News From A Parallel World

And I thought Michele Bachmann was a yo-yo. Just shows you how wrong a guy can be. Bachmann is an intellectual, a mental giant, a towering intellect compared to the former Senator from Pennsylvania.

There seems to be lively controversy on the ‘net these days about Rick Santorum. Some believe he’s evil, a creepy, scary, miserable disgrace to the human race. Others think he’s a cement head.

As I asked my friend Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post this morning, why can’t he be both?

Robinson talks about Santorum’s latest eruption, where he sharply criticized John F. Kennedy for his famous 1960 speech at the Houston Ministers Conference. In that speech, JFK described the difference between faith, including his own, and the requirements of public office. He made it clear that the separation of church and state was a critical principle of democratic government and that he understood and respected it.

Santorum last October declared –– and has now reiterated –– that reading Kennedy’s words made him ‘throw up.’

We’ve all got our nausea thresholds. Just looking at Santorum is enough to make many of us throw up, but as a responsible member of the blogosphere I will try to keep it down at least until I finish this column. I know my responsibilities. They are quite a bit less spectacular than JFK’s but no less sacred.

Robinson, whose commentary on American politics is a rare voice of near-sanity in the mass media mediocrity, believes that Santorum is a dangerous character because he assumes that the man really does understand Kennedy’s point and chooses to ignore it.

Certainly, the former Senator is not beyond any calculation that might advance his candidacy. He’d offer his children as human sacrifices if it would carry a couple of precincts. We all know that, don’t we?

But that doesn’t disqualify him from the moron sweepstakes. I think the man is both unconcerned with what JFK meant and ignorant of it. That is, it would make no difference if he got it, but he also doesn’t care enough to worry about it.

Anyway, candidates have been pretending to consult God for so many years the real shocker would be if we found one who didn’t make that claim. In the 2012 race, alone, we’ve had God’s endorsement of Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, and Santorum.

It’s not Santorum’s proximity to God which troubles me, it’s his proximity to his willie.

I’ve enjoyed the thrills and spills of roughly fourteen presidential contests since hitting puberty and I’ve never before seen anyone, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, male or female, Martian or earthling, show as much concern with what I and my chosen partner might be up to in the bedroom.

Santorum cares more about sex than he does about the mortgage meltdown. Birth control worries him more than unemployment. He is disturbed by women’s bodies and gay sex, and exhibits a bizarre fascination with bestiality and incest.

Seriously, the man is cracked.

In his own words, nine years ago: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”

Last October, he said this about birth control: “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Lest we fail to understand him, Santorum further explains in the same interview that sex has become “deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.”

“They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also procreative...  if you can take one part out that’s not for purposes of procreation... you diminish this very special bond between men and women...”

Sex outside of marriage is not okay? Contraception is not okay?

This guy is crazier than Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Charlie Manson.

I think it’s something that happened to him in his youth, something really yucky. As the great Bill Hicks observed more than once with regard to Jesse Helms and Rush Limbaugh, anybody that far to the right has to be harboring some deep, dark secret.

Just a guess, but you know, this is my column and I get to have some fun once in a while. I’ve been writing about the depredations of multinationals like Monsanto and Coca-Cola and the daily betrayals of Barack Obama, and that’s all so serious.

Do we think Rick’s problem relates to his early sexual experiences? Maybe his mommy caught him masturbating, dragged him to confession, and the priest finished him off with tales of hell and damnation. Got to be something like that.

Maybe it was worse. After all, he’s pretty sick.

The family pet? Hmmm....?

This is an actual candidate for President of the United States who thinks that if the government doesn’t regulate what goes on in your bedroom, you might do anything! What do you suppose he’s thinking of when he says this?

Sorry. You can go throw up now.

The May, 2004, FBI warning to U.S. law enforcement agencies described the use by terrorists of so-called ‘secondary explosive devices,’ used to “kill and injure personnel responding to an initial attack.”

“These devices...can be... detonated up to one hour after the initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population,” the bulletin read.

A 2007 Homeland Security Report on terrorism described such tactics as ‘double taps’, meaning that second strikes are intended for those who respond to the first, including those trying to assist victims.

The deliberate targeting of aid workers is a criminal offense under international law, but the niceties of international law do not seem to have much influence with cold blooded killers. Nor does simple human decency.

In January, 1997, a bomb went off at the Northside Family Planning Services in Sandy Springs, an Atlanta suburb. An hour later, a second bomb injured seven at the same site.

In February, 1997, a bomb exploded in Atlanta at the Otherside Lounge; police found and defused a second bomb.

In January, 1998, a terrorist detonated a bomb at the New Woman All Women clinic in Birmingham. The federal district court sentenced the man convicted of this and the Atlanta incident to two consecutive life terms in prison. The widow of a Birmingham officer killed by the second explosion there proclaimed Eric Rudolph a monster.

You won’t get any argument from me.

While any bombing is a homicide, and those against the law are murders, there is general agreement in the world community and among U.S. agencies such as the F.B.I. and Homeland Security that trying to kill rescue workers or those attending funerals is especially despicable. It is terrorism by any sane definition.

I won’t argue about that, either. Would you?

The article in Salon by Glenn Greenwald begins this way:

“On December 30 of last year, ABC News reported on a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Khan, who was killed with his 12-year-old cousin when a car in which he was riding was hit with a missile fired by a U.S. drone.”

ABC’s reporter went on to say that there were no photographs of the scene because people avoid them. “...drones often target people who show up at the scene of an attack.”

Greenwald then describes some of the findings of a just-released Report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on behalf of the Sunday Times, including:

“The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals” the Report notes, a practice which is evidently part of a deliberate strategy. In an understated estimate, it found that the CIA’s drone campaign has killed more than 50 –– perhaps many more –– in ‘follow-up’ strikes where they had gone to aid victims. In addition, more than 20 mourners were killed attending funerals for victims of earlier attacks. The real numbers, based on credible sources, are much, much higher. There have been at least 260 remote control drone attacks in Pakistan under Obama. You do the math.

While the U.S. media have been reluctant to report any of this, enough has leaked out in various outlets over the past couple of years, including CNN, the New York Times, ABC News, Associated Press, and Al Jezeera, to enable the Bureau to document at least fifteen attacks on rescuers.

There are specifics. In June, 2009, the CIA killed Khwaz Wali Mehsud, a mid-ranking Pakistan Taliban commander. They did this in order to set up another Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, when he attended the Khwaz funeral. This is documented in a new book by a Washington Post reporter. The Khwaz drone strike killed at least five others; the drone attack on his funeral later that same day killed at least 83, 45 of whom were clearly civilians, ten of these children.

This is merely one instance of a pattern repeated over and over by the U.S. in its remote-control killings. It is a policy, specifically, deliberately designed to kill anyone who aids the first targets, including medical personnel, and to subsequently kill anyone arrogant enough to attend a funeral.

The U.S. government, of course, lies about it. Since international legal experts are unanimous that these tactics are unlawful and always have been in war. President Obama claims that the drone strikes in Pakistan are a “targeted, focused effort” that “has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.” His top ‘Counter-terrorism’ expert, John Brennan declared that over the last year “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”

Since Obama took office, there have been at least 300 and probably in excess of 600 civilian deaths due to his policy of attacking responders, aid-givers, and mourners at funerals. Maybe that’s not a “huge number” in Obama’s lexicon. These are credible, documentable numbers. Since the U.S. routinely counts every dead body as a high-ranking Al Qaeda operative, a Taliban commander, or merely a terrorist, it is likely that the true figures are much higher.

Perhaps those who still defend the President would like to explain how the drone attacks deliberately targeting first responders, aid workers, doctors, and mourners at funerals –– which cannot be denied given the overwhelming record –– are justifiable when the heinous ‘double’ bombing of abortion clinics is not.

I’m waiting.

No society can aspire to democracy unless it maintains an unbreakable connection between its politics and its police powers.

Once the populace has no political access to policy and enforcement, once those with coercive power over others are not directly accountable to the people’s representatives, you can kiss your ass goodbye.

We’re on the verge of it in America, 2012.

You can close the page now if you want. Go ahead. I think there’s something on the History Channel.

As David Foster Wallace remarked, the truth will set you free but not until it’s finished with you.

All across the western world, there is enormous pressure being brought to ‘privatize’ everything. Where does this pressure come from? On whose behalf? What does it mean? What is the connection between the demands for ‘privatization’ in Greece, as part of an ‘austerity package’ initiated by the International Monetary Fund, with the ‘privatization’ of prisons in Florida and other states of the U.S.? Is there one?

I’m sorry. This is not going to be one of the funny columns.

Let’s begin with this thought: as human cultures have evolved, there has been a general agreement that some things on the planet, such as water and air, belong to everyone. Democratization has extended these rights to include access to natural beauty and to the oceans.

With various forms of democracy, even including communism and socialism, have come the acceptance that matters of common concern, however approached or regulated, are integrally connected to the political system. That is a fundamental good, since without it there is no way for the people to exercise any real power over their political environment.

If one subscribes, therefore, to democracy, one also must take with it an inviolable connection between, for example, the building of roads, and politics. Otherwise, should roads be privately built, no one could pass without paying extortionate fees. Farmers could not get their crops to market. People could not travel or visit one another. And so forth.

Severing the connection between the public and the management of and control over public resources and operations thought to be of the commons, is dangerous. It would be hard to exaggerate just how dangerous.

This all sounds theoretical, right? I can hear the pages closing as I type this. Gonna check my mail again; maybe something cool on YouTube. I can hear readers canceling subscriptions.

But the issue of privatization is maybe the most important public issue we’re facing in the U.S., and it’s causing terrible dislocation and political chaos in Europe, as well. You’re not going to see it on the news (sic). As with many things in America now, this is a story we’ll have to piece together on our own.

The Corrections Corporation of America, largest company operating private prisons, has written to forty-eight states offering to take over the running of prisons, provided that the states guarantee a ninety percent occupancy.

The systemic corruption this invites is breathtaking.

The care of inmates is of course a responsibility of the prison systems in the states and in the country as a whole for federal institutions. How we treat inmates, provision for their food and clothing, their recreation, their activities, their health, this is a matter of public policy. The state arrests, tries, and attains convictions; inmates have been sentenced to prison. The duration of the sentence is often impacted by the behavior of the prisoner.

It should be obvious that prison conditions are subject to politics; it is politics which passes the laws and operates the judicial system. How prisons are run is our public responsibility, and this is subject to our laws.

Prisons are not meant to be, nor should they be, profit-making enterprises. They have functions to fulfill. That’s not to say that budget matters are unimportant, only that they cannot be the sole criterion for proper operation.

Otherwise, inmates would be given no services at all. Rice is cheap; rancid meat is really cheap. There would be no point worrying about rehabilitation, which can be expensive. Nobody cares what happens when they get out. Gulags give you a profit margin that would impress even Wall Street.

Government is not supposed to be a profit-making enterprise. But any governmental function, once privatized, becomes exactly that. Does anyone have to ask what happens to law enforcement and the judicial system once the state agrees to keep private prisons at 90% of capacity?

How will the national parks be run when we privatize them, as some idiot politicians are advocating? What will the nation’s coastlines be like? Years ago, California voters approved the Coastal Initiative which protected it and secured public access; if and when that promise is broken, how long before only the wealthy can enjoy the beach?

On a lighter note, how about privatizing the military? It’s being done, you know. When Obama announced the ‘withdrawal’ of U.S. troops from Iraq he’d promised only three years before, he didn’t bother to mention that remaining behind are an estimated 50,000 private troops, a private army serving the needs of the corporate mobsters who are figuring to loot what’s left.

Xe, nee Blackwater, is a private army the government contracts with to perform certain tasks, often unspecified, which it feels the regular army cannot perform. Its soldiers are paid much more than a GI, and the casualty rate is much higher. Xe works for the U.S. or for Halliburton or Bechtel or whomever hires it. It is, as we discovered when Blackwater mercenaries murdered Iraqi civilians for pure sport, exempt from U.S. law and the control of the American government which hired it.

When private armies can operate outside the political control of a country, there is no democracy, even in form. We all know what it is, don’t we?

Privatization of water, which I’ve written about before (the ‘Lucifer’ column of a week ago), has enabled major corporations to destroy wide swaths of agriculture in India and elsewhere, causing widespread suicide as farmers by the tens of thousands have lost their land. Privatization of public services, public properties, public responsibilities, is a one-way ticket to hell.

The riots in Greece are about privatization. That is the agenda of the International Monetary Fund, the consortium of bankers who run a large part of the world and want more. Through the mechanism of manufactured debt, the bankers are able to extort whatever ‘austerity’ measures they want. These involve a reduction in the wages of public employees, a reduction in social services for the poor, and the privatization of what is publicly owned.

If you think we’re not headed in that direction in the United States, you’re dreaming. That’s what the budget arguments are about now, and the talk of America’s ‘debt.’ To whom is that ‘debt’ owed? Why, to the bankers, of course, the same people whose looting of the Treasury caused this crisis in the first place. Pretty neat, huh?

Having taken everything else, they are going after what’s left, and what’s left are the treasures of a nation, the wealth owned in common by its people.

We simply can’t let them get it.

What if your country was involved in a war, one which shattered boundaries and killed a great many young soldiers, one which changed the balance of power in a region and caused great hardship, with repercussions continuing long into the future –– and if you discovered, forty years later that the war itself was actually concocted by some of the antagonists, that the war was planned by people on both sides, for strategic advantage?

What if.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS BASED ON AN EXCLUSIVE STORY IN COUNTERPUNCH.ORG.

On Monday, February 27th, a memorandum will be published in the Russian weekly, Expert, written by Vladimir M. Vinogradov, Soviet ambassador to Egypt during the October, 1973, war in the middle east involving Egypt, the United States, Syria, and Israel, with peripheral involvement of several others.

The Vinogradov memorandum was a secret file, 20 typewritten pages edited in blue ink, a draft of a memo intended for the Soviet politburo, and it described the October war as a collusive arrangement involving the leaders of Israel and Egypt, and directed by Henry Kissinger. The purpose of the war was to bolster the precarious domestic position of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, reestablish U.S. presence and economic advantage in the region, and give Israel more territory, a projected buffer zone to provide better security.

Vinogradov did not speak about any of this for more than twenty-five years. Even then, he was circumspect. Now, however, his memorandum will be made public and there will be all hell breaking loose on two continents.

The Camp David Treaty was a farce. Sadat and Kissinger, recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, were co-conspirators and murderers.

Vladimir Vinogradov was a prominent Soviet diplomat with a very impressive resumé. He was ambassador to Japan in the 1960s, posted to Cairo from 1970 to 1974, co-chairman of the Geneva Peace Conference,  ambassador to Teheran during the Islamic revolution, the USSR Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

In Egypt, Vinogradov met with Sadat on hundreds of occasions. He was present with Sadat as the events of October were played out.

In a kind of prequel to the blockbuster publication due Monday, its central contents, and the larger context in which these events occurred, were published in a 3500 word article in the journal CounterPunch by Israel Shamir, who himself had been a participant in the war, as an Israeli soldier. The CounterPunch article is the main source of the details in this piece.

Shamir sketches the backgrounds of Vinogradov, Sadat, and other players in this extraordinary and bloody scheme.

Sadat had taken power following the death of Gamel Abdul Nasser, but his ascendancy had been by pure chance since he had been vice president. Shamir describes it this way:
“Soon he (Sadat) dismissed, purged and imprisoned practically all important Egyptian politicians, the comrades-in-arms of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and dismantled the edifice of Nasser’s socialism.”

And this: “Before the war Sadat was at the nadir of his power: in Egypt and abroad he had lost prestige. The least educated and least charismatic of Nasser’s followers, Sadat was isolated. He needed a war, a limited war with Israel that would not end with defeat. Such a war would release the pressure in the army and he would regain his authority. The US agreed to give him a green light for the war...”

As for the United States, it had found itself with diminishing influence in the region caused by increased nationalism. America needed to be able to develop relationships with some arab states, but Israel’s more belligerent behavior was making that difficult. It needed, in short, a situation in which it could be seen to ‘rescue’ Israel but act as a broker between the sides. America, too, saw advantage to a carefully-devised conflict.

Israel was willing to buy into the plan because it needed a stronger U.S. presence in the region as a counterweight to growing arab power; it also wanted to establish a territorial line as recommended two years prior in the so-called ‘Rogers Plan’, which involved a trade of the canal for defensive positions in the mountain passes of Mittla and Giddi. Thus, Golda Meir agreed to the Kissinger scheme.

One participant in the war which did not have advance warning was Syria. Everyone agreed that when Syria and Egypt began the offensive against Israel, the Israelis would concentrate their forces against the much weaker Syrians in order to crush them; at the same time, Egyptian forces would move virtually unimpeded across the canal. Thus, when the United States ‘intervened’, it would be too late to help Syria but just in time to stop the advance of the Egyptians.

As Shamir describes it, however, from his rather special vantage point in the Israeli defense, something went haywire in the timing of events. The Egyptian army crossed into Israeli territory –– and stopped.

“Sadat did not expect the Egyptian troops taught by the Soviet specialists to better their Israeli enemy – but they did. They crossed the Canal much faster than planned and with much smaller losses. Arabs beating the Israelis – it was bad news for Sadat. He overplayed his hand. That is why the Egyptian troops stood still, like the sun upon Gideon, and did not move. They waited for the Israelis, but at that time the Israeli army was fighting the Syrians. The Israelis felt somewhat safe from Sadat’s side and they sent all their army north. The Syrian army took the entire punch of Israeli forces and began its retreat. They asked Sadat to move forward, to take some of the heat off them, but Sadat refused. His army stood and did not move, though there were no Israelis between the Canal and the mountain passes.”

Sadat’s situation was complicated by the surprise support he received from the Russians, whom he had expected to back away , not wanting to risk a confrontation with the Americans. But Russia instead delivered perhaps the most modern weapons on the planet via an enormous airlift. The Israelis, writes Shamir, could not match the Kalashnikov AK-47s.

Vinogradov, watching the conflict unfold from his unique position with Sadat, questioned the Egyptian president on the strange failure of the Egyptian army to proceed since it had encountered little Israeli opposition. Sadat told him “he does not want to run all over Sinai, looking for Israelis, that sooner or later they would come to him.”

Shamir writes in CounterPunch, “During the war, we (the Israelis) also knew that if Sadat  advanced, he would gain the whole of Sinai in no time; we entertained many hypotheses why he was standing still, none satisfactory.”

If Vinogradov’s secret memo is accurate, the explanation is now known, although it’s not likely to be considered very satisfactory by anybody.

The Syrians, intended to be the main victims of this ugly little conspiracy, may not be completely surprised. As the war was unfolding, Shamir notes, “The Syrian army took the entire punch of Israeli forces and began its retreat. They asked Sadat to move forward, to take some of the heat off them, but Sadat refused. His army stood and did not move, though there were no Israelis between the Canal and the mountain passes. Syrian leader al Assad was convinced at that time that Sadat betrayed him, and he said so frankly to the Soviet ambassador in Damascus, Mr Muhitdinov, who passed this to Vinogradov.”

At this point, Jordan offered to intercede but Sadat, to the consternation of Syria, turned them down. According to Shamir: “The Israelis arrested their advance on Damascus and turned their troops southwards to Sinai. The Jordanians could at this time have cut off the North-to-South route and king Hussein proposed this to Sadat and Assad. Assad agreed immediately, but Sadat refused to accept the offer. He explained it to Vinogradov that he did not believe in the fighting abilities of the Jordanians. If they entered the war, Egypt would have to save them.”

The Vinogradov revelations will not receive gratitude from anyone else, for obvious reasons. Both Kissinger and Sadat were to later be awarded Nobel Peace Prizes, while if these charges are true they instead deserved prosecution as war criminals. Meir, as well, sacrificed Israeli lives, and some territory, in order to consolidate other gains and bring the Americans in deeper.

Shamir describes the surprise he and other Israeli soldiers felt at the time for the seemingly inexplicable decisions which gave the Egyptians territory and which Sadat then strangely failed to exploit. “During the war, we (the Israelis) also knew that if Sadat  advanced, he would gain the whole of Sinai in no time; we entertained many hypotheses why he was standing still, none satisfactory. Vinogradov explains it well: Sadat ran off his script and was waited for  US involvement.”

There were other bizarre indications that something was not straight. The initial Egyptian military deployment left a huge gap in between its Second and Third armies, as much as forty kilometers wide. At first, since Israel was directing virtually all of its firepower against Syria, it seemingly made no tactical difference. But when, as planned, the Israeli’s then moved against the stationary Egyptian army, the gap was never closed. Vinogradov, alarmed when Ariel Sharon’s tanks crossed through the opening, questioned Sadat, who told him it was only “a political move,” an explanation the Russian diplomat found inane.

While technical aspects of the ‘war’ are developed to a much greater extent in the Vinogradov memorandum and better explained in Shamir’s essay in Counterpunch, it should be obvious that the general goals of the plotters were achieved. The bottom line, Shamir writes, was that the U.S. “saved” Egypt by stopping the Israeli advance, while the U.N.-brokered truce gave Israel some breathing room for years to come. Sadat gained considerable prestige inside Egypt, thus temporarily saving his political career. He, in turn, showed his appreciation toward Washington by ratifying the U.S. presence in the region.

In fact, Sadat would founder anyhow. The Syrians realized that he had betrayed them. On October 12, when Egyptian troops stopped their advance inside Israeli territory –– at the same time Israel’s army was directed almost entirely against Syria –– President Hafez al Assad, according to Jordanian Prime Minister Abu Zeid Rifai, accused Sadat of “deliberately allow(ing) the Israeli breakthrough to the Western bank of Suez, in order to give Kissinger a chance to intervene and realise his disengagement plan.”

Vinogradov believed that Jordan also suspected Sadat of treachery.

As Shamir notes, there have been suspicions before now relating to the 1973 war. Military and diplomatic observers have expressed bewilderment at the behavior of both Egypt and Israel, as though the antagonists were engaged in a strange dance whose parameters were known to no one else. But until now, no one on the inside had talked.

The Vinogradov revelations, as they will appear in Monday’s Russian weekly magazine, ‘Expert’, will rip the cover off this forty year old secret. Apparently, national heroes such as Golda Meir, who ‘sacrificed’ two thousand Israeli soldiers in order to help Sadat and simultaneously give the United States its ‘comeback’ in the Middle East, and Anwar Sadat, who wanted to shore-up his domestic standing and simultaneously get rid of the Syrian thorn in his side, conspired with Henry Kissinger to instigate and prosecute a choreographed war.

Once national politics is removed from ethical, moral, or humane considerations; once national leaders convince themselves that a few thousand, or even a million, deaths will promote some ‘higher’ goal, the entire planet and every person on it is betrayed.

The part they don’t seem to have thought too much about was, after we’ve tortured them for ten years, then what?

President Obama promised he’d close Guantanamo Bay Prison upon taking office. Three years later, hasn’t happened.

That’s not especially newsworthy. After all, Obama’s broken pretty much every promise he made. But Guantanamo is especially creepy because after all this time there remain 171 prisoners, most of whom, admittedly, committed no crime and cannot be successfully prosecuted.

You may be wondering, if someone is imprisoned but hasn’t broken any laws, why haven’t they been released?

All of these people, originally kidnapped (or taken into custody) by the U.S. government via the army or the CIA, have been held under something called “indefinite detention.” Translated into english, this means they can keep you locked up forever and do whatever they want to you.

Sounds just like the democracy I learned about at San Rafael High School. Maybe not.

Now, there remain 171 people we’re not quite sure what to do with. You see, most of them are probably innocent, and that’s a little embarrassing.

We’ve made lots of prisoners disappear, especially the ones held in overseas black holes such as Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Force Base. We’ve employed a variety of sick techniques on them designed to break them, even if there was nothing to be gained thereby.

Once torturers are given the green light, it’s a carnival. The U.S. has done much more than the publicized brutalities of simulated drowning. Gangs of psychologists have been brought into the prisons to experiment on inmates. The stories have been hinted at but so far remain secret. Nothing remains secret forever.

According to the Obama government, the military expects to prosecute thirty-six of the remaining prisoners. That leaves 135 people we’ve locked up and can’t even bring to trial. The Obama government regards these 135 as ‘too dangerous to release’ but also ‘too difficult to prosecute because the evidence against them is tainted.’ Imagine that.

But it seems now that some of the 135 can win their release. Guess how. By giving the prosecutors information which will help convict the 36 chosen defendants.

Does this not strike you as thoroughly corrupt?

We can’t convict you. We’ve tortured you. But we’ll release you after all this time only if you rat on these other guys. If not, can’t say when you’ll get out, or if, or where you might be sent when we finally do close this dump. Maybe to Egypt. I hear their military enjoys a little recreational interrogation. Maybe Saudi Arabia.

Given the opinion of the American Red Cross, as well as the Pentagon’s own in-house estimates of a couple of years ago, it’s likely that most of these people never did anything to anybody. They didn’t attack America or plot to. They didn’t participate in any cabals or conspiracies, train Al Qaeda, or drive Bin Laden’s limo. Many of them were nabbed for personal reasons, because somebody wanted to get rid of them. We know this, but it’s only a problem in logistics.

The U.S. expects to convict the chosen 36 through the testimony of some of these inmates, because there is no way they’re getting out otherwise.

Brig. General Mark S. Martins, Guantanamo’s chief prosecutor, says that he strongly believes he can win the cases against the 36 –– at this point, their identities are unknown –– but that he wants to encourage other detainees to ‘cooperate’ and show a willingness to testify against others in a manner which “pleases” the government. Those who do will get plea deals, according to Martins.

If Martins really believes he’s got cases against the 36, why does he need to force others, on the promise of a plea deal and the threat of lifetime incarceration, more torture, and even death, to commit perjury –– which of course is what it is.

Sounds as though America’s military talked it over and realized that without extorting some perjured testimony, they couldn’t actually convict many of these people. And that would be a public relations nightmare.

When reporters reached the Pentagon, they got the usual line. Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale told Truthout that “legal discussions that take place amongst members of the government’s prosecution team are not appropriate for me to discuss,” but then, referring to common practice in criminal prosecutions under U.S. law, remarked that there was often cooperation from others charged with crimes, including suspects and accomplices. In other words, it’s not unusual for a district attorney’s office to give a suspect a plea deal in exchange for testimony against others.

Of course, in civilian life, the person willing to make a deal is usually not facing indefinite prison, more torture, and transfer to a hell hole worse than he can imagine. Usually the person making the deal is not an innocent person otherwise facing an unbearable ordeal.

There’s a high probability that at least some of the defendants in the military’s show trials actually committed serious criminal acts. That they ought to face trial is self-evident. But the conditions of the mass imprisonment, at Guantanamo and elsewhere, have violated every fundamental principle of America jurisprudence.

This is not our country’s finest hour and it cannot end well. Innocent people have been destroyed and there are more to come. No matter what happens, there will be people in this prison we can’t convict and are afraid to release. What does that say about America?

U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner, whose district is based in Sacramento, said, “it’s not our job to go out there and engage in public debate. We let our cases do the talking.” Then, Wagner did some talking. In an article for Hearst Newspapers, national editor Dan Freedman questioned officials about the federal raids in and threats against pot dispensaries and their supporters in California and other states.

“Conditions on the ground” is what changed between 2009 and 2011, Wagner said, not the policy of the Justice Department. “It wasn’t a lack of good faith on our part. We were alarmed by explosive growth of these large commercial operations. These huge dispensaries are focused on profits, not helping sick people.”

I guess he meant dispensaries such as the one in my home town, population 7,500, which had been established for years and had worked closely with county and town officials to make sure it was a clean operation. I don’t know how many people depended on it, but as the government’s own patent application (http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2012/02/19/the-curious-case-of-patent-number-12825157/#c17397438) makes clear, the feds realize that marijuana has numerous, well-established health benefits.

Now, thanks to the President, his Justice Department, and U.S. Attorneys such as Wagner, sick people whose lives and health were being materially improved by California’s sane dispensary law, can find their medicine on the street, where nobody can be sure of the potency and where patients risk arrest, or worse.

Talk about change you can believe in.

The problem, according to the federal government, is that some dispensaries have been making a profit. Apart from the fact that profit-making has always been a cornerstone of the American way of life, not to mention a major interest to the President’s donors and other major party contributors, more than 200 such businesses were shut down by heavy-handed government tactics in California alone, and many of these, including the one in my town, were non-profits.

Landlords have been threatened with the seizure of their property unless they evicted dispensaries. But the government does not want to “engage in public debate.” No, I guess not. Public policy is apparently not the business of the public. Shut up and go home. Turn on the television. Nothing to see here.

In Colorado, the federal government even threatened criminal charges against local public figures who tried to defend the state’s compassionate care operations.

Don’t bother questioning the President about any of this. He’s got countries to bomb and bankers to write checks to. When Obama’s much-publicized internet ‘town meeting’ was held, he refused to address the most-asked question, namely, what was his position on marijuana legalization, and he won’t answer questions about medical marijuana, either. One of his long-time financial backers, Marsha Rosenbaum, was present at a fund-raising dinner in Washington in January and asked Obama about the dispensary crackdown.

“He gave a nuanced, thoughtful answer,” Rosenbaum later said. “He acknowledged there’s confusion but he didn’t get specific and he didn’t mention California.”

I’ve got news for Benjamin Wagner, his boss Eric Holder, and Holder’s boss Barack Obama. Conditions on the ground have changed. There’s no more slack to give. If you liars and phonies think the President’s 2008 loyalists will come back for more of this in 2012, you’re in for the surprise of your lives.

The Girl Scouts of America have been radicalized. Is nothing sacred? Terrorists have burned the flag, promoted jihad, desecrated Christmas, and now this: wrecking the Girl Scouts.

Can’t buy their cookies anymore.

The latest scandal is revealed in a letter from the State Representative from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Mr. Bob Morris. His note to Republican colleagues describes how the Scouts are promoting homosexuality and abortion. Leave it to them and we can stop worrying about the population explosion.

“After talking to some well-informed constituents,” Morris wrote, “I did a small amount of web-based research, and what I found was disturbing.”

Well, you can’t blame him. These are indeed disturbing facts: the Girl Scouts are actually a “tactical arm of Planned Parenthood,” which makes them “more receptive to the pro-abortion agenda.” They also “promote homosexuality,” Morris notes, as well as preventing girls from praying or singing Christmas carols.

Of course, I’m shocked. How can this be? Morris has learned how the Scouts have been taken over by the radicals: 47 of the 50 role models listed in the Girl Scouts education seminar are “feminists, lesbians, or communists.”

To be fair, Indiana was once a real state, with actual Senators and Representatives, a legislature, and several basketball teams. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe it was the Dan Quayle effect. The Quayle family owned –– may still own, for all I know; Indiana readers, please let us know –– the Indianapolis Star, one of the more reactionary publications in American history.

I guess they raise ‘em dumb in Fort Wayne. How else explain that Morris’ ‘well-informed constituents’ think the Girl Scouts are out to turn otherwise apple-cheeked and innocent young Hoosier lassies into card-carrying commie dykes?

I don’t want to single-out Indiana. In Virginia, there’s an entire legislature full of Bob Morrises. They’ve consulted well-informed constituents and done a small amount of web-based research and learned that women seeking abortions would think better of it if required to submit to mechanical rape as part of the deal.

There’s enough blame to go around here. When I was young there were people as stupid as Bob Morris but they were just smart enough to know to keep their mouths shut. Mostly, excepting the occasional Max Rafferty, they kept out of electoral politics.

Not anymore. The loons are loose these days. You can be batshit crazy and taken seriously as a Presidential candidate, c.f. Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann. If you’re able to combine crazy with meanness and ignorance, and if you cleanup okay, you can be a ‘news anchor’ or ‘pundit’ for a major network.

You know I’m not exaggerating.

How did this happen?

We stopped teaching civics, history, and the constitution in our public schools.

We started to put dollar signs on everything in the world.

We got lazy.

But even those things are effects, not causes.

Americans got cynical when we realized that there had been a deep division made between our ideals and the way things worked. The list is long: domestic political assassinations and their cover-ups; corporate hegemony backed by the military; the ascendancy of superficial values; the drugging of everyone to elicit sleepwalking and conformity.

Look at what matters to us. Not at what is supposed to matter –– we’re all good at that game now, like Miss America who wants to end hunger –– but at where we actually direct our limited attention. Celebrities, things, what Jackson Browne called ‘the glitter and the rouge.’

Like the Romans, we want to be distracted. The content of television is pitiful, even the PBS component, now that it’s ‘sponsored by’ Chevron, Pacific Life, and Bank of America. Not long ago, there were fifty major media companies; today there are six. What exactly did we think would happen when we allowed this?

And so we get Bob Morris and the thousands of other nitwits occupying the legislatures of America. The economy is crashed, jobs are exported, corporate tax money is sitting in the Cayman Islands (and the people who parked it there sit on Obama’s ‘recovery’ commission), and on the news we get psychopaths backing state-rape of women who want abortions and accusing the Girl Scouts of undermining Christmas.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. As Jim Morrison observed, they’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers.

I don’t have exact figures but I’ve heard this from more than one generally reputable source so maybe it’s true. Financial contributions from active members of the U.S. military are running at 70% for Ron Paul, which for those of you still wrestling with the miracle of standardized tests means that it adds up to more than the bucks being given to all the other candidates combined.

How in the world can that be? I mean, when it comes to ‘supporting the troops,’ there’s Romney and Santorum and Gingrich, and El Presidente himself, all of ‘em with the flag pins and flag ties and flag underwear.

Maybe it’s one thing to stuff your fat ass into a leather armchair in Bethesda or D.C., or wave to pasty-faced crowds of blockheads at airports and shopping malls all across this great land, and quite another to wear twenty pounds of combat gear in a foreign country where most of the people you see hate your guts.

Maybe it’s not so easy to fool the troops anymore.

Yeah, I see the stories, just as you do. Marines pissing on dead Afghan civilians; hot shot snipers posing with a Nazi flag. Anytime you create situations where killing is a sport and soldiers get conditioned to dehumanize people who don’t look like them, you’re going to get atrocities. What do you expect?

But the other side of these bulletins, what the leaders of both parties, really, really don’t want you to see, pull back the flags and show us what war does to people, not just the direct victims, those we blow up, those we impoverish, those we render homeless or turn into orphans –– these are real, despite the video game promotional horrors the military recruitment ads try to sucker you with –– the other side is about what we are doing to our own troops.

I’m beginning to think that people like Gingrich and Obama and the rest secretly know what an ugly charade these wars are. How else do we account for their universal disinterest in confronting the facts of life for veterans?

Veterans comprise 8% of the adult population but 16% of the homeless, according to official data, and official data is notoriously undercounted. It neglects those who spend no more than a single night in a homeless shelter and ignores those who never make it to one.

There are more than 100,000 homeless veterans in America. Many are sleeping in the streets, in the hills, in doorways, under bridges, wherever they can find shelter, wherever the cops won’t run them off. Great numbers of these and other veterans are suffering from exposure to depleted uranium and other severe health issues.

Half of the homeless veterans are said to be plagued by mental problems, two-thirds by drug addiction. According to one member of Congress, more veterans of the Vietnam war committed suicide than were killed in it, and the ratio is the same this time.

The government, meanwhile, refuses to let the media show the body bags coming home, and yet our leaders have a lot of fine words for those who ‘sacrifice.’ More than one million, according to Bob Filner, a veteran and 10-term Congressman, have sought help from the Veterans Administration, “most of these with traumatic brain injuries. That is not a rounding error.”

A year ago, the unemployment rate for returning veterans was 18.4% Today it is 30.4%.

I have written before about these wars and about the troops. I don’t support the troops, not in the work they do. Nobody drafted these folks; they enlisted. They’re being used not for the grand things they were told but for ugly, seamy, disgusting endeavors, to destroy other countries, to bring misery to people who have never threatened us.

But our soldiers are human beings and they, too, are victims of the politicians and war profiteers who dream up these sick scenarios and train them to kill. Once they get home, they deserve better than being thrown out on the street.

This year, as we watch the candidates bragging about how much they ‘support the troops,’ we ought to be asking them, specifically, to address the real problems of these people once they return. See how patriotic they get when it’s homelessness, and suicide, and brain injuries they’re being confronted with.

I guess it’s a little bit embarrassing, that’s why the corporate media won’t be making it their lead story tonight and Obama won’t be crowing about it. But one year ago today the ersatz ‘uprising’ in eastern Libya signaled the start of the U.S. campaign to take over the country on behalf of its multinational bank and energy clientele.

The reason Obama will not be crowing is that the CIA-fomented ‘rebellion’ run by the mercenaries it airlifted into the eastern Libyan hills from Qatar has not turned out so well.

You recall the cover story. A terrible tyrant was at last facing the wrath of his people, long oppressed, anxious for change, unwilling to put up with empty promises and phony rhetoric –– sort of like the U.S. today.

America, deeply concerned with the safety of noncombatants, as we’ve demonstrated every day in Pakistan and Afghanistan, recruited a majority of captive arab states to join in a U.N. Resolution authorizing N.A.T.O. air protection for the insurgents.

America’s government told its people that Libya’s President, Moammar Qaddafi, was butchering the opposition, even handing out Viagra to Libyan troops to facilitate the rape of civilians. Like other ludicrous junk previously dumped on a lazy, indolent, and mostly stupefied U.S. public to justify military actions –– such as the ‘babies taken from incubators by Saddam Hussein’s troops’ the first George Bush used to incite a rush to war –– the U.S. media bought it uncritically.

Of course, the truth was somewhat different. In fact, Qaddafi was extremely popular, as well he might have been since Libya under his stewardship had prospered far more than any of its neighbors. In fact, in rather stark contrast with America, Libya provided its citizens with free higher education, stipends, free electricity, free universal health care, and sizable housing subsidies.

The main problem with Libya was that Qaddafi wasn’t in Washington’s pocket and didn’t expect to be. Libyan oil was owned by Libya, not by Exxon-Mobil or Chevron or British Petroleum. The west could certainly buy it but not with dollars. In fact, Libya’s state bank loaned money at zero interest. How’s that grab you, Timothy Geithner?

So the U.S. invested a few billion in pseudo-rebel troops, secured the oil fields in the east, and ‘helped’ the ‘insurrectionists’ establish a brand-new bank, into which the U.S. and other western nations deposited the money owed to the Libyan people.

Thing is, after all that energy, all that money, all those dead people –– predictably, N.A.T.O. air strikes killed hundreds of civilians, especially in Tripoli –– Libya turns out to be ungovernable.

You see, most Libyans, unlike most Americans, are not ignorant fools. They certainly knew who the soldiers were and who was behind them. As a consequence, this great popular rebellion is today unable to govern the nation or control its citizens. At least one major city is known to have ‘fallen’ to pro-Qaddafi loyalists. And because the bogus rebellion was conducted by mercenaries and thugs, the new central government has been unable to establish control and, hence, cannot govern.

Upwards of a dozen ‘rebel’ factions, in possession of areas of the country, refuse to listen to the politicians installed by Washington, instead ruling their own fiefdoms. As international observers, including the Red Cross, have noted, there is widespread torture going on many months after the supposed ‘victory.’

Libya today is a disaster, with much of its services and structures destroyed by thousands of N.A.T.O. bombs. Just as in Iraq, America’s intervention, America’s bombs and rockets, have left a people in ruin.

This is what the United States is doing these days.

In June, 1963, America’s last President gave a stunning speech at American University. He called on the then-Soviet Union to join him in a campaign to end the arms race and bring about a more peaceful world. He said, “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a pax Americana, enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I’m talking about genuine peace. The kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living. The kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children. Not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women. Not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUjJa9jnynA&feature=related

Today, not satisfied with the destruction of Iraq and Libya, the human misery inflicted upon the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the United States and its Nobel Peace Prize President are moving toward yet two more wars. They are looking to attack Iran. They are wishing they could attack Syria.

The reason the U.S. has not yet obliterated the people of Syria –– although we’ve supplied the ‘rebels’ there with much of their weapons –– is that the Syrian government is backed by Russia and China, and we don’t want to piss off those guys.

Iran is a different story. Iran is backed by nobody. The only thing holding back Obama is the prospect of the 2012 general election and the unpredictability of blowback, both domestically and overseas. The U.S. is afraid that the crazies in control of Israel will strike anyhow, dragging it in regardless.

As with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and every other American military assault on another country over the last, say, sixty years, the reasons are phony and the media are happy to pretend they’re true.

Even the CIA admits that Iran is apparently not trying to build a nuclear weapon. The U.S. military concedes that it would take Iran at least two years should it decide to do so. For its part, Iran points out that under the nonproliferation treaty, which it signed, it has the explicit right to develop nuclear fuel.

The international inspectors, who for the last ten years have repeatedly described Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful, are under intense pressure from the U.S. The chairman of the group –– a recent appointee whom America lobbied heavily to name –– has said that it is not clear what Iran’s intentions are.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has introduced severe economic sanctions, which are in fact an act of war under international law, and Israel’s psycho leadership, itself in possession of two hundred nuclear devices, is apoplectic over the prospect that Iran might get one.

In the U.S. Congress, demagogues stumble over one another to take potshots at the Iranian government, and on the campaign trail the G.O.P. contenders –– with the notable exception of Ron Paul –– try to outdo each other in bellicose statements and demands that Iran be attacked.

Under these conditions, it may not be possible to sufficiently educate the American people with respect to what our government is doing, but we have to try. We have to hope that sanity is still possible. Now, while there is still a chance, we have to try to bring our government back from inflicting yet more terror on a world already desolate.

Yes, I do appear to be outraged much of the time, but to paraphrase Robert F. Kennedy, there is much to be outraged about.

Today, it will be tough to beat the Virginia legislature, although I would very much like to, preferably with a baseball bat. The ‘conservative’ Republicans who dominate it have finally exposed their innermost feelings. They want to get government off their backs –– and into women’s vaginas.

By an overwhelming number, and including women, they have passed legislation requiring any woman seeking an abortion to submit to an ultrasound procedure in which she is vaginally penetrated.

By a vote of 64-34, legislators rejected an amendment which would have given women the right to decline the procedure, or a doctor the right to decline to perform it.

The Governor, Bob McDonnell, who is hoping for a spot as Romney’s running mate, said that he will sign the bill.

I don’t know why we’re fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan when we could be blowing the fuckers up in Virginia.

Consider this comment from legislator C. Todd Gilbert: “In the vast majority of these cases, these (abortions) are matters of lifestyle convenience.”

Democrat David Englin, who opposed the bill, said a Republican lawmaker told him that women had “already made the decision to be vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.”

In other words, once a woman has decided to have sexual intercourse in Virginia, she has consented to being raped by the state. Of course, once she has consented, it’s not actually rape. Maybe it’s a matter of lifestyle convenience.

To be fair about it, there are at least a couple of Republicans who do not grope their aides, sexually harass constituents, or rape interns in the back seat of their taxpayer-paid automobiles out behind the local 7-11 –– these would be the Republican women.

Astonishingly, one Kathy J. Byron, a sponsor of the bill, actually said, “if we want to talk about invasiveness, there’s nothing more invasive than the procedure she’s about to have.”

Presumably, Byron sees little difference between one sort of penetration and another. Maybe she’d like to try that logic on her male colleagues who, once having had their prostates probed by their physician, may be said to have consented to being sodomized by the Governor.

Bet that video on YouTube would go viral in fifty seconds.

It didn’t seem to make sense. Why would the Obama administration, which had promised to leave medical marijuana dispensaries alone, suddenly go after them?

There was no likely electoral reason for it. The policy of relatively benign neglect wasn’t costing the Change We Can Believe In any votes. The Republicans weren’t making an issue of it and, anyhow, every poll on the subject has confirmed that the public is in favor of allowing these dispensaries to operate.

But there was a coordinated assault, led by the U.S. Attorneys, and it went after not only dispensaries and their suppliers, licensed or not, but landlords, too, threatening to seize people’s property under forfeiture laws which don’t even give the victim a court hearing.

In the immortal words of R. N. Black, what they hey?

The federal government has filed a patent on cannabis. I have read the application. It is extremely long and wordy, and a big part of it is technical jargon and a recitation of complex chemical structures, but the main point is clear. They’re getting ready to sell fake pot to us by way of America’s pharmaceutical companies, and they don’t want anybody getting in the way of that.

In support of the patent, the applicant cites twenty-eight research studies and scholarly papers which support the medical benefits of cannabis. Amazing how much science can be gathered on the subject when the feds want to find it. To the public, the government continues to classify pot as a Schedule 1 drug, with no medical benefits whatsoever. That’s the only way these liars can keep it illegal.

The application declares to the patent office that cannabinoids are valuable in treating “a wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia.”

I don’t want to deter you from enjoying the full flavor of this application. You can find it, as I did, online. Go ahead, enjoy yourself. Marijuana, according to the U.S. government, has health benefits and medical applications so vast it is quite simply a wonder drug. A few of the claims made for this new ‘invention’:

“In more particular embodiments, the cannabinoid is used to prevent or treat an ischemic or neurodegenerative disease in the central nervous system of a subject, by administering to the subject a therapeutically effective amount of a cannabinoid to protect against oxidative injury to the central nervous system.

“The ischemic or neurodegenerative disease may be, for example, an ischemic infarct, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Down's syndrome, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) dementia, myocardial infarction, or treatment and prevention of intraoperative or perioperative hypoxic insults that can leave persistent neurological deficits following open heart surgery requiring heart/lung bypass machines, such as coronary artery bypass grafts... “

But pot’s illegal because it gets you high.

When you apply for a patent, it helps if you can identify why the particular item you have in mind is different from other similar items already in use elsewhere or manufactured by others. It also helps if you’re the government.

In the case of patent number 6630507, the particular item being patented is a special variety of marijuana: it has had its psychoactive characteristics removed. Same stuff, but no high.

Only the government would do something this creepy. Or maybe Monsanto.

Of course, as anyone with any brains knows, the medicinal value of this herb is not something which can be chemically extracted while the rest is discarded. That’s not how nature works, folks. The rather extraordinary value in marijuana lies in its entire composition.

But in America, health is secondary to cold cash, as the health care sellout certainly proved. The government and its pharma friends want to make money. They are probably in panic mode right now because pot is becoming not only popular but widely accepted.

Medical marijuana has indeed done what its detractors feared: it’s opened the door to legalization. For the first time, a majority of Americans would simply remove all criminal penalties.

What happens if pot is legal?

For one thing, all of that profit goes down the tubes. The mafia loses a lot of money; the government can no longer count on the Mexican drug wars to fuel the industrial machine along the border. People getting healthy and high at the same time, that’s a crisis.

Big pharma is not going to lose this opportunity. They are expecting to develop a vast array of chemical cocktails using cannabis as a base, mixing it with hard drugs and selling it at wildly inflated prices. Throughout the patent application, the government differentiates its ‘invention’ almost entirely by claiming that “In disclosed embodiments the cannabinoid is not psychoactive...”

Except of course that one cannot sever the medical benefits from the entire plant. The new drugs will not have the same beneficial effects. There will be numerous studies, a lot of chemists tweaking the formulae, all of those free samples dropped off at your doctor’s office. Because they are going to have to reformulate it, there will be problems, the usual sort of problems you get when chemical companies mix their own garbage with something natural.

This is how the government plans to sever the medical benefits of marijuana from the popular use of the plant itself. They can keep it illegal, pleasing the gangsters, they can get rid of the dispensaries, and they can enrich Roche and Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline.

Technically, the patent listed three ‘inventors’, one each in Bethesda and Rockville, Maryland and one in Irvine, California. Then there is the ‘assignee’, The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services.

For their patriotic contributions to the pharmaceutical industry, if not to organized crime, the inventors will no doubt receive benefits in the form of lifetime government research grants.

I am not sure, of course, that the actions of the Obama government in sending the U.S. Attorneys after the dispensaries –– and forcing sick people, many of them elderly, to try to get drugs on the street –– coincide with patent 6630507, but it’s curious that the very first application was filed in 1999, the same time that the medical marijuana partisans began looking for a way to get the issue on the ballot. And while the actual application was finalized in 2003, it is only now that the U.S. patent office is moving forward with it.

There’s too much money to be made on sick people. That’s why America, alone among the economically privileged societies, has no universal health coverage. It would be much too easy to legalize a drug which grows naturally, which anyone, with the possible exception of me –– I’ve tried growing it a couple of times and produced pitiful little things unworthy of their noble use –– can raise in their garden, flower box, or as an indoor plant.

First of all, get off this fiction. There’s no coalition and no coalition forces. It’s the U.S. military, nobody else. Probably a few transitory French or British troops to take tickets at the camp theater and park the generals’ cars. This is an American operation, this horrible, stupid, brutal war.

Army Brigadier General Lewis Boone, director of ‘public affairs’ –– i.e. professional liar –– for the ‘coalition’ said that air strikes were called in after ‘movements’ by eight people on the ground were assessed as a ‘threat’ to NATO forces in the area.

“The aircraft dropped two bombs on the group that we believed to be an imminent threat to our people,” Boone told reporters in Kabul. “Despite all tactical directives being followed precisely, we now know the unfortunate result of this engagement.”

Where I come from, the ‘unfortunate result of’ an ‘engagement’ is an ill-advised marriage, not blowing people up. Why can’t these fuckers just say it? Is it because it’s easier to get away with being murderers when you can mangle the language?

The A.P. wire service story says that American forces were “searching the area for weapons and ammunition. Using binoculars and other equipment, ground forces identified several groups of Afghan males leaving a village at different times and going in different directions.”

Boone described the scene:

“They were observed moving in open terrain in a tactical fashion, clearly keeping distance from each other. Their purposeful movements and the weapons they were seen to be carrying led the ground commander to believe this group was getting ready to attack and were an imminent threat to...coalition forces.”

And so these people, seen through binoculars leaving a village, moving in ‘tactical fashion’ and with ‘purpose’ and ‘carrying weapons’ were assessed to be an ‘imminent threat’ and were struck with two bombs, and were killed.

Seven of the eight victims were boys between the ages of 6 and 14. The other was a mentally ill young man of about 18, local officials said.

The United States General John Allen, the top commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, thereafter “met with the provincial governor to express his condolence.”

Hey, so they were kids. We didn’t know. They shouldn’t have been moving in a tactical fashion. They shouldn’t have been in open terrain. They shouldn’t have been keeping distance from each other. They shouldn’t have looked as though they were carrying weapons and had a purpose. They shouldn’t have been living in a country the United States has decided to destroy. It was practically their own fault. Our condolences.

In the words of Barack Obama’s old pastor, God damn America. God damn this country which murders children and sends a public relations asshole to make the best of it, using language which blames the victims.

There were photos of the President in the paper this morning. He’s been in California, meeting with rich people, $38,500.00 per, to fund his re-election campaign. He was all smiles.

Mr. Nobel Peace Prize. His children are safe tonight in Washington. Nobody’s blowing them up for having the foolish idea of going out to play. He can smile. Nobody’s raining death down on his family.

William Shakespeare said it well. One may smile and smile, and be a villain.

I really hate this part. Not very evolved of me but so be it. I’m a selfish person and I want to hang onto people and places that feel good.

I think the first time I met Kimo Campbell was when we were both arrested at what was then the federal building, the old post office which housed the Selective Service System, in San Rafael. Nearly forty-one years ago.

They used those plastic contraptions to handcuff us and loaded us into vans for transport to the Blue Roof Inn up at the civic center, and we were fingerprinted and tossed into the drunk tank until the lawyers worked out the own-recognizance thing.

In the tank, we had plenty of time to talk about the war and the draft. He was very smart, soft-spoken, confident. We were young and therefore expected to change the world.

Don’t remember how we got home. Lynn was supposed to stay with the car and then pick us up on release but as the Legendary Mendelson and I sat in the van, there she came out the door, handcuffed like us. She didn’t want to be left out.

Since Lynn, Drew and I were planning to leave for Europe shortly, we copped a plea, paid the fine, and never saw a judge on the deal. Kimo, I think, went to trial and got acquitted.

Kimo was an heir to some sort of fortune connected with Hawaii, but I never asked him about any of that and he wasn’t offering. With him it was sort of beside the point. He wasn’t one of those guys gets confused about what money means.

He worked at making the world better in a variety of ways, and I’m sure he did, though I never heard him talk about it.

He had one of those gentle, modulated voices that made you want to listen carefully to every word, and it was so effective I’d suspect him of trickery except that wasn’t his style.

We didn’t hang out. I wasn’t a part of his everyday life. Once he helped me out greatly with one of my insane forays into politics. Once we had a falling out over an article I’d written for the local press highly critical of his stewardship on the community college board. These were long ago. He didn’t hold grudges.

We weren’t especially close, but that was okay. In recent years I saw him only around Christmas. He’d throw parties at his place, up the hill in Kent Woodland, a house much like what I’d want if I had the bucks, then more recently in Loch Lomond, couple of blocks up the street from where I’d lived in high school. A lot of folks I’d run into only at Kimo’s parties, but it was nice to reconnect with Bonnie and Bryan and other people from the early days. They’d come from everywhere just to be there those nights.

I saw him in December. He looked thin, tired. He wasn’t complaining about anything other than the Obama administration and politics in general. I think he’d been a major donor to the President and was unhappy with what he’d seen of his presidency. But Kimo was a realist and knew things were always more complicated than they often seemed to outsiders.

I’d heard of Kimo’s decline a month ago through friends. He’d gone into hospice care and finally back home. I didn’t visit. According to the e-mail I got this morning from a mutual friend, Rick, Kimo decided several days ago to discontinue the machines keeping him alive.

He was one of the people whose presence on earth held up the sky. It’s hard to explain but it feels as though with the world seeming to go on as though nothing has happened, there must be some mistake. Somehow, everyone should know, if only by instinct, feeling it, a piece is missing.

His friend Rick, who is a poet, of all things, and living in Paris, wrote that “we who loved him loved a very special man, who will never die to us.”

I don’t know how he saw his life, but I know one thing. Whatever his hopes had been, he did change this world for the better. The poet is right, he will never die to us. But the world’s a little less gentle, a little less kind, a little less intelligent, loving, and decent without him.

Evidently, the Republican Party, as represented by its elected leadership, has officially left planet earth. I say this with all due respect.

The G.O.P., a majority in the Virginia legislature, is running through a couple of bills which will make any woman who decides to undergo an abortion subject to, essentially, criminal charges and mechanical rape. We’ve come a long way, baby.

If I used the sort of simple minded, idiotic terminology of the right wing media, I’d ask something like, Why do Republicans hate women? Being of a higher mind, I do not ask such a question; besides, I’m afraid I know the answer.

One Virginia bill, which the governor says he will sign, proclaims that human life begins the very instant the sperm and egg are introduced, even, in some cases, before their owners have exchanged phone numbers.

The second requires any woman who wishes to have an abortion to submit to an invasive procedure in which a device is inserted into her vagina to obtain images of the fetus, if any can be seen.

The sick kind of mischief these pieces of legislation will set loose is easy to foresee. Presumably, the first will make possible homicide prosecutions whenever fetuses are accidentally aborted, which happens with some frequency. The second will feed the twisted egos and fantasies of domination so prevalent among male politicians.

This craziness is not limited to states. In the Congress, at a hearing on the matter of religion, public financing, and abortion, the committee chairman, an imbecile from California named Darrell Issa, ruled that women would not be allowed to testify since the subject matter was not really abortion but religion. Presumably, Mr. Issa is under the impression that women have nothing useful to say about religion.

Apparently, having a brain is not essential for a committee chairman. It used to be, but that was before America had leadership at this level of moral and intellectual degeneracy. We’ve had our share of racists and drunks, but mostly we’ve kept them away from the throttle. Ah, the good old days.

It is possible, I guess, to interpret these misogynistic stories in a positive light. Maybe women are gaining political power to a degree which really scares people like Issa.

But I’m afraid I don’t think that’s a very satisfactory explanation. There’s a meanness in the country these days. When times are tough, people’s true character shows more clearly, and the American character, far from the fantasy we have long entertained of ourselves, is shallow, ignorant, and violent.

That’s my read. Maybe I’m just feeling grouchy or something. After all, there’s plenty to be amused by with the gyrations of the Republican Presidential candidates. Obama has been an absolute disaster as President but next to these morons he actually looks okay. I don’t intend to insult morons.

I guess I ought to calm down. My doctor says my blood pressure’s fine but you know how that is. Many years ago I attended a few A.A. meetings with a friend and realized that the credo, or prayer, was a good one for me. There are things I can’t do anything about other than in a very small, personal way, and I’d do well not to freak out about them.

But I still believe that if the feminist movement of the ‘seventies had kept alive, kept gathering steam, we wouldn’t be in this mess today, legislatures would not be passing stupid, hateful legislation like Virginia’s, and assholes like Darrell Issa would be in prison instead of Congress. Guess I’m just a dreamer.

Gather ‘round, children. It’s time for another bedtime story about one of America’s great corporations. It’s a story of inspiration and struggle, of money and even more money. And of course, it’s a story of lies, greed, political corruption, and the systematic introduction of some very weird shit into the nation’s food supply.

I. The monster is born

Monsanto began life in 1901 as Monsanto Chemical Company. Its first product line was saccharin. Within a hundred years, it earned one of the worst corporate reputations in the world, which is saying plenty. Its chemical plants produced PCBs and dioxin, and poisoned entire towns, their rivers and streams, their wildlife, and their inhabitants. It also manufactured chemical agents among the most deadly on planet earth, including Agent Orange, which the U.S. military used to defoliate much of South Vietnam and which in turn left tens of thousands of Americans, as well as perhaps millions of Vietnamese, with lasting illnesses and damage to their DNA. All the while, it issued soothing statements to the public and regularly lied to the government about the safety of its products.

By the 21st century, the company was cranking out a stunning range of products, including artificial caffeine, dishwasher detergent, antifreeze, plastic goods, fuel additives, rubber, vinyl siding, pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. It was also being sued pretty much everywhere and, despite an aggressive and well-stocked legal department, it was losing a few of these suits. This didn’t look good. Moreover, by 1980, it had begun to emphasize biotechnology, it wanted to look clean for the age of Reagan, and the bad press was not helping matters.

So Monsanto simply spun off the troublesome chemical and fibers businesses into something called Solutia. Then it reincorporated itself in 2002, again as Monsanto, now an ‘agricultural company.’ The new Monsanto was engaged on a quest, it says, to help “farmers around the world in their mission to feed, clothe, and fuel” the planet.

Evidently, it will be helping us all in ways we never dreamed possible.

II. The monster alleviates hunger

In 1981, Monsanto put together a group of scientists and began construction of a huge Life Sciences Research Center a few miles from its main headquarters in St. Louis. The Biological Sciences Program became the first anywhere to genetically modify a plant cell. It took another fifteen years, and a helpful President, to loose the first GM seeds on the country.

There followed in rapid succession genetically modified cotton, corn, soybeans, and canola. To the rest of the world, the corporation proclaimed that its discoveries would help alleviate hunger. It was like Coca-Cola claiming they were only in it to bring water to thirsty Indians.

Meanwhile, the company’s herbicide, glyphosate, sold as Roundup, was universally regarded as the most powerful and dangerous agricultural poison ever invented. But in killing weeds and other invasive plants, Roundup also had the propensity to damage crops. Then Monsanto found the answer: it was able to genetically modify its seeds such that they would resist Roundup.

Now the company could offer farmers a package deal. If they signed up for it, they’d be able to spray their fields with herbicide without killing the crops. Monsanto applied for, and was granted, the first of more than 700 biotechnology patents.

Historically, the government Patent and Trademark Office had denied patents on seeds, since seeds are life forms with too many variables. But in 1980, in a case involving a specialized bacterium developed by General Electric to help clean up oil spills, the Supreme Court held for the first time that patent law would permit coverage of a “live, human-made microorganism.”

The door was now open and Monsanto ran through it.

III. The monster hires lawyers

A farmer who buys Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds must sign an agreement not to save the seed after harvest for re-planting or to sell it to other farmers. That not only means that farmers must buy new seed every year, but that they are potentially liable for any ‘volunteers’ or other accidental germinations. Even if a farmer decides to stop using GE seeds, the plants self-seed and some will grow on their own the following year, thus exposing the unwilling farmer to a lawsuit.

Any seeds cleaned by commercial dealers can easily get mixed together with non-GM seeds; the difference can’t be seen with the naked eye. Monsanto regularly patrols farming areas where it doesn’t have agreements, trespassing on land to snag soil samples for analysis.

And there are other ways Monsanto seeds can end up in a farmer’s fields. One classic case is that of a Canadian farmer, Percy Schmeiser. He did not want Monsanto seed, but pollen from a neighbor’s engineered canola fields blew off trucks on their way to a processing plant and ended up contaminating his fields. The court ruled that no matter how the plants got there, Schmeiser had infringed on Monsanto’s patent when he harvested and sold his crop. He eventually escaped civil penalty, but by the time the case was reversed in Canada’s Supreme Court, it had cost Schmeiser $400,000.00.

This sort of insane logic has infested the American legal system, too. Amazingly, it is not only possible but proven that the company whose own negligence in controlling its own product has ruined a farmer’s crops can thereupon prevail in a claim for damages against the victim.

Hundreds of farmers otherwise innocent of intent have, like Schmeiser, had their own fields contaminated by Monsanto seeds, then found themselves in court defending against claims of patent infringement. More than 150 lawsuits have been filed, and in hundreds of other cases accused farmers have quietly settled rather than try to defend themselves against lawsuits they did not have the resources to win. Some have gone to jail. Some have committed suicide.

Farmers are being run off their land, financially crippled, because seed they never wanted has turned up on their farms. This is especially crazy in the case of organic farms, where nobody could possibly have used Monsanto’s seed intentionally. But when a neighbor uses the seed, the wind –– or birds –– will carry it.

Even non-organic farmers seem to have little choice because there is very little other conventional seed left to buy. In addition to patenting its own seed, Monsanto has managed to buy most of the independent seed companies in the United States, including Seminis, the biggest producer of vegetable seeds in the world. In 1980, there were no genetically-engineered crops in the U.S. Today, ninety percent of all sugar beets, canola, soybeans, and corn are modified and patented.

Regardless of how careful or particular you are in your eating habits, it is now almost impossible to avoid Monsanto’s GM foods. Consider that nearly every restaurant uses vegetable oil, right from Monsanto’s labs to your digestive system. Virtually all processed foods of any kind contains modified ingredients. If you’re in America, you’re stuck.

For roughly 12,000 years, farmers have saved their best seeds for replanting, increasing yield and improving the genetic characteristics of food. That ended in 1996, when the Clinton administration gave Monsanto the green light, and the first patented GM seed was sold.

That’s just the beginning. The Monsanto story is the tale of a corporation which is literally attempting to corner the world’s food supply. That might not be easy. Despite enormous pressure applied by Hillary Clinton and the U.S. State Department to force European countries to lift their restrictions on GMO foods, other nations have not swallowed the bogus ‘scientific’ approval in the U.S.

IV. The monster befriends the animal kingdom

Seeds is one thing. The company is going after animals, and animal products such as milk and butter, as well. Monsanto is the source of bovine growth hormone, rBGH, first injected into cows with approval from the Food & Drug Administration under the Clinton administration.

rBGH and rBST is injected into cows to increase milk supply. But the milk from injected cows also has more antibiotics, more bovine growth hormone, and more insulin-like growth factor 1. IGF-1, according to a scathing article by Jeffrey Smith, a leading expert on GMO foods, is a “huge risk for common cancers,” and is thus banned in Canada, as well as Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Not only that, side effects of rBST include lameness, digestive problems, uterine disorders, and problems giving birth. Yet Monsanto claims that there is no difference between milk and meat from rBST-treated cows and others.

Monsanto is also trying to control the world market in pigs. In February, 2005, the company published patent applications in Geneva, notifying the World Intellectual Property Organization that it was seeking patents in more than 160 countries around the world. These patents were not only for methods of breeding but for the actual breeding herds and offspring that result. The Monsanto theory is that it has located and developed the best characteristics of pigs and has produced a particular, identifiable genetic signature.

Legally, as a patent holder, Monsanto can prevent breeders and farmers from breeding pigs with the characteristics described in the patent, or force them to pay royalties. The patent applications describe general methods of crossbreeding and the use of artificial insemination which are already used by farmers all over the world; there’s nothing new or unique about them other than the specific combination of methods said to accelerate breeding cycles.

As one critic observed, “I’ve been reviewing patents for 10 years and I had to read this three times. Monsanto isn’t just seeking a patent for the method, they’re seeking a patent on the actual pigs which are bred from this method. It’s an astoundingly broad and dangerous claim.”

A Greenpeace bulletin explains:

“...patent application WO 2005/017204... refers to pigs in which a certain gene sequence related to faster growth is detected. This is a variation of a naturally occurring sequence –– Monsanto didn’t invent it... Monsanto wants to use the detection of this gene sequence to screen pig populations, in order to find which animals are likely to produce more pork per pound of feed. And that will be Monsanto Brand genetically engineered feed grown from Monsanto Brand genetically engineered seed raised in fields sprayed with Monsanto Brand Roundup Ready herbicide and doused with Monsanto Brand pesticides, of course.”

The implications are, of course, staggering. A private corporation, with support from the U.S. government, is seeking to own, eventually, all the food on the planet and to make it exceedingly difficult for others to grow, develop or produce any other kind.

Yesterday, as I was reviewing dozens of documents on this issue, a news bulletin on the internet read:

“The FDA is on the brink of approving genetically engineered salmon for human consumption. This would be the first genetically engineered animal on supermarket shelves in the United States. The salmon is engineered to produce growth hormones year-round that cause the fish to grow at twice the normal rate.”

The writer of the article then called on the FDA to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. Evidently, any argument about the health and safety of these foods in the first place has been settled as far as some skeptics are concerned. Now they’re simply pleading for a notice on the package.

They probably won’t get it. The operation of the FDA, under whatever administration happens to be in power, has been reliably on the side of Monsanto and other purveyors of GE products. The FDA has actually ordered some milk producers and sellers to stop telling the buying public that their product was ‘BST-free’ since BST is also a natural hormone found in all cows. Astoundingly, the FDA has also forbidden sellers of organic, non-GE milk and milk products to say as much on their packaging unless they include a disclaimer which states that “government studies have shown no significant difference between milk derived from rBGH-treated and non-rBGH-treated cows.”

The ‘government studies’ which show this have been, to be polite about it, tainted. In fact, the okay Monsanto originally got for its GMO crops and for its bovine growth hormone cow’s milk came from a federal regulatory process so corrupt it is breathtaking.

V. The monster befriends Blackwater and Bill Gates

In case that isn’t enough, the company has hired “intelligence, training and security services” from the mercenary operation formerly known as Blackwater. Over a recent two year period, according to a September, 2010, article by Stephanie Dearing at digitaljournal.com, Monsanto paid the Blackwater subsidiaries Total Intelligence Solutions and Terrorism Research Center a total of at least $232,000.00.

The history of Monsanto, especially since it hit pay dirt with the first genetically engineered seeds, is remarkable even for a well-connected multinational corporation. It has done things no one else has ever done. It convinced the federal government to permit it to patent seeds, then to patent bovine growth hormone, and now, evidently, to patent animal DNA.

And all this time, it has been trying to destroy organic food. Not satisfied with the rather overt contamination of uncooperative farmers’ fields (followed by ruinous litigation), Monsanto is riding the issue of ‘food safety’ in a war against organics. It is making good use not only of tame legislators and shameless regulator whores, but of ‘respected’ media outlets as well. It has powerful friends everywhere. Two years ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation bought 500,000 shares. Gates, of course, is promoting the ‘Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa’ which is one of the most sinister ‘charitable’ operations of all time, working to deprive poor African farmers of access to their traditional seeds and forcing them to use GM seeds. To accelerate this particular evil, Gates hired Robert Horsch, a Monsanto director, in 2006.

Consider the Washington Post, which has now editorialized for a ‘moratorium’ on organic food due to fabricated safety concerns. The Post last month ran a bizarre piece by one Lyndsey Layton, entitled “New FDA deputy to lead food-safety mandate,” which was so fawningly putrid as to raise legitimate questions as to the intelligence of the writer.

First, some background. From the excellent Daily News Blog of February 13th, this year:

“The Food Modernization and Safety Act of 2010 was forced through Congress in the middle of the night in the very last days of a lame duck session, breaking rules and congressional safeguards. ‘Food safety’ bills (had) arrived in Congress almost as soon as Obama arrived in the White House.”

Speaking of Obama’s transition team, R. Patel writes, “a food safety ‘crisis’ occurred almost immediately. Contaminated peanut butter was sent out through the owner of the company, on the board at the USDA, knew it was contaminated and almost before the news hit the paper a series of massive food safety bills already laden with co-sponsors showed up in the House. One in particular drew intense attention – HR 875 – introduced by Rosa DeLauro, a close friend of the Clintons, whose husband Stanley Greenberg polled for Bill Clinton and works for Monsanto.”

None of the foregoing would be quite so ominous were it not for the fact of one Michael Taylor.

VI. The monster, Michael Taylor, and Barack Obama

Taylor is the single most critical personage where Monsanto and a corrupt government intersect.

He began as a staff attorney for the FDA in 1976 but soon left for a ten-year sojourn with an outfit called King & Spaulding whose clients included Monsanto. He then returned to the FDA as deputy commissioner for policy. In that role, he was instrumental in FDA’s approval of Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone, despite considerable scientific doubt among the government’s own scientists. He also fought attempts to require Monsanto to label its products so that customers would be aware of the presence of rBGH, and he authored the policy which required non-rBGH farmers and producers who wanted to inform people that their product did not contain this hormone to include the disclaimer that the FDA had found no difference between treated and non-treated cows. In 1994, he migrated to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to run its food safety program.

As might be expected, Taylor was rewarded with a fat paycheck and a cushy job on his return to Monsanto as a vice president for public policy. From there, he slid over to a ‘think tank’ and then to a chair at George Washington University.

Then, in July of 2009, the Obama administration summoned him back to public service. There have been two different opinions about this. The Post writer, Layton, rhapsodized that while “sitting in his office at George Washington University, (he had been) considering a basic mission of the federal government: making sure food was safe. He’d devoted his career to food safety, working in and out of government, and he was finally in academia where he could think deeply about what was wrong and how to fix it.” Then, Layton says, he was brought back into government by the Obama administration to do just that.

A second opinion was issued by Jeffrey Smith in an article which appeared in Huffington Post (and, originally, at http://www.responsibletechnology.org/blog/858), to wit: “The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history has just been made the food safety czar.”

According to Smith, when the issue of genetically-modified food first arose, FDA scientists were extremely worried. Numerous memoranda have since surfaced depicting alarm at toxins, new diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and allergens. There were “serious health hazards,” they said, and before the government approved the release of GMOs into the food supply, there would have to be extensive testing.

But Taylor wasn’t having any of that. The man who “devoted his career to food safety” saw to it that Monsanto’s GMOs were allowed into the market without any safety studies at all. Genetically-engineered foods were safe, he said, since the company’s own studies had proven it.

The fact that Monsanto’s own studies had also proven the safety of Agent Orange and DDT might have raised a red flag for regulators, but the FDA under Taylor’s authoritative guidance, is color blind.

As Smith details, the incidence of chronic illness nearly doubled in the nine years after GMOs became part of America’s diet. Allergy-related ER visits doubled between 1997 and 2002, and food allergies, especially among children, went through the roof. There were also spikes in asthma, autism, obesity, diabetes, digestive disorders and some cancers.

Smith cites comments by Dr. P.M. Bhargava, whom he calls one of the world’s top biologists, who said that after reviewing 600 scientific journals it was clear that GM foods in the United States “are largely responsible for the increase in many serious diseases.” In May, 2009, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine reported that “studies demonstrated a causal relationship between GM foods and infertility, accelerated aging, dysfunctional insulin regulation, changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system, and immune problems such as asthma, allergies, and inflammation.”

In July of 2009, Obama made Michael Taylor the senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA, specifically in charge of food safety. The President’s “Food Modernization and Safety Act of 2010” gave Taylor centralized police power over the nation’s entire food supply.

The act is currently before the Congress for funding. There is a strong grassroots opposition but Obama wants it, the Democratic and Republican parties want it, and of course the corporations want it. Why would these people be so enthusiastic about a law promising to deliver food safety? Because it’s not about safety. It’s about the creation of a major weapon for use against small farmers and organic producers.

Real food is under assault everywhere now by the purveyors of Frankenfoods and their political allies. There’s still great resistance in Europe. Even where Monsanto has been able to get its junk into the marketplace, European nations have required that it be labeled. And, thus labeled, it is dying on the shelves and in the stalls. People are not quite stupid enough to eat it if they don’t have to.

But Monsanto won’t give up, of course. It’s bought the seed companies, secured patents and plans for more. It wants to own the genetic markers in plants and animals everywhere and its armies of lawyers and Blackwater/Xe spies are well paid to make that happen.

We’ll have to stop them.

Where do rights come from? That’s the question someone posed on a forum were I now eavesdrop and occasionally drop in. I’ve been invited, which is a nice thing. Some places don’t invite me anymore.

The question in the context of the discussion is slightly more than academic. It arose with respect to a debate on the Occupy movement, political ideology, and anarchism.

One school of thought is that rights emerge from God and nature, complete with biblical references, albeit somewhat unspecific, and terms familiar to those who toy with teleological matters. The other viewpoint is that since God is an invention and the Bible unreliable, rights are a matter of laws, if they exist at all.

I ventured a mild interjection in the middle of these somewhat florid exchanges and was accorded a brief tip of the cap before the warfare resumed. I don’t know these folks. They read pretty damned smart and certainly better-educated on some of these things than I. So instead of dropping my more developed thoughts on the subject like a paper ship on Lake Oswego I decided to float them out your way.

I know you will feel free, as you always do, to move on to more interesting fare.

Both ‘sides’ of the argument are right, of course. I don’t know about the God thing, but that’s not what I mean.

I mean that rights derive from agreement and a sense of things. We’re here on planet earth, foraging, mucking about, screwing around, and we are aware that we’re not alone.

The commentary flying back and forth on the forum contains heavy doses of what are said to be socialist, anarchist, and communist theory. Since I am ignorant as hell about all three of these I can’t interject anything very useful, although since a part of the argument seems to be about seeking and taking power I might observe that the only time anarchists would ever do so is by accident.

It might have been my junior year at Berkeley, a small group of like-minded freaks, sitting around and getting seriously stoned, noted that the ‘Anarchist Party’ was entering candidates in the race for 8 positions on the student Senate. We figured, hey, we’re the anarchists around here, being completely unorganized and having no party affiliation at all; why don’t we run? And five of us entered as members of the soon-to-be-legendary Frogs of Freedom.

At the meeting to select ballot position, every time one of our names was drawn, we entertained the gathering of serious political types with a chorus of reedeep, reedeep (or, depending on your regional accent, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit). It was something, watching all of those heads snap around. After all, who the fug were we?

One thing we were were petty criminals. This was in ancient times, before the internet and home computers. So in order to spread our bizarre message, we’d break into the Speech Department offices at night and borrow the equipment to print our own daily newspaper.
Alas, we didn’t win, although we came pretty close, finishing 10th, 12th, 14th, 18th, and 20th out of 60.

Talking about the nature of ‘rights’ in an ideological debate is interesting but a little strange, at least for me.

This is where ‘rights’ come from. Human beings mucking around, as I said, and becoming aware of other human beings, developed rules, agreements, or a sense of things. Whatever ‘rights’ are came out of that. The argument these guys on the forum are having is a lot of fun but essentially crazy because it’s not an either-or proposition.

Rights are whatever people agree they are. If they think they come from God, that’s cool. If they think they come from some form of rational thought, why not? If they’re written down, then they evolve, grow, or are edited depending on the agreed process for doing that, and if they’re not codified then they’re dependent on the continuing general agreement that they exist.

I’m not sure why it matters. Thomas Paine wrote of ‘The Rights of Man’. The revolutionists in France or America or Russia or China, or anywhere, always decide that there are ‘rights’ to which humanity is entitled. That’s axiomatic. How they arrive at this is particular to the origin and nature of the struggle and the breadth of social, cultural, and political consciousness which informs the new vision.

Marx thought one thing, Jefferson another, but they were not very far apart in philosophy or yearning, only in circumstance and theory.

I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but if I worried about that sort of thing I’d’ve stopped writing long ago. The partisan debates on ideology seem strange to be because in the end all humanist systems represent the same thing.

Communism, democracy, socialism, anarchy, all four of these are brilliant, utopian ideas which share a sense that human beings are worthwhile, that we are engaged in a great journey of unknowable scope, and that we find ourselves here making the best of the situation.

Marx and Jefferson, necessarily shackled as we are now with the limitations of our time, our consciousness, and our very slow evolution, shared a vision of a sweeter human condition based on a common recognition of what’s best in us.

Each of these systems, each of these visions, is perfect once we get past the madness. Revolutions always work at first because people are inspired, because we raise our sense of ourselves and of what’s possible, because in the first glow of liberation we have a universal feeling of brotherhood far more powerful than the things which drag us down.

But gravity has its place and fear starts to take over. When the revolutionary glow wears off and we start thinking of how we’ve got to cadge what we can, secure what we can because you never know what our neighbors are up to, not to mention people who don’t look like us or believe as we do or salute the same flag or God, that’s when the trouble starts.

In optimistic moments, I suspect we are engaged in a very slow evolutionary process of the human spirit. I’ve been working on my own evolution for decades now and it’s slow going.

I think that human beings have rights based on a mutual understanding that we are all in this together, that we are luminous beings, spirits incarnated, taking the earth courses we need to graduate. Those rights are inherent but they don’t really manifest unless seen and agreed on by everyone.

We make rules, of course, some of them well-meaning, some of them based on generous recognition, but those are only the hopes we have for who we may become.

An old high school friend posted it on facebook. She said that she normally doesn’t post anything on politics but was impressed with this pro-Obama ad, calling it ‘awesome.’ Indeed, I also think it’s awesome. It took an awesome amount of nerve to create the thing, but that’s why the political hacks get paid the big bucks.

It’s a large photo of the President, mostly the head, looking dignified and sincere. The large type caption reads: “What did you do in the last three years at your job?” Know what you did? Not as much as Barack Obama! Of course, for some people, an increasing number, the answer might well be, “I looked for work, that’s what. I don’t have a job. By the way, thanks again for leaving NAFTA in place for your friends.”

Of course, Obama has a little more power than I do. Plus, he has a job.

Then, across the photo, there’s a list of his achievements. This, one gathers, is what Obama did in his job. I presume it constitutes his best shot.

I posted a short response to my friend but it’s her posting and I don’t think it’s fair to desecrate anyone else’s stuff on facebook. Call me old-fashioned.

So I’ll desecrate it here.

22 achievements are listed, plus he quit smoking. I, too, quit smoking in 2011, so we’re tied on that score. The other twenty-two I couldn’t manage. Let’s take a look at them.

He created “3,000,000 new private sector jobs.” Not mentioned: the number of reported unemployed and the additional unreported unemployed, the underemployed and the part-timers, the people who have quit looking and the ones who lost their jobs.

“Smaller government.” Did he fire someone on the White House staff? What was cut? Services for the poor? Doesn’t say.

“$2,000,000,000,000 deficit reduction.” I can’t credit this one, either. For one thing, it depends on where the cuts were made, if it’s actually true, and how much of it was due to idiots in the G.O.P. slashing useful programs? Plus, it may not even be true. We’re still funding our wars using borrowed money from China.

“Health care reform.” I guess he has to brag since he’s stuck with it. So are we, a scheme which forces everyone to buy insurance from private corporations at ridiculous prices or go to jail for failing to do so.

“Wall Street reform.” Really? No criminal inquiry. No prison for the crooks. Geithner, Bernanke, and the rest of them still in power, no actual reform, and millions in re-election ‘contributions’ from the bankers. Change you can believe in.

“Saved U.S. auto industry.” Ask the UAW about the deal which ‘saved’ their jobs by killing the union and lowering their pay by more than 50%.

“All bailout money returned with interest.” Another sleight-of-hand job. The government effectively loaned trillions to the biggest crooks in the world, with no requirement for accountability. This should’ve got Congress jailed for malfeasance. Of course, it began with Bush, but Obama supported it and carried on the policy. Before ‘paying it back’ the biggest banks used the money to swallow the smaller banks, while taking huge tax write-offs for doing so. Nice deal, right? Gets better. They also used some of this interest-free cashola to buy government bonds, thus making ‘free’ money by loaning the government back the money the government loaned to them. I don’t think Obama –– or anyone in government –– ought to be bragging about this.

“Three new trade agreements.” Forget ‘reforming’ NAFTA, as he promised. Three more job-killing trade deals on top of it. More exporting of jobs, degrading of the environment, and unhealthy working conditions.

“Repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” Finally, an actual achievement. Not much, in the great scheme of things, but at least it’s something.

“Killed Bin Laden.” And a great accomplishment it was, too, a special hit team finding and shooting the old man in the eye as he sat there holding a channel changer. Apart from the fact that this violated the principles of Nuremberg and executed a man America has presumed guilty of something he likely did not do, it’s hard for Obama to claim that he did it. Killing, however, is something he has been better at than Bush, so maybe we ought to give him this one.

“Rescued American hostages.” Again, he didn’t exactly do this himself, but he was President while it was done, so put it on the plus side.

“Toppled Qaddafi without American casualties.” I don’t think he means ‘toppled’. I think he means beat an old man to death and overthrew the Libyan government using Qatari mercenaries recruited and paid by the CIA under the pretense that it was a popular uprising. The government had been quite popular and had afforded its people the highest standard of living in the region, free higher education –– something the U.S. isn’t rich enough to manage, I guess –– and free universal health care –– another embarrassment. Libya also insisted that its oil be purchased with its own currency, not with dollars or euros, and that’s what caused the U.S. to subvert and overthrow the government. No U.S. casualties but thousands of dead Libyans, and of course the death of Libyan self-determination. Shame on Obama for claiming this as an achievement.

“Unified the world against Iran.” Great! Saber-rattling, acts of war, and a plan to attack yet another nation for phony reasons. The ‘world’ is of course not “unified” against Iran. However it is rapidly becoming afraid of America.

“Has the Arab League watching Syria.” And how did he manage that, exactly? Say, you arabs, look over there!

“No taxpayer money spent on the BP cleanup.” Why would there be? It’s the corporation’s spill and negligence. They bloody well owe it, period. Second, although Obama’s poster doesn’t mention it, he rapidly okayed a resumption of deep water drilling in the Gulf.

“More deportations per year than Bush.” He’s bragging about this?

“Supports states’ rights on medical marijuana.” An outright lie. The Obama government has been engaged in a sweeping campaign against California dispensaries such that hundreds have had to close due to threats against landlords by the U.S. Attorneys.

“Ended war in Iraq.” Except that there’s still a war going on. Except that he promised to withdraw immediately and it took three years. Except that U.S. troops were actually kicked out by Iraq, which refused the U.S. attempt to negotiate leaving some there. Except for the U.S. installations, the Green Zone, and 50,000 heavily-armed mercenaries paid by corporate interests still there. And then there are the thousands of U.S. troops ‘removed’ just over the border into Kuwait and available whenever we want them. But he ‘ended’ the war. And expanded the one in Afghanistan. Otherwise, ‘Mission Accomplished.’

“Reduced military spending by $500 billion.” See earlier comments. We don’t actually know what the budget it because there are growing military expenditures under other categories –– Homeland Security, arms for urban police, and the CIA, whose budget is secret and can’t even be checked by Congress.

“Increased veterans benefits every year.” The ‘benefits’ have increased because there are more veterans and more veterans injured or psychologically destroyed by war. The Pentagon’s doctors believe that more than half of all returning veterans are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but the government is reluctant to acknowledge or treat them. On top of that are the costs of care for soldiers poisoned by depleted uranium, much of it still unknown and denied by the government.

“Saved the world from global financial collapse.” Saved the bankers from global financial collapse would be more accurate. U.S. support of the World Bank’s forcing ‘austerity’ policies on countries so that they squeeze their own people dry –– and ‘privatize’ public services –– in order to ‘service’ existing debt, borrow more, and pay the banks.

“Hired more border patrol agents than Bush.” Presumably part of his jobs plan.

Of these twenty-two items, most of them are counterfeit and a few are outright lies. Now, let’s look at his real achievements:

Continued support for and even expansion of ‘free trade’ and NAFTA.

Increased the income of insurance companies through health care ‘reform.’

Screwing the workers enough to keep Detroit’s auto corporations from going under.

Reversal of his medical marijuana promises and the crackdown on dispensaries.

Appointment of bank officials and lobbyists to high positions in his administration.

Support for Monsanto and GMO crops, including the use of the State Department to threaten other nations which continue to ban such crops; the appointment of high Monsanto officials to regulatory positions in the government.

Continued no-bed contracts for Halliburton, despite findings that the company stole hundreds of millions, and engaged in massive fraud.

Renewed deep water drilling licenses right after the BP disaster.

After Fukushima, allocated several hundred million dollars for subsidies for nuclear power, enabling the first nuclear facilities in America in 34 years and the first since the Three Mile Island near-meltdown; denial of accelerated oversight and inspections.

Authorized murder and the use of death lists, dispatching of CIA and special ops ‘hit teams’ to other countries to kill people ‘suspected’ of being ‘enemies.’

Escalated the use of drones, remote-controlled killing machines.

Continued Bush policies of ‘extraordinary rendition’ where people are flown to other countries to be tortured.

Prosecuted Bradley Manning, for leaking classified documents which, among other things, revealed war crimes committed by Americans. Held Manning in prison and openly tortured him for 19 months. Failed to prosecute the war criminals.

Interfered in judicial proceedings across the U.S. where citizens tried to establish their rights against illegal domestic spying. Refused to release documents which show this.

Extended ‘national security’ wiretaps, bugging, and other formerly illegal surveillance of American citizens without warrants.

Supported and signed National Defense Authorization Act of 2011 which gives him and the army the power to detain indefinitely any citizens without charges or trial. Destroyed the right of habeas corpus, the fundamental basis of our criminal justice system. The new law also destroys a century-old prohibition against the use of troops against American citizens, which protected the people from dictatorship.

Dispatched CIA teams to at least 75 countries whose mission is to establish power over the governments of those countries.

Overthrew the legitimate government of Libya on a pretense of supporting a nonexistent ‘popular uprising.’ Did this for geopolitical reasons and to strengthen the control of the dollar as against a possible pan-African currency which Qaddafi had proposed.

Opposed an international movement to ban land mines. Land mines kill hundreds of children each year.

Opposed to an international movement to ban fragmentation bombs.

As the political committees say at the end of their endorsement rosters, that’s just a partial list.

Of course, he did get ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ enacted. Thanks, Mr. President. I’ll run right out and campaign for you again. Your presidency has been awesome.

And on a personal note, my old high school acquaintance has ‘de-friended’ me on facebook. Must’ve been something I said.

An estimate by the International Red Cross a couple of years ago was that eighty percent of the people locked up and, in one form or another, tortured by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay Prison were innocent of any crimes.

A similar review by the Pentagon found the same thing.

In the 2008 Presidential campaign, Barack Obama declared that he would close Guantanamo as soon as he was sworn in. This promise was very popular. There had already been stories leaked to the press about physical and psychological methods of coercion –– what the criminals of the Bush regime called ‘enhanced interrogation’ –– and a hunger strike in the prison had claimed many lives.

On taking office, Obama issued an executive order closing the prison and ordering that its inmates be brought to the United States for trial. The Democratic-controlled House thereupon passed a bill forbidding any funds to be spent on relocating the prisoners.

Three years later, the prison is still open and still houses innocent people, most of whom have been there for more than ten years. They are victims of the indefinite detention policy recently codified under the National Defense Authorization Act and, beginning in March, applicable to American citizens. You may now quite literally be taken from your home by the army and locked up without charges, trial, lawyers, or the right of habeas corpus. There are names for societies which do this and ‘democracy’ is not one of them.

The bogus ‘war on terror’ has been used to crush the Bill of Rights.

And, according to a new poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News –– which, I grant you, is reason enough to discount its findings –– most Americans don’t mind it.

As the Post story notes, “Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. laws and values, has little to fear for failing to live up to those promises.” No kidding.

70% of Americans, say the pollsters, approve of Obama’s decision to keep the prison open, including 53% of self-described ‘liberal Democrats.’

It gets worse. 83% of all Americans support Obama’s use of remote-controlled assassination by drones.

Apparently, Barack Obama turned out to be the perfect President to usher in the New World Order. Had George Bush pushed the button on drone warfare, half the country would have been appalled, and members of Congress would have denounced him for committing war crimes.

But Obama gets a pass from most Democrats, including ‘liberal’ Democrats. This, incidentally, confirms my long-held view of ‘liberal’ Democrats. They confuse the symbol with the thing itself, write checks to public television and Save the Whales, and recoil from anything which might resemble grim reality.

‘Liberal’ Democrats are against war when a Republican conducts it but not when a Democrat does; they are all in favor of free speech when it’s Nazis marching in Illinois but not when it’s Occupy demonstrators marching in downtown Oakland. They are offended more by impolite dissent than by the horrors which occasion it.

I see evidence of these ‘liberals’ on the message boards on sites such as Alternet, Truthdig, Salon.com, and even ReaderSupportedNews, and their rationalizations make me want to upchuck my breakfast. Maybe they are all artists; F. Scott Fitzgerald thought that an artist was someone who was able to entertain two diametrically opposing views at the same time and still function, and many of these people are entertaining inherently inconsistent notions yet able to work their keyboards.

Confront a ‘liberal’ Democrat on issues like Guantanamo, the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan, the prospective war against Iran, the use of kidnapping –– called, in the police state terminology of Bush, ‘extraordinary rendition’ –– and the assassination of people on death lists, and you will get the simultaneous condemnation of these offensive actions and policies and praise (or excuses) for the President who is executing them.

It’s as grotesque in its intellectual emptiness as the spectacle of the so-called ‘Christians’ who want to ‘free’ other countries by blowing them up. It’s pretty much the same thing, too, only the icons are different.

Neither of these groups can answer the questions, nor do they wish to try. The popular bumper sticker, ‘Who would Jesus bomb?’ can be applied to the secular ‘liberals’ by switching Jesus with Martin Luther King, Jr. Ask the pro-Obama ‘liberals’ on these message boards whether King would agree with Obama’s policies and you will not get an answer. That’s because there isn’t any answer other than “fuck, no.”

There are a lot of reasons why America’s empire is falling. It’s easy to nail the obvious suspects: the bankers who took all the money, the politicians who sold out, the ‘obstructionists’ in Congress, the ‘bureaucracy.’ The idiot right wing goes after illegal immigrants, labor unions, and the ‘liberal media’.

I suppose we could blame the media, since it is in fact a corporate brainwashing apparatus which quite purposely works to keep us ignorant and to deflect any nascent anger toward fake targets, but we are, after all, sentient beings.

We may not be terribly bright or sophisticated, but the information is out there. If you want to let the culture soap up your brain, go ahead, but you’ve got a choice. 83% of Americans are said to approve of remote-controlled murder. Most ‘liberal’ Democrats think it’s okay to lock up innocent people for ten years and will support a President who broke his promise to end it.

It’s a nice slogan the Occupy forces have, that 99% thing, but the fact is that while most of the people in the United States are being royally hosed, they keep paying into the system which is hosing them and supporting the politicians who are controlling the water pressure. It might be that 99% of the people are being victimized, however more than 80% think it’s okay to blow up wedding parties using drones.

Many historians believe that a revolution will be successful if as much as 10% of the population supports it. That’s because the vast majority of people have no opinion and will do nothing. Since most of the 83% who like killing strangers will be home watching football or cop shows on the tube, it’s possible that there’s enough room out here to turn the machine over.

We do need at least 10%, though.

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” –– Sinclair Lewis.

Speaking of Rick Santorum, do we think he’s a serious possibility as the Republican nominee or is he just the latest clown the G.O.P. has trotted out in a forlorn, desperate attempt to make Romney seem human? Questions such as this, once the province of satirists and other hangers-on, are now real. That’s the state of American politics.

I’ve been battering Obama a lot lately and will no doubt do it some more, which in my opinion he richly deserves, but to be perfectly fair there are other useless fill-in-the-blanks out there and they’re entitled to proper recognition as well.

My God, Rick Santorum. Let’s face it, he’s really just Michelle Bachmann with a sweater vest and a dick. Same depth of intellect, same personality disorders.

This is a guy who brought a dead fetus home in a jar to show his children, plunked the thing down on the dining room table. Try to imagine the salutary effect that had on the appetites of the Santorum family at the evening meal thereafter, images of dead babies floating in their little minds. I’m surprised he didn’t braise it and bake it and serve it up with a little catsup as an object lesson on cannibalism.

The fetus was the result of an abortion induced chemically to save Mrs. Santorum’s life, something they now deny and which Santorum would forbid to women in the U.S. A lot of votes in misogynistic self-righteousness these days. Flag and the cross. This guy’s a perfect avatar for fascism. Humorless, depraved, mean-spirited and stupid.

I don’t know where we get them. Santorum was actually defeated for re-election to the Senate from Pennsylvania. His own constituents, having seen his work, didn’t want him no more. On the other hand, his record and accomplishments are the equal of some of the others. Herman Cain, who ‘suspended’ not ended his campaign so that he can keep receiving and spending campaign bucks. Bachmann, who has returned to Minnesota to look for lesbians to be afraid of. Rick Perry, who kept forgetting the names of countries. Gingrich.

Jesus, Gingrich is a treat. A dim bulb who fancies himself an intellectual which I guess he is if he hangs around the rest of these people, who was run out of the Speakership on about fifty ethics violations and whose marital hijinx make Cain look sober and faithful, this is a candidate beloved of a large chunk of ‘Christian fundamentalists,’ according to the polls, which makes one wonder about both Christianity and fundamentalism.

Saw a short clip of Gingrich lecturing Ron Paul on why it was necessary to torture, spy on everybody, and engage in racial profiling because Muslims are our enemy, at which point Paul wondered whether we ought to racially-profile suspects who looked like Timothy McVeigh. There was one of those brief ‘oh shit’ moments as Gingrich’s brain went into panic mode before he blurted that he wanted to “stop” those things “before” they happened, and the audience, no doubt relieved, applauded.

Gingrich, another one of the flag-wrapped, cross bearers. I still like Bill Hicks’ observation that people that far to the right are harboring some deep, dark secrets.

America’s electoral problem does not look solvable to me. Any direction looks hopeless. Readers of this post know my feelings about Obama by now. Obviously, things would not improve with any of the possible Republican nominees. They’re all nitwits and thugs. Those who are considering that one might live with a Romney election –– since he clearly has no principles and thus could track toward the mythical center –– had better reconsider since his running mate will certainly be crazier than he is.

Third parties, well, the last one which had a shot was Teddy Roosevelt a hundred years ago, and even that didn’t work, plus they tried to off him, and Teddy was some serious shit. There’s the Greens, who are so useless on the electoral level people don’t know they exist. There’s Rocky Anderson and his new Justice Party, so disorganized that they missed the California ballot; Anderson has raised about ten grand so far. And then there’s the weird internet nominating process which mysterious unnamed people are financially backing and which promises to ‘nominate’ a candidate online.

Are we levitating yet?

And then there’s Ron Paul, the half wise, half crackpot semi-Republican who says the best things about war and peace that I’ve heard since McGovern got slaughtered forty years back. He’s also right about the drug war, and about the Patriot Act and NDAA, and the domestic police state ushered in by the Bush-Obama combination. But as my grandson Jake remarked, watching a video in which Paul attacked the CIA for ‘killing people’ and called Bradley Manning a ‘brave soul’ and ‘an American hero,’ “they’ll kill him.” And probably they would.

Hey, I’m open to suggestions here.

Here’s a question for you. Which candidate for President recently said this:

“Why do we have a CIA involved in overthrowing governments and rigging elections around the world and then we sit back and wonder why do they hate us? Because we’re bombing and killing people.

“One of the big issues going on today is the issue of torture. We now have become a nation known for torture. Pictures have been out there early on when the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo pictures came out, we don’t see them anymore, nobody talks about them, but torture still goes on, we farm it out to other countries, but those pictures circulated around the Muslim world and believe me they didn’t like it.

“What would we think if someone was torturing American people around the world? I mean, it would infuriate us. So what do we do? We have the information that came up, they said we need to look into that and this administration was supposed to do that, so they started investigating and they had some evidence that the CIA was involved and guess what? The CIA destroyed all the evidence and this administration will not pursue it, they’ve excused them, said that’s it, we can’t find the evidence. Not one challenge to the people who claim, oh, no, they’re not really torturing, but it was a POLICY. As long as torturing is a policy of America, America cannot remain great.

“We now have a policy, it’s been sitting around for awhile, but frankly admitted today, that there’s a clear cut policy that the American President and the Attorney General can designate American citizens to be assassinated. Now there’s probably three or four Americans out there, nobody here’s going to be on that list, at least for a year or two. But just the idea that they can do it, they say, well, this is a bad guy. Well, probably IS a bad guy, but the law is supposed to protect the bad guys so that the good guys are never treated like bad guys.

“What they want to protect are secret prisons and secret judicial systems and the military courts, and they don’t want to lose their ability to torture.

“The reason the individual wasn’t convicted of more crimes this week was because all the information came from torturing the guy. He was probably very much involved, but he wasn’t directly involved –– but they say, you can’t do this in civilian court, we have to keep it secret, it has to be military because they’re all guilty. Guess what? Since 9-11, we’ve had 400-plus individuals who have been tried and convicted in civilian courts and there’ve been four convicted in military courts. And then the clamor now is, no, we can’t depend on civilian courts, we have to have military courts, this is a very, very bad precedent and we must be aware of this so hopefully we can get this stopped.

“They are talking about giving sovereign immunity to our government officials, and I would remove it, but what about giving immunity to the whistle blowers? They’re the ones who deserve immunity. We have a few brave souls, especially in the foreign policy area, it came up in Vietnam, it’s come up more recently with WikiLeaks, information that, technically, yes, they’re breaking a rule, but what’s the government doing? They’re breaking the law! And they’re doing these horrible things.

“So if we had an American citizen and he’s willing to take it, take the consequences and practice civil disobedience, saying ‘this is what our government is doing’, should he be locked up in prison or should we see him as a political hero, maybe he is a true patriot, who reveals what’s going on in government.”

In the fall of 1973, I was hired to work for the campaign of then-State Senator George Moscone’s campaign for Governor of California. My first assignment was to do research on one of is likely opponents, Congressman Jerome Waldie of Antioch.

I drove out to Waldie’s home town and burrowed through old press records, looking for whatever I could find. This was of course pre-internet; one couldn’t just google the guy. So there were newspaper morgues to haunt and photocopying, I think, and lots of note-taking and memo writing.

My job, to be direct about it, was to find whatever dirt there might be on Mr. Waldie.

There’s a point to this. I’m not merely tripping down memory lane.

As we all know, part of organizational politics is not the stuff everybody sees in the paper or in candidate’s ads. It’s the seamier side, the digging up of facts –– or in some cases things which can be made to look like facts –– which cast doubt on the qualifications, credibility, moral character, sexual proclivities, behavior, and personal practices of one’s opponent.

Sometimes, the digging involves people presumed to be allies or even friends. How it’s done.

I couldn’t come up with much to discredit Waldie, whether due to my lack of ability as a researcher or his lack of vulnerabilities. He seemed to be a pretty good guy. Moscone was, too. Didn’t seem to matter in the end, anyhow, as most of this stuff doesn’t; Jerry Brown won the primary and went on to become California’s youngest governor.

There are seamier aspects to politics than this kind of stuff, but it’s got a kind of nasty edge to it quite often. When Lyndon Johnson was trying to pick off the Democratic nomination in 1960 and Jack Kennedy was in his way, LBJ spread rumors that Kennedy had Parkinson’s disease.

In this year’s fun-filled presidential contest, the ferrets are already working ‘round the clock, a descriptive term no longer useful since everything is digital and if clocks can be said to exist they’re not round. This is all very difficult for someone like me who still misses rotary phones.

Anyway, the ferrets are at work. We know this because we’re catching the charges and countercharges, mostly between the media-selected G.O.P. ‘front-runners’ Romney and Gingrich. There were quite a few earlier fusillades, attacks on and on behalf of Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Michelle Bachmann, each of whom faded under the charges or simply self-destructed. True, this was a threesome whose combined IQ would rival the average woodchuck’s, but each for a while was regarded as a serious candidate by all the major news (sic) media and their brain dead anchors and commentators.

It’s all about image, of course, but there does seem to be a kind of randomness to it all. Consider, for example, that about two dozen male members of Congress have been discovered spending the household cash on prostitutes. My guess is that this leaves about 200 others who haven’t been caught yet.

Of the known aficionados of hookerdom, a few have been forced from office but the rest, after the obligatory public confession, the parading around of the loyal wife, and the talk of Jesus and whatnot, have gone back to work. One went on to election to the Senate.

But on the presidential level the difference in treatment is absolutely breathtaking. There’s Herman Cain who, granted, is a numbskull, chasing after every woman he sees, as though he was attempting to eclipse Clarence Thomas in the nastiness Olympics, and then there’s Newt Gingrich, whose serial adulteries are the stuff of legend. Granted, these were not strictly pay-per-play professionals, but we all know there had to be some kind of quid-pro-quo here. I mean, just look at the fucker.

But Newt, despite violating pretty much every precept of the G.O.P.’s nutball fringe, is their darling still. Apparently, given the uselessness of Rick Santorum, the far right sees Gingrich as their only hope to derail the relentless charge of that socialist-sympathizer Mitt Romney.

Matters that might be slightly more relevant to the candidates’ character and ability usually take a back seat to sexual indiscretions because the latter are just a lot juicier, to borrow the noxious term of a former neighbor of mine in tendering an offensive and disgusting offer. Gingrich, after all, got caught on several dozen ethics violations while Speaker of the House, but nobody seems to care. Presumably this is because he was thieving and peddling influence more than ten years ago. Maybe in today’s politics there’s a statute of limitations on crooked behavior.

There’s no statute on other things, though, not in certain cases. Racist comments printed in several editions of what were called ‘newsletters’ sent out under the name of Congressman Ron Paul in the late 1980’s are still fair game, and they’re all over the internet.

Apparently, Paul published three different newsletters back in those days, mostly for fund-raising or promotional purposes. They were written by others, including people he never met and didn’t know. But because they went out with his name attached, he is reasonably held liable for their contents.

The thing about attack research in the modern day is that it makes it much easier to pick up on written or spoken embarrassments. Just about anything can be found. And now everybody’s got a digital recorder in their camera phones, as Barack Obama discovered when his remarks about ‘clinging to guns and religion’ to a fund-raising crowd got recorded and played all over the place soon after in the 2008 campaign.

In Paul’s case, researchers located eight such offensive remarks in literally thousands of pages of ‘newsletters’ back twenty years or more, but you and I are not going to read those newsletters. We have other things to do. So, instead, we get to read the 8 isolated comments.

This, despite overwhelming testimony from everyone who’s known him since, including quite progressive members of Congress, left-wing staff members, and even black community leaders, is being run right up his pant leg by commentators on web sites everywhere. Ron Paul is a racist, is the theme.

Politics has become increasingly a matter not of substance but of image. I spent the better part of an afternoon on one of the ‘progressive’ web sites trying to make the point that people the followers of this site would presumably trust, such as Dennis Kucinich and Alan Grayson, are adamant that Ron Paul is not a racist. I was run over by a large number of posters who seemed as uninterested in what the truth might actually be as are the craziest ‘birthers’ and other ‘believers’ on the far right. One guy kept trying to tell me I was a liar, in capital letters.

That was pretty disappointing.

I do know how it works. The attack dogs going after Ron Paul right now are not backers of idiots like Mitt Romney or Gingrich because they all know that the Republicans will never nominate him. This is a guy who told South Carolina Republicans that they ought to end the death penalty because it was disproportionately applied to blacks. Hell, Ron, that’s one of the things they like about it.

No, these guys are not Republicans but Democrats. It’s obvious by now to anyone who reads the boards –– and Obama’s people do –– that Ron Paul is picking up a lot of support from people on the left, people sick of Obama’s wars, assassinations, and police state policies. They are worried that Paul will run as an independent and take more votes from Obama than from Romney. They may be right.

That’s where the ‘racist’ charges are coming from, and the claims that Paul hates gays, women, blacks, you name it. They don’t have to be true or fair or even based on facts, they just have to have enough traction to stick.

Come a long way since attack researchers plowed through old newspaper files. Jerome Waldie was a pretty decent guy. So was Moscone. Both dead now. Thirty-six years later, Jerry Brown got himself elected Governor all over again.

They’re still executing people in Texas as fast as they can manage it, and there are a few other states with the same general approach, but in a lot of places in America the death penalty is not as popular as it once was.

For one thing, it’s always been about retribution. Plenty of studies have shown what a lot of penologists have long said, which is that it’s not a deterrent. Also, for you Republicans out there, it’s not cost-effective. In recent years, we’ve seen more than one outgoing state governor commute all the death sentences, citing the unreliability of juries and misconduct by prosecutors.

Innocent people have been put to death by the state. Now that DNA evidence is available, more than a few people facing death have been exonerated by scientific proof.

Of course, Texas is still a little different. Not long ago a man whose conviction was shown by DNA evidence to be wrongful was nonetheless executed because, according to the court, his appeal had been filed too late.

As a political issue, not many politicians bring it up anymore. The last time it was a big issue in a presidential race, Michael Dukakis got himself run over with a boneheaded answer to a hypothetical question concerning the rape and murder of his wife. If, instead of providing a thoughtful, reasoned response, he’d have answered by cold-cocking the questioner, which is what I’d have done, he’d probably have won the damned election.

Democrats, who used to oppose the death penalty, learned they could lose elections on that issue alone and started ducking it. Face it, that’s what Democrats have gotten really good at, ducking questions. The last party nominee with guts was, let’s see... uh, Adlai Stevenson?

There are a lot of good reasons for ending the death penalty. It’s wrong on a lot of levels. One of those reasons is this: it’s applied in a seriously prejudicial way. Black and Latino defendants get fried, white defendants don’t. No getting around it. The death penalty is undeniably racist in its implementation.

Who’s willing to talk about this? Not Obama.

Ron Paul.

That’s right, that racist congressman from Texas whose name was on those newsletters twenty years ago.

You feel tricked, right? A little bait-and-switch. Hey, the guy’s writing about the death penalty and Texas and now he’s dragging that old cracker into it. Look, I sometimes drive this thing kind of loose and don’t always put the turn signal on. You can jump out now and nobody will know.

Ron Paul is annoying the hell out everybody. The Republicans want to shut him up. He stood on the stage at the South Carolina debate and acted as though he was addressing a meeting of the congressional black caucus.

The death penalty ought to be abolished, he said, because it discriminates against blacks. Drug laws, too, he said. Black people are 14% of the population but comprise one-third of those arrested and 60% of those incarcerated. That’s racism, he said, and a very good reason to legalize all drugs.

A moderator, scarcely believing his ears, asked him if he was serious. Didn’t he realize that this would lead to a much greater drug problem? Paul’s answer, let’s see a show of hands, all those who would run right out and buy heroin.

Paul is an embarrassment to modern-day Republicans because he’s a genuine conservative. That means he’s against the federal government assuming all sorts of powers not granted to it by the constitution, among these the power to regulate what you do with your body, what you do in your own home, and what you do with your property. He’s also against the President waging wars all over the world, especially since the constitution does not give him that authority.

The fake conservatives, the Gingriches and Palins and Santorums who have taken over a big piece of the party pretend they’re against big government, but what they really are is against big government meddling with the rich or trying to regulate the corporations; they’re fine with Big Brother in your bedroom. They love big government when it comes to blowing the shit out of people in other countries.

Paul’s a problem for the Democrats, too. Here they are, gearing up for another electoral tussle, rounding up the troops to support the President, and there’s this other candidate who’s exposing the moral corruption of Barack Obama.

The owners of the country would like an election between two candidates they control. In a two-person race between Obama and Romney, let’s say, the candidates will spar over things like budgets and health care and foreign policy and energy and so forth, but the real difference between them will be nonexistent.

Both support keeping health care private and controlled by the insurance industry. Both support engaging in wars all over the world for global commercial advantage, big banks, and multinational corporations, only they will call it ‘freedom’ or ‘defense’ or some other mutually-acceptable lie.

They will fight over pretend differences. Obama will back ‘green’ jobs but continue to spend money to build new nuclear plants, the first since Three Mile Island; Romney will say we should drill more. Obama will pretend that coal is clean. Romney will say that everything’s on the table. The table is very popular these days and everything will be on it.

Everything will be on the table in foreign policy, too. Romney will accuse Obama of being soft on terrorism and Obama will respond by pointing out that he’s killed more civilians than Bush did, assassinated a bunch of suspected Al Qaeda sympathizers, and blown up an occasional wedding party. He’ll brag that we overthrew the Libyan government without losing a soldier. Then he’ll haul out the flag he got from the SEAL team which killed bin Laden. Both will warn Iran, or Syria, or whoever is next on the target list.

They will be for jobs, too. Romney will say he’ll create jobs and Obama will say he has already created some and is creating more. Both will be lying, but you knew that.

Real issues will not be discussed because neither candidate is interested in them. They’re too dangerous. Besides, with both candidates heavily-funded by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and Bank of America, nothing of real significance will be in prospect for the next presidential term, whoever fills it.

The problem with Ron Paul is that the Democrats realize he might run as an independent and if he does Obama’s in big trouble.

That’s because on a wide range of issues, from war and peace to civil liberties to the bank bailouts, Paul’s views are one hell of a lot closer to mainstream Democratic Party values than are Obama’s. That sure sounds weird, but these are weird times.

Like a lot of people, I at first figured Paul’s antiwar stance was an oddity. Then I saw a few of his remarks not only about Iraq and Afghanistan but about other places where Obama’s policies are aggressive and violent.

I saw him speak about Iran. I don’t know why nobody else seems able to tell the truth here. The rest of the Republicans are barely able to find it on a map but they’re ready to blow the place up, kill ‘em all, because, well, they’re not sure but they just know Iran’s run by bad guys. Probably they saw it in F*X News.

Obama’s policies are more clever but just as ugly. He increases economic sanctions, threatening to cut off the ability of Iran to sell its oil. He moves battleships into the area. He lies about the Iranian nuclear program, claiming it’s moving to build nuclear weapons and would be a threat to its neighbors, e.g. Israel. Hillary echoes the saber-rattling.

But Iran’s position is actually quite logical. For one thing, it has not only invited inspectors but offered to extend their stay. It denies that it’s enriching uranium for weapons, which may be true; even if it’s not, it’s at least three years away from being able to build a bomb and if it builds one that will only give Israel a 200-1 superiority. Only Paul points that out.

Only Ron Paul talks about Iran with a sense of history. He talks about how the United States, through the CIA, in league with England’s MI5, overthrew the elected President of Iran and ousted its democratic government in the early ‘fifties, installing the Shah and creating a reign of terror which lasted more than twenty-five years. That’s one reason they don’t trust us, Paul says. His is the only voice to say this.

He also says that any interest Iran had in nuclear weapons would be justified because countries with nuclear weapons are not attacked by the U.S., whereas countries without them, such as Iraq, get hit. He also points out that the economic sanctions Obama is increasing against Iran are acts of war under international law.

You can see why the Democrats want to shut him up. He makes Obama look like what he is.

On the boards, the attacks on Paul are escalating, and the distortions are getting ratcheted up nicely. He’s a racist, they say, based on eight pages of objectionable content in thousands of pages in three newsletters from twenty years ago. Yes, those comments were rather disgusting; well, seven of them. I thought one was pretty funny. He’s answered those charges years ago and has answered them recently. Maybe his answers sound contrived to you or maybe not. I don’t have a problem with him on this issue. I think he’s less racist than any other candidate in the race. And that includes you know who. I’m happy to debate it anytime.

Paul’s antiwar position is also under attack., which is creepy. He’s only against war for economic reasons, some people write. Of course, were that true, it would not invalidate it. I’m personally in favor of anyone ending wars for whatever reason turns them on. There isn’t one war going on right now which seems justified to me.

But Paul is not antiwar for economic reasons. He’s against it for a lot of reasons, including moral reasons, and his position, I think, is the only sane one in this race. In Iowa, for the caucuses, he ran this commercial. I defy anyone to watch it and tell me this guy doesn’t understand what America’s doing and why it’s wrong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKfuS6gfxPY

This is not a candidate satisfied with a slogan or two but one who wants to explain things. America’s policies have histories, he says. Our relations with other nations have antecedents. It is important to understand historical context, to respect the feelings and traditions of others. You sure don’t get that from Hillary “Glad He’s Dead” Clinton.

Paul is also right about NAFTA. He does not see it as ‘free trade’ but as corporate-imposed rules which screw the poor, send jobs overseas, and promote a lot of mischief such as the Mexican drug wars. Obama at least knew this, but his campaign promise to make changes in NAFTA have never been mentioned since.

Paul’s right about the banks, too, and the rest of those candidates are wrong. Critics on the left say his economic policies are crazy, but how crazy is his analysis of the banking disaster? The left counted on the federal agencies to police the banks. We know how well that worked out. The banks simply corrupted the oversight agencies and got their people inside Clinton’s cabinet to deregulate.

The difference with Paul is that he would not have bailed them out. Period. Too big too fail? Nope. Bye bye. So the money the government had which got shoveled to the crooks would instead be available to real people. The math is pretty instructive. Had the 1.4 trillion (it’s turned out to be much, much more) handed to the biggest offenders, been instead distributed per capita to underwater mortgage holders, it would’ve kept nearly everybody in their homes and pumped the money directly into the economy.

The only people looking for work would’ve been the investment bankers.

But with Bush and Obama, the banks consolidated, bought out smaller competitors, and wound up bigger today than they were before the crash. The bailout never even required them to account for how they spent it. Some of it was used to buy government securities, which created what one banker gleefully called ‘free money’ as we, the taxpayers, paid the banks interest on our own money.

Doesn’t anybody think this is crazy? I mean, besides Ron Paul?

Then we have a little thing called the Bill of Rights. Without it, you can kiss your ass goodbye. Obama, a constitutional lawyer by training, pushed through Congress a defense authorization act which effectively lays the foundation for a police state. For the first time in American history, it authorizes the military to take into custody anyone it believes may be aiding terrorists. No warrants, no specifications, no lawyers, no appeals. Obama assures us, don’t worry, I won’t use it, probably. All the candidates supported it except Paul.

Ron Paul wants to repeal the odious, un-American Patriot Act as well as the NDAA bill’s detention provisions. Again, he’s alone here.

Of course, he also wants to restrict the CIA to its original role of intelligence gathering. The last politician who wanted to do that rode in the wrong motorcade.

Then there’s the matter of government secrecy. Remember Barack Obama, the candidate? The budget would be online, people would be able to see what lobbyists got what out of their lobbying. Whistle blowers would be protected. Hahaha, pretty good jokes. His government is crazier for secrecy than Bush’s was, and it goes to court all the time to keep it that way.

Ron Paul talks about openness, too, but he can get specific. He calls Bradley Manning an American hero, which he is, even though Manning is facing life in prison for disclosing secrets to WikiLeaks, and some members of both parties want him executed. The Obama government has held Manning for 19 months in conditions roundly criticized by Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and U.N. oversight committees as being against international law and constituting torture.

I suppose Paul is open to attacks on environmental issues, though there are a few points about even that. One, he wouldn’t try to prevent nuclear power. But the fact is, right now Obama not only supports it but has authorized millions in subsidies. Nuclear power, you see, needs subsidies. It also needs protection from lawsuits but nobody will insure it for obvious reasons. Paul would simply end federal subsidies and federal insurance guarantees, and there would go nuclear power. Not only that, there would be no place to store the waste because the feds would not be able to force a state such as Nevada to accept it.

Two, increasingly in California, state measures to protect the environment are being overturned in federal court because federal rules are less strict. State efforts on automobile emissions have been knocked down that way. Paul would leave it to the states.

It may be simple-minded and even totally nutso to say, as Paul does, that the market and the tort system would provide better environmental protection, but considering that the present system enables the biggest polluters to do whatever they want to with the complicity of corrupt federal oversight agencies, and considering that the powerful will certainly try to corrupt any such agency under any administration, it’s maybe worth rethinking the whole thing.

San Francisco recently passed an ordinance requiring sellers of cell phones to notify customers of the tested emissions of the differing brands. This is of interest to people who are concerned with studies showing spikes in the rate of brain cancer with the use of cell phones. The federal government struck down the ordinance on the grounds that commerce is regulated by the feds.

In Fairfax, where I live, attempts to ban plastic bags or certain types of non-recyclables have brought threats of expensive lawsuits based on the supremacy of federal rules.

Also in Fairfax, the local dispensary for medical marijuana, which had the unanimous support of the town council and which has existed since California voters approved it, has been forced to close because the U.S. Attorney, on orders from the Obama administration, has cracked down on dispensaries, threatening landlords with seizing their property and throwing people in jail. More than two hundred have been closed in the state.

Contrary to what some morons think, medical marijuana has legitimate uses and has aided a great many people with a variety of illnesses. There is considerable scientific and medical proof of this, including a huge government-funded study at U.C.L.A. But for reasons which I concede are hard to imagine, Obama has forced many dispensaries to close, making it much harder for sick people to access what for them is medicine.

Ron Paul does not think any of this is the business of the federal government. He is right, and he’s the only one who is.

So, go ahead, let’s have it. He’s, as one old friend recently put it, batshit crazy. He wants to take possession of women’s uteruses, as someone else wrote to me. He hates blacks, women, gays, anyone who’s not white. I don’t buy any of it, but we’ve got plenty of time to have this conversation.

The Republicans would never have permitted him to get the nomination no matter how many primaries he won, and he’s not winning them anyhow. The G.O.P. will choose Romney, probably, because he seems like a better shot than the rest of those grotesqueries. Legitimate third-party challengers such as Rocky Anderson can’t even get on the ballot in some states and nobody in the mass media is paying him any attention.

You can see where this is probably going. And if the two-party-controlled operation which runs the presidential debates tries to keep Paul out they’ll have problems they can’t even imagine. But letting him in would mean problems for the two major party hacks they’d do about anything to avoid.

I’ve never much understood the great desire of some people to appear richer and more sophisticated than they are. I mean, I guess I get it in one sense. I want people to think I’m cool, if there’s a choice, in contrast with, say, I’m, well, stodgy. Even if I am stodgy I don’t bloody want to hear it.

But then there’s the lengths to which people go. That goes double for geographical groupings, for communities, cities, counties, and larger political entities. When a city tries to look cool, somebody usually takes it in the shorts.

Today’s headline in the Chronicle was not about Bradley Manning, the Army Pfc. who probably sent a few hundred thousand documents to WikiLeaks, being ordered held for courts martial. That was on page 6, a small article but, what the fug, not a surprise. No, the headline story was “New pact troubles America’s Cup critics.”

From the headline, one would naturally assume that whatever the new pact was, it would not be expected to trouble the America’s Cup backers. One might even assume that the ‘critics’ were people who just plain didn’t like the event itself. This is why nobody with any sense believes the crap they read in a newspaper.

We’ll save the details for a minute. First, I will crow some. Readers of this column, especially its subscribers (It’s free! Just sign up with your e-mail in the space provided, then confirm), are often out front of the news. We print the facts of things long before you see them elsewhere.

On October 2, 2010 (‘Darkness At The Break Of Noon’), I wrote of the contest to bring the America’s Cup to San Francisco:

“They’re moving heaven and earth to bring the next America’s Cup to San Francisco. Actually, they’re moving a lot of cash, estimated at $270 million, ‘privately-raised’, and all the local business and political heavyweights have climbed on board, as it were, along with Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, and Governor Peckerhead.

“The $270 million will not be enough; everyone knows that. There are two alternative sites apparently available in Europe where more cash is on offer. San Francisco has sweetened the deal with free use of Port of San Francisco property, a rent-free lease of 66 to 75 years, and future development rights for Piers 30-32 and Pier 50.

“The America’s Cup event authority –– Ellison –– would in return shore up the piers, dredge the surrounding area, and install new breakwaters and utility lines. Of course, these improvements would benefit the city; they’d also benefit anyone who happened to own a long term lease and development rights.”

And on December 5, 2010 (‘The Circuses Continue’):

“People get rich off these things, and those people are not you.

“The swindle involves a city spending many millions –– always a multiple of whatever number they originally estimate –– to “improve” a section of the town, often a section owned by the city itself and/or its wealthiest friends. The visitors spend money, and the marketing bunch and television ad buyers, but the money goes to the ‘investors’, not the citizenry.

“It is not, however, as simple as that. There is also the cash flowing the other way. For example, with the America’s Cup deal San Francisco will grant Larry Ellison “development rights” nearly in perpetuity along the city’s waterfront.

“It’s a business story, a friendly two-way hand job where the real parties, the real players, go to a luxurious dinner while the mob presses its collective nose against the glass.”

Well, Ellison chose San Francisco and there breathed a great collective sigh of relief amongst the rich and special because there would be money for everyone well-connected or crooked, not to mention luxury boxes aboard well-placed yachts and all the perks one associates with colossal spectacles.

But of course the manipulators are still trying to increase the take. Today’s paper led with this paragraph:

“San Francisco may hand over rights to a contentious piece of waterfront property to America’s Cup organizers under a new version of the deal to bring the famed regatta to the city.”

And you probably thought, hey, a deal’s a deal. What a silly goose you are!

The details, of course, will be worked out along the way. Plenty of money for everyone. Not you and me, maybe, but anyone who counts. As the Chron wrote, “The crux of the agreement (between the city and Larry Ellison) has been that Ellison’s group would pay millions of dollars to repair sagging piers the city can’t afford to fix...in exchange for long-term development rights to some waterfront properties. San Francisco would get the prestige of hosting an international sporting event whose local economic benefit is projected at more than $1 billion, according to some analysts –– while Ellison’s group would be able to recoup its investment in port property.”

What, I ask you, could be fairer than that?

The details, it turns out, include a very long-term lease on Pier 29, where the city has just broken ground on a cruise ship terminal and plans an extensive open space greater than two acres.

Democratic Party Chairman Aaron Peskin, noting declining attendance projections, says the deal leaves the city “on the hook for too much money. It’s becoming increasingly clear that this is not the mini Olympics and Larry Ellison has got resources. There’s no reason the people of San Francisco need to pay the tab.”

The details include a few other items. Ellison’s gang gets Seawall Lot 330, a $24 million parcel where Bryant Street meets the Embarcadero, the rights to leases of ten or more years and rent credit on four piers, development rights and a 66-year rent-free lease on Piers 3-32, a single conjoined pier south of the Bay Bridge, as well as Pier 29.

An earlier version had the city collecting 1% from the sale of future condominiums planned for Lot 330; this has disappeared. Also changed: the Ellison crew would get credit for over a million smackers on infrastructure work, which when applied to Pier 29 just about hands the whole thing over to the racing boys.

The lawyers, of course, are getting rich throwing clauses around. Ellison will end up with enormous profits and a big chunk of San Francisco. The city will get, well, the city will get screwed. But that’s okay because it’s just part of the city. As I wrote 14 months ago:

“The regatta will bring money in for the rich boys and girls, the well-connected, everyone who’s in line for a payday, and it will use city property, zoning ordinances, development rights, permits, and a piece of the treasury to get it.”

In America over the past forty years, the wealth has been sucked straight to the top. In 1970, the richest 1% owned roughly 8% of the wealth. Today, it’s about 25% It’s the greatest disparity between rich and poor in any nation in the world, even oil baronies and military dictatorships.

People who hold political power are in some cases simply unconscious about the lives of ordinary people. In some cases, of course, they don’t give a damn, but often they don’t realize what’s going on for people not in their circles. An ‘event’ such as the America’s Cup is seen by ‘important’ people in ‘large’ terms.

That means that valuable public properties can be casually traded for benefits which apply to the few. Ask these people about what San Francisco will get out of this and you will be told that money will come to the city. But it will not come to you and me. It will come to those people with the luxury boxes, and they will accept it as no less than their due.

We all know that twenty years from now, the America’s Cup story from 2013 will be that Larry Ellison and his friends made new fortunes off the public property they got their hands on. The public servants who voted for it and the frothy socialites who championed it will have moved on, unaffected.

Quite well-known but seldom remarked upon, the attitude of most Secret Service agents toward President John F. Kennedy in 1963. More than a few in the White House detail had serious problems with the man they were sworn to protect and several were heard to express the attitude that they would not risk their own lives to protect him.

Many agents on this detail had been born in the South and resented Kennedy’s attitude about civil rights. Some were openly contemptuous over his appointment of the first black –– in those days they were Negroes –– to the detail, Abraham Bolden, and Bolden’s supervisor often called him a ‘nigger’ in front of other agents. The harassment was so severe that Bolden eventually asked to be transferred back to Chicago.

The Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy did not spend any time reviewing the behavior of the agents assigned to protect him during his Texas trip, although there was some comment about a number of key personnel spending the night before the 22nd drinking heavily in a local bar.

The Commission made no mention of the bizarre fact that in the sixty day period prior to the assassination, beginning shortly after the Texas trip was announced, eleven of the most experienced members of the White House detail, almost one-third of all such agents, were transferred to different assignments at their own request. Nothing like this had ever happened before and nothing like it has happened since. This rather peculiar occurrence has never been explained.

In addition, Gerald A. Behn, the man who had made arrangements, including security arrangements, for the Dallas trip, and who was to have been sitting in the President’s car, just in front of Texas Governor John Connally and next to the driver, decided at the last minute to take an unplanned vacation.

The limousine assignment fell to an agent named Roy H. Kellerman.

There were eight agents riding behind the President, four of them on the running boards of the backup car. With the exception of Clint Hill, who was personally chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy, none of them even moved from the car during the fusillade of shots.

In the Lincoln, the driver, William R. Greer, actually slowed to a near-stop when the shooting began. Kellerman, seated next to him, did nothing. It is standard training that on hearing a shot, the driver of the President’s car is to accelerate rapidly; indeed, that particular Lincoln could achieve a speed in excess of 100 miles per hour very quickly.

In the third car, where Lyndon Johnson and his wife rode, the first shot brought Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood out of his seat; he slammed Johnson to the floor and covered him with his body. This is what agents are trained to do. That had been Kellerman’s job in the lead car.

Later, Kellerman and Greer told the Warren Commission that they did not recognize the first sounds as gunshots. Secret Service agents are all trained to recognize the difference between gunshots and firecrackers and car backfires. Indeed, most people in Dealey Plaza not employed by the government to protect the President were instantly aware that bullets were flying. As Kellerman sat frozen and Greer hit the brake, spectators all over the plaza hit the ground.

The immobility of seven of the eight agents in the backup car is stupefying and in obvious contrast with their training. It’s not as though things just happened too fast for them to react. For one thing, nothing prevented the agent in Johnson’s car from covering his body immediately. For another, as filmic evidence graphically shows, everybody else reacted faster than the agents.

This may not have been purely fortuitous. While it may have been simply bad luck which left the President without experienced agents on the Dallas trip; while it is possible, though rather hard to believe, that the agents all ignored their training and did not respond to the crisis as expected; while it is conceivable that Behn really needed a vacation and possible, though extremely odd that the Secret Service approved the Dealey Plaza detour –– as demanded by Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, whose brother, Charles, chief of dirty tricks at the CIA, had been fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs –– against its own regulations concerning degree of turns permitted; while it may have been coincidence that nine agents got drunk the night before –– no alcohol is permitted to agents during a Presidential trip; while the bizarre confluence of all of these things might be explained away, there is one thing which gives the lie to that remote possibility, and that is what happened as the motorcade began its journey from Love Field.

As the agents took their assigned and customary places in the limousine and follow-up cars, two agents who would normally have ridden against the rear corners of the Lincoln, where special platforms are constructed and hand grips built in, were waved off the car by Secret Service supervisor Emory Roberts. Video of this event has been discovered. It is on YouTube. One of the agents, stepping down from Kennedy’s car, raises his hands in puzzled surprise. See it for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY02Qkuc_f8

The President’s advance man, Jerry Bruno, had been with Kennedy from the very beginning, setting up appearances during the primary campaign and throughout the 1960 election. Bruno had gone to Dallas to meet with local authorities in advance of the Texas trip and argued against the peculiar route change, where instead of proceeding straight through the Plaza to the Stemmons Expressway en route to the Trade Mart, it would make a ninety-degree right turn onto Houston Street, then a much sharper left turn onto Elm. This forced the limousine to slow to an unsafe speed which was prohibited by Secret Service rules.

But the Dallas people were adamant and Bruno gave in. When he returned to Washington, he told the President’s people, “We’re going to let them have the route.” The Secret Service did not veto it. Instead, Behn decided to take a vacation.

No Secret Service agents were stationed in Dealey Plaza that day. Since only Clint Hill left his position when the shooting began, it has always struck researchers as important that when two Dallas cops, guns drawn, ran up the grassy slope toward the picket fence, behind which two shots had been fired, they encountered two men in suits bearing Secret Service credentials and with the special pins in their lapels. The cops were Bobby W. Hargis and Joe Marshall Smith. Hargis was a critically-important witness. He has been riding his motorcycle behind and to the left of the limousine, and the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head showered him with blood and brain matter.

Hargis was never called as a witness before the Warren Commission. Smith was called but questioned only by counsel and without Commission members present.

Many years later, it was discovered that the Secret Service lapel pins for the trip –– different pins with different codes are prepared for each trip –– had been created by a highly-secret group operating illegally within the CIA called the Technical Services Division.

Over the years, I’ve heard people wonder why Kennedy rode in an open car when there was a protective ‘bubbletop’ available. It wasn’t Kennedy’s decision; he left all of that to the Secret Service. He trusted it. On November 22, 1963, with a motorcade route approved against its own policies, with the top removed and the agents transferred, with no one checking open windows or oversight areas along the route, and with the two agents removed from the running boards, the President was alone. The Secret Service had abandoned him.

On October 3, 1963, the respected, conservative columnist for the New York Times, Arthur Krock, published an astonishing piece, entitled ‘The Intra-Administration War In Vietnam.’

Krock, despite his conservatism, was a long-time, trusted friend to the President. In this column, Krock wrote that Kennedy had declared war on the CIA, that the agency “had flatly refused to carry out instructions” with respect to Vietnam, and in one instance had “frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge (Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam) brought from Washington.”

Krock wrote that the CIA’s growth was “likened to a malignancy,” citing as his source a “very high official” who was “not even sure the White House could control (it) any longer.”

Krock then wrote, “If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government it will come from the CIA.” Seven weeks later, the President was dead.

Even though for reasons of mental health I gave up watching television news some thirty years ago, I still check out newspaper editorials. This morning’s in the San Francisco Chronicle reminded me that they can be as ugly and stupid as anything on F*X.

You might think that since the Chron has a monopoly in the Bay Area, where the prospective readership is one of the most politically ‘progressive’ and sophisticated in the nation, its editorials would reflect that. If so, you would be so wrong.

I don’t expect much from the Chron’s editorial page. The paper is owned by Hearst, after all, and its political writers run to the right of center. Still, I’m surprised by how stunningly scary management can sometimes be.

Today, the editorial began this way: “Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has raised some very legitimate questions that go to the heart of Pakistan’s commitment to stopping terrorism.”

For one thing, the very term ‘terrorism’ has only one real meaning anymore, which is behavior offensive to or thought disagreeable by the government of United States. As many have pointed out before me, a terrorist is someone who doesn’t have the firepower that you do and must resort to funky, sometimes improvised weaponry.

So what Panetta and the Chron’s editorial writer mean is that Pakistan is not behaving the way the U.S. has instructed it to. If you don’t obey us, we question your commitment to the war on terror. You may even be helping the enemy, which would make you a terrorist.

Under the new NDAA law signed by Obama, as of March you can be rounded up and thrown into a detention center if someone in the military thinks you might be on the wrong side in America’s eternal war against terror. If you’re a country, I suppose we can’t round up everyone but we sure can bomb the hell out of you.

Of course, in the case of Pakistan, we already are.

Pakistan’s offense, according to Panetta? It is putting on trial Dr. Shakeel Afridi on charges of treason. Dr. Afridi is accused of conducting a fake vaccination program in an effort to obtain samples of DNA from the Bin Laden family.

According to Panetta, Afridi was “helping to go after terrorism.”

The Chron editorial includes these grotesque statements:

“Afridi’s assistance should not be considered an act of treason for a nation ostensibly engaged with the United States in the fight against global terrorism.”

“The defense secretary acknowledged that he didn’t have any hard evidence that anyone in the Pakistani government knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts. But his suspicions are more than plausible, especially considering that the compound was near a Pakistani military academy and about 35 miles from Islamabad.”

“This attempt to prosecute the doctor for his brave efforts to help find the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks validates the White House apprehensions about Pakistan.”

Wow, we’re just king shit of the universe, aren’t we? We can tell other countries what their laws should be, what they should do about those laws, and to whom those laws should apply.

If you’re on our side, then you’ll do what we tell you. And we’ve got our suspicions about you anyway. Maybe you knew where this guy was hiding out and didn’t bother to tell us. We’re already not trusting you –– the Obama regime didn’t bother to inform Pakistan that the Navy SEALS operation was coming –– and this makes us doubt you even more.

Memo to Panetta, Obama, and the egomaniac writing the Chron’s editorials: We don’t own Pakistan. It is a sovereign nation. Its laws and procedures are none of our business.

What’s really egregious about this is the background. For starters, while the U.S. believes it has the moral authority to kill anyone around the world our government thinks has done us harm or is even thinking about it, the case against bin Laden as the “mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks” has never been made.

Think about it. What evidence have you seen? I’m not talking about allegations, or the repetition which the U.S. government seems to think is sufficient to constitute truth, but actual evidence. There ain’t none. This may explain why the F.B.I. declined to charge bin Laden and why the U.S. made no attempt to capture and extradite him.

Before the invasion of Afghanistan, when the world was on America’s side and there was the expressed claim that bin Laden had been behind the 9/11 attacks, the government of Afghanistan offered to capture and extradite him if the U.S. would provide it with some proof of his guilt. The U.S. declined to do so, choosing to invade instead.

Now, why would that be?

If there was evidence, the appropriate thing to do, based on American law as well as international law, would be to put bin Laden on trial. After all, whoever participated in, let alone masterminded, those attacks is guilty of war crimes.

Historically, war criminals face trial. The Nazis at Nuremberg may have been obviously guilty as hell but they were afforded trial. Adolph Eichmann, years later, captured by Israeli intelligence, was given a trial. Even Noriega had a trial, of sorts, although none of us got to see any of it lest we learn of his drug connections with George Bush. But not this time.

Bin Laden was unarmed and was shot through the eye. Nobody wanted to bring him out for a trial. Why was that?

Plus, let’s be honest about it, the entire story is probably a fabrication. I mean, it kept changing. We did this with the body, no we did that, no we did something else, and the whole compound story, you got this master criminal in his hideout and there’s no alarm system or escape hatch... he’s just sitting there watching re-runs of the Brady Bunch and these guys burst into the room.

It doesn’t help any of this that the rescue team itself wound up getting killed shortly after in a peculiar crash narrative that other SEALS have publicly –– on the internet –– wondered about.

Jessica Lynch, anyone? Pat Tillman?

Meanwhile, the U.S. has a problem with Pakistan anyhow because the Pakistani secret police is not exactly well-liked and the Pakistani government is trying to walk a narrow precipice between growing domestic resentment at its collaboration with America and the threats of people like Panetta.

The U.S. is, after all, blowing up Pakistanis every day in drone attacks. Pakistanis are, no surprise, pissed off about that.

Allies? Why are they our allies? How voluntary do you think this combination is? What happens to Pakistan if its government is overthrown? What happens if the U.S. finalizes the deal it’s working on with the Taliban right next door?

And all this time, as America tries to tell everybody in the world how to behave on penalty of all sorts of nasty repercussions, Pakistan’s got nuclear weapons. And we’re worried about Iran?

The Chronicle editorial concludes:

“Pakistan needs to more clearly delineate its allies and enemies –– and the United States deserves to know the reliability of its partner in a critical part of the world. The treatment of Afridi is a good test of Pakistan’s loyalties.”

In other words, screw your legal system, Pakistan, and do what we tell you. Otherwise, we’re going to think you’re not loyal.

Since when do other countries owe “loyalty” to the United States? What kind of logic is loose in America when stupidity like this is considered reasonable?

Laugh riot of the day: Hillary Clinton telling the U.N. Security Council that the draft resolution being pushed by the U.S. demanding that Syrian President Bashar Assad give up his power was not anything like the recent U.S. move to, in the words of the Associated Press wire service, ‘pacify’ Libya.

“I know that some members here may be concerned that the Security Council is headed toward another Libya,” she said. “That is a false analogy.”

Clinton, who has the credibility of the average drug pusher along Mexico’s northern border, is known for her little jokes. We were, according to her, behind Egypt’s Mubarak until it was time to be behind its military instead. We wanted Security Council resolution number 1970 to protect civilian populations from probable massacres by the government in Libya, and then it turned out to be air strikes in the thousands against the civilian population in order to overthrow Qaddafi.

We’re only imposing sanctions against the people of Iran because we’re sure they’re trying to build a nuclear weapon. We’ve been sure of it for fifteen years but we’re even more sure now. We have no proof, but their denial is proof. If they weren’t building a nuke, they’d admit it.

We’re willing to release several supposed Taliban captives from Guantanamo in exchange for the Taliban not messing with our pipeline in Afghanistan, but we want to release the captives in Qatar. The reason for this has not been explained, however the disclosure prompted Afghan President Karzai to yank his ambassador from Qatar.

I don’t want to jump to any premature conclusions or draw a false analogy or anything, but could the Qatar part of the equation have anything to do with the fact that the U.S. used that country, and Qatari mercenaries, as a cover for the fake ‘uprising’ which toppled the Libyan government? Just wondering.

I read the Chron every morning, covering the international news, the stories and bulletins, most of them so transparently written they might as well have a CIA byline instead of the Associated Press, and most mornings I don’t shower until after I’ve done this because it helps remove the slime.

U.S. missiles yesterday struck a meeting of al Qaeda “militants” in Yemen, killing four, including “a man suspected of involvement in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.” I wonder if anyone’s noticed but this brings to about 500 the number of people killed by American air strikes who were ‘suspected’ of involvement in the Cole bombing. The planning for it must have taken place in a soccer stadium.

We don’t get the truth from our government. I realize that’s no news flash. Anyone not actually stuck in a cave with Bin Laden for the last ten years –– oh, wait a minute, that one wasn’t true, either –– well, anyone with access to a brain with real flesh tones and lifelike synapses has seen one lie after another and knows the score.

The score is, approximately, government 48, the people 0. It would be worse except the attempted coup on Venezuela didn’t work out.

I’ve got a theory, though, which goes like this: the American people register some of the lies, the relatively smaller and more digestible ones. We pretty much have to because there’re so damned many of them that if we didn’t our brains might actually explode like in those monster movies. We then wobble between mild outrage and a kind of bored cynicism. There never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but hey, Hussein was a bad guy anyhow, his execution, he probably deserved it for other things, and we’re nearly out of there, maybe not really but it looks sort of like it. So a bunch of GIs died and a lot more got their heads fried, and those dead Iraqis, well, collateral damage, that’s all, and that’s too bad but what a great season the 49ers had!

We’re sophisticated. Sure Bush lied, and Cheney, and Rummy, and Wolfie, and the rest of them, and there was torture which got out of hand a little, not our finest hour, but we’ve got Obama now and everything’s better.

We don’t really want to know what’s going on, we sure as hell don’t. Maybe we’ve even got an inkling, the clues that leaked in under the door where we didn’t get it completely sealed up. Iraq was just a small part of it and not the worst, no, not the worst.

People who ask questions about worse matters are set on by hyenas. Write a book or make a television appearance, the rest of the media will jump on your ass as though you killed Christ. I think I’m onto how it works but I fall for it anyhow. I hadn’t paid much attention to the ‘controversy’ surrounding Charlie Sheen, only hearing some things he’d said or was said to have said, and he sounded like a loudmouth, self-absorbed Hollywood schmuck. Even when my grandsons told me I was wrong, you know, I figured, they’re kids, what do they know.

Then I saw a couple of videos of Sheen talking about 9-11 and I got it. As a character in one of Blake Edwards’ films put it, in Hollywood, you can smoke dope and sleep with your Afghan and you’re just one of the gang, but question the way things are... In the videos I saw, Sheen wasn’t screaming or foaming at the mouth or making accusations. He was simply asking questions, as an American, he said. Well, that was the crime.

Got a copy of a new book by Mark Lane, called “Last Word. My indictment of the CIA in the murder of JFK.” I’ve read so damned many books on this subject I have little interest in reading more. I could operate a small library. I even have the infamous 26 volumes of Testimony and Exhibits, my own copy of the Zapruder film, and about two hundred pounds of newspaper and magazine articles. But, I figured, why not.

One of the things Lane collected over the years was a file on how the government operates to systematically discredit anyone perceived as a threat. Lane, who wrote one of the first books questioning the official fairy tale, was the subject of CIA memoranda instructing sources and agents inside America’s newspapers and magazines to go after him and suggesting lines of attack. Amazing how many of the CIA phrases later showed up verbatim in articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, various magazines, and in book reviews all over the country. ‘Experts’ were often quoted but never were readers to learn that they were paid by the CIA. When those people go after you, they go after you.

Politicians who raise seriously uncomfortable questions are quickly marginalized. Even if they are running for President, they can be made to disappear. Ask Dennis Kucinich.

So Mark Lane, and Jim Garrison, and Kucinich, and Charlie Sheen, and whoever else sticks his or her head above ground is suddenly in a game of whack-a-mole.

It’s a matter of degree. You can say that Iraq was based on a lie, but you can’t say Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Libya, and the entirety of American policy in that area of the world –– and for that matter everywhere else in the world –– is an enormous lie, that the U.S. uses its military as the enforcement arm of a corporate empire. If you do that, regardless of the documentation you can present, you’re a conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat wearer, someone whose ideas can be dismissed out of hand, and therefore never have to be examined.

The U.S. government maintains a squadron of F-16s on full alert, 24-hours-a-day at Andrews Air Force Base, ten miles out of Washington. On September 11, 2001, there was an elapsed time of an hour and sixteen minutes between the hijackings and the alleged attack on the Pentagon. The eastern seaboard of the United States is the most heavily-defended geographical area in the world.

None of the planes even got airborne.

“In a world of universal deceit,” Orwell wrote, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

There hasn’t been much rain this season were I live. Personally, I don’t mind much. I like sunny days, summer weather, dry fairways at San Geronimo. The deer are not very happy, having to spend more time on my street than they’d prefer but they’ve had to come down from the hills a bit looking for food.

Where I live the reservoirs are still mostly full from the last winter’s rain and we will not experience any delays or service interruptions. I pay for water every month, the local water district sends a bill, costs maybe thirty bucks if everybody showers a lot and there are loads of clothes.

Drinking water, all I have to do is open the tap.

I take water for granted, did even during drought years when we recycled water for the garden and to flush toilets. Shower with a friend, the saying went, and we did, although that didn’t really seem to save much water.

Every year about two million people, most of them children, die from lack of water, either directly or indirectly through lack of sanitation; that’s twice as many people as the United States killed in Iraq. Estimates of international agencies put the number at 1.1 billion who do not have access to enough water to drink, cook with, or properly bathe.

Water in Marin County is a public utility. There’s a water board elected by the voters and various projects from time to time. For most of my life I was not even aware that water might be a problem for some people, blissfully wrapped in the Bay Area cocoon. What I’d heard seemed to be passing news bulletins. Droughts somewhere, I wasn’t sure. Relief efforts.

I’ve also been ignorant about nearly everything else in the world. I don’t think I really got how deeply evil some corporations were. I didn’t understand how money worked, nor what the World Bank was about, nor the International Monetary Fund. They sounded benign. They are about as benign as Lucifer.

I certainly didn’t understand how the World Bank and some huge corporations were, in concert, working to kill millions of people by depriving them of access to water. I do now.

Of course, their public relations departments would go berzerko at such a charge. For my opinion on public relations departments, see Bill Hicks on YouTube.

We’re helping all of those people, the World Bank would say. We’re sponsoring important developments and laying pipe all over the place. Without us, hell, that water would just lay there underground not doing anybody any good. That’s not only what they would say, it’s what they do say.

If you were naive, like I was, you might think that water, being the one single necessity of life without which you’re flat-out dead, and being a substance which comprises 70% of the surface of the planet, and which falls from the sky and runs in rivers above and below ground, you might think that water is a common property, owned by the human race. That’s pretty much been true for a couple of thousand years.

It has long been accepted throughout the world that, according to Indian author Vandana Shiva, “water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature’s gift and denies the poor of their human rights,” and “water is a commons... it cannot be owned as private property and sold as a commodity.” Water is the basis of all life. It is preposterous that it might be owned and that some may be thereby deprived of it.

Thanks, however, to the World Bank, which is actually just the operative arm of the largest U.S. banks and whose policies can bring down governments –– c.f. Italy and Greece in the past few months alone –– the commons argument is quickly dying. Most Americans, being inhabitants of a nation which does not generally have these worries, are unaware of this.

Beginning about twenty years ago, it dawned on the bankers and some major corporations that if oil was a lucrative commodity water would be even more so. Everyone had to have water, even if they rode bicycles to work or took public transit. The trick was how to take it away from the people and sell it back to them.

But with the help of the World Bank and friendly government such as the U.S. under Bill Clinton, stipulations could be included in trade agreements and in loan conditions to developing countries.

Programs grew quickly in India, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Nigeria, Mexico, Malaysia, Australia, and the Philippines. They’ve now spread to Canada, England, Turkey, Colombia, Guatemala, Morocco, New Zealand, South Africa, El Salvador, and even China.

The impact has been to dramatically, and fatally, increase the cost of water, especially to the poor and for small agriculture, while simultaneously degrading its quality. Corporations such as Coca-Cola, Bechtel, Nestle, Pepsi-Cola, and the French company, Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, have bought off local governments, imposed horrendous conditions, and in some cases murdered people who have tried to stop them.

Maybe you’re thinking, Coca-Cola? How can that be? Things go better with Coke! But no, they actually don’t. And Bechtel? Why, that’s a Bay Area company, voted near the top of employers people like working for. I mean, it’s not as though we’re talking about Halliburton here.

Everywhere water privatization has gone there are stories of widespread misery. Quite literally, every country listed above is a horror story, with the exception of Argentina because the government there, and the people, kicked Suez’ sorry ass out (along with the World Bank). But we’ll focus on just two or three. Whatever I don’t get to in this column –– I’ve got more than fifty pages of notes and printouts –– you can find by typing in the name of a country, water, and the World Bank. That ought to do it.

The first water privatization story I ever heard was out of Bolivia. It seemed that Bechtel, somehow, had gotten hold of the country’s water supply. I didn’t understand how that was possible, plus I’d never associated Bechtel, which is mostly a construction outfit once run by Reagan’s pal (and Secretary of State) George Schultz, with water. What could that possibly be about? As it happens, Bechtel is involved in over 200 water and wastewater projects in more than 100 countries around the world.

Cochabamba, Bolivia, is a semi-desert region. Water is a scarce precious resource. In 1999, the World Bank told Bolivia that in order to obtain a much-needed $600 million in international debt relief, it would have to privatize Cochabamba’s public water system, giving the concession to a Bechtel subsidiary, International Water.

The Bolivian Congress caved in, passing the ‘Drinking Water and Sanitation Law’ in October of 1999, ending government subsidies to municipal utilities and authorizing privatization. International Water took over in Cochabamba. The minimum wage is less than $100.00 a month, but IW raised the price of water to an average of $20.00 per household. The impact was immediate: many poor families had to choose between food and water.

The people rebelled. In January, 2000, peasants formed The Coalition in Defense of Water and Life and through mass mobilization shut down the city for four days. Within a month a million Bolivians marched to Cochabamba and stopped all transportation in the city.

The Bolivian government pretended to give in, promising to roll back water prices; it never did. In February, the Coalition organized a peaceful march demanding that the October, 1999, law be repealed, the water contract terminated, the inclusion of ordinary people in drafting a resources law, and the cancellation of ordinances permitting privatization. The government responded by imposing martial law.

The media was censored, activists were arrested, and several protesters, including a 17-year-old boy shot in the head by soldiers, were killed.

But the people would not bend. Finally, after demonstrations which rocked the country, the government was forced to revoke the privatization legislation. The water company (and its debts) was surrendered to the people, and the Coalition held public hearings to start democratic management and planning.

Bechtel, and its allies inside the government, refused to quit. They harassed and threatened activists and leaders of the Coalition. In November, 2001, Bechtel filed a lawsuit before The International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, which happens to be located on the grounds of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The ICSID holds its sessions in private. The public and the media are barred from the proceedings.

I’ve written before about how the world’s largest banks control nations by forcing them into positions of debt from which they can’t escape. It’s a simple but elegant mechanism. Simply loan money to a government which desires to –– choose one or more of the following –– steal it, give it to their friends, buy weapons, build infrastructure, and then enjoy the leverage you’ve got when they can’t quite service the debt.

It’s how France was able to crush Haiti forever on the imposition of a debt for Haitian independence. It’s how nearly all Latin American countries have been controlled for decades, making deals to stave off bankruptcy by borrowing ever greater sums and, for the dubious privilege, sacrificing the public welfare and in many cases democracy.

It’s how the World Bank and the IMF were able to impose on Italy and Greece so-called ‘austerity measures’ which screw the poor, privatize public resources, and install as President in each country a recent big shot from Goldman Sachs by way of the IMF.

That’s why the Kirchners sent such shock waves through the world’s banking giants when they got themselves elected in Argentina and promptly told the World Bank to go fuck itself.

But for the most part, in most places on earth, regardless of the people living there, the unholy alliance between multinational corporations, the World Bank, and governments with flexible ethics has produced vast profits for the principals and increasing misery for the people.

India is another classic example, although there it is Coca-Cola, which has essentially appropriated the water needed for agriculture, which is despoiling large portions of the country.

Although its public relations whores have recently described the corporation as “a leader when it comes to environmental issues,” the facts are quite different. One classic example would be in the Plachimada community in the state of Kerala. Coke opened a bottling plant there in 2000; the community immediately suffered from chronic drought and polluted water. The reasons are hardly in dispute. As Indian journalist Arjun Sen wrote in 2003, “Three years ago, the little patch of land in the green, picturesque rolling hills of Palakkad yielded 50 sacks of rice and 1,5000 coconuts a year. It provided work for dozens of labourers. Then Coke arrived and built a 4-acre bottling plant nearby. In his last harvest, Shahul Hameed, owner of the small holding, could manage only five sacks of rice and just 200 coconuts. His irrigation wells have run dry because Coke draws up to 1.5 million litres of water daily through its deep wells... To make matters worse, the bottling plant was producing thousands of gallons of toxic sludge and, as the BBC reported, disposed of it by selling the carcinogenic material to local farmers as ‘fertilizer.’”

That’s a “leader when it comes to environmental issues”? Christ, who finished second?

Needless to say, many people in India have fought against the Coca-Cola operations but they’ve been unable to overcome money and vast political resources of the corporation. The company is able to extract groundwater free of charge, except for a small fee for discharging wastewater. It makes exploiting India too valuable to give up. About a dozen years ago, the cost of industrial water in the United States was roughly $5.00 per 10,000 litres. In India, the price was three cents.

By several reliable estimates, there have been in excess of 25,000 suicides by farmers over the last decade, a majority of these in the western and southern states, no longer able to feed their families because Coca-Cola has destroyed their farms.

Popular protest finally forced the closing of the Kerala plant, at least temporarily, but the corporation simply shifted their operations to other areas of Southern India. Other companies besides Coca-Cola have begun to grab a piece of the action, all of this facilitated by the World Bank, which is promoting the privatization of water in India and all over the world.

The northern territories are also at risk. Another bottling plant, which opened in 2000, is located in Mehdiganj, where company extraction has caused water levels to fall more than 6 meters. Crops have failed and livelihoods have been destroyed. Local activists throughout the country, trying to rally opposition, have discovered that Coca-Cola, in league with the wealthier segments of the polity, have simply rerouted pipelines to bypass villages entirely.

“What we see happening with Coca-Cola has been happening all over the country,” says Tom Palakudiyil of Water Aid. “The rich (are) able to acquire powerful pumps and extract more and more water with no limits.”

It is not only Coca-Cola sucking up the Indian water. In partnership with Enron –– yes, that Enron –– it operated the Dabhol plant and is involved in water privatization in Coimbatore/Tirrupur as part of a consortium with others.

As internet journalist Tom Levitt reported two years ago, ‘Sitting at the bottom of the pile are the small-scale farmers. Without adequate water supplies, the 70 percent of Indians who make their living from agriculture have nothing. The Bundelkhand region in northern India is a typical example of what happens when the water runs dry. Although never a lush region, the area has no completely lost the ability to sustain small-scale agriculture.’

Many thousands of villages have been unable to get water even from tankers and have been abandoned completely. The entire society is being violently altered by what amounts to wholesale theft of the nation’s water. And, of course, larger forces are prepared to “help” those most in need. One of the powerful forces driving the growing problem worldwide has been the World Bank which, in late 2009, had the astonishing temerity to say that “under current practices” one-third of the world’s population would have access to only half the water they need by the year 2030. The report then recommended that $50 billion be invested annually by governments and business in water management projects.

Coca-Cola, which uses enough water each day to meet the entire world’s water requirements for 10 days, enthusiastically endorsed the World Bank report.

To fully appreciate how powerful the World Bank is and how significant its ‘recommendations’, consider that it is able to wave large sums of money in front of political leaders in any country, offering not only cash which may or may not be diverted into personal bank accounts but financing for massive projects which both enrich major contractors and, for a while, please a lot of people.

The debt incurred, as you know from periodic references on the generally useless mainstream U.S. media, cannot be paid back. Many governments don’t much care at the time of the original loan, of course, because by the time the interest becomes onerous those politicos will be retired on their estates.

Any country faced with a large debt, and there are many, are forced by the IMF and the World Bank to privatize water. It is a common demand of these entities as one of the conditions of a loan. They also insist on creation of policies which guarantee “full cost recovery” and the elimination of internal government subsidies. In Ghana, for example, thanks to the World Bank, the forced sale of water at ‘market rates’ required the poor to spend up to half of their earnings on water.

This is worldwide, it is growing, and it is killing people.

Add to this equation what happens when nations do not wish to borrow themselves into a hole. They mysteriously find themselves in wars. Ask Libya. And in the aftermath of wars, there is enormous wealth to be made.

Consider again our friends at Bechtel. Being run out of Bolivia has not daunted them, no indeed. Within a month of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bechtel acquired a $680 million contract for ‘rebuilding’ the country we were about to destroy.

As described by Vandana Shiva in her article, ‘Bechtel And Blood For Water: War As An Excuse For Enlarging Corporate Rule,’ “The U.S. led war first bombed out Iraq’s hospitals, bridges, water works, and now U.S. corporations are harvesting profits from ‘reconstructing’ a society after its deliberate destruction. Blood was not just shed for oil, but for control over water and other vital services.”

Our old friend George Schultz, board member and senior counsel to the company where he once served as President, wrote a September, 2002, newspaper OpEd in which he was a positively thrilled cheerleader for the destruction yet to come: “A strong foundation exists for immediate military action against Hussein and for a multilateral effort to rebuild Iraq after he’s gone.” How’s that for putting a price tag on human misery?

Now, let’s talk about Mexico.

The situation in Mexico is especially dire, and its impact is of course felt directly by the United States since it impacts the desire of people to cross the northern border illegally, and contributes, with NAFTA, at least indirectly, to the drug wars near the border.

Coca-Cola is big in Mexico, very big. It is the number one Coke consuming nation in the world. Its impact on the water supply has been catastrophic. The company spends more than $500 million annually on advertising. It also imposes quotas on small shop owners in exchange for promotional items such as tables, chairs, and refrigerators with the Coke logo.

At the same time, and not coincidentally, 12 million people have no access to piped water and 32 million have no access to proper sewage. Coca-Cola’s resource monopoly simultaneously creates a scarce water supply and an abundant supply of Coke. The country is also the second largest consumer of bottled water, much of it sold by guess who.

The process of making Coke requires at least two liters of water for each liter of the finished product; some estimates are as high as five-to-one. The business end is covered by dozens of water concessions from the Mexican government which handed the company the legal right to take water from, as of 2008, 19 aquifers and 15 rivers, many of these in indigenous territories. They have also picked up the right to dump toxic waste in at least eight different public water sources.

The process of privatization has nearly swallowed the entirety of the country’s water. Yet the country hasn’t received much in return from Coca-Cola. In 2003, the company paid $29,000 for water concessions in the entire nation; in 2004, their profits from the bottling plant in San Cristobal de las Casas, the largest in the country and second largest in the world, alone reached $40 million.

An internet article by journalist Monica Wooters in 2008 described the situation in Chiapas, which gets nearly half of Mexico’s total annual rainfall and contains a large percentage of its surface water.

The bottling plant is located at the foot of Huitepec, a mountain overlooking the city, protected in part by a Zapatista ecological preserve. Huitepec is on top of an enormous underground aquifer, which is the key source for Coca-Cola’s water for the plant. In 2004, the company used 107 million liters from this aquifer, enough to supply water to 200,000 homes –– more homes than currently exist in San Cristobal.

There’s no actual record of the size of the aquifer, and the company, if it has estimates, is not saying, however the company’s operative subsidiary, FEMSA, has begun looking for new water sources in Chiapas. In addition, the waste created by the plant is often toxic, containing lead, cadmium, and chromium. The city has not imposed controls on dumping, nor does the central government, and there is now a risk of contaminating the water table.

The central Mexican government does not recognize indigenous communities as having any rights to participate in the legal proceedings concerning water concessions. Coca-Cola, via FEMSA, has achieved what is essentially a monopoly over water rights. In 1996, the Zapatista rebellion, which roiled the country for a considerable time, succeeded in gaining a measure of local voice in water decisions, however in 2001 the legislature overturned the agreements which the central government had made.

The impact around the world of the privatization of water is calamitous.

In each of the countries cited earlier, there are similar stories about privatization: the destruction of agriculture, the escalating cost to the poor, the concomitant rise in associated diseases and infant mortality. In many places, the private corporations, in league with corrupt, venal governments, simply rob inhabitants of one of the necessities of life. In many places, corporations are assisted by extortionate lending practices of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In many of these, the United States and its State Department play significant roles.

Privatization of water is making inroads in the United States. In Sitka, Alaska, which is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes, the Blue Lake Reservoir holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it does not need any treatment.

Now, under the auspices of True Alaska Bottling and S2C Global, hundreds of millions of gallons are being siphoned into tankers and shipped to Mumbai, and from there to several cities in the middle east. Water is being turned into a global commodity.

“Water’s been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says attorney James Olson, who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous.” He may be right on both counts. Commodities are sold to the highest bidder for the biggest profit. They have nothing to do with human needs or even human survival.

A former Vice President of the World Bank said, “The next world war will be fought over water.” If he’s right, he’d better be well-armed because most of the rest of the world will be looking for sons of bitches like him.