades - and the economies of the "first world nations" will never go back to being what they were. Unemployment, the housing crisis, the looming commercial real estate crisis, homelessness, lack of healthcare, increasing costs for food, and lies, greed, and sociopathic malfeasance in the realms of finance, politics, and commerce make daily headlines in primarily alternative news sources. The mainstream media continues its assault on intelligence and reason. Unfortunately, there is not yet a critical mass of individuals that understands spin from truth.

Capitalism is defined by Merriam Webster Dictionary as: "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital (from Late Latin meaning "top of the column" goods), by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market."

We are now learning that the "free market" has been anything but free and that few citizens have access to "capital" goods.

Why, one might ask, does the foregoing matter? It matters because most individuals in Western culture equate Communism (a political system) with Socialism (an economic system) and have knee jerk reactions to any system other than Capitalism. This is due to a lack of real knowledge and understanding. There have been many people in the past who have warned of the coming demise of capitalism, including the great theologian, Paul Tillich, author of The Courage To Be.

In the years to come, we will all be required to possess a large measure of "the courage to be." The question is: what social form will our "courage to be" take? The human being is nothing if not creative and imaginative, and these new forms of social interaction will be created as necessity demands. More than likely, these new forms will more closely resemble what we think of now as socialism than capitalism and communism. Our new societies and communities, in order to be sustainable, will require it.

The reasons that many people dream of living in some sort of sustainable community are many: they may be sick and tired of politics as usual, power structures, irresponsible, greedy lifestyles, have serious ecological concerns, be worn out with making money just to spend money - for all sorts of reasons based upon their own individual values and beliefs. So many people are starving for an alternative.

The difficulty is that creating a truly sustainable, compassionate, joyful community is anything but easy and requires that we engage not just our heads, but our hearts and souls as well. Absent heart and soul, any community is destined to fail. Western culture, including many of those that dwell therein, is not known for valuing either.

The first impediment to the creation of community, much less sustainable community is that we have no clue as to how to go about doing so. Western Civilization, in its thousands of years' drive for power, control, and wealth, has decimated every indigenous culture on the planet. Western belief systems carry the mantra that "might makes right." Just because we have the power to do something does in no way mean that we should - a fact that we will soon come to realize and confront in our daily lives.

The very people who might have had something to teach us are long dead. Even though there are written remnants of indigenous wisdom that are helpful to us today, reading about indigenous cultural communities is hardly the same as being able to experience them first hand.

What this means is that we are on our own - castaways of our own making - and are completely unprepared to face the tsunami of change that is upon us, due to our unwillingness and inability to face the truth. We in Western culture cannot expect or even hope to avoid the ramifications of our actions and inactions. We have hidden from our own internal personal and cultural darkness and shadows for millennia. The Piper has arrived in town for payment.

In the second installment of this series of articles, we will begin an in-depth discovery and discussion of the primary challenges of the creation of community. Stay tuned.

Martha Ireland is a social entrepreneur, author, poet, educator, public speaker, organizational and social theorist, human performance and business consultant, futurist, and social architect. Visit her website at Sustainable Strategic Solutions. She may be reached at ireland.martha@gmail.com

Wealth, or the lack thereof, has been on the minds of many these long and often hotter, wetter, colder or drier summer days. Pundits compete daily with their predictions for when the recession will end and the economy will "recover." Will it be 2010? 2011? Those like Robert Reich and Gerald Celente claim that our current economic difficulties are not going to end and that we're in for a long-term--perhaps even permanent--state of decline.

Meanwhile, I have many friends and colleagues who are suffering financially, as I imagine you do, too. They're looking back on a lifetime of thinking they were, or someday could be, wealthy. Now they're sensing that not only will they most likely never be wealthy but find themselves slipping into what feels more like poverty. For so long so many have held fast to the American Dream that they're the wealthy in waiting, but now they wonder.

I recently had the opportunity to visit my fellow ecopsychologist and dear friend, Allison Ewoldt, and the subject of our global economic woes came up. She told me that our discussion reminded her of a Reconnecting with Nature workshop she had attended a few years ago where participates were inspired to ask nature, "What is wealth?" What she experienced that day had such a great impact on her life and her relationship with money that she decided to capture it in an article so others could also benefit from the wisdom she gained. Here is how she describes her Reconnecting with Nature activity on that memorable afternoon:

"Our physical reality is formed by energetic attractions we perceive through our senses, so Reconnecting with Nature activities begin with our sensing an attraction in nature. Usually as I go into nature something claims my attention right away, but this time was different. As I walked alone along a forest path asking permission from nature to learn its lessons on wealth, I waited for something to attract me. Everything looked beautiful, but nothing in particular caught my attention. As time went by I realized that this time my attraction was not the vibrant color of a flower, the beautiful song of a bird, the strength of a massive tree, or the softness of the moss on a rock. It was the forest in its entirety. This attraction held my attention, so I sat on a small boulder to 'listen' as its wordless lesson began.

How does one express a non-verbal, purely sensory experience in words? Something is always lost in the translation, but I will try. As I watched, a wealth of diverse, teeming life before me became apparent. I saw:

· The insect attracted by the flower, gaining sustenance from it as it helped in-kind by assisting pollination.
· The plants reaching for the life-giving energy of the sun and sharing it with the caterpillar.
· Roots attracted to the damp, moist earth while holding the earth in place.
· The 'dead' leaves and trees transforming before my very eyes into new earth for new life.

As I became aware of the exquisite interconnected richness of the forest, my consciousness shifted and I stopped seeing separate entities. Instead, the physical reality before me became a beautiful, continuous flow of mutually attractive relationships collectively giving rise to Life. Everything was receiving just enough energy to sustain itself in health, returning energy in like quantity back to the web of life of which it was a part. Even death of an individual element gave rise to the health of the whole. I began to sense myself as part of this whole--and I, too, experienced the seamless flow of energy, the joyous fulfillment of mutual support and reciprocity.

'Ah,' said my rational language-based brain, never too happy to be wordless for long and thus determined to translate my nonverbal awareness.'This is the lesson about wealth you are seeking. True wealth is a seamless flow of energy shared through a web of mutual support and reciprocity that's held together through our natural attractions. When we experience a separation from life's supportive web, the result is fear and fear blocks our flow of life-giving energy, damming it up and leading to greed. In blocking the reciprocal flow of shared energy we disrupt the intricate and exquisite balance in the web of life, and soon many problems arise--poverty, crime, degradation of the environment which sustains our very lives ... the list of negative consequences is almost endless.

'The irony is that those who take and hoard more than they need without giving back equally, thinking that this makes them 'wealthy,' are really impoverished of spirit and bereft of the true joy and fulfillment that only being in the flow life can bring. Energy flow, besides being the basis of wealth, is also necessary for health--individual, social, and environmental. When energy is blocked--again, because of fear, the major symptom of disconnection, and trauma--the result is illness. Health and wealth are really identical. They're the result of a seamless energy flow of mutual support and reciprocity.

'Then an additional thought occurred to me. Energy flow, besides being the basis of wealth, is also necessary for health, individual, social, and environmental. When energy is blocked -again, due to fear - the major symptom of disconnection - the result is illness. So you see? Health and wealth are really identical. They're the result of a seamless energy flow of mutual support and reciprocity.

'As we returned to the workshop at the appointed time and shared the wisdom gained from our attractions in nature, our personal values shifted closer to those of the web of life of which we are a part. And we felt wealthy beyond measure."

After Allison told me about this experience during a recent visit with the Ewoldts in Tucson, her husband Dave, who is a sustainability consultant, added, "True wealth can be best measured by the number and quality of mutually supportive relationships an individual organism can create and maintain. When set against the backdrop of the web of life that has been evolving sustainably for eons, we see that finding a support network of mutually attractive relationships is actually the prime activity of all living organisms. The living systems that we humans create would reflect a higher degree of wisdom were we to mirror this process. This type of wealth is naturally abundant."

Then Allison summarized her lesson from nature about wealth in one simple sentence:
"There is no profit-taking in nature, and the prevailing concept of profit is the key to the unsustainability of our current economic system."

I believe this particular summer in all it's unfamiliar diversity of temperatures and weather features brings a particularly timely lesson. We've been taught to measure our wealth in dollar signs and material possessions. But I see neither dollar signs nor possessions in the wild forest that surrounds our home here in Pine Mountain. Instead I see abundant health and wealth. I see that seamless flow of energy of which Allison speaks and I wonder, how might we find such wealth in our lives? How can we use the opportunity today's economic upheavals present to rearrange our lives so that accumulating dollars and possessions need no longer fill the bulk of our days, but that instead we might simply enjoy being part of the miracle of Life itself?

Summer, the growing time, provides us with a hint. Maybe what we see in our economy today is really both a decline and an incline. If we look at the origin of these two words we find that decline is from the Old French decliner, "to bend and turn aside," or from the Latin declinare, "to bend away from." Incline, on the other hand, is from the old French encliner or the Latin inclinare, meaning "to bend or bow toward."

Could the feelings we're experiencing now as we grapple with today's economic and environmental conditions represent a deep need to turn away from a way of life that has not been truly nourishing and to lean or bow toward our desire for the true sense of health and wealth that comes from being part of a seamless natural flow of energy with its joyous fulfillment of mutual support and reciprocity?

If, like the plants of summer, we were each to reach deep into the earth of our being and draw on the great innate wisdom there, a new way of life might sprout and flourish for us to harvest. That life might look quite different from our lives today, but might be far richer than we can imagine now.

Blessings of Summer,
Sarah

After the presentation a former member of the National Security Council who happened to be seated to my right turned to me and said, "[The QDR] seems like a fraud."

More recently Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), Chairman of the House Armed Services air and land forces subcommittee, referred to the QDR as a "PR stunt" and a "PR exercise" (as reported by Marjorie Censer, Inside the Pentagon, 18 June 2009.) Rep. Abercrombie then went on to offer a less than precise elaboration, saying, "It's all Thunderbird stuff, booms and all that."

I can not be all that sure what the former National Security Council member or Rep. Abercrombie meant by their characterizations of the QDR. But, having followed all four QDRs fairly closely, I can make an educated guess at what they are getting at.

Congress has intended that through the QDR the Pentagon will make a serious attempt to reconcile the national defense strategy to the defense posture of the services and from that presumed point of congruence reconcile it to the defense budget. Policy analysts frequently complain that strategy, posture and budget are dangerously out of whack. If the QDR process addresses this problem and then does the analytical and policy work required making real advances toward reconciliation then we can judge that it is meeting it stated purpose. If it results in a public document that uses rhetorical flourish in order to mask disjuncture of ends and means and to perpetuate prior posture and budget directions, then it is something like a 'fraud' or 'PR exercise.'

The unfolding 2010 QDR process gives us a good opportunity to look for evidence of either real reconciliation or PR exercise. A few pieces of evidence:

The complete article may be read here

Charles Knight is the co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives and editor of the Defense Strategy Review page - http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/. The webpage will closely follow the 2010 QDR process and track accumulating evidence of 'sincere effort' or 'PR stunt'.

When the "public option" campaign began, its leaders promoted a huge "Medicare-like" program that would enroll about 130 million people. Such a program would dwarf even Medicare, which, with its 45 million enrollees, is the nation's largest health insurer, public or private. But today "public option" advocates sing the praises of tiny "public options" contained in congressional legislation sponsored by leading Democrats that bear no resemblance to the original model.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the "public options" described in the Democrats' legislation might enroll 10 million people and will have virtually no effect on health care costs, which means the "public options" cannot, by themselves, have any effect on the number of uninsured. But the leaders of the "public option" movement haven't told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It's high time they did.

The bait

"Public option" refers to a proposal, as Timothy Noah put it, "dreamed up" by Jacob Hacker when Hacker was still a graduate student working on a degree in political science. In two papers, one published in 2001 and the second in 2007, Hacker, now a professor of political science at Berkeley, proposed that Congress create an enormous "Medicare-like" program that would sell health insurance to the non-elderly in competition with the 1,000 to 1,500 health insurance companies that sell insurance today.

Hacker claimed the program, which he called "Medicare Plus" in 2001 and "Health Care for America Plan" in 2007, would enjoy the advantages that make Medicare so efficient - large size, low provider payment rates and low overhead. (Medicare is the nation's largest health insurance program, public or private. It pays doctors and hospitals about 20 percent less than the insurance industry does, and its administrative costs account for only 2 percent of its expenditures compared with 20 percent for the insurance industry.)

Hacker predicted that his proposed public program would so closely resemble Medicare that it would be able to set its premiums far below those of other insurance companies and enroll at least half the non-elderly population. These predictions were confirmed by the Lewin Group, a very mainstream consulting firm. In its report on Hacker's 2001 paper, Lewin concluded Hacker's "Medicare Plus" program would enroll 113 million people (46 percent of the non-elderly) and cut the number of uninsured to 5 million. In its report on Hacker's 2007 paper, Lewin concluded Hacker's "Health Care for America Plan" would enroll 129 million people (50 percent of the nonelderly population) and cut the uninsured to 2 million.

Until last year, Hacker and his allies were not the least bit shy about highlighting the enormous size of Hacker's proposed public program. For example, in his 2001 paper Hacker stated:

[A]pproximately 50 to 70 percent of the non-elderly population would be enrolled in Medicare Plus.... Put more simply, the plan would be very large.... [C]ritics will resurface whatever the size of the public plan. But this is an area where an intuitive and widely held notion - that displacement of employment-based coverage should be avoided at all costs - is fundamentally at odds with good public policy. A large public plan should be embraced, not avoided. It is, in fact, key to fulfilling the goals of this proposal. (page 17)

In his 2007 paper, Hacker stated:

For millions of Americans who are now uninsured or lack ... affordable work place coverage, the Health Care for America Plan would be an extremely attractive option. Through it, roughly half of non-elderly Americans would have access to a good public insurance plan.... A single national insurance pool covering nearly half the population would create huge administrative efficiencies. (page 5)

Hacker's papers and the Lewin Group's analyses of them have been cited by numerous "public option" advocates. For example, when Hacker released his 2007 paper, Campaign for America's Future (CAF) published a press release praising it and drawing attention to the large size of Hacker's proposed public program. The release, entitled "Activists and experts hail Health Care for America plan," stated:

Detailed micro-simulation estimates suggest that roughly half of non-elderly Americans would remain in workplace health insurance, with the other half enrolled in Health Care for America.... A single national insurance pool covering nearly half the population would create huge administrative efficiencies.... Because Medicare and Health Care for America would bargain jointly for lower prices ..., they would have enormous combined leverage to hold down costs.

When the Lewin Group released its 2008 analysis of Hacker's 2007 paper, CAF's Roger Hickey wrote in the Huffington Post, "efficiencies achievable ... through Hacker's public health insurance program" would save so much money that the US could "cover everyone" for no more than we spend now.

The switch

Now let's compare the "single national health insurance pool covering nearly half the population" that Hacker and other "public option" advocates enthusiastically championed with the "public option" proposed by Democrats in Congress, and then let's inquire what Hacker and company said about it.

As readers of this blog no doubt know, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and three House committee chairman working jointly, published draft health care "reform" bills in June. (The third committee with bill-writing authority, the Senate Finance Committee, has yet to produce a bill.) According to the Congressional Budget Office, the "public option" proposed in the House "tri-committee" bill might insure 10 million people and would leave 16 to 17 million people uninsured. The "public option" proposed by the Senate HELP committee, again according to the Congressional Budget Office, is unlikely to insure anyone and would hence leave 33 to 34 million uninsured. The CBO said its estimate of 10 million for the House bill was highly uncertain, which is not surprising given how vaguely the House legislation describes the "public option."

Here is what the CBO had to say about the HELP committee bill:

The new draft also includes provisions regarding a "public plan," but those provisions did not have a substantial effect on the cost or enrollment projections, largely because the public plan would pay providers of health care at rates comparable to privately negotiated rates - and thus was not projected to have premiums lower than those charged by private insurance plans. (page 3)

Obviously the "public option" in the Senate HELP committee bill (zero enrollees; 17 million people left uninsured) and the "public option" in the House bill (10 million enrollees (maybe!); 34 million people left uninsured) are a far cry from the "public option" originally proposed by Professor Hacker (129 million enrollees; 2 million people left uninsured). Have we heard the Democrats in Congress who drafted these provisions utter a word about how different their "public options" are from the large Medicare-like program that Hacker proposed and his allies publicized? What have Professor Hacker and his allies had to say?

In public comments about the Democrats' "public option" provisions, the leading lights of the "public option" movement imply that Hacker's model is what Congress is debating. Sometimes they come right out and praise the Democrats' version as "robust" and "strong." But I cannot find a single example of a a statement by a "public option" advocate warning the public of the vast difference between Hacker's original elephantine, "Medicare-like" program and the Democrats' mouse version.

For example, on June 23, Hacker testified before the House Education and Labor Committee that "the draft legislation prepared by [the] special tri-committee promises enormous progress." He went on to enumerate all the benefits of a "public option." Yet the House tri-committee proposal bore no resemblance to the public plan he described in his papers and that the Lewin Group analyzed. Later, when Kaiser Health News asked Hacker in a July 6 interview why "your signature idea - a public plan - has become central to the health care reform debate," Hacker again praised his "public plan" proposal and offered no hint that the "public option" so "central to the debate" was very different from the one he originally proposed.

Ditto for Hacker's allies. Representatives of Health Care for America Now (HCAN), the organization most responsible for popularizing the "public option," repeatedly describe the House and Senate HELP committee bills as "strong" or "robust," always without any justification for this claim, and have repeatedly failed to warn the public that the "public options" they promote today are mere shadows of the "public options" they endorsed in the past. On July 15, the day the HELP committee passed its bill, Jason Rosenbaum blogged for HCAN:

The Senate HELP Committee has just referred a bill to the floor of the Senate with a strong public option.

Searching the websites of the organizations that serve on HCAN's steering committee - AFSCME, Democracy for America, Moveon.org and SEIU, for example - one will find not a shred of information that would help the reader comprehend how small and ineffective the "public options" proposed in the Democrats' bills are, nor how different these are from the one Hacker originally proposed. Yet these groups continue to urge their members and the public to "tell Congress to support a public option."

Hacker's original model compared with the Democrats' mouse model

It has become fashionable among advocates of a "public option" to trash the expertise and the motives of the Congressional Budget Office. But the CBO's characterization of the "public option" proposed in the Democrats' legislation is entirely reasonable. This becomes apparent the moment we compare Hacker's blueprint for his original "Medicare Plus" and "Health Care for America" programs with the "blueprints" (if tabula rasas can be called "blueprints") contained in the Senate HELP Committee and House bills.

Hacker's papers laid out these five criteria that he and the Lewin Group said were critical to the success of the "public option":

• The PO had to be pre-populated with tens of millions of people, that is, it had to begin like Medicare did representing a large pool of people the day it commenced operations (Hacker proposed shifting all or most uninsured people as well as Medicaid and SCHIP enrollees into his public program);
• Subsidies to individuals to buy insurance would be substantial, and only PO enrollees could get subsidies (people who chose to buy insurance from insurance companies could not get subsidies);
• The PO and its subsidies had to be available to all nonelderly Americans (not just the uninsured and employees of small employers);
• The PO had to be given authority to use Medicare's provider reimbursement rates; and
• The insurance industry had to be required to offer the same minimum level of benefits the PO had to offer.

Hacker predicted, and both of the Lewin Group reports concluded, that if these specifications were met Hacker's plan would enjoy all three of Medicare's advantages - it would be huge, it would have low overhead costs, and it would pay providers less than the insurance industry did. As a result, the "public option" would be able to set its premiums below those of the insurance industry and seize nearly half the non-elderly market from the insurance industry. According to the Lewin Group's 2008 report, Hacker's version of the "public option" would, as of 2007:

• Enroll 129 million enrollees (or 50 percent of the non-elderly);
• Have overhead costs equal to 3 percent of expenditures;
• Pay hospitals 26 percent less and doctors 17 percent less than the insurance industry (but these discounts would be offset to some degree by increases in payments to providers treating former Medicaid enrollees); and,
• Set its premiums 23 below those of the average insurance company.

I question some of Hacker's and the Lewin Group's assumptions, including their assumption that any public program that has to sell health insurance in competition with insurance companies could keep its overhead costs anywhere near those of Medicare (Medicare is a single-payer program that has no competition), especially during the early years when the public program will be scrambling to sign up enrollees. A public program will have to hire a sales force and advertise. It will have to open offices. It will have to negotiate rates, and perhaps contracts, with thousands of hospitals and hundreds of thousands of clinics, chemical treatment facilities, rehab units, home health agencies, etc. Or it will have to contract with someone to do all that. But I have little doubt that if a public program were to open with a large enough customer base, and it had the advantage of a law requiring that only its customers receive substantial subsidies, it could do what the Lewin Group said it could do.

Now let us compare Hacker's original model with the mousey "public options" proposed by the Senate HELP Committee and the House. Of Hacker's five criteria, only one is met by these bills! Both proposals require the insurance industry to cover the same benefits the "public option" must cover. None of the other four criteria are met. The "public option" is not pre-populated, the subsidies to employers and to individuals go to the "public option" and the insurance industry, employees of large employers cannot buy insurance from the "public option" in the first few years after the plan opens for business and maybe never (that decision will be made by whoever is President around 2015), and the "public option" is not authorized to use Medicare's provider payment rates. (The House bill comes the closest to authorizing use of Medicare's rates; it authorizes Medicare's rates plus 5 percent).

Is it any wonder the CBO concluded the Democrats' "public option" will be a tiny little creature incapable of doing much of anything? More curious is that CBO gave the House "public option" any credit at all (you will recall CBO said it would enroll maybe 10 million people). The CBO should have asked, Can the "public option" - as presented in either bill - survive?

Put yourself in the "public option" director's shoes

To see why the "public option" proposed by congressional Democrats remains at great risk of stillbirth, let's engage in a frustrating thought experiment. Let's imagine Congress has enacted the House version (it is not quite as weak as the HELP Committee model and thus gives us the greatest opportunity in our thought experiment to imagine a scenario in which the "public option" actually survives its start-up phase). Let us imagine furthermore that you have been foolish enough to apply for the job of executive director of the new "public option," and the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (the federal agency within which the program will be housed) decided to hire you. It's your first day on the job.

You know the House bill did not create a ready-made pool of enrollees for you to work with the way the 1965 Medicare law created a ready-made pool of seniors prior to the day Medicare commenced operations. You realize, in other words, that you represent not a single soul, much less tens of millions of enrollees. You will have to build a pool of enrollees from scratch. You also know the House bill authorized some start-up money for you, so you'll be able to hire some staff, including sales people if you choose. You can also open offices around the country, and advertise if you think it necessary. But you know you can't pay out too much money getting the "public option" started because the House bill requires that you pay back whatever start-up costs you incur within ten years. In other words, you may hire enough people and open enough offices and buy enough advertising to create a critical mass of enrollees nationwide, but you must do it quickly so that your start-up costs don't sink the "public option" during its first decade.

The only other feature in the House bill that appears to give you any advantage over the insurance industry is the provision requiring you to use Medicare's rates plus 5 percent, which essentially means you are authorized to pay providers 15 percent less than the insurance industry pays on average. But the House bill also says providers are free to refuse to participate in the plan you run.

So what do you do? Let's say you open offices in dozens or hundreds of cities, you hire a sales force to fan out across the country to sign up customers, you advertise on radio and TV to get potential customers (employers and individuals) to call your new sales force to inquire about the new "public option" insurance policy. What happens when potential customers ask your salespeople two obvious questions: what will the premium be and which doctors they can see? What do your employees say? They can't say anything. They haven't talked to any clinics or hospitals about participating at the 15-percent-below-industry-average payment rate, so they have no idea which providers if any will agree to participate. They also have no idea what the "public option" premium will be because they don't know whether providers will accept the low rates the plan is authorized to pay. And they have no idea about several other factors that will affect the premiums, including how much overhead the "public option" will rack up before it reaches a state of viability, or who the "public option" will be insuring - healthy people, sick people, or people of average health status.

So, let's say you redeploy your sales force. Now instead of talking to potential customers, you direct them to focus on providers first. But when your salespeople call on doctors and hospital administrators and ask them if they'll agree to take enrollees at below-average payment rates, providers ask how many people the "public option" will enroll in their area. Providers explain to your salespeople that they are already giving huge discounts, some as high as 30 to 40 percent off their customary charge, to the largest insurers in their area and they are not eager to do that for the "public option" unless the plan will have such a large share of the market in their area that it will deliver many patients to them. If the "public option" cannot do that, providers tell your salespeople, they will not agree to accept below-average payment rates.

In other words, you find that the "public option" is at the mercy of the private insurance market, not the other way around.

This thought experiment illustrates for you the mind-numbing chicken-and-egg problem created by any "public option" project that does not meet Hacker's criteria, most notably, the criterion requiring pre-population of the "public option." If the pre-population criterion isn't met, the poor chump who has to create the "public option" is essentially being asked to solve a problem that is as difficult as describing the sound of one hand clapping. You need both hands to clap.

How did the "Medicare Plus" proposal of 2001 (when Hacker first proposed it) get transformed into the tiny "public options" contained in the Democrats' 2009 legislation? The answer is that somewhere along the line it became obvious that the Hacker model was too difficult to enact and had to be stripped down to something more mouse-like in order to pass. Did the leading "public option" advocates realize this early in the campaign? Or midway through the campaign when the insurance industry began to attack the "public option"? Or late in the campaign when they found it difficult to persuade members of Congress to support Hacker's original model? Whatever the answer, will they find it in their hearts to tell their followers their original strategy was wrong?

I suspect the answer is different for different actors within the "public option" movement. Hacker surely knew what was in his original proposal and surely knows now that the Democrats' bills don't reflect his original proposal. Hacker and others familiar with his original proposal were probably betrayed by the process. As the "public option" concept became famous and edged its way toward the centers of power, they couldn't find the courage to resist the transformation of the original proposal into the mouse model.

For other actors within the "public option" movement, ignorance of Hacker's original proposal and of health policy in general may have led them to rely on more knowledgeable leaders in the movement. Their error, in other words, was to trust the wrong people and, as the "public option" came under attack, to cave in to group think. This error was facilitated by the "public option" movement's decision to avoid mentioning any details of the "public option" whenever possible.

What next?

Those of us in the American single-payer movement must continue to educate Congress and the public on the need for a single-payer system. We must also convince advocates of the "public option" that they have made two serious mistakes and, if they learn quickly from these mistakes, that real reform is still possible.

The first mistake was to think that a "public option" that merely took over a large chunk of the non-elderly market (as opposed to one that took over the entire market) could substantially reduce health care costs and thereby make universal coverage politically feasible. Any proposal that leaves in place a multiple-payer system -- even a multiple-payer system with a large government-run program in the middle of it -- is going to save very little money. Even if Hacker's original Health Care for America Plan had taken over half the non-elderly market and then reached homeostasis (something Hacker swore up and down it would do), the savings would have been relatively small. The reason for that is twofold. First, any insurance program, public or private, that has to compete with other insurers is going to have overhead costs substantially higher than Medicare's. (It is precisely because Medicare is a single-payer program that its overhead costs are low.) Second, the multiple-payer system Hacker would leave in place would continue to impose unnecessarily large overhead costs on providers.

The second mistake the "public option" movement made was to think the insurance industry and the right wing would treat a "public option" more gently than a single-payer. Conservatives have a long history of treating small incremental proposals such as "comparative effectiveness research" as the equivalent of "a government takeover of the health care system." It should have been no surprise to anyone that conservatives would shriek "socialism!" at the sight of the "public option," even the mouse model proposed by the Democrats.

The bait-and-switch strategy adopted by the "public option" movement has put the Democrats in a terrible quandary. Seduced by the false advertising about the potency of the "public option" to lower costs, Democrats have raised public expectations for reform to unprecedented levels. Failing to meet those expectations during the 2009 session of Congress, which is inevitable if the Democrats continue to promote legislation like the bills released in June, is going to have unpleasant consequences. Is there no way out of this quandary?

Conventional wisdom holds that if the Democrats don't pass a health care reform bill by December, they will have to wait till 2013 to try again. But if the "public option" movement were to join forces with the single-payer movement, the two movements could prove the conventional wisdom wrong. This won't happen, obviously, if the "public option" movement fails to perceive the reasons it failed.

It is conceivable the "public option" movement could decide the bait-and-switch strategy was wrong and that their only error was not to stick with Hacker's original model. It should be obvious now that that would also be a tactical blunder. We have plenty of evidence now that conservatives will react to the mousey version of the "public option" as if it were "a stalking horse for single-payer." We can predict with complete certainty they will treat Hacker's original version as something even closer to single-payer. If a proposal is going to be abused as if it were single-payer, why not actually propose a single-payer? At least then, when a particular session of Congress comes and goes and we haven't enacted a single-payer system, we will have educated the public about the benefits of a single-payer and have further strengthened the single-payer movement.

To sum up, "public option" advocates must choose between continuing to promote the "public option" and seeing their hopes for cost containment and universal coverage go up in smoke for another four years, and throwing their considerable influence behind single-payer legislation. At this late date in the 2009 session, it is unlikely that a single-payer bill could be passed even if unity within the universal coverage movement could be achieved. But if the "public option" wing and the single-payer wing join together to demand that Congress enact a single-payer system, December 2009 need not constitute a deadline.

Kip Sullivan belongs to the steering committee of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.

According to the inspector general, of the 360 banks surveyed, 156 said they'd used some of the funds to boost their capital cushion, 110 invested some of the money, 52 repaid debts, and 15 bought other banks with the funds. (A total of 611 banks have received bailout funds.)

Three hundred banks, or 83 percent of those surveyed, reported that some of the money had gone to support lending, but fewer than a third said their lending levels would have been lower [5] without the federal money.

Neil Barofsky [6], the special inspector general, said the Treasury Department should require banks to report how they use TARP funds. Currently, Treasury does not require banks to track TARP spending, nor do banks need to keep TARP funds in separate accounts. There are also no consequences for using funds for purposes other than spurring lending.

The Treasury Department dismissed Barofsky's call for greater transparency. Assistant Treasury Secretary Herbert Allison [7] wrote that because banks distribute TARP funds into general accounts, "it is not possible to say that investment of TARP dollars resulted in particular loans, investments or other activities by the recipient."

The AP says Barofsky countered by saying that banks likely have internal budgets for using the funds, so they could report on the general uses of the aid.

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT President Barack Obama has done some serious back-pedalling on the issue of health care reform during his journey to the White House. It's a well-worn path trod by, among others, Hillary Clinton during the 1990s and by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.

The wind at their backs comes from the medical, pharmaceutical, hospital and insurance industries which together have spent more than US$4.2 billion on lobbying during the last 10 years. A recent report in the Washington Post [1] says that, in the current battle against a government insurance plan, the health industry is spending $1.4 million a day lobbying key figures in the capital.

The fight over universal health care in the United States is being fought on three broad fronts reflecting three different positions: those for, those against, and those who are calling for a "private-public option" that would provide American consumers with "choice." Canadians are probably most familiar with the divide between those on the first front who support a public, universal, national health insurance (single payer) scheme, and those on the second who are against any public involvement in the health sector.

Everybody in, nobody out

Advocates [2] of a public single payer include Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers, the latter of whom brought a bill [3] before the House of Representatives that would provide U.S. residents access to "all medically necessary care, such as primary care and prevention, prescription drugs, emergency care, and mental health services."

The Conyers bill, taking a page out of Canada's health care legislation, would prohibit private insurers from selling coverage for services already included in the public insurance plan. The bill, which now has 93 co-sponsors [4] (20 per cent of House members), goes significantly further than Canadian legislation in prohibiting private, for-profit facilities from participating in a national, expanded and improved Medicare scheme. The plan would be financed with existing health care funds, as well as increased taxes on the top 5 per cent of income earners, a modest tax on stock and bond transactions and payroll and self-employment taxes.

In another departure from Canada, the Conyers bill would stream Native Americans in to the national health program. Support for the single payer option outlined in the bill is coming from the United Steelworkers [5], U.S. Physicians for a National Health Plan [6], the California Nurses Association [7] and, according to polls [8] conducted between October 2003 and February 2009, between 59 per cent and 75 per cent of the American public.

Public support for single payer was also strong when Hillary Clinton attempted to introduce modest reforms to the U.S. health system. What advocates learned then is being applied now. During the past several years, advocates have raised awareness about the benefits of a national, public health program -- in spite of the heavy-handed propaganda from the health industry. Between December 15 and 31, 2008, for example, more than 4200 "house parties" were held across the United States largely at the encouragement of Obama's legion of organizers. Ironically, while Obama has jumped off the single payer bandwagon, he has inspired a groundswell of support for "everybody in/nobody out" that is not only determined but knowledgeable as well.

The second front
The people campaigning for the U.S. status quo -- private, high-priced, employer-controlled health insurance -- include some notable Canadians, including Brian Day [9] and David Gratzer [10], whose views we have seen reflected within the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) in recent years.

Among the significant voices opposing [11] single payer are the American Association of Retired Persons, the Business Roundtable, The Lewin Group, Families USA, PhRMA and the American Medical Association [12], which argues that services should be "provided through private markets, as they are currently." The AMA's Principles for Health System Reform [13] include a "robust private insurance market" and "sustainable public programs for vulnerable populations."

That position, an echo of the one taken by the CMA nearly half a century ago, was rejected by the 1964 Royal Commission on Health Care [14]as being too costly and too short of the goal post. But the corporate media is also doing what it can to support the status quo, sweeping any discussion of single payer under the rug (a repeat performance of 1993 efforts at health care reform). A March 2009 study by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) [15] found a virtual blackout in the mainstream media of any reporting about the single payer option, despite support among a large majority of Americans.

The take-forever option
The third front -- those in favour of incremental progress -- appears to be a tactical alliance between the health and insurance industries, on the one hand, and those with financial links to the health and insurance industries on the other. Senator Max Baucus, chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, is described as the Senate's "point man" on health care reform and a leading opponent of a universal public program.

In June, the Standard [16], a leading newspaper in Baucus' home state of Montana, reported that Baucus had received "$1,500 a day, every day, from January 2003 through 2008″ from the health and insurance industries, more money than any other elected member. During the last two elections Baucus has also attracted almost $230,000 from the pharmaceutical industry, another strong opponent of a single payer system.

On June 2, Baucus announced that "everything is on the table" -- everything, that is, except for single payer. "It cannot pass," he told reporters, and could endanger any meaningful reform. During Senate Committee hearings on health care reform last month, single payer supporters showed up at a Finance Committee hearing to protest against their exclusion from hearings. They were arrested. But after hearing from angry, pro-single payer voters back home, Baucus softened his position -- he has drifted to the incremental middle.

This is probably not surprising since one of the senator's key paymasters, the insurance industry, has now decided that a pubic-private partnership might save its place in the health care pocketbook. On May 5, Karen Ignagni, head of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), announced that the lobby group had issued "a transparent call for a full-scale renovation and a complete overhaul of the existing regulatory mechanism" that governs the industry.

AHIP, representing some 1300 health insurers, has promised -- not for the first time -- to end its long-standing practice of claim denials, discrimination and premium-gouging. Industry observers are not holding their breath, but the "middle ground" is becoming crowded with health industry representatives, politicians on their payroll and the White House. Ironically, government funding to cover the 47 million uninsured, if channeled through subsidies to the private insurance industry, could significantly increase its revenues. What the industry does not want, however, is further government regulation. The goal of industry advocates of this so called 'middle way' is new public money without strings. Depending on the content of future legislation, it could be a bonanza for industry investors.

Sidelined in the entire debate is the AFL-CIO, which has remained mum on the single payer option supported by some of its affiliates. The labour movement's key speaker on national issues, the AFL-CIO seems to have adopted the view that anything is better than nothing. Its website [17] asks "What's Wrong with America's Health Care?" -- but clearly "everybody in/nobody out" is not one of the solutions to the myriad of problems listed.

The Federation is a member of the Health Care For America Now [18] coalition that supports a private insurance option. At a June 25 demonstration [19] in front of the US Congress, an unidentified AFL-CIO representative argued that single payer was "a kind of thing that throws everybody off the track," articulating fears that even modest reforms like affordable premiums and coverage for the uninsured might be sacrificed to an unobtainable goal. "We feel that health care reform is the way to go," she said, "because something has to be done NOW!"

So what does this have to do with us who live above the 49th parallel? The answer, for better or worse is "plenty."

The Canadian and U.S. insurance markets are almost entirely integrated, thanks in part to the North American Free Trade Agreement. A quick look at the list of members of the Canadian Life & Health Insurance Association (CLHIA) shows some important overlaps with AHIP in the United States, including Manulife (through its subsidiary, John Hancock Financial Services), Aetna, Cigna (which purchased Great-West's US subsidiary last year for US$2B), MetLife, New York Life Insurance, Prudential, State Farm, Transamerica and Zurich.

The CLHIA's June 2009 report contains a number of recommendations to strengthen the industry's role in the provision of insurance, including tax and financial incentives to enable Canadians to purchase of private insurance. The industry has already secured significant subsidies for private insurance coverage amounting to $5 billion in 2004, according to health economist, Robert Evans. The industry's submission to the post-Chaoulli consultation in Quebec cautioned the province, "It is not enough to lift the prohibition on private insurance in the sectors financed by public plans in order for private complementary insurance products to spring into existence. Privates insurance must also be allowed to provide added value." An example of "added value" would be queue-jumping.

But more to the point, Canadian governments are staging an assault on health care at the urging and with the support of insurers, employers, private providers, the media and right wing ideologues. Since 1995, for example, when Alberta became the first province to remove outpatient physiotherapy from the pubic insurance plan, a whole section of the health sector -- outpatient rehab services -- was privatized and delisted, reducing patient access but boosting insurance industry profits.

That was a short 10 years, and the privatization "train" is still going full steam ahead. But, like the ever-growing number of uninsured Americans, the number of people with private benefits in Canada is also falling and, of those who are covered, high deductibles, co-pays and claim denials are the order of the day.

Whatever happens in the U.S. it will have an impact on our ability to not only protect medicare in Canada, but to expand it as well -- an issue that is becoming more and more urgent.

We share a continent with Americans, and soon, if economic integration continues, we may share a health care system with them as well. It is in our interest to see Americans get what they have needed for so long: a national health system that provides universal coverage based on need, not on ability to pay.

Colleen Fuller is a health care activist with the B.C. and Canadian health coalitions. She is the author of Caring for Profit: How Corporations Are Taking Over Canada's Health Care System (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives/New Star Books, 1998) and, with Diana Gibson, The Bottom Line: The Truth Behind Private Health Insurance in Canada (NuWest Press/Parkland Institute, 2006).

Source URL (retrieved on Jul 15 2009 - 7:40pm): http://www.rabble.ca/news/2009/07/whats-stake-us-health-care-debate [2]

Links:

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/05/AR2009070502770.html?wprss=rss_print&sid=ST2009http://www.http://www.washingtonpost.com:80/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/register

[2] http://www.singlepayeraction.org/blog/?p=489

[3] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR00676:@@@D&summ2=m&

[4] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR00676:@@@P

[5] http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3961

[6] http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_resources.php

[7] http://www.calnurses.org/

[8] http://www.wpasinglepayer.org/PollResults.html

[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBzie4kq6MA

[10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DII7v8yeRjs

[11] http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/07/health-cheat-sheet-moneyinpoli.html

[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/politics/11health.html?_r=1

[13] http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/advocacy/current-topics-advocacy/health-system-reform/ama-hsr-principles.shtml

[14] http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hcs-sss/com/fed/hall-eng.php

[15] http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3733

[16] http://www.mtstandard.com/articles/2009/06/14/state/hjjajdifjijigd.txt

[17] http://www.aflcio.org/issues/healthcare/whatswrong/

[18] http://healthcareforamericanow.org/site/content/statement_of_common_purpose

[19] http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3937

[20] http://www.rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/i-read-news-today-oh-boy/2009/06/will-get-fooled-again-iran-public-health-care-and-fa

[21] http://www.rabble.ca/babble/national-news/public-health-care-under-attack-bc

[22] http://www.rabble.ca/user

[23] http://www.rabble.ca/user/register

The latest manifestation of this continuity came last week when Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, announced plans to transform the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) from a pilot project into a permanent budget item. Blair also announced plans to establish a "Reserve Officers' Training Corps" to train unidentified future intelligence officers in US college classrooms. Like students receiving PRISP funds, the identities of students participating in these programs would not be known to professors, university administrators or fellow students -- in effect, these future intelligence analysts and agents would conduct their first covert missions in our university classrooms.

Four years ago I wrote a series of CounterPunch exposés on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), then a pilot project funded under section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act. PRISP links undergraduate and graduate students with US security and intelligence agencies like the NSA or CIA, and unannounced to universities, professors or fellow-students, PRISP-students enter American university campuses, classrooms, laboratories and professor's offices without disclosing links to these agencies. PRISP was originally conceived by anthropologist Felix Moos, long a proponent of using anthropological knowledge in waging of counterinsurgency campaigns -- an area of growing interest to the Obama administration as it prepares for prolonged soft power counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan.

It seems likely that many of the affected disciplines will offer little resistance and some may quickly warm to announcements of any new funding stream. Traditionally, the disciplines of political science, history or area specialists coming from the humanities have seldom resisted such developments; but for disciplines like anthropology, these undisclosed intelligence-linked programs present devastating ethical and practical problems, as the non-discloser of funding and links to intelligence agencies flies in the face of the basic ethical principles of the discipline. But even without the problems for individual disciplinary ethics codes, the presence of these undisclosed secret sharers in our classrooms betrays fundamental trusts that lie at the core of honest academic endeavors.

While the National Intelligence Director's move to make PRISP a permanent budget item will damage the academic freedom and integrity of American universities, it will likely be met by the open arms of university administrators facing crashed university endowments and dwindling budgets. That some administrators would so easily accommodate themselves and their institutional integrity for the promise of funds should be of little surprise, but I fear that the combined forces of the current economic collapse conjoined with President Obama's ability to bring a new liberal credibility to the this warmed-over Bush era project will induce many faculty and students to seriously consider participating in these programs. Times are hard and as funds get scarce it will be increasingly difficult for many to say no.

This development is just the latest installment in on ongoing efforts to increase the militarization of American higher education. None of this should be surprising in a nation that alone spends about 48% of the planet's military budget. In the social sciences, these shifts away from broad funding sources designed to create independent knowledgeable scholars, to those now requiring indentured servitude has been a long time coming.

Back in the early 1990s when the National Security Education Program (NSEP) was first introduced it was widely condemned by professional associations like the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Latin American Studies Association for blurring the lines between independent scholarship raised by NSEP's its requirements that program participants later seek employment in governmental agencies. But with the depressed economy, plummeting endowment funds at universities and foundations, the difficult academic job market, and scarce academic funding sources, I fear that professional associations' reactions against these developments will be muted. As pilot programs, PRISP and the Intelligence Community Scholars Programs made scarce funds available to students, as traditional non-payback funding programs were being cut. Programs like PRISP that seek to tie young scholars to agencies like CIA early in their career as a means of bringing new ideas and skills to these agencies will fail in meeting the claimed goal of getting these agencies to think in new ways because such ties to institutional culture early in student-agent careers will increase the influence of agency cultural groupthink while diminishing the impact of academic culture. If the Obama administration really wants to improve governmental agencies' knowledge of and approaches to the world, they need to increase funding to a broad range of educational funding programs that do not encumber or limit the range of knowledge in the ways that programs like PRISP do.

This move to establish PRISP as a permanent budgetary item is the sort of program that likely will speed through congress -- which can then claim it is both supporting education funding, and military and intelligence sectors, with a bonus feel-good work-ethic mandate thrown-in by requiring students to payback their funds through required future governmental service. But this push will be done without an outside assessment of PRISP as pilot program. PRISP needs an independent assessment of what it has accomplished -- including an assessment of the impact of the predatory penalties facing former PRISP students who come to realize that they do not wish to fulfill their commitments to work for these agencies upon graduation. Because of the lack of transparency surrounding PRISP, we have little idea what is really going on with the program. Last year I was able to identify one social science recipient of PRISP funds who explained to me that PRISP had been such a failure in finding social scientists to fund that PRISP had sought out this person and provided them with funds for work that was already underway just to spend-down the PRISP budget. Given these recent difficulties with the program, I wonder if the current expansion of PRISP is a supply-side effort to troll the pool of increasingly underfunded and debt-carrying desperate young scholars with few other funding options.

Professional associations like the American Association of University Professors, the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association need to speak out in opposition of the permanent establishment of PRISP. PRISP risks further blurring already hazy borders marking proper independent academic roles, and it stands to confuse academic identities in ways that many will not even realize. Some of these processes are reminiscent of a recurrent motif in Philip K. Dick's stories where protagonists becomes unclear of their own agency and identity; becoming unsure of their own histories and memories, or true political alliances -- in effect becoming undercover agents with identities unknown even to themselves. As this new generation of programs covertly brings undeclared and unidentifiable students into our universities they disrupt university identities and transforms the roles all who teach, research, study and work there in ways that they will not necessarily understand -- as institutions of higher learning further lose their independence and become unwitting agents of state intelligence functions.

Such an order would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

After months of internal debate over how to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, White House officials are growing increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may prove impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the facility by the president's January 2010 deadline.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt did not directly respond to questions about an executive order but said the administration would address the cases of Guantanamo detainees in a manner "consistent with the national security interests of the United States and the interests of justice."

One administration official suggested the White House was already trying to build support for an executive order.

"Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order," the official said. Such an order can be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation, but civil liberties groups generally oppose long-term detention, arguing that detainees should either be prosecuted or released.

The Justice Department has declined comment on the prospects for a long-term detention system while internal reviews of Guantanamo detainees are underway. The reviews are expected to be completed by July 21.

In a May speech, President Obama broached the need for a system of long-term detention and suggested that it would include congressional and judicial oversight. "We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the Executive Branch decide alone," the president said.

Some of Obama's top legal advisers, along with a handful of influential Republican and Democratic lawmakers, have pushed for the creation of a "national security court" to supervise the incarceration of detainees deemed too dangerous to release but who cannot be charged or tried.

But the three senior government officials said the White House has turned away from that option, at least for now, because legislation establishing a special court would be both difficult to pass and likely to fracture Obama's own party. These officials, as well as others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations.

On the day Obama took office, 242 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo. In his May speech, the president outlined five strategies the administration would use to deal with them: criminal trials, revamped military tribunals, transfers to other countries, releases and continued detention. (Read our sidebar: "Review of Gitmo Detainees Has Been Slow and Complex.")

Since the inauguration, 11 detainees have been released or transferred, one prisoner committed suicide and one was moved to New York to face terrorism charges in federal court.

Administration officials said the cases of about half of the remaining 229 detainees have been reviewed for prosecution or release. Two officials involved in a Justice Department review of possible prosecutions said the administration is strongly considering criminal charges in federal court for Khaled Sheik Mohammed and three other detainees accused of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The other half, the officials said, present the greatest difficulty because these detainees cannot be prosecuted either in federal court or military commissions. In many cases, the evidence against them is classified, has been provided by foreign intelligence services, or has been tainted by the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques.

Attorney General Eric Holder agreed with an assessment offered during congressional testimony this month that fewer than 25 percent of the detainees would be charged in criminal courts and that 50 others have been approved for transfer or release. One official said the administration is still hoping that as many as 70 Yemeni citizens will be moved, in stages, into a rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia.

Three months into the Justice Department's reviews, several officials involved said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees can not be charged or released.

The White House has spent months meeting with key congressional leaders in the hopes of reaching agreement on long-term detention, even as public support for such a plan has wavered as lawmakers have sought to prevent detainees from being transferred to their home states.

Lawyers for the administration are now in negotiations with Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., over separate legislation that would revamp military commissions. A senior Republican staff member said that senators have yet to see "a comprehensive, detailed policy" on long-term detention from the administration.

"They can do it without congressional backing, but I think there would be very strong concerns," the staff member said, adding that "Congress could cut off funding" for any detention system established in the United States.

Concerns are growing among Obama's advisers that Congress may try to assert too much control over the process. Earlier this week, Obama signed an appropriations bill that forces the administration to report to Congress before moving any detainee out of Guantanamo and prevents the White House from using available funds to move detainees onto U.S. soil.

"Legislation could kill Obama's plans," said one government official involved. The official said an executive order could be the best option for the president at this juncture.

Under one White House draft that was being discussed earlier this month, according to administration officials, detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. soil, but their ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review. U.S. citizens would not be held in the system. (Last month, ProPublica explored the key issues around preventive detention.)

Such detainees -- those at Guantanamo and those who may be captured in the future -- would also have the right to legal representation during confinement and access to some of the information that is being used to keep them behind bars. Anyone detained under this order would have a right to challenge his detention before a judge.

Officials argue that the plan would give detainees more rights and allow them a better chance to one day end their indefinite incarceration than they have now at Guantanamo.

But some senior Democrats see long-term detention as tantamount to reestablishing the Guantanamo system on U.S. soil. "I think this could be a very big mistake, because of how such a system could be perceived throughout the world," Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told Holder.

One administration official said future transfers to the United States for long-term detention would be rare. Al-Qaida operatives captured on the battlefield, which the official defined as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and possibly the Horn of Africa, would be held in battlefield facilities. Suspects captured elsewhere in the world could be transferred to the United States for federal prosecution, turned over to local authorities, or returned to their home country.

"Going forward, unless it's an extraordinary case, you will not see new transfers to the U.S. for indefinite detention," the official said.

Instituting long-term detention through an executive order would leave Obama vulnerable to charges that he is willing to forsake the legislative branch of government, as his predecessor often did. Bush's detention policies suffered successive defeats in the courts in part because they lacked congressional approval and tried to exclude judicial oversight.

"There is no statute prohibiting the president from doing this through executive order and so far courts have not ruled in ways that would bar him from doing so," said Matthew Waxman, who worked on detainee issues at the Defense Department during Bush's first term. But Waxman, who waged an internal battle inside the Bush administration for more congressional cooperation, said the "courts are more likely to defer to the president and legislative branch when they speak with one voice on these issues."

Walid bin Attash, who is accused of involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and who was held at a secret CIA prison, could be among those subject to long-term detention, according to one senior official.

Little information on bin Attash's case has been made public, but officials who have reviewed his file said the Justice Department has concluded that none of the three witnesses against him can be brought to testify in court. One witness, who was jailed in Yemen, escaped several years ago. A second witness remains incarcerated, but the government of Yemen will not allow him to testify.

Administration officials believe that testimony from the only witness in U.S. custody, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, may be inadmissible because he was subjected to harsh interrogation while in CIA custody.

"These issues haven't morphed simply because the administration changed," said Juan Zarate, who served as Bush's deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"The challenge for the new administration is how to solve these legal question of preventive detention in a way that is consistent with the Constitution, legitimate in the eyes of the world and doesn't create security loopholes that causes Congress to worry," Zarate said.

Now, at the age of 23, Chris is a college graduate on his way up the corporate ladder, and Taylor sits in an 8' X 12' cell, his home for the next 5 years.
What happened? What went wrong for Taylor in the years between kindergarten and adulthood? Who is responsible?

From the time each child left the house on that first day of school and reached beyond the boundaries of the family, their lives followed different paths.
On the first day of school, Chris' mom had a meeting, but Chris' dad, who was an executive with a locally-based, national insurance firm, took the morning off and drove Chris to school. Chris arrived with fresh haircut, and new outfit and backpack.

The classroom was well equipped with audio-visual aids including three computers, a wide variety of supplies, and unmarred desks and chairs. The piano sat behind a new area rug in bright colors that depicted the alphabet. Outside the large windows Chris could see a sprawling, multi-activity, play structure. Chris' school had a cafeteria, a gym, and a small auditorium that would be part of school life from 1st grade on. The grade school staff included two counselors, and a nurse and psychologist that were shared with one other school.

Taylor woke the first day of school full of enthusiasm. Best jeans and tee shirt were topped by new shoes bought on payday and stared at for subsequent days in anticipation of wearing them for the first time. The used backpack belonged to Taylor's older brother, James, and a prize possession since it sported the colors and logo of the state college basketball champs.

James fixed Taylor's breakfast as their father had already left for work and their mother was asleep after her night job. They walked the three blocks to school hand in hand.

Taylor's classroom was in a two story brick building. At the front door a man greeted the two and nodded to James to pass. They entered through the framework of a metal detector down a dimly light hall. Ahead Taylor could see the shine on the linoleum emanating from double glass doors chained at the other end. Taylor's classroom had no piano, no computer, no rug, limited supplies, and mismatched, but serviceable, desks and chairs. The grade school staff included one counselor and a nurse that was shared with the six grade schools in the district. The playground consisted of a basketball court, several marked off games on the blacktop and a set of six metal, strapped-seated swings.

Throughout their school years, Chris and Taylor experienced very different lives. Taylor's dad had worked at a box-making plant while going to night school at the local community college. Taylor's mom had worked full time and cleaned houses on the weekends during this time to make ends meet. Both of them worked hard toward becoming a part of the American Dream, an upper middle class, homeowner with comparable social life and economic stability.
After Taylor was born, his mother went to work nights in order to take care of him during the day. His father had completed his schooling and, now, worked days.

As a black accountant in an insurance firm, Taylor's dad was passed over several times for promotions in the following years. His mom, still, cleaned a few "regular's" houses on weekends. They had applied for a house loan but could only qualify for a subprime loan with monthly payments they couldn't afford while raising a family. They like many others were caught in the middle, earning too much to qualify for government programs that might have helped, directly or indirectly, through healthcare or childcare, and too little to put back, to save or invest on their own.

Chris was from a white, upper middle class home. Living in a school district with high property values and, therefore, a substantial tax base, afforded Chris a commendatory secondary education. And, with hard work and good grades, an Ivy League college followed.

Taylor's mother went to work in an upscale dress boutique once Taylor was in school full days. Not wanting to buy in an area where property values continued to fall and not being able to afford a house in a better neighborhood, the new job enabled them to put money aside to build a larger down payment for a house. That is, until a boutique patron found money missing from her purse and accused Taylor's mom, who lost her job on the patron's suspicions.

When Taylor was 8, his mother went back to work cleaning houses, leaving James, age 12, in charge. Over the years James' much-older, social group became Taylor's. By the time Taylor's parents realized they had a problem with James, his influence over Taylor was strong. Taylor had looked up to his brother all his life. James was cool, James had the answers. The "gang" of friends was not violent and, mostly, ran the neighborhood, sometimes shoplifting from the neighborhood convenience store or writing graffiti on street signs or sides of buildings. As long as Taylor kept his grades up, his parents looked no further for signs of trouble. And, Taylor himself saw his activities as "normal" compared to the activities of other youth in his neighborhood.

As Taylor's awareness of the outside world developed throughout high school, his awareness of the injustices of being black and poor began to grow bringing with it an anger and resentment for those more privileged. He saw how badly society had treated his parents and he saw other sons and daughters of white, affluent families driving nice cars, having nice clothes, the newest electronics or going on graduation cruises and obtaining admittance to prestigious colleges and universities. He was resentful and jealous and that fueled his anger. His personal examples of people "doing well" were pimps and drug dealers who sported fancy cars, expensive jewelry, and an air of success and confidence.

Taylor wasn't the only one at his school whose eyes smoldered from the inequalities they had suffered. Violence erupted in the halls and students formed tight groups after school either for safety in numbers or to intimidate. The school, and the system it functions within, had failed Taylor. As the institution that has the most affect on each child's life outside of the family during formative years, Taylor's time at school and the social structure that it reinforced created a hostile, depressing and, often, hopeless atmosphere. His family, loving and caring though they were, worked long hours and had many pressures. The seeds for bigger trouble were blowing in the wind.

So how did Chris and Taylor come to their individual circumstances at 23?

At 22, Taylor had moved to an apartment with his pregnant girlfriend and brother, James, and two friends. The economy was in a slump and many labor jobs were being eliminated. Taylor was laid off from this job at the local food processing plant. He worked, for a while, at a local fast food restaurant, but his peers felt he was selling out and lost respect for him. James and the other roommates were into petty crimes and drug dealing to pay their bills, and they always seemed to have money in their pockets. Taylor started selling marijuana. He refused to traffic in the crack cocaine of his neighborhood, feeling it was the scourge of his black brothers.

At this same time, Chris was just graduating college and a grand celebration was being planned. Marijuana was not unfamiliar to Chris either. There was an accepted attitude that partaking during last night study sessions and philosophical discussions was cool and part of being amongst the intellectuals.

The day of the party, one of Chris' friends suggested that they purchase marijuana for the celebration. Striking out with their usual connections, they headed for the seedier part of town to try their luck. After several inquiries, they were directed to Taylor who sold them 1 ounce.

Upon the exchange, all parties were arrested by the police who had been observing from nearby. Chris' dad hired a private attorney that was recommended by his employer; and as a first offense, Chris was allowed to enter a diversions program of drug-awareness classes. The result of completing the program was a complete expunging of the offender's record. The maximum sentence for his offense would have been 10 years.

Taylor had served 6 months for a first offense possession of marijuana at age 19. Although he qualified, there was no diversion offered to him. As his second offense, his public defender was not able to keep Chris out of prison and he was sentenced to 5 years. The maximum sentence for his offense would, also, have been 10 years.

Chris has put the unfortunate experience in the past, an indiscretion of youth. His biggest regret was missing his graduating party, a reward for his years of hard work. Taylor will live with his "unfortunate" experience every day for the next 5 years and beyond. In a three strike state, Taylor now has two strikes and one more could put him in prison for the rest of his life.

Black students are more likely to attend schools in areas with high concentrations of poverty. Because most of our school's revenues come from property taxes, school districts with the most poverty also have the poorest schools, with less qualified teachers, lower expectations and a less challenging curriculum. At the time of college admittance, these schools are not considered to have proper educational foundations for higher education. Even children who graduate from these schools with good grades have a hard time finding a college who wants them.

To make matters worse for the young adults who manage to graduate and are willing to take on the responsibilities of adulthood, the employment situation for labor jobs is dyer. With the passing of legislation and the implementation of policies that encouraged U.S. companies to move their labor production outside the country, unemployment rates for those in poverty, many of whom were African Americans, have been considerable. Recently the practice of doing credit checks for prospective employees has, also, hurt employment opportunities for the poor. And, with our recent economic woes that situation has deteriorated even further.

Add this to the fact that our justice system is biased towards blacks, and one can see why blacks made up 41 percent of the nation's prison and jail inmates in 2006. In the area of drug offenses alone, blacks make up 36.8% of those arrested for drug offenses, 42% of those in federal prisons for drug felonies, and 58% of those in state prisons for drug felonies. This despite the fact that there are estimated to be 5 times more white drug users than black. And of the persons convicted of drug felonies, blacks are more likely to go to prison (51%) than their white counterparts (38%).

Often targeted with racial profiling, a study from Maryland showed that, although comprising only 17.5% percent of the traffic and speeders on Interstate 95, African Americans comprised 70% of the traffic stops.

In states where the "three strikes" law exists, blacks are also unfairly targeted. Studies in Los Angeles and San Francisco showed that the three strikes law was applied to blacks at a rate 17 times higher than whites and 13 times higher than whites, respectively.

The answer to this inequality is not to increase prison incarceration for whites but to reduce the rate of incarceration for non-violent drug offenders in lieu of drug treatment and job training.

The results of the current policies are:

• 1,559,200 children has a father in prison at midyear 2007; nearly half (46%) were children of black fathers.

• A majority of parents in both State (62%) and Federal (84%) prison were held more than 100 miles from their last place of residence."

• Because census data includes an inmate's residence as the state in which they are incarcerated, every dollar transferred to a 'prison community' due to the county's population, is a dollar that is not given to the home community of a prisoner. These communities are among the most disadvantaged urban areas and the most in need of aid. For example, in New York State, 2/3 of the inmate population comes from New York City but 91% are housed in prison in upstate New York.

• Throughout the 80's and 90s, the number of prisons grew from 600 to over 1,000. Ten states had more than 20 new prisons with Texas topping the list at 120. And even with the increase, the currently prison system is operating at 32% over capacity. This, in part, is due to mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent drug users.

• The nonviolent prisoner population in America is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.

• There are three times as many black people who live in prison cells as in college dorms

• Overcrowding and unchecked health issues have resulted in an AIDS rate 3 times higher than the general population, and positive or latent tuberculosis cases 50-100% higher

• The average cost of housing an inmate at a state prison is $67.55/day or $24,000/year. Per day states spend over $17million to house non-violent drug offenders, over $6trillion per year. For every dollar spent on incarceration, one less dollars is available for education, or health care. Federal spending is estimated to be $3billion.

• Department of corrections data show that about a fourth of those initially imprisoned for nonviolent crimes are sentenced a second time for committing a violent offense. Even if the current system doesn't cultivate violence, it can be seen that it doesn't help to reduce violent habits.

• As the Hispanic population becomes significant enough to warrant studies, the same pattern of judicial bias is emerging.

Marc Morial, former New Orleans mayor, feels that "conservatives blame a lack of family values while liberals blame a lack of government programs, with neither side seeing the whole picture." He believes that minority students need more early children education, longer school days and years, and meaningful summer jobs. "We need to get serious about true investment on the front end."
U.S. Representative Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) points out that we are sending huge numbers of blacks to prison only to have them return to society with no jobs or job skills, no quality of life, and a growing environment of unrest and crime. "It warns us that we are risking an entire generation of African-American young men."

Maybe Chris will feel differently after trying to buy a first home and finding that her sex is working against her in a way that can't be ignored. Until now socialization has blinded Chris to any disadvantages to her male counterparts that she may have experienced.

Reflecting on Taylor and Chris and their paths to adulthood, is the future any brighter for Taylor with a strike two, felony conviction and limited education? Will Chris ever be enlightened to the inequalities that her privilege manifests? And more importantly, will she act upon whatever insight she does gain?

Although each of us is an individual with freedom to make choices concerning our paths in life, the playing field is not equal for all. We must always try to be aware of our circumstances in relation to others, and we must act upon the inequalities that are revealed to us throughout life.

---

1 Common Sense for Drug Policy: Race and Prison. http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/64. Copyright 2000-2008.

2 Associated Press: More blacks Latinos in jail than college dorms, "Civil right advocates say Census Bureau figures are startling, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21001543/. September 2007.

3 Racial fairness questioned "4 in 10 young black men caught in justice system? " http://www.casaplumeria.com/rapsheet/race.htm . Prensa Pacifica: Ocean Park, Ca. Copyright 1996.

Colored people and people with different features do not have the luxury of shedding their skin and leaving their race behind. They hold on to what this difference means for them and that is their ethnicity. They accept it as part of their identity because they have no choice, they can't hide it. I had met a Japanese-American family in NY when I was growing up and I asked the parents when they had moved to the US. I was a kid so they were tolerant of the question and they answered me. The woman told me that they had just moved to NY a year before but they were born in California, I asked "Then when did your parents move here?" She said "Our parents were born there too." I must have looked really confused because she told me that her great-great-great-grandparents had come to the USA on a boat in the 1800's. Then I must have looked even more confused because she asked me with a chuckle; "Why are your eyes crossed?" I said "If you were born here and your family has been here for so long, then how come you haven't turned white yet?"

I was 11 and we had just moved to the US, for one reason or another my younger sisters and I thought that becoming American meant turning white... We even had preferences on what colour hair and eyes we wanted. Well we couldn't turn our skins white, we coloured our hair as teenagers but more to look cool than to look white- or maybe not... Our skin colour is the same, maybe a bit lighter in the winter than summer- but pretty much we have a healthy "tan" all year round. I know that I do not identify with my cousins who live and grew up in the Philippines as well as I do with my friends who grew up here in the US. I call myself an American, but I am not white. My children are American but they are not white. My husband is American but he is not white. My cousins, nephews, and nieces who were all born here are all Americans and none of them are white! Why is it that as a child I thought all Americans were white? I knew about different countries and different races; we had Geography and World Cultures in the school I had attended.

My explanation is the Filipino obsession with American shows like "Baywatch" and "Mac Gyver" who always had white leading roles and were the quintessential American examples we had access to. We watched movies produced in Hollywood like "Star Wars" and "Goldie" and we just knew that the actors had to be American because they were white. Being white was idealized. When we were told by our parents that we were moving to America we were excited and anxious. Talk floated about amongst the elders that it took at least five years to become an American citizen, sometimes longer. There was talk about how the children will become lighter because of the cold seasons and the time spent indoors. My sisters and I heard these talks and we whispered to each other the wishes that we had when we became Americans. I wanted to be blonde with purple eyes like Elizabeth Taylor's. My sister had wanted to be blonde too, but with blue eyes because it was her favourite colour. The fact that the shows and movies we watched may have had some coloured people was lost on us. We obsessed over American music, memorising lyrics to whole albums by Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. The only thing we could not do was dress like the Americans we saw on the TV shows and movies. We didn't have access to the type of bathing suits Pamela Anderson's character "CJ" wore, nor did we have her physique. We believed what the media told us about Americans, we believed the violence that was portrayed by the blacks (whom we did not consider American but African) and the Latinos (who could not be American because all the ones we saw on TV were from Mexico, Cuba, or Spain). It was a shock when we finally did move to New York City; is this the only city in the USA where whites are considered the minority? We moved to the US the beginning of summer and I did not see a single white person until the first day of school two months later. There were two white kids in my 6th grade class. All of my teachers were white.

In the 7th grade I met a white girl named Jaime who had red hair. One day in the lunchroom our entire table was talking about what countries our families were from. Jaime loudly proclaimed herself Irish and the only real white person in the class, an Italian girl (who had a tan complexion) automatically piped up and said "Uh-uh, Italians are white too!" They argued about who was "whiter" and more "American" between the two ethnicities. They argued that the whiter your skin then the more American you had to be, the Irish girl was gaining an edge- they started talking about how many red-heads, blondes, and brunettes they had in the family. They talked about how they had relatives who had fought in the civil war and how white their skin was. They had an audience; young, eager, 13 year old girls who all wanted to say something but could not (none of us were white you see). Meanwhile another girl whose family had just moved to USA from Poland the year before had been listening to the exchange from one table over. When there was a pause in the "conversation" she shortly told the two "I am blonde and I have blue eyes, I am whiter than either of you." The only other white person in this area of the lunch room and she ended the debate with her statement. We all knew that a statement like that was all it would take. For the life of me I still don't know why I didn't just say "Does it really matter who is more white? Does it really matter what colour skin you have?" No one said it. I knew that it did make a difference. I knew if I said anything I'd be ostracized for trying to break up something I have no experience with or worse; that I was trying to pass off as white. Even at a young age I knew that it did matter. Why else would half the colour guard consist of white kids and the other half a representation of the other races in the school? Whites were the minority, yet the majority of representation for our school went to them. Almost all of my teachers were white. Mr. Paez was a dean and he was Hispanic, Mrs. Granger, my gym teacher and her assistant Ms. Wilson were both black. We had a Jewish teacher, Mrs. Levine- she was white as well. Everyone else was white, all of our authority figures. Except the security guards, they were always black at every single NYC public school that I attended from 6th grade to High School.

Growing up in NYC exposed me to a myriad of cultures. I knew the difference between a polish, a brat, a sausage, and a plain Sabrett's hot dog before I had even tasted them all. White people that I knew growing up always had an ethnic association. There were the Greeks, the Poles, the Germans, the Italians, the British, the Swedes, one person who claimed to be ethnically Southern, the Russians- who after the cold war officially declared themselves Czechs, Ukrainians, Latvians, Armenians, and the list goes on... All these white people were moving in from other countries, and they all had their ethnicity intact. They are a part of the white race. My aunt had lived in the United States longer than they have, but she was still denied certain privileges that were automatically given to the newcomers with the pale complexions. Of course some of the newcomers' privileges were suspended once another white person hears their accents, but nonetheless- they never walked into a Nordstroms and had security cameras follow them around because of their colour "predisposes" them to theft. Of course that is unless they are young and were dressed in baggy, hip-hop style clothing. Then it doesn't matter so much, the cameras will follow regardless of your race, age and style becomes the equalizer.

"Binghamton Shooter" Jiverly Wong also garnered front-page headlines nationwide and set off a cable news frenzy when, "bitter over job loss," he massacred 13 people at an immigration center in upstate New York. Similarly, coverage was brisk after Pittsburgh resident Richard Poplawski, "upset about recently losing a job," shot four local police officers, killing three of them.

But where was the front-page treatment when, in January, Betty Lipply, a 72-year-old resident of East Palestine, Ohio, "who feared she'd lose her home to foreclosure hanged herself to death" shortly after "receiving her second summons and foreclosure complaint from her mortgage lender"? And where was the up-to-the-minute cable news reporting on the two California dairy farmers who "killed themselves... out of despair over finances, according to associates"?

Mass Murder, Mass Media, and Missing Stories

Last summer, in the pages of the Nation magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich called attention to people turning to "the suicide solution" in response to the burgeoning financial crisis. Months later, major news outlets started to examine the same phenomenon. Last fall, a TomDispatch report on suicides and a range of other extreme acts -- including self-inflicted injury, murder, arson, and armed self-defense -- in response to foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, and layoffs, was followed, months later, by mainstream media attention to the notion of "econo-cide" -- prompted, in large part, by a spate of familicides (murder/suicides in which both parents and their children die).

While it's impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones, that contribute to people resorting to drastic measures, violent or otherwise, many press reports suggest that the global economic crisis has played no small part in a range of extreme acts.

An analysis by TomDispatch of national, regional, and local news reports in 2008 and early 2009 indicates that a silent, nationwide epidemic of drastic measures may be underway. News of such acts linked to economic woes -- from armed robberies to pay the rent to financially-motivated suicides -- has filtered out of cities and towns in no less than 30 states, many of which have seen multiple incidents. And since only a fraction of such acts ever receives media coverage, what is being reported, even if mostly in local newspapers, qualifies as startling.

For every Jiverly Wong, who garners days of cable-news coverage, there are untold despondent and desperate dairy farmers and retirees battered by the economy and at wits' end who respond by subjecting themselves, others, or property to violence and are hardly noticed. What follows is a sampling of such incidents, most reported locally, and organized by month -- no month lacked such reports -- since the beginning of this year.

January 2009

David Kelley lost his job in September 2008. As values plummeted on his Clairemont, California, home as well as the rental properties he owned, he reportedly became "overwhelmed by debt and depression." On January 5th, he shot himself. "He saw his good life and successful career slipping away," said his stepmother. "He couldn't see beyond the struggles he was having."

According to a police report, Manchester, Missouri, resident Frank Kavano, 66, who killed his wife and then himself, left a suicide note that mentioned "financial issues and difficulty in the marriage."

After losing a bet on a college football bowl game -- on top of losing his home to foreclosure -- Dante Vinci, age 48, reportedly stabbed a man to death outside a Reno, Nevada, sports bar.

February 2009

According to a news report, Gregory and Randolph Graham, third-generation car dealers from Ligonier, Pennsylvania, "watched helplessly over the past year as their business collapsed under the weight of the recession." One night, Gregory, 61, set fire to some of the cars at his dealership and "died of a heart attack next to the burning wreckage." Days later, Randolph, 51, "was found dead, slumped over the wheel of his car in what may have been a suicide."

When Otero County, New Mexico, sheriff's deputies tried to serve foreclosure papers on Miguel and Inga Gutierrez, the couple armed themselves and opened fire. After a 16-hour standoff, Miguel was found dead and Inga was taken into custody.

"Unemployed, awash in debt and hiding an October foreclosure from loved ones," 55-year-old Wayne "Mike" Anderson of Stratmoor Valley, Colorado, shot himself to death as a sheriff's deputy, ready to evict him, stood at his doorstep.

In Glyndon, Maryland, advertising executive Howard "Jack" Marks Jr., 63, killed himself after, his wife told the police, financial woes left him in danger of losing his business.

According to news reports, 53-year-old Jeffrey P. McKnight of Pataskala, Ohio, was "struggling financially and overwhelmed with caring for his elderly father" when he set his house ablaze and then killed his dad and himself.

Reportedly "upset over being unemployed and his financial status," George Vincent, 49, of Fort Meyers, Florida, drank copious amounts of beer, after which his wife called the police, telling them her husband was drunk, armed, and suicidal. When Vincent pulled a gun on responding officers, they opened fire, killing him, in what the state attorney's office deemed to be a case of suicide-by-cop.

March 2009

Lonnie Glasco walked into the San Diego, California, bus-maintenance depot where he worked as a mechanic and shot two fellow employees, one fatally, before police gunned him down. A friend said Glasco, 47, was "despondent over losing his wife and his home."

Michael McLendon, age 28 and "despondent over his inability to hold a job," fatally shot nine people in Samson, Alabama, and killed a 10th in a neighboring county.

After 46-year-old Springfield Township, Ohio, resident Michael Swiergosz's home went into "foreclosure and had been set for sheriff's sale," he barricaded himself inside "during a standoff with authorities that lasted three hours," before being arrested.

April 2009

In Warrenton, Virginia, police said that "domestic issues," likely compounded by "job-related stress," lay behind 39-year-old Bruce Curtin's decision to kill his wife and then himself.

Distraught in the face of eviction for failing to pay rent, Ginette Denize, 48, of Canarsie, Brooklyn, New York, turned on the gas burners of her stove, started banging on her landlord's door, and returned to her apartment. Police soon arrived and, when one of them reportedly tripped and fell in her kitchen, she allegedly "hovered with a knife over" him. The two other officers then opened fire, killing her. It was conjectured that the shooting might have been a case of suicide-by-cop.

Angered that someone else was living in the home he had lost to foreclosure, Derek C. Hightower, 24, of Bristol, Wisconsin, reportedly set a fire that "destroyed the garage, the house and three vehicles."

Michael Knudson's former girlfriend wondered whether he "somehow thought he was saving his mom and brother from the pain and loss of the foreclosure [of the family home] in some misguided way." Eviction was scheduled for April 7th. Days before, say authorities, the 39-year-old killed his mother and brother, buried them in "a shallow grave" nearby, and burned down their Hudson, Ohio, home.

Police reported that Mark I. Levy, a 59-year-old Bethesda, Maryland, resident, who had been a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration and "was about to lose his job because of the economy," died of "an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound."

Under investigation by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies for possibly "scamm[ing] clients out of millions in a side investment business he ran," Garden City, New York, resident William Parente, 59, "beat and asphyxiated his wife and daughters in a Maryland hotel room" before killing himself.

With talk of layoffs in the air and reportedly fearful of losing his job at California's Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, Mario Ramirez entered his workplace and shot two immediate supervisors before killing himself.

Reportedly $450,000 in debt, 34-year-old Middletown, Maryland, resident Christopher Wood shot and killed his wife and children before taking his own life.

At a home north of Frederick, Maryland, a man threatened to kill workers from a company that clears out recently foreclosed homes, prompting SWAT team members to be called in. Not far away, outside Baltimore, a man attempted to commit suicide while being evicted from his home.

In Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, a 27-year-old man, upset about losing his job, killed himself. A week later, another area man, who had threatened to kill himself "after recently losing his job," surrendered to authorities after a five-hour standoff.

In North Carolina, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department reported 10 "suicide threats or attempts" over the weekend of April 18th and 19th. Bill Cook, the director of the Mecklenburg County Mobile Crisis Team, told the press that economic woes had contributed to the spike.

May 2009

Faced with eviction, 33-year-old Motalekgose Mothuse Valela allegedly warned the property manager of his Dallas, Texas, apartment: "No one comes to my place without me being there, and I don't care who it is: the constable, the police or the sheriff... I will blow them all up and blow this place up," according to court documents. He reportedly also affixed a note to his door reading, "Bomb set on door, don't touch," resulting in a standoff with the Dallas police bomb squad and SWAT team which lasted several hours, before he eventually surrendered.

According to Indianapolis, Indiana, Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Sgt. Paul Thompson, 27-year-old Candance Macy lured her landlord to her residence "with the intent to kill him" in order to avoid eviction. Reportedly, Macy claimed that "she had lost a ring behind a stove in the kitchen and... she had asked him to retrieve it. When he stooped down to look for the ring, Macy allegedly stabbed him in the back at least four times and several more times on other parts of his body." He was reported to be in serious condition.

In Rhode Island, during an eviction proceeding, a Pawtucket Housing Authority employee found a "man lying in a bed with a knife sticking out of his neck, and quickly phoned police, reporting either a stabbing victim or possible deceased person." When police arrived and approached the man, he "suddenly sat up, with the knife hanging from his throat." The knife fell from his neck and the man began threatening the officers with it. "You will have to shoot me. I have nothing to live for," he told them. Eventually, they persuaded him to drop the knife.

After Allen Park, Michigan's Mark David Fussner, 44, refused to obey an eviction order and threatened to shoot court officers, the police were called in. As one of the officers approached, Fussner reportedly fired birdshot from a shotgun, wounding him. Other police on the scene returned fire and for the next two hours, the sound of gun shots reverberated through the neighborhood. Fussner was later found dead in his basement. It was unclear whether he died of a self-inflicted wound or was killed by the police.

A Silent (and Violent) Epidemic

While news reports indicate that extreme acts precipitated by economic disaster have occurred in at least 30 states, similar incidents have undoubtedly occurred in most, if not all, of the remaining 20 states. Suicides are normally under-reported in the press, while murders linked to the economic crisis may never be reported as such. Many extreme acts, in any case, go unnoticed by those not intimately affected.

There is, of course, no way to know which of these and similar acts might have occurred even if there had been no global economic meltdown. One thing is certain however: there will never be a full accounting of the lives ruined or lost under the pressure of economic disaster, nor will anyone ever raise a monument to the victims of foreclosure, job loss, and business failure, of busted pensions and dynamited 401(k)s.

There will be no memorial wall in Washington with names etched into black granite -- not for these people, neither the desperate who killed themselves, nor those who lashed out and murdered others. Who will remember the Knudsons in their shallow grave, or Christopher Wood's dead children? No statue will be raised on Wall Street to solemnly remind the former masters of the universe of the Main Street consequences of their financial manipulations. No equivalent of the Arlington National Cemetery will ever be laid out for the dead of this crisis or filled with headstones reading: "Beloved Mother, Killed by Capitalism" or "Devoted Husband and Father, Sacrificed in the Name of Greed."

Instead, the bodies will just continue to pile up. A daughter here. A father there. A family in a nearby neighborhood.

No one will ever know how many. And no one will record their names for posterity.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the recent winner of a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. A paperback edition of his book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books), an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, has recently been published. His website is Nick Turse.com.

[Note for Readers: This is Nick Turse's third report on the rising body count in America as part of his Tough Times series, analyzing the human fallout of the global economic crisis, at TomDispatch. The first two were: The Rising Body Count on Main Street (Oct 19, 2008) and Meltdown Madness (January 28, 2009).]

This isn't a mass-consumption book nor should it be. My life and experience have taught me that few humans have evolved or are aware enough to even grasp its significance. The book is like a great sacred text from antiquity that makes us love our forbears and take comfort in our connectedness to them. If intelligent life is able to find "Sacred Demise" in two or three millennia I can see it being revered as a great testament to what our potential as a species might have been... or might yet become.

"Sacred Demise" is an incredible how-to, first-aid, healing map and manual of how one can navigate an aware psyche through the emotional and spiritual challenges of collapse - to find and to give love, comfort and even great joy in the midst of pain, despair and death. It teaches and reminds us that death is not a bad word but a "parenthesis in eternity" as Joel Goldsmith wrote. I know of no one who has had the courage to address these crying needs in detail and Baker is uniquely qualified to do it. Every ounce of her heart, mind and soul were committed to this book's writing and that is clearly evident throughout. This book is an act of love. I am no different than any human in that I respond instantly and involuntarily when I see that someone has the courage to place a naked heart in front of my eyes. It reminds me that we are never stronger than when we are most vulnerable.

The book's genesis comes from Baker's clear statement that, "while many individuals will be able to physically navigate collapse, some will not be able to do so emotionally". I consider the book to be profoundly spiritual, although others may approach it as a psychological or cultural text that finally and beautifully addresses what I have seen as a crying need to deal with the emotions that collapse surfaces. Emotions ignored always return to bite us on the behind. They sap rather than enhance our strength. "Sacred Demise" is an emotional and spiritual guide for the treatment of those of us who understand what collapse means and by which we can give comfort, aid, assistance and great strength to ourselves and to those we love.

As Baker points out consistently - while fearlessly acknowledging that civilization and the species may become extinct soon - here is a pathway to choose not only which physical parts or our lives may endure, but what core values survive the transition and die-off. She reminds us that to be truly effective, "we must come to grips with our own mortality."

I have known Baker for many years. We have worked closely together and shared many painful "initiations". I am not at all surprised that she cites many spiritual books that I have long treasured and also delves deeply into Native-American spirituality for its close connection to a planet that "civilization" has cut us off from. Nor am I surprised that we have both arrived at exactly the same conclusions. What I am surprised at is Baker's Herculean research, her incredible depth and her broad, multi-discipline and multi-cultural approach. She does not confuse the reader, she refreshingly reminds us that truth and knowledge based upon harmony and balance with all life are universal truths once liberated from artificial labels and knee-jerk induced intellectual door slamming..

The book's greatest use will be in guiding and comforting those of us who are "hospice" workers for industrial civilization. Having written on the subject of collapse for almost a decade I have longed for something that would comfort me and the great many who have labored to awaken mass consciousness to the gravity of the current crisis. As on a battlefield one inevitably asks, who or what will care for the caregivers? This is that book.

Reprinted from MIKE RUPPERT BLOGSPOT

[Books by Mike Ruppert: "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil" and "A Presidential Energy Policy: Twenty-five points Addressing the Siamese Twins of Energy and Money"]

Here I offer a brief glimpse into the less obvious but far more insidious phenomenon of "soft" colonization. That scholars and political thinkers have talked at length of such processes only establishes the uncomfortable reality that history is bound to repeat itself in all its ugliness, unless the human civilization makes a concerted effort to eliminate the use of brute force from human affairs.

Gandhi, the apostle of non-violent resistance said:

"I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people's houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave."

This is an idea rendered irrelevant in the current scenario, where the mightier among the world's nations have secured the mandate to invade, with impunity, any society and any state that can be exploited for resources. Unlike earlier times, modern-day invasions are invariably camouflaged by a façade of elaborate deceit that claims altruistic intent as the motive of assault. In this new scheme of things, resistance is deemed as insurgency and dissent is unpatriotic. Those that are invaded do not have the luxury to decide between being beggar and slave. Culture would be the last thing on their minds as they struggle to stay alive. Yet it is the loss of their culture that ultimately causes the disintegration of these societies to the absolute advantage of their victors.

It is said that history is written by the victor. What is not said is that destroying the enemy is only half the purpose of a victor. The other half is the subjugation and drastic alteration of the self-perception of the enemy, so as to gain unquestioned control over every aspect of the subjugated state, its populace and its resources, so that having won victory it can get on with the "much bigger business of plunder," according to Franz Fanon, philosopher, psychiatrist, author and a pre-eminent thinker of the twentieth century.

At one level we have the Human Terrain System (HTS) I have written about previously wherein social scientists are embedded with combat units, ostensibly to help the occupiers better understand the cultures they are occupying. The veiled intent is to exploit existing schisms and fault-lines in these societies to the occupier's own advantage through the policy of divide and conquer.

As Edward Said stated in "Orientalism":

"... there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge - if that is what it is - that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency, and outright war. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion."

It is extremely obvious that the HTS belongs to this second category.

At another unquestioned level, the "democratization" and "modernization" of a "barbaric" society goes on. The embedded scholars of HTS evidently find no evidence of these cultures having withstood decades of international isolation and assault, yet sustained their sovereignty by the sheer dint of their education, culture and a well-integrated diverse social fabric. So the US sets up a range of state-funded programs, ostensibly to empower the women and youth of the target society, in the ways of democracy and modern civilization. Whether or not that suspect goal is accomplished, the badgered collective consciousness of the invaded people, traumatized by loss and conflict, does begin to submit to the "norms" of behavior prescribed by the victor, even when they are in violation of actual norms of society that may have prevailed prior to invasion.

Transform

Fanon said:

"A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion."

Describing the psychopathology of colonization he said,

"Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his 'nation', and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure."

Fanon's speech to the Congress of Black African Writers in 1959 is an uncanny description of Iraq's tragedy today:

"Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women ...

"For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; it is the result of internal and external extensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies."

At times we may witness blatant violations as in the distribution of backpacks with US flags to Iraqi children.

A more repulsive example is the Skin White Serum. One of many companies engaged in selling skin-bleaching cream is Skin White Research Labs. They proudly sell Skin White Serum in "over 30 countries." There are countless other companies involved in this market, selling similar products, like Skin White Bleaching Cream and Xtreme White.

The hidden message here is that, politically, those in the culture being colonized should seek to cover their brown skin, which is in fact part of their ethnic identity, and aspire to the culture, power and influence of the dominant culture at the expense of their own.

Somewhat less subtle is the corporate colonization of Iraq's culture. An example of this is Iraqi girls carrying Barbie backpacks in the Sadr City area of Baghdad.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the dominant culture for a while now has been the US military. Since it has all the firepower and the brute force, it sets the norms and the standard. This is done by repeated suggestions through propaganda, and advertisements suggesting that the local population is of lesser worth than the occupiers of their country in their appearance, their beliefs, their customs and their way of life.

The material practices of society sustain its culture, which is the lifeline of identity, and affirmation that the progress of a nation depends on. Social custom, production systems, education, art and architecture are a few of the visible pillars of culture.

Community and custom become the first casualties when an entire people, unequal in the face of military might, struggle to survive under perpetual fear of loss and death. In a state of vacuum, the threatened society will grasp whatever is offered by the occupier as a "better" way of living. In the process it is bound to lose its own tried and tested self-sustaining modes of living.

With the destruction of infrastructure, education, health and livelihood sources are destroyed. When rehabilitation and restoration come packaged in alien systems of knowledge (read-USAID), that, too, is accepted in the absence of what existed earlier.

Literature, art and architecture meet with more systemic demolition.

My artist friends in Baghdad have reported,

"The occupation forces encouraged the rebels to loot museum and libraries. Five thousand years of history and art were irretrievably lost in hours. It is a loss for the world, not Iraq alone. Buildings can be fixed, so can electricity, but where can I find another Khalid al-Rahal to make me a new statue for Abu Fafar al-Mansoor? How will I replace the artifacts dating back to thousands of years? Iraq is altered forever."

I have heard from ordinary men and women in Iraq, "We need our art, because it connects us with what has brought us here, and reminds us of where we are headed." Dr. Saad Eskander has been director general of whatever remains of Iraq's National Archive and Library and he says, "This building was burned twice, and looted. We have lost sixty percent of our archival collections like maps, historical records and photographs. Twenty-five percent of our books were lost ... It has crippled our culture, and culture reaches to the bottom of peoples' hearts, whereas politics do not."

It is not difficult to see that the extent of devastation caused by the invasion and occupation of Iraq goes beyond loss of life, livelihood and property. The historical and cultural roots of the nation have been destroyed.

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last four years.

The Republican attacks were bogus. A 2008 McClatchy investigation revealed that the overwhelming majority of Guantánamo detainees taken into custody in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent of wrongdoing or bit players with little intelligence value. A substantial number of those prisoners were literally sold to U.S. officials in exchange for bounty payments offered by the U.S. military. A Seton Hall Law Center report has debunked Pentagon claims that many released detainees have "returned to the fight." And no one has ever escaped from one of the U.S. super-max prisons, which house hundreds of people convicted of terrorist offenses.

The Republicans have continued to oppose the effort to close Guantánamo. In an attempt to burnish his image and forestall war crimes charges, Dick Cheney now leads the charge, making ubiquitous attacks on Obama. Keeping Guantánamo open is "important," Cheney declares. He claims that closing Guantánamo would endanger Americans, and warns that if detainees are brought to the United States , they would "acquire all kinds of legal rights." Obama is also taking heat from the intelligence community. Those officials, like Cheney, seek to justify what they did under the Bush regime.

And now even the Democrats are piling on the bandwagon. Reacting defensively to the Republican attack campaign, the Senate voted 90 to 6 to deny Obama funds to close Guantánamo until he comes up with a "plan" for relocating the detainees there. "We spent hundreds of millions of dollars building an appropriate facility with all security precautions on Guantánamo to try these cases," said Democratic Senator Jim Webb on ABC News. "I do not believe they should be tried in the United States ," he added.

The pressure has caused Obama to buckle. Timed to coincide with a Cheney speech to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Obama announced an appeasement plan to deal with the 240 remaining Guantánamo detainees. Parts of his plan would threaten the very foundation of our legal system - that no one should be held in custody if he has committed no crime. These are Obama's five categories for disposition of detainees once Guantánamo is closed:

1) Those who violated the laws of war will be tried in military commissions.
Obama's plan would backtrack on an early promise to shut down the military commissions. Obama now claims that such commissions can be fair because they will no longer permit the use of evidence obtained by cruel, inhuman or degrading interrogation methods. He fails to mention, however, that the Pentagon is using "clean teams" to re-interrogate people who were previously interrogated using the prohibited methods. When they once again give the same information, it miraculously becomes untainted. Obama also fails to acknowledge that those tried in the military commissions are forbidden from seeing all the evidence against them, a violation of the bedrock principle that the accused must have an opportunity to confront his accusers.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court has disagreed with this part of Obama's proposed plan of action. In Ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court declared military trials of civilians to be unconstitutional if civil courts are available.

Prisoners falling in this category should be tried in the courts of the United States , because the laws of war are actually part of U.S. law. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution says that treaties shall be the supreme law of the land. The Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, which the United States has ratified, contain the laws of war.

2) Those who have been ordered released from Guantánamo will remain in custody.
Seventeen Uighurs from China were ordered released after they were found not to be enemy combatants. But they continue to languish in custody because they would be imperiled if returned to China , which considers them enemies of the state. Suggestions that they be brought to the United States have been met with paranoid NIMBY (not in my backyard!) protestations. So, under Obama's plan they will remain incarcerated in a state of legal limbo.

3) Those who cannot be prosecuted yet "pose a clear danger to the American people" will remain in custody with no right to legal process of any kind.
These are people who have never been charged with a crime. Obama did not say why they cannot be prosecuted. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates claims as many as 100 people may fall into this category. Included in this group are those who have "expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden." They will suffer "prolonged detention."

Obama's plan for "prolonged detention" is nothing more than a newly-coined phrase for "preventive detention," a policy that harks back to the bad old days of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the internment of people of Japanese extraction in the 1940's. If Obama succeeds in convincing Congress to legalize "prolonged detention," the United States will continue to be a pariah state among justice-loving nations. The U.S. Congress, still rendered catatonic by post-9/11 rhetoric, will probably capitulate along with Obama.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, noted that Obama's new system of preventive detention will just "move Guantánamo to a new location and give it a new name."

4) Those who can be safely transferred to other countries will be transferred.
Obama noted that 50 men fall into this category. It is unclear what will happen to them when they reach their destinations.

5) Those who violated U.S. criminal laws will be tried in federal courts.
Obama cited the examples of Ramzi Yousef, who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was identified as the 20th 9/11 hijacker. Both were tried and convicted in U.S. courts and both are serving life sentences.

This is the only clearly acceptable part of Obama's plan. All detainees slated to remain in custody should be placed into this category. The federal courts provide due process as required by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which does not limit due process rights to U.S. citizens: "No person ... shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."

The federal courts are well suited to deal with accused terrorists. Indeed, federal judges who have presided over such cases say that the Classified Information Procedures Act can effectively protect classified intelligence in federal court trials.

If Mr. Obama proceeds with the plan he announced this week he will empower those who point to U.S. hypocrisy on human rights as a justification to do us harm. Obama's capitulation to the intelligence gurus and the right-wing attack dogs will not only imperil the rule of law; it will actually make us more vulnerable to future acts of terrorism.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of " Cowboy Republic : Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the War" and co-author of the new book, "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent." Her articles are archived at Collapse

The US military has sent shock troops, which also donned helmets and flak jackets - anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists, with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two years prior to this, the CIA had quietly started recruiting social scientists by advertising in academic journals, offering salaries of up to $400,000. The military's goals for the HTS was to have them gather and disseminate information about Iraqi and Afghani cultures. These embedded scholars, contracted through companies like CACI International, work in the project that is described by CACI as "designed to improve the gathering, understanding, operational application, and sharing of local population knowledge" among combat teams.

This new form of psychological warfare is deeply disturbing. Throughout my five years of reporting on the occupation of Iraq, when I've asked Iraqis what they feel the most damaging aspect of the occupation is, I have been told that the occupation is "shredding the fabric of Iraqi society and culture."

Anthropology, in particular, has been referred to through history as the "handmaiden of colonialism," thus putting anthropologists, at least those with a moral conscience, on guard against anything that smells like exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and leading member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, told Time magazine that the militarization of anthropology will cause the field to become "just another weapon ... not a tool for building bridges between peoples." Anthropology has core professional ethics standards that require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists do no harm. How likely do you think these will be adhered to by the flack-jacket-wearing, gun-toting, embedded anthropologists working directly with regimental combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan?

In an article titled "When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents," published in September 2007, and co-authored with David Price, author of the book "Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Abuse of American Anthropology in the Second World War," Gonzalez and Price wrote:

"Although proponents of this form of applied anthropology claim that culturally informed counter-insurgency work will save lives and win 'hearts and minds,' they have thus far not attempted to provide any evidence of this. Instead, there has been a flurry of non-critical newspaper accounts in publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor that portray these HTS anthropologists as heroically serving their nation without bothering to report on the ethical complications of this work. Missing are discussions of anthropologists' ethical responsibilities to disclose who they are and what they are doing, to gain informed consent, and to not harm those they study. Portraying counter-insurgency operations as social work is naive and historically inaccurate.

"In fact, David Kipp of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas describes HTS teams as a 'CORDS for the 21st Century'-a reference to the Pentagon's Vietnam-era Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project. The most infamous product of the CORDS counter-insurgency effort was the Phoenix Program, in which CIA agents collected intelligence information used to 'neutralize' (read assassinate) suspected Viet Cong members. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 26,000 suspected Viet Cong were killed as a result, including many civilians.

"Kipp's comparison of HTS and CORDS begs a series of ethical questions which have gone unanswered. If anthropologists on HTS teams interview Afghans or Iraqis about the intimate details of their lives, what is to prevent combat teams from using the same data to one day 'neutralize' suspected insurgents? What would impede the transfer of data collected by social scientists to commanders planning offensive military campaigns? Where is the line that separates the professional anthropologist from the counter-insurgency technician? Although the answers to these questions are not clear, the history of anthropology should give us pause. During World War II and the Cold War, US military and intelligence agencies tended to use anthropologists' work to help accomplish immediate goals, and discarded all other information that was counter to their beliefs or institutional models."

Adding credence to the points made by Price and Gonzalez is the fact that one of the top ten US defense contractors, Science Applications International Corporation, which has been operating in Iraq since the beginning of the occupation, describes anthropology in its job advertisements as a "counter-insurgency related field."

Marcus Griffin, an anthropology professor, while preparing to deploy to Iraq at part of an HTS team, boasted on his blog, "I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant ... I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range ... Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon."

Nevertheless, proponents of the program attempt to dismiss any ethical dilemma encountered by the embedded scholars. Montgomery McFate, a Navy anthropologist, described HTS as an effort to anthropologize the military, not militarizing anthropology, told Time, "The more unconventional the adversary, and the further from Western cultural norms, the more we need to understand the society and underlying cultural dynamics."

The program is nothing new, neither for the US empire nor other empires throughout history. As far as the US empire project is concerned, there were two programs from the Vietnam era that involved anthropologists.

Project Camelot, in 1965, organized by US Army intelligence, recruited anthropologists to assess the cultural causes of war and violence. Despite the misleadingly benign sounding name, the project used Chile as a trial run while the CIA was engineering the election of Eduardo Frei as president in 1964 to prevent the election of Socialist leader Salvador Allende.

The second program from that era, known as CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), was formed to coordinate the US civil and military pacification programs in Vietnam. CORDS used anthropological data to map human terrain and identify individuals and groups that the military believed were sympathizers of the Vietcong, who were then targeted for assassination.

It is easy to imagine HTS teams in Iraq being used to exploit existing fault lines between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, and even differences within each group, in order to invoke the classic divide-to-conquer strategy. For example, the Sahwa (US-created and -backed Sunni militia) clashing with the US-backed Maliki government in Iraq is a classic example of Iraqis being effectively turned against one another so as not to unite against the occupier.

Another example would be the effective creation and exploitation of the myth of sectarianism in Iraq, which has lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and threatens to do so once again.

Documentary filmmaker Jason Coppola is directing and producing a film titled "Justify My War." In the film, an introspective Coppola explores the question of rationalization of the wars being waged by our government, from Wounded Knee to Fallujah. I asked Coppola for his perspective about the ongoing use of anthropologists by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This seems to be the most powerful weapon against indigenous cultures today. Much more powerful than F-16s and M-1 tanks. We see how well it worked against our own indigenous culture. You need to know a people before you decide what can corrupt them, what can be used to confuse, divide and conquer them. The strongest defense against occupation is an undivided, culturally rooted people, but empires don't like that."

Commenting on experiences from his recent trip to Iraq, Coppola adds, "A country can rebuild itself after an invasion, but it is much more difficult to rebuild a culture after it has been invaded. I realized this seeing young girls walking the streets of Sadr City, on their way to school in their traditional hijab carrying their books in a backpack with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbie design on it. Confusion is sewn throughout the Iraq occupation, nobody trusts anybody. And as I looked up in Baghdad or Fallujah or Sadr City, and stared at 'Apache' helicopters flying overhead ... I couldn't help but to think - mission accomplished - certainly for the Apache people. But what about the Iraqis? We still don't know."

Price and Gonzalez, along with several other scholars, felt the problem serious enough to have formed the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and drafted a "Pledge of Non-Participation in Counter-Insurgency" to boycott anthropological work in counterinsurgency and direct combat support operations. They took their stand against "work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another."

Similarly, in October 2007, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association issued a statement that warned its members that activities such as involvement in the HTS program are likely to violate the code of ethics. As it should have, for it is impossible to imagine the lethality of a massive conventional military coupled with unconventional scholarship made into a weapon for use in combat, as it is in the ongoing US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brzezinski was right, of course. Obama was the perfect choice for president. Not because of his experience. He had none. He was a two year senator with a resume' small enough to fit on the back of a matchbox. Still Obama had what Brzezinski and Co. were looking for, symbolism; the kind of symbolism that connected him to people around the world and made them feel like one of their own had finally clawed their way to the top. Even better, Obama was a charismatic populist who could fill stadiums with adoring fans and put a benign face on America's interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. What more could Brzezinski hope for? After 8 years of dragging "Brand America" through the mud, the country would finally get the emergency facelift it needed and begin to restore its battered image as the world's indispensable nation.

For leftists, Obama has been a total bust. He's escalated the war in Afghanistan, increased the cross-border bombings of Pakistan, hemmed and hawed about prosecuting war crimes, refused to actively lobby House members to make it easier for workers to organize (EFCA), and surrounded himself with bank industry reps who've committed $12.8 trillion to sinking financial institutions with no assurance that the money would be repaid. Apart from a trifling bill on stem cells, Obama has done absolutely zero to confirm his bone fides as a liberal. The truth is, Obama is neither liberal nor conservative; he's simply an inspiring orator and a skillful politician who has no strong convictions about anything. If he achieves greatness, it will be because he was thrust into a crisis he couldn't avoid and reluctantly acted in the best interests of the American people. That possibility still exists, although it seems more unlikely by the day.

Foreign leaders are clearly relieved to see the last of George W. Bush, and they appear to be willing to give Obama every opportunity to mend fences and break with the past. But Obama has made little effort to reciprocate or show that he's serious about real change. The emphasis seems to be more on public relations than policy; more on glitzy photo ops, grandiose speeches and gadding about from one capital to another, than ending the chronic US meddling and militarism. Where's the beef or is it all just empty posturing?

No one's ready to write-off Obama just yet, but he needs to show he's the real-deal by taking steps to ratchet-down the war machine and reign in the corporate elites and bank vermin. But is it really possible for one man-however well-meaning-to change the course of a nation by standing up the gaggle of racketeers who pull the strings from behind the curtain? Keep in mind, America's history of violent interventions, unprovoked wars, color-coded revolutions and coup d' etats has a long pedigree that stretches from Bunker Hill to Baghdad. That river of blood did not begin with George Bush and it won't end with Barack Obama. Every generation has produced its own litany of crimes, from Wounded Knee to Nagasaki to My Lai to Falluja. In Harold Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech, the playwright invokes one such incident which epitomizes the pattern of hostility which has been repeated over and over again wherever the Washington mandarins detect opposition to their iron-fisted rule.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Acceptance Speech

"The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it."

Analysis

Pinter's speech is a somber indictment of US foreign policy; a policy which is now cloaked behind the rock-star facade of Barack Obama. Nothing has changed and, perhaps, nothing will change. The same barbarous campaign that thrived under Bush has been passed along to Obama intact. Wherever there is resistance to US ambitions; there lies the enemy. Whether it's Marxists in Bogota, nationalists in Kosovo, Bolivarians in Caracas, Shia militias in Beirut, Islamic moderates in Mogadishu or Quakers in Toledo. They're all enemies, every one of them, and they need to be dealt with.

Obama is no fool; he knows he's being used. He knows he wasn't chosen for his enlightened views on health care and stem cells. He was picked because the men in charge needed a new poster boy to hide behind while they carry out their illicit activities. Obama is not so much of a Commander in chief as he is master illusionist, diverting attention from the stealth war that goes on relentlessly with or without his consent. Here's Pinter again:

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis...It's a scintillating stratagem."

Consider how the news was shaped to make it look like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were carried out for altruistic reasons. Thus, the war in Afghanistan became "Operation Enduring Freedom", stressing the selfless generosity of bombing a country into oblivion and reinstating the thuggish warlords to power. The same strategy was used for the invasion of Iraq which was celebrated as "liberation from a brutal dictator." Liberation which cost the lives of over 1 million Iraqis and the displacement of 4 million more. Still, no one in the UN or so called international community has pressed for removing the US from the Security Council or prosecuting its leaders for war crimes. It's a testimony to the success of the US media in upholding the "tapestry of lies" of which Pinter speaks. Under Obama, the charade has only gotten worse. The coverage of the war has stopped entirely. War? What war? What matters now is Obama's cheery banter with Jay Leno, or Michelle's well-proportioned arms or Malia's adorable Portuguese Waterdog. America is whole again. Let the killing resume.

Pinter: "What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticize our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us."

Obama doesn't need to solve the world's problems. He doesn't have to reverse global warming or slow peak oil, cure AIDS or end world hunger. All he needs to do is meet the minimal requirement of his job as president, which is to deliver justice to his people. That's why the prosecution of Bush for war crimes is more important than any other issue on the docket. Justice precedes everything; it's the thread that keeps the social fabric stitched together. Justice for the victims who were killed in their homes with their families while they were sleeping or eating dinner. Justice for the people who were bombed in wedding parties or going to work or at the mosque praying to God. That's what people want from Obama. Justice, nothing more. The Reverend Martin Luther King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." It's up to Obama follow that arc and take at least one step on the path of legitimacy, accountability and justice.

>Pinter: "How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice."

It's highly unlikely that a black man with a background in community organizing really believes that expanding the war in Afghanistan is the right thing to do. Nor is it likely that he supports wiretapping, the crackdown on immigrants, penalizing sellers of medical marijuana, trillion dollar bank bailouts or "enhanced" interrogation. He is merely reading from the script that he has been given. But as the economic crisis deepens and the country becomes more radicalized and politically unstable, that script will have to be tossed aside. Obama will have plenty of opportunities to shrug off his handlers and show what he's really made of. Perhaps he is great man after all.

Pinter: "When we look into a mirror, we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us."

Go ahead, Barack. Smash the mirror.

Mike Whitney's scathing analyses of the plutocratic status quo are widely distributed on the web.

RELATED:

Wiki profile on Pinter

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s).

I can honestly say we all did well in school at that time. We even participated in extra curricular activities together, we had no problems getting along with each other and we often shined because we were the minority, and because we were Asian Americans. We were the "smart Asian kids." Something changed along the way by the time high school hit. My family moved from Milwaukie to Happy Valley. By my senior year of high school, I had gone through a major identity crisis. When I moved to the Clackamas area, there were nothing but Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino students. Clackamas high school was incredibly diverse -- Asian American students were labeled as the "smart kids." Although we were labeled that, my grades and attendance didn't match up with my title. The people I was hanging out with were primarily Lao & Cambodian Americans. There were very few of us, maybe around eight all together. I skipped school, rebelled and my parents had no idea. My parents believed everything I told them -- why I was missing school, why my grades were low -- I had an excuse for everything. The friends around me were doing the same thing. We took advantage of our parents' trust for our own selfish reasons.

My parents came from war torn Laos as teenagers during the late 70's. I was born and raised in America. They've worked very hard to be where they are right now and they are definitely living the American dream. They never really talked about it, so I never really took it seriously. Like my friends in high school, we seemed to have come together because our parents didn't understand us, nor did they discipline us for our actions -- it wasn't because they didn't love us -- it was because they didn't really know how to talk to us without upsetting us.

I bring this all up because as I read the first chapter of our text book, one of the "Unsettling Facts," hit a cord with me. I can't say I was exactly shocked, but I was definitely disappointed. At the same time, as I read it over and over again and the more I read it, the more I realized it was a good thing. The bittersweet fact reads, " Despite the idea that Asian Americans are seen as a "model minority,' poverty among Asian American families is higher than that among White American families and has increased in recent years; among certain Asian American groups, namely Lao(tians) and Cambodians, poverty strikes two thirds of all families" (pg. 9).

In a social sense, it automatically clicked in my mind when I read the fact. I know why so many Lao and Cambodian families struggle with education and poverty, I know why we're not as successful as the other Asian nationalities. I know all of this because I have lived it. We're looked down upon in Asian groups, but the society around us has always grouped us with other Asians, when in fact Southeast Asians are so completely different from the typical "Far East" persona. Although I refuse to make excuses for the people who share the same heritage as I, because I feel if I can do it, anyone can, I know that we need extra and focused support. In our communities, we're lacking it and although there is no direct evidence, there's definitely some sort of correlation between support at home affecting students' decisions to pursue higher education.

Sociologists "try to reveal the social factors that shape society and affect the chances of success for different groups," (pg. 9) and I feel by doing this they are exposing the facts. There's something happening right now among SE Asians in Portland, as more of us go to college and learn to think intellectually, we are also learning about how our people aren't doing so hot. But what makes sense is that we understand why it's happening because we've lived it. What's important is that we are finally doing something about it because as our "other Asian" peers succeed, we are often left in the shadows wondering why we don't share their success.

By illuminating the issue with the study of Sociology among groups like Lao and Cambodian Americans we can pin point certain issues. It's not that our culture is so different, its that mainstream America is starting to understand the diverse group of Asian Americans. We cannot continue to be grouped as one big chunk because we are so different from each other. Imagine an entire continent being grouped together as one, that's like saying Mexicans and Canadians are the same. As we become classified as a separate group, messages are easier to convey.

Studying diversity among different Asian ethnicities is so important because it gives light to an unknown variable. In our textbook, the term diversity is defined as, " a broad concept that includes studying group differences in society's opportunities, the shaping of social institutions by different social factors, the formation of group and individual identity , and the process of social change" (pg. 11).

Social change is finally starting to happen more and more in SE Asian societies. As a student at PCC, I have become so inspired to be positive for Lao Americans. I have read facts similar to the one in the book about Lao Americans being among the poorest in Asians in America. In Oregon, we do not have the type of support for Lao American students like we do for, say Chinese Americans. Because we don't have a significant identity, we are less likely to shine. Some of my peers and I have come together to organize a group called "LAAS," which stands for Lao American Alliance for Students. It is our hope, that by creating this group we are able to enrich the lives of American born Lao students who know nothing about their heritage and roots, but struggle in American culture as well. We are also hoping to educate more students about the importance of higher learning and why it is essential to the progression of our peoples in America and lastly, we hope to empower students to do something positive, to change the perspective on Lao Americans by exposing what we know about our beautiful culture to others. We hope to spark an interest, and by doing so we will gain more exposure and become better known. It is also my personal hope and passion to help Lao parents understand their children and to instill the encouragement, love and support needed at home; things that are essential to help a student excel. I really hope that my message will be heard and I don't know if I have conveyed my message properly but I know that sociology has a big part in what we are trying to do to help Lao Americans strive for better lives.

Works Cited

Andersen, Margaret and Howard Taylor. "Sociology in Everyday Life." Mason, Ohio: Cengage Learning, 2008.

That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had "universal jurisdiction" statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against "ourselves," or "our" allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. Home Secretary Jack Straw let him escape back to Chile.

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January last, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. "Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime," he said. "So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as 'former President George Bush' [but] as a current war criminal." For this reason, Bush's former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said, "We have clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture."

The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing to death 600,000 peasants in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, said, "I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger."

Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair's wars. Spain's celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq -- "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law" that had left the UN "in tatters." He said, "There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay."

This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the West. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa -- the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.

Today, the unreported "good news" is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde R.L. Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: "Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter ... I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete."

Blair, too, is safe -- but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing "an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges," according to international law authority Richard Falk, who cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. Currently, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for Blair's prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E.W. Thomas wrote: "My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr. Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr. Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate."

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East Envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli "peace prize" worth a million dollars. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long revealed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister -- a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his "project" and crimes is an embarrassment and preferably forgotten.

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer's former leading Blair fan, declared that "this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried." He demanded, "Did Blair never ask what was going on?" This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: "Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?" In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Iraq's "contribution to international terrorism" and Saddam Hussein's "frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction." Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a "point of principle" for Blair who, he later wrote, was "fated to be right." He lamented, "Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short." In the subsequent six years at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.

Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour -- in Australia, the original murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the "mystical" Blair in the Guardian of than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous groveling to the Nazis: "I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to sooth them."

With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as "a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion." She asked him: "What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability ...[sic]?" A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about "values." Doogue said to him that "it was the bifurcation about right and wrong that what I thought the British found really hard" [sic], to which Blair replied that "in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was." It was his classic lie, which passed unchallenged.

However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his "James Bondish-ish Gulfstream" where she was privy to his "bionic energy levels." She wrote, "I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?" Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. "That is war, I'm afraid," said Blair, "and war is horrible." No counter came that Gaza was not a war but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair's task to "prepare them for statehood." The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man "has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated." The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that "women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him."

These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a "prayer breakfast" with President Obama, the yes-we-can-man now launching more war. "We pray," said Blair, "that in acting we do God's work and follow God's will." To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair's "faith" represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profananation on the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part -- or, like Alistair Campbell, his "communications director," offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some -- might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: "Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maiming and traumas."

These are indeed extraordinary times.

The US policy that has led to this recent violence has been long in the making, as it has only been a matter of time before the tenuous truce between the groups came unglued. For it has been a truce built on a deeply corrupt US policy of backing the predominantly Shia Iraqi government forces while paying the Sunni resistance not to fight both government and occupation forces.

Most of us remember all too well the praise from the Bush administration lavished on the Awakening Groups, a Sunni militia comprised of former resistance fighters and al-Qaeda members (according to the US military), each member paid $300 per month of US taxpayer money. They grew in strength to 100,000 men.

US aid to the Councils was cut off last October on the understanding that the members would be absorbed into Iraqi government forces. To date, less than a third have been given government jobs.

Two months ago I visited the al-Dora area of Baghdad, a sprawling area controlled by Awakening forces. One of their commanders told me he was concerned about the fact that most of his men were not being given government jobs. "They are lacking pay, and most of them are becoming more angry by the day, since they have had more broken promises than they can handle," he explained as we drank tea, "Many of my men have not been paid since October. This cannot continue."

Meanwhile, the US-backed Iraqi government led by US-appointed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki continues to target the leadership of the Awakening Groups. Maliki perceives the Awakening groups as both a political and military threat, and since October has been targeting their leadership in parts of Baghdad, as well as in Iraq's volatile Diyala Province.

In the wake of the spasm of violence in Baghdad last weekend, The Washington Post reported "As Apache helicopter gunships cruised above Baghdad's Fadhil neighborhood, former Sunni insurgents fought from rooftops and street corners against American and Iraqi forces, according to witnesses, the Iraqi military and police. At least 15 people were wounded in the gunfights, which lasted several hours. By nightfall, the street fighters had taken five Iraqi soldiers hostage. The battles, the most ferocious in nearly a year in Baghdad, erupted minutes after the arrest of Adil Mashadani, the leader of the Fadhil Awakening Council, which is composed mostly of former Sunni insurgents who allied themselves with the US military in exchange for monthly salaries that are now paid by Iraq's government."

Of course, the reason given to justify government's detention of the Awakening leader of the area, the incident that triggered the bloodshed, were "terrorist acts" by the group, according to Iraq's chief military spokesman, Gen. Qassim Atta. Predictably, the Awakening group spokesman for the area, Abu Mirna, told the Post, "We will fight them till the end if they don't release him."

It was convenient policy to have set up the Awakening groups to temporarily quell overall violence in Iraq. Resistance fighters rushed to join the ranks for the paycheck, as well as US military protection from Shia militias, which now largely comprise the government security apparatus. Now, however, clearly the US has lost some of their interest in continuing to support the Awakening groups, and the Maliki government is ratcheting up its efforts to dismantle them. Predictably, members of the Awakening are fighting back - for without a paycheck, and with yet another broken promise by the occupation forces to spur them on, why should they sit back and allow themselves to be detained, killed or further betrayed?

However, let us not martyr the Awakening Groups. Most of the leadership of the Awakening Groups are thugs, as are many of the members. Within weeks of the formation of the groups back in 2006, Iraqis living in areas that began to come under the control of Awakening groups began complaining of the brutality of the fighters in their area. Extortion and bribery became rampant, and many Iraqis view Awakening forces as collaborators with the occupiers of their country.

For example, I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with the president of the Fallujah Awakening Council, Sheikh Aifan Sadun, who, like other Awakening leaders, has hundreds of security personnel under his control. It was just before the January 30 elections in Iraq, and he was vying for political power against a rival Sunni group in the city - the Iraqi Islamic Party. Sheikh Aifan, who spoke with me while driving his $420,000 custom-built heavily armored BMW through the city that was destroyed by two US sieges in 2004, was accusing his rivals of rigging the upcoming elections.

He told me he would use "any means necessary" to fight them if they stole the elections. It was and is all about power for these Awakening leaders. And money. Shiekh Aifan, like most of the Awakening leaders, quickly got into the "construction business" when the US military stopped direct payments to them last October. Now those payments come in the form of "construction contracts." Sheikh Aifan himself has been awarded "contracts" worth $250 million - keep that in mind during this tax season, because it is your money that is paying for things like his own private militia, his BMW and his mansion on the outskirts of Fallujah.

In nearby Ramadi, the capital city of Al-Anbar, Sheikh Ahmad Abo Risha is president of the Awakening Council for the entire province. Just before the election, he, like Sheikh Aifan, was making moves to ensure he maintained his grip on power. His rival in the elections was Sheikh Hamid Al-Hayis, also an Awakening Council leader in the city, and from the same tribe. Abo Risha did not have kind words for Al-Hayis. "Al-Hayis has relations with government people and oil contracts, and he gets money from this by using his position which we helped him acquire," Abo Risha told me at the Awakening Council of Ramadi headquarters. "I'm from a long line of sheikhs, but Al-Hayis has only been a sheikh since 2006 when we started the Awakening," Abo Risha said. If Al-Hayis were to win the elections, "there will be a revolution."

When I asked Abo Risha about the Islamic Party, which Sheikh Aifan was accusing of trying to steal the elections, he told me if the Islamic Party took the elections by fraud, "It will be like Darfur."

None of these threats came to pass, as both men were victorious over their rivals. But their bellicose rhetoric is indicative of the kind of people they are, and the lengths they are willing to go to in order to maintain and/or seize power.

Despite the corruption and inherent infighting with the Awakening Group leaders, most of them, and the tens of thousands of men under their control, will certainly fight when attacked or provoked, as evidenced by this past weekend in Baghdad.

Broadening the frame of reference, keep in mind that government detentions, killings and threats towards Awakening Group leaders and members are ongoing in neighborhoods of Baghdad, as well as across Diyala province. We should expect violence in the areas of Baghdad they control as the Iraqi government continues to make moves towards taking them out in advance of the national elections scheduled for later this year. Thus, keep your eyes on the following areas of Baghdad in the coming weeks and months: Adhamiyah, Amiriyah, Gazaliyah and al-Dora, to name just a few. More broadly, also watch Baquba and surrounding areas where Awakening Groups are largely in control.

And keep Al-Anbar in mind. The province, which is one-third the geographic area of Iraq, is largely controlled by Awakening groups. This is the area where the fiercest resistance to the occupation has occurred, and if US occupation forces or the US-backed Iraqi government begins to move on men like Sheikh Aifan or Abo Risha, it will bring predictable results.

As Awakening Group member Abu Ayad, 58, told the Post, "We will all become suicide bombers" if his leader, Mashadani, is not released by the Iraqi government.

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last four years

The stories we tell ourselves about the future will, in the end, define it more than our technologies or our practices. In the end, practices are vulnerable to shift in meaning - one can see poverty or wealth in a simple, subsistence life, for example. Fixing meaning is the only way to sustain ethical practice - modern society at its root transforms things that are good and sustainable into things that are backwards and impoverished. Few other books that I know of on our coming triple crisis - the end of economic growth, peak oil and climate change - has begun to answer the deeply important question "how shall we view this, how shall we speak of it."

I often joke "I'm not spiritual, I'm religious." That is, I am something of a skeptic about spiritual approaches that pick and choose appealing bits from faiths, without addressing or fully dealing with the whole structure of religious belief that underlies them. I worry about the lack of rigor of such an approach, and so when Baker sent me a copy of her book, I was afraid I'd struggle to find something good to say. I was thus, favorably impressed by the way that Baker uses her raw material to speak about spiritual life in ways that are not pallid or empty, but are deep, rigorous and complex.

Baker is unflinching in her diagnosis of our situation, and never pulls her punches. She does not offer false hope or false reassurance. What she offers is a deeply complex and valuable narrative in which to contextualize our experience, a great deal of personal wisdom, and a long historical view of our present state. It might seem that these things are small in comparison to what we lose when we look honestly at our situation, but they turn out not to be.

Perhaps the best and most useful thing I can say about Carolyn Baker's book is this - it manages to leave you consoled, sustained and in new ways prepared to face the future. Despite the fact that its unflinching honesty takes away denial as a choice, it leaves us better off than before. And what more can one say about a book?

Sharon Astyk is the author of DEPLETION AND ABUNDANCE: Life On The New Home Front and A NATION OF FARMERS: Defeating The Food Crisis on American Soil. By all means, check out her BLOG.

One of the four states that is not insolvent is an unlikely candidate for the distinction--North Dakota. As Michigan management consultant Charles Fleetham observed last month in an article distributed to his local media:

"North Dakota is a sparsely populated state of less than 700,000, known for cold weather, isolated farmers and a hit movie--Fargo. Yet, for some reason it defies the real estate cliché of location, location, location. Since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56%, personal income has grown 43%, and wages have grown 34%. This year the state has a budget surplus of $1.2 billion!"

What does the State of North Dakota have that other states don't? The answer seems to be: its own bank. In fact, North Dakota has the only state-owned bank in the nation. The state legislature established the Bank of North Dakota in 1919. Fleetham writes that the bank was set up to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. By law, the state must deposit all its funds in the bank, and the state guarantees its deposits. Three elected officials oversee the bank: the governor, the attorney general, and the commissioner of agriculture. The bank's stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota. The bank operates as a bankers' bank, partnering with private banks to loan money to farmers, real estate developers, schools and small businesses. It loans money to students (over 184,000 outstanding loans), and it purchases municipal bonds from public institutions.

Still, you may ask, how does that solve the solvency problem? Isn't the state still limited to spending only the money it has? The answer is no. Certified, card-carrying bankers are allowed to do something nobody else can do: they can create "credit" with accounting entries on their books.

A License to Create Money

Under the "fractional reserve" lending system, banks are allowed to extend credit (create money as loans) in a sum equal to many times their deposit base. Congressman Jerry Voorhis, writing in 1973, explained it like this:

"[F]or every $1 or $1.50 which people--or the government--deposit in a bank, the banking system can create out of thin air and by the stroke of a pen some $10 of checkbook money or demand deposits. It can lend all that $10 into circulation at interest just so long as it has the $1 or a little more in reserve to back it up." (3)

That banks actually create money with accounting entries was confirmed in a revealing booklet published by the Chicago Federal Reserve titled Modern Money Mechanics. 2 The booklet was periodically revised until 1992, when it had reached 50 pages long. On page 49 of the 1992 edition, it states:

"With a uniform 10 percent reserve requirement, a $1 increase in reserves would support $10 of additional transaction accounts [loans created as deposits in borrowers' accounts]." (4)

Dangerously inflationary? Not if the money were used to create new goods and services. Price inflation results only when "demand" (money) exceeds "supply" (goods and services). When they increase together, prices remain stable.

Today we are in a dangerous deflationary spiral, as lending has dried up and asset values have plummeted. The monopoly on the creation of money and credit by a private banking fraternity has resulted in a malfunctioning credit system and monetary collapse. Credit markets have been frozen by the wildly speculative derivatives gambles of a few big Wall Street banks, bets that not only destroyed those banks' balance sheets but are infecting the whole private banking system with toxic debris. To get out of this deflationary debt trap requires an injection of new, debt-free money into the economy, something that can best be done through a system of public banks dedicated to serving the public interest, administering credit as a public utility.

Some experts insist that we must tighten our belts and start saving again, in order to rebuild the "capital" necessary for functioning markets; but our markets actually functioned quite well so long as the credit system was working. We have the same real assets (raw materials, oil, technical knowledge, productive capacity, labor force, etc.) that we had before the crisis began. Our workers and factories are sitting idle because the private credit system has failed. A system of public credit could put them back to work again. The notion that "money" is something that has to be "saved" before it can be "borrowed" misconstrues the nature of money and credit. Credit is merely a legal agreement, a "monetization" of future proceeds, a promise to pay later from the fruits of the advance. Banks have created credit on their books for hundreds of years, and this system would have worked quite well had it not been for the enormous tribute siphoned off to private coffers in the form of interest. A public banking system could overcome that problem by returning the interest to the public purse. This is the sort of banking system that was pioneered in the colony of Pennsylvania, where it worked brilliantly well.

Restoring Michigan to Solvency

Among other advantages to a state of owning its own bank are the substantial sums it could save in interest. As Fleetham notes of his own ailing state of Michigan:

"According to recent financial reports (available online), the State of Michigan, the City of Detroit, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, the Wayne County Airport, the Detroit Public Schools, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State University pay over $800 million a year in interest on long term debt. If you add interest paid by Michigan cities, school districts, and public utilities, the cost to our taxpayers easily tops a billion a year. What does Wall Street do with our billion plus dollars? They decorate their offices like kings."

Interestingly, the projected state budget deficit for 2009 is also $1 billion. If Michigan did not have to pay over a billion dollars in interest to Wall Street, the budget could be balanced and the state could be restored to solvency. A state-owned bank could not only provide interest-free credit for the state but could actually generate revenues for it. Fleetham notes that in 2007, the Bank of North Dakota earned a net profit of $51 million on a loan volume of $2 billion. He comments:

"Last year, Michigan citizens paid over $5 billion dollars in personal income tax. With a state bank like North Dakota's we could reduce this burden, fund new businesses, and restore our crumbling water and sewer systems. And we don't have to feel sorry about Wall Street losing our business. They didn't 'earn' the money they lent us. They created it in computers and charged us interest to boot. Let's follow North Dakota's lead and get free from Wall Street's web."

Taking the Initiative in California

California could do this as well. Robert Ellis is a Tucson talk show host who once worked on Wall Street and has been involved in setting up several banks and financial institutions. In January of this year, he proposed in a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger that California could resolve its financial woes by setting up a bank on the model of the Bank of North Dakota. Ellis wrote to the governor:

"I admire your tenacity in dealing with California's financial problems. Your idea of using IOU's was ingenious but there is a better way. The State of California can charter its own bank and issue its own checks to all state employees... . It can also pay all its vendors, contracts and contractors through the bank... . Additionally, once the bank is operational, you can fund your own state projects and you determine the interest rate paid as opposed to being at the mercy of the banks you currently deal with or the interest rates the investment bankers make you pay to issue bonds. By doing this, you will put the state in control of its own destiny and make it the benefactor of its own money.

"... What I am proposing is not new. It has been done by one other state in the nation [North Dakota]. Why should you continue to pay the banks for services and interest on loans when you can receive that interest for the benefit of the state of California? Wouldn't it be better if you could fund your own infrastructure projects without having to get the approval of independent banks or investment bankers? Additionally, you set the interest rate on your own projects. You can even set it at zero if you deem the project worthy enough."

Ellis offered his services in setting up the bank, which he thought could be chartered in a few short months. The Governor has not replied, but some pressure from constituents might encourage a response.

Failing that, there is the initiative and referendum process pioneered in California. It allows state laws to be proposed directly by the public, and the state's Constitution to be amended either by public petition (the "initiative") or by the legislature submitting a proposed constitutional amendment to the electorate (the "referendum"). The initiative is done by writing a proposed constitutional amendment or statute as a petition, which is submitted to the California Attorney General along with a submission fee, which was a modest $200 in 2004. The petition must be signed by registered voters amounting to 8% (for a constitutional amendment) or 5% (for a statute) of the number of people who voted in the most recent election for governor. (5)

As Gandhi said, "When the people lead, the leaders will follow." We the people can beat the Wall Street bankers at their own game, by moving our legislators to set up publicly-owned banks that create credit using the same banking principles that are accepted as standard and usual in the trade by bankers themselves.

CITATIONS:

1. Anne Davies, "Lockdown Vote Saves California from Bankruptcy," theage.com.au (February 21, 2009).

2. John Mitchell, "46 of 50 States Could File Bankruptcy in 2009-2010," Freedom Arizona (January 30, 2009).

3. Jerry Voorhis, The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon (1973), excerpted at sonic.net

4. Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Public Information Service, 1992, available at rayservers.com.

5. "California Ballot Proposition," Wikipedia.

.......
Ellen Brown, J.D., wrote this article in March, 2009, for Path to a New Economy, a collection of online articles for YES! Magazine, on economic and financial solutions. Ellen developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her eleven books include the bestselling Nature's Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, and Forbidden Medicine. Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

The Cruise case points to the overlooked notion that the internal mechanisms of Hollywood are not determined entirely by audience desires, as one might expect, nor are they geared to respond solely to the decisions of studio creatives, or even those of the studio heads themselves. In 2000, The Hollywood Reporter released a top 100 list of the most powerful figures in the industry over the past 70 years. Rupert Murdoch, chief of News Corporation, which owns Twentieth Century Fox, was the most powerful living figure. With the exception of director Steven Spielberg (no. 3), no artists appeared in the top 10.

Each of the dominant Hollywood studios ("the majors") is now a subsidiary of a much larger corporation, and therefore is not so much a separate or independent business, but rather just one of a great many sources of revenue in its parent company's wider financial empire. The majors and their parents are: Twentieth Century Fox (News Corp), Paramount Pictures (Viacom), Universal (General Electric/Vivendi), Disney (The Walt Disney Company), Columbia TriStar (Sony), and Warner Brothers (Time Warner). These parent companies are amongst the largest and most powerful in the world, typically run by lawyers and investment bankers.Their economic interests are also sometimes closely tied to politicised areas such as the armaments industry, and they are frequently inclined to cozy-up to the government of the day because it decides on financial regulation.

As Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Professor Ben Bagdikian puts it, whereas once the men and women who owned the media could fit in a "modest hotel ballroom," the same owners (all male) could now fit into a "generous phone booth." He could have added that, whilst a phone box may not exactly be the chosen venue for the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, these individuals do indeed meet at plush venues such as Idaho's Sun Valley to identify and forge their collective interests.

Of course, the content of a studio's films is not, as a rule, determined entirely by the political and economic interests of its parent company. Studio CEOs typically have considerable leeway to make the pictures they want to make without direct interference from their ultimate masters. At the very least, however, the content of Hollywood studios broadly reflects their wider corporate interests, and, at times, the parent companies behind the studios take a conscious and deliberate interest in certain movies. There is a battle between "top down" and "bottom up" forces, but mainstream media and academia have traditionally focused on the latter, rather than the former.

Consider last year's blockbuster Australia, the epic from Baz Luhrmann. Two of the film's most salient aspects were that, firstly, it glossed-over the history of Aboriginal people, and, secondly, it made Australia look like a fantastic place to go on holiday. This should come as no surprise - Twentieth Century Fox's parent company (Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) - worked hand-in-hand with the Australian government throughout the film's production for mutual interests. The government benefited from Luhrmann's huge tourist campaign, which included not just the feature film itself but also a series of extravagant tie-in advertisements (all in apparent support of its ham-fisted Aborigine "reconciliation" programme). In turn, the government gave its favourite son tens of millions of dollars in tax rebates. The West Australian newspaper even alleged that Murdoch had his "journalistic foot soldiers" ensure that every aspect of his media empire awarded Australia glowing reviews, an assessment nicely illustrated by The Sun, which enjoyed the "rare piece of good old fashioned entertainment" so much that its reviewer was "tempted to nip down to the travel agent."

There are historical precedents for such interference. In 1969 Haskell Wexler -cinematographer on One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest - had considerable trouble releasing his classic Medium Cool, which riffed on the anti-war protests at the Democrat Convention the previous year. Wexler claims he has Freedom of Information documents revealing that on the eve of the film's release, Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley and high sources in the Democratic Party let it be known to Gulf and Western (then the parent company of Paramount) that if Medium Cool was released, certain tax benefits and other perks in Gulf and Western's favor wouldn't happen. "A stiff prick has no conscience," Wexler told us angrily, referring to Hollywood's business leaders, "and they have no conscience."

Wexler explained how this corporate plot was enacted so as to minimize attention: "Paramount called me and said I needed releases from all the [protestors] in the park, which was impossible to provide. They said if people went to see that movie and left the theatre and did a violent act, then the offices of Paramount could be prosecuted." Although Paramount was obliged to release the film they successfully pushed for an X rating, advertised it feebly, and forbade Wexler from taking it to film festivals. Hardly the way to make a profit on a movie, but certainly an effective way to protect the broader interests of the parent.

Then there's the more famous case of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), the Michael Moore blockbuster which the Walt Disney Company tried to scupper despite it "testing through the roof" with sample audiences. Disney's subsidiary Miramax insisted that its parent had no right to block it from releasing the film since its budget was well below the level requiring Disney's approval. Disney representatives retorted that they could veto any Miramax film if it appeared that its distribution would be counterproductive to their interests. Moore's agent Ari Emanuel alleged that Disney's boss Michael Eisner had told him he wanted to back out of the deal due to concerns about political fallout from conservative politicians, especially regarding tax breaks given to Disney properties in Florida like Walt Disney World (where the governor was the then US President's brother, Jeb Bush). Disney also had ties to the Saudi Royal family, which was unfavourably represented in the film: a powerful member of the family, Al-Walid bin Talal, owns a major stake in Eurodisney and had been instrumental in bailing out the financially troubled amusement park. Disney denied any such high political ball game, explaining they were worried about being "dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle," which it said would alienate customers.

Disney has consistently spread pro-establishment messages in its films, particularly under subsidiary banners such as Hollywood Pictures and Touchstone Pictures (although Oliver Stone's 1995 Nixon biopic is a notable exception). Several received generous assistance from the US government: the Pentagon-backed In the Army Now (1994), Crimson Tide (1995), and Armageddon (1998), as well as the CIA-vetted Bad Company (2002) and The Recruit (2003). In 2006, Disney released the TV movie The Path to 9/11, which was heavily skewed to exonerate the Bush administration and blame the Clinton administration for the terrorist attacks, provoking outraged letters of complaint from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger.

The nature of Disney's output makes sense when we consider the interests of the higher echelons of the corporation. Historically, Disney has had close ties with the US defense department, and Walt himself was a virulent anti-communist (though reports about him being a secret FBI informant or even a fascist are rather more speculative). In the 1950s, corporate and government sponsors helped Disney make films promoting President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" policy as well as the infamous Duck and Cover documentary that suggested to schoolchildren that they could survive an atomic attack by hiding under their desks. Even now, a longtime Directors Board member of Disney is John E. Bryson who is also a director of The Boeing Company, one of the world's largest aerospace and defence contractors. Boeing received $16.6bn in Pentagon contracts in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan. This would have been no small incentive for Disney to avoid commissioning films critical of Bush's foreign policy, such as Fahrenheit 9/11.

It is hardly surprising that when Disney released Pearl Harbor (2001) - a simplistic mega-budget movie made with full cooperation from the Pentagon, and which celebrated the American nationalist resurgence following that "day of infamy"- it was widely received with cynicism. Yet, despite lamentable reviews, Disney unexpectedly decided in August 2001 to extend the film's nationwide release window from the standard two-to-four months to a staggering seven months, meaning that this 'summer' blockbuster would now be screening until December. In addition, Disney expanded the number of theatres in which the film was showing, from 116 to 1,036. For the corporations due to profit from the aftermath of 9/11, Pearl Harbor provided grimly convenient mood music.

But whilst movies like Australia and Pearl Harbor receive preferential treatment, challenging and incendiary films are frequently cast into the cinematic memory hole. Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986) was a graphic expose of the Salvadorian civil war; its narrative was broadly sympathetic towards the left wing peasant revolutionaries and explicitly critical of U.S. foreign policy, condemning the United States' support of Salvador's right wing military and infamous death squads. Stone's film was turned down by every major Hollywood studio - with one describing it as a "hateful piece of work" - though it received excellent reviews from many critics. The film was eventually financed by British and Mexican investors and achieved limited distribution. More recently controversial documentaries such as Loose Change (2006/2007), which argued that 9/11 was an "inside job," and Zeitgeist (2007), which presents a frightening picture of global economics, have been viewed by millions through the Internet when corporate media wouldn't touch them.

Universal studios' contemporary output has been less rigidly supportive of US power, as films like Children of Men (2006), Jarhead (2005), and The Good Shepherd (2006) indicate. Still, with movies like U-571 (2000) and Charlie Wilson's War (2007), it makes sense that Universal's parent company is General Electric, whose most lucrative interests relate to weapons manufacturing and producing crucial components for high-tech war planes, advanced surveillance technology, and essential hardware for the global oil and gas industries, notably in post Saddam Iraq. GE's board of directors has strong ties to large liberal organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Whilst 'liberal' may sound like a positive term after the unpopularity of Bush's brand of conservatism, liberal organizations are cemented firmly in the bedrock of US elites and have frequently been architects of American interventionist foreign policy, including against Vietnam. They are prepared to ally themselves with conservatives over certain issues, particularly national security, so it should come as no shock to find that GE was close to the Bush Administration through both its former and current CEOs. Jack Welch (CEO from 1981-2001) openly declares disdain for "protocol, diplomacy and regulators" and was even accused by California Congressman Henry Waxman of pressuring his NBC network to declare Bush the winner prematurely in the 2000 "stolen election" when he turned up unannounced in the newsroom during the poll count. Welch's successor, the current GE CEO Jeff Immelt, is a neoconservative and was a generous financial contributor to the Bush re-election campaign.

Perhaps GE/Universal's most eyebrow-raising release was United 93 (2006), billed as the "true account" of how heroic passengers on 9/11 "foiled the terrorist plot" by forcing the plane to crash prematurely in rural Pennsylvania. Although the film made a return on its relatively low investment, it was greeted with a good deal of public apathy and hostility prior to its nation-wide release. At the time, Bush's official 9/11 story was being seriously interrogated by America's independent news media: according to the results of a 2004 Zogby poll, half of New Yorkers believed "US leaders had foreknowledge of impending 9/11 attacks and 'consciously failed' to act," and, just one month prior to the release of United 93, 83% of CNN viewers recorded their belief "that the US government covered up the real events of the 9/11 attacks." With the official narrative under heavy fire, the Bush Administration welcomed the release of United 93 with open arms: the film was a faithful audio-visual translation of the 9/11 Commission Report, with "special thanks" to the Pentagon's Hollywood liaison Phil Strub tucked away discreetly in the end credits. Soon after the film's nationwide release date, in what might be interpreted as a cynical PR move and as gesture of official approval, President Bush sat down with some of the victims' family members for a private screening at the White House.

GE/Universal's Munich (2005) - Steven Spielberg's exploration of Israeli vengeance following the Palestinian terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics - raises similar suspicions. Although the Zionist Organisation of American called for a boycott of the film because they felt it equated Israel with terrorists, such a reading is less than convincing. Indeed, by the time Munich's credits begin to roll its overriding messages have been stamped indelibly into the brain by the film's Israeli Special Forces characters: "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," "We kill for our future, we kill for peace," and "Don't f*ck with the Jews." Predictably, Israel is one of GE's most loyal customers, buying Hellfire II laser missiles as well as propulsion systems for the F-16 Falcon fighter, the F-4 Phantom fighter, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, and the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. In Munich's167 minute running time the voice of the Palestinian cause is restricted to two and a half minutes of simplistic dialogue. Rather than being an "evenhanded cry for peace," as the Los Angeles Times hailed it, General Electric's Munich is more easily interpreted as a subtle corporate endorsement of the policies of a loyal customer.

On the most liberal end of the spectrum for movies in recent years has been Warner Bros. - JFK (1991), The Iron Giant (1999), South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), V for Vendetta (2005), A Scanner Darkly (2006), Rendition (2007), and In the Valley of Elah (2007). It is indicative that following complaints about racial stereotyping in Warner Bros.' Pentagon-sponsored action adventure, Executive Decision (1996), the studio took the unusual step of hiring the services of Jack Shaheen, an on-set adviser on racial politics, resulting in what was critically received as one of the best films of its genre in a generation, Three Kings (1999). It may be no coincidence that Warner Brothers' parent company, Time Warner, is less intimately tied to the arms industry or the neoconservative clique.

But to have an idea of what happens to movies when you remove multinational interests from the industry, consider the independent distributor Lions Gate Films, which is still very much a part of the capitalist system (formed in Canada by an investment banker) but not beholden to a multibillion dollar parent corporation with multifarious interests. Although Lions Gate has generated a good deal of politically vague and blood 'n' guts products, it has also been behind some of the most daring and original popular political cinema of the past ten years, criticizing corporatism in American Psycho (2000), US foreign policy in Hotel Rwanda (2004), the arms trade in Lord of War (2005), the U.S. healthcare system in Michael Moore's Sicko (2007), and the U.S. establishment in general in The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006).

It hardly needs re-stating that Hollywood is driven by the desire for dollars rather than artistic integrity. As such, cinema is open to product placement in a variety of forms, from toys, to cars, to cigarettes, and even state-of-the art weaponry (hence the "special thanks" to Boeing in the credits of Iron Man (2008)). Less obvious though - and less well investigated - is how the interests of the studios' parent companies themselves impact on cinema - at both systemic and individual levels. We hope to see critical attention shifted onto the ultimate producers of these films to help explain their deradicalised content, and ultimately to assist audiences in making informed decisions about what they consume. As we peer up from our popcorn it is as well to remember that behind the magic of the movies are the wizards of corporate PR.

Matthew Alford is author of the forthcoming book "Projecting Power: American Foreign Policy and the Hollywood Propaganda System." Robbie Graham is Associate Lecturer in Film at Stafford College. References available on request.

NOTES

Most memorably, Cruise declared his love for Katie Holmes whilst bouncing up and down on Oprah (the chat show, not the woman).

The 2008 Fortune Global 500 list placed General Electric at no. 12 with revenue of $176bn. Sony was at 75, Time Warner at no. 150, The Walt Disney Company at no. 207, and News Corp at no. 280. By way of comparison, Coca Cola is at no. 403.

Interestingly, Disney's CEO Michael Eisner was personally involved when it pulled Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect show after the host committed the cardinal sin of saying that the US use of cruise missiles was more cowardly than the 9/11 attacks, with Eisner "summoning Maher into his office for a hiding" according to Mark Crispin Miller in the Nation.

A less convincing but nevertheless intriguing case can be made for high political/economic influence over the distribution of John Carpenter's satirical sci-fi They Live (1988), which depicted the world as being run by an invading force of evil space aliens, allied with the US establishment. The film was well received by critics (with the notable exceptions of the NYT and Washington Post) and opened at number one in the box office. It easily made its $4m investment back over the weekend, and although by the second weekend it had dropped to fourth place, it still made $2.7m. The distributing studio, Universal Pictures, published an advertisement during its run that showed a skeletal alien standing behind a podium in suit and tie, with a mop of hair similar to that of Dan Quayle, the new US Vice-President-elect. The Presidential election had been just a few days previous, on November 8th. Co-star Keith David observed: "Not that anybody's being paranoid but... suddenly you couldn't see it [They Live] anywhere - it was, like, snatched".

We stated elsewhere that representatives from Universal attended the screening. This was erroneous.

Shaheen also later assisted on Warner Bros.' Syriana (2005).

I don't mean to trivialize America's economic crisis. It is real. And it is serious. Many of my friends are out of work. But while all of us are busy pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, we can't forget about the millions of people in Africa that are still suffering.

Why? Well, it's hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you're barefoot.
Millions of HIV+ Africans can't even afford $0.43 a day to get the medicine they need to stay alive. But you've heard this all before. You've heard countless heartbreaking stories about AIDS in Africa. Yet there still is one largely untold story about the crisis. The story about how our efforts to end the epidemic are actually working. I've seen the evidence. I've seen it first hand.

I spent last month volunteering at a workshop for HIV+ people in western Kenya. It's called Imani Workshops. And for anyone who needs evidence that the aid we send to Africa is truly a hand up, and not a hand out, you need look no further than Imani. The goal of the workshop is to promote economic self-sufficiency for the region's HIV+ people who are too poor, too unskilled, or too stigmatized to secure a job or access credit. These patients, or "interns," are placed at Imani by social workers at an affiliated HIV/AIDS clinic. Once at Imani, interns spend three months at the workshop learning handicraft skills in jewelry making, pottery, paper making, and tailoring.

At the end of their three months, these certified Imani artisans head out to find a job and make room for the next round of interns. The Imani model empowers HIV+ people without encouraging dependency on the donor community. Furthermore, the workshop supports itself entirely through the sales of the products they make. Imani not only promotes economic self-sufficiency, it embodies it.

Imani Workshops is a program within one of Africa's largest, most comprehensive HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention models (AMPATH). Anti-retroviral drug therapy (ARV) is at the core of the model's treatment program (ARVs are the medicine HIV+ people need to stay alive). Without ARVs, Imani would not be possible. You see, Imani is run entirely by and for HIV+ people. But ARVs are just the first step toward restoring the health of those affected by HIV.

ARVs are the boots. Imani provides the straps. And from there, well, you get the idea.

Chris Murphy
Planning Director, Modernista
Proud supporter of (RED)

(RED) was created by Bono and Bobby Shriver to raise awareness and money for The Global Fund by teaming up with the world's most iconic brands to produce (PRODUCT) RED-branded products. A percentage of each (PRODUCT) RED product sold is given to The Global Fund, to invest in African AIDS programs, with an emphasis on women and children. JOINRED.COM

Consider: by 2005, the trade imbalance between China and the United States was 202 billion dollars, having multiplied nearly twenty-fold in just fifteen years. China now holds 922 billion dollars' worth of U.S. Treasury bills, and a total of almost two trillion in U.S. dollars. Its economy expands nearly 10% a year, while the American economy is hovering on the edge of a full-scale depression, and will need Chinese loans to bail it out. And while the American manufacturing sector gets weaker with each passing day, China has become the workshop of the world. It won't be long before it starts to flex its muscles militarily as well.

Such are the conclusions of a number of distinguished economists and political scientists. What few of them provide, however, is an explanation for this turn of events. A notable exception is a recent book by the Irish journalist Eamonn Fingleton, In the Jaws of the Dragon, which makes the point that while the Americans spend like there is no tomorrow, the top-down bureaucratic system of China forces its citizens to save rather than consume. In this authoritarian, state-capitalist arrangement, a number of policies make consumer spending very difficult, with the resulting savings generating huge cash reserves that are then deployed in boosting key industries. It's a coercive system, says Fingleton, and it works. (In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did something similar during World War II, and the U.S. savings rate went from 5% to 25% in three years. The resulting capital was used to pay for armaments manufacture.)

Yet as Fingleton recognizes, the policy of restricted consumption and enforced savings has a deeper root to it, what he refers to as the "Confucian truth ethic." Although there are real differences among the various schools of Eastern philosophy, they do have a number of important things in common; and as with the Judeo-Christian ethic of the West, these things go very deep. Whether we are talking about the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, the Analects, or the Chuang Tzu, two items in particular stand out as central to this way of thinking: the notion that the truth is relative, or provisional; and that harmony is the ultimate end of society. Before I say any more about contemporary China, it might be worth our while to explore these themes in a bit more detail.

In a sense, harmony and radical relativism form the shadow side of the Western tradition, which prizes individualism and the reliability of (binary) logic and empirical evidence. This lends Eastern thought a "forbidden fruit" aspect, an exotic aura that exerted a strong influence on many young people in the U.S. during the sixties and seventies, especially. I remember my own introduction to it during that time, and the sense that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. For Western individualism and scientific reasoning can finally seem oppressive, too tight a box to live in; in which case thought systems such as Taoism and Buddhism appear to be a breath of fresh air. "Go with the flow," we all told each other during those heady days in California.

A particularly significant milestone of the genre during that time was the publication, in 1974, of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was Pirsig's claim that this Eastern shadow tradition showed up in ancient Greece as Sophism, the bête noire of Plato and his school. In fact, so forbidden was this fruit for Pirsig that he finally went insane in the pursuit of the "lost" tradition. Whether or not the Sophists really were Taoists, however, is not the point. What matters historically is that they represented an alternate fork in the road to Platonic doctrine, and one which Plato did his best to squash. The founder of the school, Protagoras (after whom Plato named one of his dialogues), was fond of saying that "man is the measure of all things"; by which he meant that every person has his or her own truth, and that all of these are equally valid. Rhetoric was the issue, he taught his disciples, not logic; persuasion, not reason, was what counted in any given argument. For Plato, this was the philosophy of the mob, of people who were morally and intellectually dead and interested only in acquiring the gift of gab. As Pirsig notes, Plato won the battle-at least in theory-and the Western notion of truth (postmodernism and perhaps law courts excepted) is that it really does exist, and is not merely a function of who is speaking or how persuasive an orator he or she is. As the British philosopher A.N. Whitehead famously remarked, Western philosophy is essentially "a series of footnotes to Plato."

But the East went in a different direction, and for those accustomed to only one way of thinking, it definitely casts a spell. "Choosing is a disease of the mind," as one Eastern text puts it. All is in flux; there is no Yes or No. We must avoid getting attached to Right or Wrong, because they fluctuate depending on the person and the circumstances. "For each individual there is a different 'true' and a different 'false'," says the Chuang Tzu. By following the Tao, going with the flow, one attains the best possible outcome. As the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once put it, the Chinese are "crossing the river by feeling for the stones."

That the truth is contextual, says Fingleton, means that expediency, or the optimization of what is regarded as beneficial, is the true priority. Thus Zhou Enlai, the consummate Chinese politician, was said to have never told the truth-or a lie. In effect, he made no distinction between the two; he just "felt for the stones."

Again, on an individual level, Eastern philosophy can afford a large measure of relief. The Western reality system exalts notions of intentionality and deliberate action; it holds that the world can and should be bent to the human will. But this doesn't really work in human life, does it? We all eventually have to confront the fact that there are many things in life-perhaps the most important ones-that are simply beyond our control. "Those who would take hold of the world and act on it," wrote Lao Tzu, "never, I notice, succeed." Hence the Chinese concept of wu wei, or not-doing; which, properly understood, is not the same thing as passivity. Rather, it refers to surrender, to letting things take their course, follow the Tao.

The word "Tao" appears for the first time in the Analects of Confucius, and means the right way of conduct for both the individual and society. According to the American sinologist Herlee Creel, contemplative Taoism, which operates on the individual level, strives for inner harmony. But there is also, he says, a purposive Taoism, which seeks to use the techniques of nonaction and nonjudgmentalism as a means to power. In other words, be without desire in order to get what you desire. This theme-which is essentially one of pure manipulation-features big in the Tao Te Ching, a book that (like The Prince, by Machiavelli) gives advice to kings and lords, and sees the Tao as a technique of control. "The sage, in governing," says the Tao Te Ching, "empties the people's minds and fills their bellies, weakens their wills and strengthens their bones." We are starting to approach the political philosophy of the Chinese state, in which 97% of the population (a total of 1.3 billion people) have full bellies (no mean achievement, by the way).

This, then, is a system of "soft authoritarianism," in which relationships take precedence over laws-which are, as Fingleton points out, only selectively enforced anyway. Confucianism, he says, is "every enlightened despot's perfect ideology." Its emphasis on harmony is easily twisted into an insistence on conformity. ("The nail that stands out is likely to get hit down," as the Japanese like to say.) It enjoins the people to passivity, and legitimizes authoritarian leadership. Indeed, it is hard to dissent from a system in which there is no right or wrong, true or false, but only that which supposedly promotes the commonweal. Those who try-like the Falun Gong movement that was founded in 1992, and whose doctrines are basically Buddhist-become the target of government crackdown in short order. The Communist Party's monopoly of power is presented to the Chinese people as a "natural" fact of life: the way, the Tao.

Much of Fingleton's concern in his book is over the way in which he sees America becoming "Confucianized," the way U.S. corporations play ball with the Chinese state so as to acquire influence and get on the gravy train. Thus Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft all agreed to abide by China's censorship rules in serving Chinese Internet users-for example, to expunge all references to Tiananmen Square and Taiwanese independence. In addition, top technology firms in the U.S. contracted with China to develop fire walls that block access of Chinese citizens to "dangerous" information, including important Western websites. Under the influence of the China lobby, pro-Chinese journalists and academics in the United States get their reputations enhanced, go to exclusive dinner parties, and receive lavish fees for lectures. Those who are critical are quickly left out of the loop, and barred from sources of research and information. In general, the Chinese system is one of institutionalized bribery, in which corruption functions like legitimate payment for services rendered. The process, says Fingleton, is destroying American values (Enron executives did wind up in jail, after all). It is China that is changing us, he concludes, not we who are changing China. We are not democratizing them-far from it. Rather, they are Confucianizing us.

All this is probably true, but it seems to be part of a larger, graver loss, that of the Enlightenment tradition itself. Eastern philosophy may be the shadow side of that tradition, but it should be clear by now that the shadow has a shadow. How can the West confront a nation whose government is endlessly slippery, and that meets confrontation with Sophism, in effect? And if, as Mao Zedong predicted, "the East wind will prevail over the West," what will it be like to live in a world dominated by an ethos in which the truth doesn't, for all practical purposes, exist, and in which everyone is expected to fall in step with some enforced "harmony"? There is a word for this type of regime: Orwellian. The loss of the Enlightenment yardstick of truth to some kind of pervasive amorality would represent a loss far deeper than an economic one, it seems to me. A Confucianized society in which truth is nothing more than expediency is its own kind of prison; "go with the flow" can become its own form of ego, and of repression.

Some time ago, I was talking with a Mexican colleague of mine, a very brilliant teacher and administrator who had read up on China and was aware of some of these issues. "There may come a time," he said with a sigh, "when we shall actually miss the gringos."

What a thought, eh?

Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. During 1982-88 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Berman won the Governor's Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. He is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness-The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)-and in 2000 his Twilight of American Culture was named a "Notable Book" by the New York Times Book Review.

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (IPS) - CENTCOM Commander General David Petraeus and Multinational Force Iraq (MNF-I) Commander General Ray Odierno have submitted assessments of Iraq combat troop withdrawal plans to President Barack Obama based on the premise that his 16-month withdrawal plan would pose significantly greater risk to "security gains" than the 23-month plan they favour.

But a senior commander in Iraq appeared to contradict that premise last week by declaring that security gains in the Shi'a provinces of Iraq are "permanent", and a field commander in Iraq says there is no objective basis for any Petraeus-Odierno finding that Obama's plan carries greater risk than their 23-month plan.

Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, U.S. commander for the eight southern provinces of Iraq, denied in remarks to reporters Feb. 12 that the security gains in that region were fragile, contrary to the premise that Odierno has publicly asserted. Oates cited the dramatic reduction in activities by Shi'a militia fighters and the holding of the Jan. 31 elections without any major attacks.

In a previous press briefing Jan. 14, Oates had told reporters that, even if violence were to break out after provincial elections, Iraqi security forces "are well prepared to handle that".

He also cast doubt on Iranian involvement with Shi'a militias in the south, saying he had "no evidence or reports of people training in Iran", despite periodic "anecdotal intelligence reports" of such training camps.

Oates said he had already reassigned combat forces in the region to non-combat missions, either training or economic development, despite grumbling by soldiers.

Although Oates did not explicitly address the issue of drawdown plans, he has been known to favour a more rapid withdrawal from Iraq than Petraeus and Odierno for some time, according to a military officer who served under Odierno and is familiar with Oates's views. "His belief is that we need to get out of the country and let the Iraqis take responsibility for their areas," the officer, who asked not to be identified, told IPS.

A field commander in Iraq, who spoke with IPS on the understanding that he would not be identified, asserted flatly that there is no greater risk associated with President Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan than with the 23-month plan, contrary to Petraeus and Odierno.

The officer said that the U.S. military presence has already "passed the tipping point of diminishing returns" in relation to stability and security in Iraq. "The longer we stay now, the less we achieve," he said.

Neither Petraeus nor Odierno has offered any public explanation for their argument that a 16-month drawdown plan would pose greater risk to stability and security than one lasting seven months longer. However, Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, an adviser to Petraeus, argued in Foreign Affairs last fall that the U.S. military presence is "essential to stabilize a system of local ceasefires" between Sunnis and Shi'as and between the militias loyal to Moqtada al Sadr and the Shi'a-dominated government.

But the field commander now serving in Iraq told IPS that the U.S. military mission in Iraq has "little correlation" with the present ceasefire between Sunnis and Shi'as. The Sunni-Shi'a conflict, said the officer, "is now one for political supremacy, not a counterinsurgency as defined in the Army's Counterinsurgency manual".

He said he had been briefed recently on the U.S. mission in Iraq and had been told it is still a counterinsurgency mission, as it has been for several years. There was "no mention of any peacekeeping function aimed at maintaining ceasefires," the officer said.

The idea of enforcing ceasefires is advocated by some in the U.S. command, he said, but that would be "a very different mission from counterinsurgency".

Biddle confirmed in an interview with IPS that the U.S. military peacekeeping role he advocates has not been adopted by the MNF-I command. A number of officers in the command, he said, still believe the U.S. objective in Iraq is "the gradual elimination" of all forces competing with the Iraqi government's security forces.

Ironically, it was Biddle who revealed in Congressional testimony last April that the reduction in sectarian violence in and around Baghdad beginning in 2007 for which Odierno had credited the U.S. troop surge was actually the result of the heavy defeat of Sunni insurgent forces in a year-long battle with Shi'a militias for control of Baghdad in 2006. Biddle observed that the U.S. military tried to stop the sectarian violence but played "no decisive role" in the ultimate ceasefire between Sunni and Shi'a.

In an online discussion on the Washington Post website Feb. 9, Biddle conceded that U.S. troop strength had been insufficient in 2006 to prevent the sectarian violence in Baghdad.

That revelation undercuts the Petraeus-Odierno argument that keeping combat troops in Iraq longer than 16 months would help maintain the present ceasefire between Sunni and Shi'a forces. In 16 months, U.S. combat troop strength will be only a fraction of its 2006 level, even under the Petraeus-Odierno plan.

The U.S. field commander said that, even if U.S. troops were given the mission of enforcing ceasefires, it would not give the U.S. military any additional influence over either side to remain several more months beyond the 16-month withdrawal period.

"At some point [U.S. troops] are going to have to leave," said the commander. "The Iraqis are going to resolve political differences without American military muscle to enforce it. It doesn't matter if that process begins in 16 months, 23 months, or 23 years. We gain nothing with the additional time."

"The 1st Cavalry Division cannot make the Shiites and Sunnis kiss and make up," he observed. "They can't make the problems of oil revenue sharing get resolved. Those are issues only Arabs and Kurds can resolve."

A second U.S. officer now serving in Iraq, who also asked not to be identified, expressed doubt that a 16-month withdrawal is logistically feasible, based on his experience in a specific area south of Baghdad. But he agreed that it is time to complete the turnover of responsibility to the Iraqi Army and rapidly withdraw U.S. combat troops.

"It's time for us to get out," he said in an interview. "If the U.S. military continues to do the job, the Iraqis are going to be lazy, and they won't do it themselves."

The officer conceded that the Iraq army "is nowhere near as competent as the U.S. Army," and that "there may be some breakout of bad things" after the troop withdrawal. Nevertheless, the officer warned, "If you don't give the Iraqis the mantle of responsibility, we will be there for another 25-30 years."

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

If you're reading this book you already know we're living in perilous times. By now most people are waking up to that fact. Even President Obama has warned us that difficult times lie ahead. Just days before taking office when asked if sacrifice will be required of everyone, Obama told the nation, "Everyone is going to have to give. Everybody's going to have to have some skin in the game."

But even recognizing that times are tough, chances are reading this book will feel overwhelming and unsettling at times. I know it has been for me and I've been studying, writing, and teaching about the implications of such threats as peak oil, climate change, and economic collapse over half a decade. But I'd like to suggest that we welcome whatever feelings of overwhelm or disquiet this book may stir in us, because like the medicine our mothers gave us as children, they will make us better.

I say this because Carolyn is not one to beat around the bush. Her focus is not on statistics, charts, and data demonstrating the factual realities of our eco-nomic situation. There are ample books with such information. Most of them touch lightly on the focus of this book, firmly acknowledging its importance, but skittering on to the facts.

In Peak Everything, for example, Richard Heinberg emphasizes that "Much of the human impact (of peak oil and climate change) will be measurable in economic terms; however, individual and collective psychological effects will perhaps be of equal and often greater significance." Having observed the effects economic collapse of the USSR in the 1990's, Dmitry Orlov agrees. In Reinventing Collapse, he writes, "Economic collapse is about the worst time for someone to suffer a nervous breakdown, yet this is what often happens."

Fact is, the future is going to be hard to swallow, not only presenting practical day-to-day challenges but deeply impacting our emotional and spiritual lives. In Sacred Demise Carolyn doesn't just touch on this fact. She dares to make it the sole focus of our attention, reaching far beneath the statistic, charts, and generalizations about their implications and delving deeply into the heart and soul of the inner traumas and turmoil we will most likely encounter. She zeroes right in on the very places we want to run away from, ignore, and rationalize, including the profound loss we will feel.

This naked honesty about such matters is only the context of the book, not its purpose. This is not a doom and gloom book. It's about looking squarely at the reality of our circumstances, as incomprehensible and uncomfortable as they may be, and exploring the potential for personal growth, transformation, and resurrection.

By openly sharing her personal experiences and the wisdom, poetry, questions, and activities included in the book, she draws upon herself to understand and grow from our circumstances by infusing them with compassion. Carolyn makes us feel safe venturing into the tender, vulnerable places.

She says let's look straight on at what we're facing and allow it to be a grand teaching to deepen our understanding of life and our place in it. While the reality of what we are dealing with may be overwhelming when seen with such stark honesty, isn't that what we yearn for? Isn't the failure to talk together in this way what unsettles us most? Like the young child whose parents won't talk about a life-threatening illness that's befallen their household or the child who on the way to the dentist is told "It won't hurt at bit," we don't want to be blindsided by realities that could be opportunities instead to prepare ourselves and make ourselves strong and capable.

After all, what is being overwhelmed but a just fast flowing river of experience we need to catch our breath for; a rug pulled out from beneath our feet to get up from, an unexpected encounter we can surprise ourselves with by responding to aptly? Chances are as you read on page-by-page you will begin to feel oddly relieved. You'll be getting your bearings in a reality that at first seems foreign and frightening but gradually reveals itself as a truth you have long known already.

Certainly that has been true for me. From the time I was a small child I sensed there was something very wrong with how things work in our human-made world. I spent many hours out of doors where everything seemed to make sense, but as I matured I concluded there must be some flaw within myself that was preventing me from understanding what everyone else seemed to grasped so easily, that our culture works to our best interest even if it appears otherwise. With that mind I undertook the arduous task of molding myself into what was expected of me hoping at some point everything would fall into place as promised.

It was not until I entered the ecopsychology PhD program that I came to see how terribly disconnected, distorted, and dysfunctional our human world has become; how tragically separated we've become from the natural world we are innately part of. As I began to learn from nature how naturally other life forms function, I was heartened by my four years in which I had the pleasure of experiencing how naturally and organically life could unfold. Oh, surely not without challenge or discomfort, but like riding down that fast-flowing river. At times it's surging furiously; at other times it's bubbling along gently. But it's always ever- changing and engaging, always keeping me on my toes, yet something perfectly natural I could navigate as long as I paid attention.

"Ah, ha!" I concluded, at last I will know how to live in our world! When I complete the program I will return to the "normal world" and just continue living in accord with nature's ways. But that was not to be. Returning to the "normal world" was one of the most difficult experiences of my life. My short-lived, free-flowing journey through life ran smack dab into a massive cultural dam of expectations and limitations as difficult for us to escape from as it is for any river to circumvent the manmade dams we've constructed to divert and contain.

This is when I realized fully how virtually impossible it is to function naturally and healthfully within the demands of our growth-oriented, consumer-driven, materialistic, and hierarchical culture. But that's the world that's crumbling now. While we may enjoy many of its conveniences and comforts, or at least have the promise of enjoying them, we also know the price we pay to pursue and maintain them is high. The stress, the long hours, the fast pace, the pressure, the fatigue, and the demands on our time by tasks far different from those we'd prefer. Our way of life is not only wearing down the natural world, it's also wearing down our psychic and our physical well-being. No matter how many possessions we garner or how much money we make, there is never enough to quell our yearning for a greater sense of peace, potency, normalcy, and well-being.

Granted, the difficulties we're facing will not bring us this kind of well-being anytime soon. Probably anything but, at first, because few of us are prepared mentally or spiritually for the onslaught of feelings, the tide of emotions, the rush of the unexpected that is engulfing us. After all, the world that anchors our daily lives now is collapsing right along with the dam upon which our current way of life in built. We don't know if we'll make it to the bottom of the spillway as the dam cracks and breaks away. Assuredly some of us won't. Even if we do, there is no guaranteed, made-to-order world awaiting us on the river once it has burst forth from the dam. For sure there will be no welcoming "comfort inns" along the shore. We're uncertain what the unleashed river of our life will look like or if we will have the knowledge, skills, and acumen to survive in it.

But life, death, mystery, uncertainty, paradox, and danger are all part of the natural world we inhabit. As Henry David Thoreau discovered and expressed so aptly after abandoning his attempt to climb Maine's Mt. Ktaadn, there is in nature "a force not bound to be kind to man, an awesome, primal force of evolving matter-in-motion," a force, I might add, that has proven to be beyond our control to manipulate and mould to our desire. This simple insight is not easily accepted in our culture where we learn that anything we believe, we can achieve, and it is something Carolyn invites us to address before it's too late.

Sacred Demise is an opportunity to do the emotional and spiritual preparation we need to be present, awake, and responsive in awesome circumstances we can't control or prevent. Each chapter invites us to delve deeper into ourselves, deeper into who we are and how we fit into the natural world outside our roles in a crumbling system. From that blatantly honest, deep place of our hearts and souls we can begin to find our way to a more natural way of life and glimpse how the grand unleashing of the waters constrained behind our current way of life could bring us the peace, potency, normalcy, and well-being we yearn for.

The operative word in this possibility is find. Throughout Sacred Demise, Carolyn refers to many insights from Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who wrote in Man's Search for Meaning of his experiences in the Nazi death camps. Some years ago I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing Frankl. His rather stern rebuke of a question I raised left me with an enigma I spent many years wondering about. Not until midway through my ecopsychology program and many learning experiences in nature did I finally understand what Frankl was getting at and why he correctly me so sharply. I had made an innocent error common to our culture, an error we all need to correct to be prepared mentally and emotionally for the years ahead.

As I began to ask how we create meaning in our lives, Frankl interrupted me abruptly, "Not create meaning, find meaning." And so it is in the adventure Carolyn invites us to undertake in Sacred Demise. The pages that follow are an invitation to find meaning in a time of collapse so that when our preconceived and manufactured dreams for how we'd like things will often no longer be relevant, it needn't be also the end of joy and value. This is a worthy task because only from a place of such personal meaning can we build new lives along life's free-flowing river, if not for ourselves then at least for those who come after us.

Sarah Anne Edwards, LCSW, PhD Ecopsychologist, provides continuing education courses for helping professionals through the Pine Mountain Institute and directs Let's Live Local, a non-profit organization working to build local resilience. She's the co-author of Middle-Class Lifeboat, and a trainer for the US Transition Initiatives Network.